Hot Asian Babes
1.
“Cheap, aren’t they?”
The white woman, a townie, smug in her brown and shabby cardigan, asks me this without prelude, not even a stereotypically British and blustery, “Fine day, isn’t it?”
In point of fact, it is a fine day. I am 24 years old, a student at Oxford, living on a generous stipend from the Rhodes Trust that, having tasted freedom here, for the first time truly out of the reach of my parents, I am saving earnestly, albeit in dribs and drabs. Twenty or 40 or even 100 pounds, here and there, all toward a vague unspecified fund I’m starting, entitled “Freedom,” and only in some vague and desperate way, all that keeps me from having to give into my parents and accept arranged marriage.
This means that I no longer eat in Oxford’s tourist restaurants. It’s 1995 and Britain is on an upswing, in recovery from an economic recession. Cheap food, local food, is plentiful. Instead of buying books like my Rhodes Scholar classmates, I read them at the public library. I go to Sainsbury’s like any local, spirit out sales, carry plastic bags looking harried, like I’m too poor for even one of the tiny cars the smart, wine-carrying banker/lawyer set my age is busy settling its own bags into.
To this woman, a stranger, I simply must not look American. Though would I, even if I weren’t counting my change? This news stand is the place where I buy allsorts licorice, sometimes crisps and cola, trying to fill myself absent “real food.” I’m not on a college meal plan, nor do I live in a fancy apartment. I’m living low, not buying the clothes, CDs, or magazines on which, during the first months of the scholarship, like everyone, I frittered my money.
Instead I keep my daily
