hi. who I am: Linh, 18, freshman at a big state university in Texas, a couple of hours up the highway from Houston, where I grew up. My parents came over from Vietnam in 1980 and they run a nail salon in a strip center off Bellaire. I am the first person in my family to go to college in America, which means I am carrying everybody's hopes in a backpack along with my chem book, and the chem book is heavier. (Not really. But some days.)

I'm officially pre-med. My dad says "officially" doesn't need to be there. I type this in the 24-hour computer lab in the library basement, usually after midnight, because that's when there's a free machine and also when I have feelings.

(A note: this computer can't do the Vietnamese accent marks, so when you see "Ma" and "Ba," please imagine them. Ma is my mom and Ba is my dad. They are not sheep.)

Sunday call. I waited until 8:15 because Ma doesn't get home from the salon until after seven on Sundays and she needs to take off her shoes and yell at my little brother Danny about something first. That's the order.

"An com chua?" Have you eaten yet. That's always the first thing, before hello, basically instead of hello. Yes, Ma. "What did you eat?" Rice, Ma. (True. From the illegal rice cooker. With a fried egg and the last of the fish sauce.) She sounded tired. Mrs. H, the lady who comes every Saturday and tips in two-dollar bills, moved to Dallas, and Ma was sad about it like it was a cousin.

Then Ba got on and asked about chemistry, and I told him the truth about the 68, and there was a long quiet, and then he said, "Okay. Next one better." And that was it. I had been dreading that for five days. Five days! And it was eleven seconds.

I almost told him about anthropology. I had the sentence ready: "Ba, there's a class I really love." I got as far as "Ba, there's a class," and then Ba Ngoai (my grandma, Ma's mom) started talking in the background about whether I'm wearing a sweater (it was 91 degrees today), and the moment went by, and I let it.

My roommate Jenna ate the last half mooncake while I was on the phone. She left me a note on my pillow that says "I'm sorry. It was calling my name. I owe you a Frito pie." That is not a fair trade but I love her.

The moon was full last night, for real this time. I walked back from the lab at 1 a.m. and it was so bright the sidewalks looked wet.

listening to: Lauryn Hill, "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" (the whole thing, again)
mood: 60% relieved, 40% chicken

Today is the Mid-Autumn Festival, Tet Trung Thu, the fifteenth day of the eighth month. When I was little it was the best night of the year: paper star lanterns with a candle inside, running around the parking lot of the temple with all the other kids, somebody's lantern always catching fire, some uncle always stomping it out. Mooncakes. Staying up late. Ba Ngoai telling the story of Chu Cuoi, the man who got carried up to the moon holding onto his magic banyan tree, and now he's stuck up there sitting under it forever. (When I was five I thought that was the saddest story in the world. Now I live in a dorm, so I get it.)

Yesterday a box came to the mail room with Ma's handwriting on it, all capital letters, my name spelled out extra carefully like she was afraid the post office would argue. Inside, wrapped in the Vietnamese newspaper from home: four mooncakes. Two lotus seed with the salty egg yolk in the middle, two thap cam, which is the mixed kind with nuts and seeds and candied stuff. And a note in Vietnamese that said, basically: eat, study, don't stay up too late, wear a sweater. (See? It's genetic.)

I cut one in quarters and Jenna and I split it. She looked at the egg yolk in the middle like it was a crime scene. Then she ate her piece and said "Oh. OH." and ate my other piece. The Panhandle has been converted.

Tonight the Vietnamese Student Association did lanterns on the lawn by the student union. We made star lanterns out of cellophane and bamboo sticks at tables all afternoon (mine is lopsided) and walked them around after dark, forty college kids acting like they're six. A campus cop watched us the whole time like we were going to burn down the quad. (We did not. Khoa, our VSA president, had a fire extinguisher. Khoa is very responsible.)

I called home after. Danny said he's too old for lanterns. Ma said she wished I was home. I said me too. Then I went and sat outside for a while.

mood: homesick but in a good way, if that's a thing

Got the first chem exam back. 68.

Sixty. Eight.

The class average was a 64, the professor said, as if that should make us feel better, and a boy behind me said "Yes!" out loud because he got a 70, and I wanted to throw my calculator at him. I did not. I went and sat in the stairwell of the science building for an hour and did the math on what I need on the next three exams to get a B. (It is possible. It is not fun.) The limiting reagent problems killed me. I understand them at 2 a.m. and then they leave my brain when a person hands me a Scantron.

Then I came back to the dorm and Mei from down the hall was sitting on the floor by the hall phone with her calling card, and she'd been there since last night. There was a huge earthquake in Taiwan, in the middle of the night over there, and her family is in Taipei and she couldn't get through. The lines were all busy, over and over. Jenna and I sat on the floor with her. Around eleven tonight her mom finally answered, and Mei just started crying and talking really fast in Mandarin, and Jenna and I held her hands even though we didn't understand a word. Everybody's okay. Their building is okay. They're scared of the aftershocks.

So my 68 is a lot smaller now than it was this afternoon. It's still a 68. But it's smaller.

Okay I have to write about anthropology because I think I'm in love with a class and I don't know what to do about it.

I took Intro to Cultural Anthropology because it fit between chem and calc and it counted for a social science. That's it. That was the whole reason. And now it's the only class I've done all the reading for, and I did it twice, and I'm the girl in the front row with her hand up, which in high school I would have made fun of.

Today Dr. R talked about gift exchange. There's this French guy, Marcel Mauss, who wrote a whole book about how a gift is never just a gift: you have to accept it, and you have to give something back, and the giving back is how people stay tied together. And I sat there thinking about Tet and the little red envelopes, and how Ma never, ever lets a customer's kid leave the salon without a lollipop, and how when Ma's best friend Co Lan's husband was in the hospital every single auntie showed up with food and Ma kept a list on the refrigerator of who brought what so she could bring it back later, exactly. I thought that was just Ma being Ma. It's in a book. It has a name.

Then our assignment was to draw our own kinship chart, triangles for men and circles for women, lines for marriages and kids. Mine didn't fit on the page. Ba Ngoai had nine kids. I had to tape on two more sheets of notebook paper. Dr. R held it up in front of everybody and said "Now THIS is a family," and everybody laughed, and I didn't even mind.

I don't know the Vietnamese word for anthropology. I would have to ask Ba Ngoai. And then she would ask why I want to know. And then she would tell Ma.

reading: the anthro reader, again, for fun, which is a sentence I never thought I'd type

Sunday call, week three. I have a routine now. Calling card from the campus store, the phone on my desk, the cord stretched over to my bed so I can lie down, because I always end up lying down.

Ma: "An com chua?" Yes. Ba: "How's the chemistry?" Fine (lie, first exam is Friday). Danny: "Hey." "Hey." (That's the whole conversation. He's fourteen. He's allowed.) Ba Ngoai: a sweater.

Ma said her back has been bad again. She does twelve-hour days on Saturdays, bent over people's feet, and she's forty-six, and her back has been bad since I was in middle school. She said it like she was telling me the weather. Then she asked if I needed money and I said no, I have enough, and she said she'd send some anyway.

Here's what I can't stop thinking about. A pedicure at the salon is eighteen dollars. On Friday I spent six dollars on pizza at eleven at night because everybody on my floor was ordering and I didn't want to be the girl who says no. Six dollars is a third of a pedicure. That's a third of one stranger's feet in my mom's lap, and I ate it in about four minutes watching somebody's Titanic tape in the lounge.

I know that's not how Ma would want me to think. She'd say that's what the money is FOR. That's the whole point of the feet. But I think about it anyway, every time I buy anything. I bought a highlighter yesterday and did the math.

mood: guilty. about a highlighter.

9/9/99! A boy on the second floor skipped chem lab to go buy a Sega Dreamcast the day it came out, and now the entire second floor is in his room yelling. We can hear it through the ceiling. Jenna put her pillow over her head and said "Lord, give me strength" and she meant it literally.

Lab report due at 9 a.m. Too tired to write anything real. More Sunday.

Labor Day weekend and half my floor went home. Jenna's parents came and got her yesterday for her cousin's wedding. I stayed because I don't have a car, and because Labor Day weekend is one of the busiest weekends at the salon (everybody wants their toes done for the lake) so there's nobody to come get me anyway. Me, Mei, and a girl from Laredo named Adriana had the whole hall to ourselves. We ate ramen and watched TV in the lounge in our pajamas like three little old ladies.

Last night was the first meeting of the Vietnamese Student Association. It was an ice cream social in a room in the union and I almost didn't go, and then I did, and I walked in and heard it. Vietnamese. Not all the way Vietnamese: that half-and-half thing, "Troi oi, my calc professor is SO mean," the way I talk to my mom. I didn't realize how much I missed hearing it until my eyes got all hot in front of a table of strangers holding a bowl of cookies-and-cream.

The president is a junior named Khoa from San Jose who talks really fast and has a clipboard. He asked what I'm majoring in and I said pre-med and he said "Ha, yeah, us too," and pointed at like eight people. Every one of them pre-med. I don't know if that made me feel better or worse.

Here's a weird thing I miss: the smell of the salon. Acetone and that lotion Ma uses. I used to hate it. It got in my hair and my homework. Mei says the thing she misses is her mom's rice cooker singing the little song when it's done. I have a rice cooker. It doesn't sing. It just clicks.

mood: clicky

First real day of classes. General Chemistry I is in a lecture hall with FOUR HUNDRED people. I counted the rows and multiplied. That's more people than my whole graduating class plus half the class under us. The professor is a tiny man way down at the bottom with a microphone clipped to his tie and an overhead projector, and from the back he's the size of a thumbtack.

Ba told me on the phone last night to sit in the front, so I sat in the third row, which is basically the front, because the first two rows are a little too front. The boy next to me had AP Chem in high school and told me the first three weeks are "review." I did not have AP Chem, because my high school had it one period a day and it was the same period as the only calc class, and I had to pick. So it is not review for me. It is view.

We did significant figures and I understood it and I wrote everything down in three colors. I'm going to be okay. Probably. Everyone in that room wants to be a doctor. All four hundred of us. Somebody said half of us won't be pre-med by next year. I did the math on that too. Two hundred.

Anthropology was in a little room with thirty people and a professor who sat on the desk instead of behind it. She asked us what the weirdest thing our family does is. I said my grandma puts oranges on a little altar for my grandpa every morning and then we eat them at night. And she said, "Is that weird?" and I thought about it and said, "No." And she smiled like I'd passed a test.

mood: small.
number of people in chem: 400
number I know: 1 (the AP boy. I don't know his name.)

Things I have learned about my roommate, Jenna, in three days:

• She is from a town in the Panhandle with one stoplight. ONE. She says it blinks yellow after nine.
• Her grandmother made the quilt on her bed. It has a star in the middle made of pieces of her grandpa's old shirts.
• She has a picture of her horse on her desk. The horse is named Biscuit. The horse has a nicer picture frame than her parents do.
• She says "y'all" for one person. She says "all y'all" for more than one.
• She prays before she eats, even ramen, even at 1 a.m. She did it the first time and then looked at me kind of nervous, and I said my grandma prays every morning too, with incense, to Buddha, and she said "Well, all right then," and that was that.
• She had never had rice from a rice cooker. She asked if it's "like a Crock-Pot for rice." Yes, Jenna. Exactly like that.
• She had never smelled fish sauce. She has now. She opened the mini-fridge and said "Is something dead in here?" I double-bagged it. I triple-bagged it.

The rice cooker, by the way, is technically not allowed. It's on the list with hot plates and candles. Our RA is a very nice senior named Beth who has definitely seen it and has decided not to. I have decided to give her a bowl of rice every once in a while to keep it that way. (See, Ma. I listened.)

The communal bathroom is exactly as bad as everybody said. Shower shoes are not optional.

listening to: Jenna's Dixie Chicks tape, which she plays every morning. I'm starting to know the words. Help.

Ma and Ba closed the salon today. On a Saturday. They have not closed on a Saturday since they opened it in 1988, except for Tet. Co Lan offered to run it and Ba said no, we close, and he put a sign on the door in English and Vietnamese: CLOSED - DAUGHTER GOING TO COLLEGE. Ma told me that on the drive and then looked out the window for a while.

We drove up in the Camry with: a mini-fridge, the rice cooker, a twenty-five-pound bag of jasmine rice (Ma insisted, I said they HAVE food at college, she said "not rice"), a bottle of fish sauce in two plastic bags, a box of instant noodles, my comforter, and Ba Ngoai's instructions, which were mostly about sweaters.

My roommate's family was already there. Her dad had a gimme cap and a pickup truck and said "Y'all need a hand with that fridge?" And my dad, who is five foot four, said "Yes, thank you, very nice to meet you," very formal, the way he talks to the bank. And the two of them carried the mini-fridge up three flights of stairs together, not saying anything, just "okay... okay... turn..." and I stood at the top of the stairs and watched and it was honestly one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

Ba checked the smoke detector twice. Ma made my bed with the corners tucked the way she does them. Then it was time, and in the parking lot Ma held my face with both hands and cried, and Ba didn't cry, but he told me three separate times to lock the door.

Then they drove away and I went back up the stairs and my new roommate said "You want a Dr Pepper?" and I said yes, and I sat on my bed that doesn't feel like mine yet, and that was the first day.

mood: everything at once