Free Lucy and Linh by Alice Pung Page A

would be to admit that he hangs around shady people and condones their dodge,
I would write in my essays. Or:
The green light is supposed to be a metaphor for Gatsby’s hope, because it is far away and flashes and blinks, to emphasize that hope is often elusive. But no one ever speaks about Gatsby’s envy, which the green could also symbolize.
    I had no idea why, but this last comment really did it for Mrs. Leslie. Her brown eyes lit up. “You are really engaging with the text and learning the skill of analysis,” she praised. “What do you mean by Gatsby’s envy?”
    I thought of all the people I knew in Stanley who looked at the houses along Ambient Estates with the same metal-rimmed, wide-eyed Eckleburg yearning as those living in the valley of ashes. I thought of how hard we tried—you, me, Yvonne, Ivy—to look sophisticated with our imitation perfumes and gold buttons and makeup, when true Laurindans never wore such stuff, and how the plainness of their clothes did not conceal the fact that their tops were made of angora and their shoes of calfskin. I’d been at the school for only a few weeks when I realized that we were the ones standing on the shore in our pink suits, suddenly tacky, suddenly left so far behind, and that—unlike Gatsby—most of us could not afford a boat to take us across to the other side. The only way to get there was to do it individually, sink or swim, and of course very few swimmers made it.
    “Gatsby wants the status they have, but he can’t get it no matter how rich he becomes, because his wealth is shady…I mean, ill gotten.”
    “Spot on, Lucy!” cheered Mrs. Leslie.
    Then she asked me how I was settling into the school.
    “Good,” I said. “Katie has been a good friend to me.”
    “Katie,” Mrs. Leslie said slowly. “Is that Katherine Gladrock?”
    “Yes,” I replied.
    Then she chuckled. “Sweet girl. But awfully dull.”
    —
    For my first history essay for Ms. Vanderwerp, I received thirteen out of twenty. Thirteen out of twenty! A bare pass. She had also written a note:
A good effort, but your argumentative skills need improving. Please come and see me.
And she got my name wrong again. I don’t know how difficult it is to forget “Lucy,” but somehow she did.
    Ms. Vanderwerp’s office was a small, cramped corner thing, bigger than a broom closet but only just. It smelled of Pine-Sol, and on an overhead shelf she had three cartons of wipes and two boxes of tissues.
    “Don’t worry,” she reassured me. “I can see that this is the first history essay you’ve written. It was a good attempt. But you didn’t sustain a consistent argument about what could have caused World War I.”
    “My argument is that many things happened to cause the war, and no one thing made it happen.”
    Ms. Vanderwerp looked at me for a while, then told me that my conclusion was satisfactory but that I had to structure my argument to reflect it. She allowed me to resubmit because it was my first essay. When she returned it with a sixteen out of twenty—a mark that would have made Tully weep inconsolably—I felt like I’d got the hang of things.
    So for my next two assignments, I followed the same formula. Many things in history happened to cause X, Y or Z. There was no decisive moment.
    “Lucy, your writing skills are vastly improved,” Ms. Vanderwerp told me, “but the questions are asking you to choose a side and argue for it.”
    “But why do I have to choose a side? There are so many sides to a historical event, as you’ve taught us.”
    “Yes, Lucy. But the nature of the task is to write argumentatively. So you have to choose a side, acknowledge the other side and then defeat its arguments. Am I making sense to you?”
    She was making sense, but I wasn’t sure whether I should be forming opinions about grave historical events in six hundred words or less. What did an argument I made about who started World War I have to do with anything? I didn’t even get to decide