Wealth and Class in Three Episodes: An Essay

 Episode 1: The Pen

 The girl who knocked on the window of our rental car looked about my age. The boy who waited next to her had her eyes. The second time she raised her fist to knock on the glass, I could see the veins in her too-thin wrist bulging through her skin; they reminded me of the varicose veins on my nani’s legs. I tapped my father and yelled over the horns of angry drivers in bumper to bumper traffic. “Open the window, open the window!” He turned the crank and the window slid down.

“Kya chaahie?” my father asked. After years of watching Nani’s Hindi soap operas, my mind unconsciously translated his sentence to “what do you want”. The girl replied, her voice high and floating, speaking too quickly for me to catch all but one word: paise. Money. Though her plea confirmed it, I knew she was a beggar when she ducked her head and clasped her hands before the car as though in prayer. My father pulled his money clip out of his pocket, counted out a few bills, and placed them in her dirt-covered hands. Her eyes widened.

 “Too much,” she said.

 “Take it,” insisted my father.

She folded the bills and handed them to her brother, who slipped them into the pocket of his khaki shorts that probably could have reached his knees if he were two years younger. She turned to leave as my father started turning the crank back. Suddenly, she turned.

 “Rukna!” she pleaded. “Wait!”

My father started rolling the window down again. The girl stuck her hand through the gap and dropped a green ballpoint pen, covered in scratches and losing its color. My father bent down to pick it up, but by the time he sat back up, the girl was gone. Only I had seen the glint of tears on her cheeks as she ran back through the traffic, yelling “dhanyavaad” back at me. My father faced me with a somber visage, half sorrowful and half reminiscent.

“Don’t forget it,” he whispered as he placed the pen in my hand. I curled my hand into a fist around it. A few days later I lost the pen. A few weeks later I lost the memory; after all, beggar children never knock on the windows of my mother’s Tesla. The closest we have to beggar children in Palo Alto is the legless dwarf who lives on the street corner where Waverly Street meets University Avenue. He sits by the CVS in his wheelchair with a cardboard sign that reads “HELP ME SLEEP IN A MOTEL TONIGHT” and a basket for spare change.

The way his thighs end in stumps disturbs me. When I pass him on the way to the ice cream sandwich store, I speed up my walk, avoid eye contact, and toss a $5 bill in his basket. When he yells “thank you” at the back of my head in his high, nasal voice, I never look back to say “you’re welcome.”

Episode 2: The Nintendo 

I moved from San Ramon to Palo Alto the summer before sixth grade. The move was a hard one for me; I was used to my best friends living next door, and my new house was smaller and much older than my previous one. I would have been content to sit alone in the family room and watch cartoons all summer long, but my mother insisted that I make friends with other kids in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, I had no idea where to start. Unlike the kids in San Ramon, kids in Palo Alto played inside during the summer, a fact I found puzzling. Even the park was empty, despite the gorgeous summer day. As I walked back from the park I heard a ball bouncing against concrete. I peeked over a white picket fence and met the only children my age I had seen since moving in. Their names escape me now, but I remember their faces and personalities easily. The shorter, pale-faced boy lived a few blocks down, had a short temper, and took great pride in himself for his apparent skill with the ladies of the fifth grade. His friend, whose yard they were playing in, was polite, quiet, and reluctant to share, fearing what horrible things his friends might do to his possessions. I invited the two over for snacks, but my idea of a snack (chopped raw cucumbers) was apparently, in the shorter boy’s words, “lame.” While my choice in snacks may have bored them, the Nintendo Wii plugged into the TV did not.

“Wow! You have Wii! What games do you have for it?” I finished chewing my cucumber before reading through the titles on the stack of games piled by the television. Without hesitation, the boys grabbed a disc and inserted it into the Nintendo. We played games for hours, with only a short break for dinner before sitting back on the couch to play again. The sun had been gone for a few hours by the time the two had left. My mother, thrilled that I had made some friends, made no complaints about how we spent the entire day playing video games. She never anticipated that the next day the two boys would come to my door and ask “can we play Wii?” Again, she tolerated us, glad that I had found new friends so quickly. Even the day after that, when the boys came to play Wii again, she tolerated us. When she heard them knocking on the fourth day, she pulled me over as I walked to the door.

“Don’t let them play Wii today! Can’t you play outside or something?” I nodded and walked to the door, resolved to convince them to play outside with me.

“Can we play Wii?” they asked.

“Not today, sorry, but we could play outside instead,” I replied, my voice neutral.

“Please? Just for a short while,” the pleaded.

“We really can’t. Why don’t we find that ball you were playing with the other day?”

“That ball is boring. We’ll see you later,” replied the shorter one who had mocked my cucumber habit. As they left, it dawned on me: they weren’t interested in being my friend. They used me for my Nintendo.

Episode 3: The Steak 

The summer before my prep year, my father was traveling to Tokyo on business, so he brought the whole family along with him: his parents, my mother, my sister and me. I had been studying Japanese in school for three years, and I showed off my skills occasionally, impressing my family by buying food or paying the taxi driver without using English. More exciting to me than using my language skills, however, was the food. My vegetarian mother never made fish for me at home, so Tokyo’s bounty of fish markets and sushi restaurants were a gold mine for me. For my first trip to Japan, however, I set my stomach’s aspirations even higher. I wanted a Kobe steak. Kobe beef is beef from the 3,000 Tajima Wagyu cows, which have been bred as a delicacy since the second World War. It is said that their meat is so well marbled with fat that it melts on the tongue. Since the importation of Kobe beef to the United States was (and still is) highly regulated, I knew that being in Japan might be my only chance in a long time to try this king of beef. I expressed this desire to my father, who would only respond with “we’ll see” or “I’ll think about it.” It was on our last night in Tokyo when he surprised me with our reservation at Seryna Honten, one of Tokyo’s premiere Kobe steakhouses. When we sat down, my father handed me a steak menu and told me to pick. I ordered their Kobe Beef Sirloin and waited, salivating in anticipation. At last, the time had come. The little steak was cut into six pieces. My family watched as I took the first bite into my mouth and moaned. The steak exceeded my expectations by far, and though I tried to savor the taste, I found myself stuffing the next bite in as soon as I could swallow the first one. In a few minutes, the steak was gone. Only then did I look back at the menu, thinking about seconds, and see the price: Nijuuman-yen. A quick calculation in my head caused my face to wrinkle in despair. I stared at the empty plate, and as I realized that my little steak cost as much as enough pizza to feed a party of 50, my heart sank. Not because I felt wasteful or extravagant, but because my dreams of seconds were suddenly shattered.