#169. Hide and Seek (Saturday, July 31, 2010)
What was your best day…of helping others even when things weren’t going well yourself?
For the first eight months of 2010, I was not in a good place. Aside from a brief reprieve after passing my driving test (#55) and taking a fun New York trip, that summer back home—with no job and nothing purposeful to do—was a disaster.
But just because your own world is collapsing doesn’t mean you have nothing to contribute to the people around you.
That long weekend, my family and three others rented a giant cottage in Mont Tremblant. Each family had a twelve-year-old son—my brother, Alex Jiang, David Hou, and Jack Ming1—so them it was basically a preteen sleepover, complete with a huge room and two sets of bunk beds. David, the youngest and easiest target, absorbed most of the teasing and harmless pranks from the other three.
Saturday we spend the day around the mountain and village—chairlifts, hiking, shops, and a luge track. David somehow gets stuck midway through his luge run. This, and the giant neck-covering sunhat his mom makes him wear, further fuels the borderline bullying by the others.
Back at the cottage, the adults make a giant Chinese dinner, which I normally would have hated but somehow enjoy in the unusually serene mood of the weekend. A rerun of Jeopardy! comes on, and Alex’s dad, Mr. Jiang—a Carleton professor—turns out to be as into it as I am. On Final Jeopardy, the clues “Pennsylvania” and “environmental protection” make Rachel Carson obvious to me. Only one contestant gets it, and Mr. Jiang is visibly impressed.
Soon after, Mr. Jiang tells me Stanford would be a good place for graduate school. With my weak math grades and nonexistent experience, that idea feels absurd. But the fact that he says it seriously gives me a little confidence that survives the weekend.2
That evening, while the younger boys continue their chaos, I alternate between the balcony and living room reading the three books I brought: Baseball Between the Numbers, The Elements of Style, and a book about the philosophy of The Office. I finish the first two and have just started the third when loud crying erupts upstairs.
Turns out the David-bullying has gone too far. My brother, Alex, and Jack have covered David’s bunk with wet paper towels, so he gets soaked when he lies down. He completely loses it, crying and yelling that he hates the other three and doesn’t want to share a room with them anymore. The others apologize sincerely, but he is done.
Watching this, all I can think is what a waste it is. They have the kind of giant-cottage sleepover setup I never had as a kid, and my brother—probably the wet-paper-towel mastermind—has managed to ruin it. I can’t let that stand.
So I go up to them and announce that the cottage is way too big to spend the night sulking in one room. We’re playing hide-and-seek, and I volunteer to hide first. It takes several rounds of exaggerated enthusiasm before all four agree.
The cottage is perfect for it: odd closets, beds with space underneath, little alcoves, side rooms, shelves, boxes. I hide in a side closet, and while they work together to find me, I can already hear them talking to one another like non-enemies again.
Soon everyone is friendly again. The only hitch comes when my brother hides so well that fifteen minutes pass without anyone finding him. My mom joins the search, then starts genuinely panicking, and eventually I’m yelling too. We finally find him crouched behind a stack of file boxes in a study.
After my mom calms down and goes back to playing cards with the other adults, my brother comes up to me and says, very simply, “Thanks for making us friends again.”