The Topeka School

Jonathan sits in a plane that is circling New York City’s JFK airport, waiting to land. He is reminded of the first time that he flew into New York, when he was 16, returning to the United States after living in Taiwan for two years. At the time, Jonathan’s father was a diplomat, and Jonathan’s family lived with other American and foreign families in a neighborhood of “big American-style […] nearly identical homes” (161). In Taipei, Jonathan’s family lived with far more means than they are used to in the U.S., and his family had a full house staff. A driver took Jonathan to an international school each day, where there were no Chinese people besides some staff and janitors. Jonathan befriended other sons of diplomats, and together they freely ventured around Taipei, their Whiteness and Americanness granting them power to do whatever they wanted without interference from locals. Some of the schoolboys used a gun to kill all of a local farmer’s cows, ruining the farmer’s livelihood, with no repercussions. Jonathan’s family grew particularly close to the Selkies; their son Frank was Jonathan’s best friend, and Jonathan had a crush on their daughter Donna. One day, Jonathan and Frank went to a Taiwanese brothel, where Jonathan lost his virginity to a prostitute while imagining having sex with Donna. Afterwards, Jonathan felt immense guilt that he “committed a kind of sexual wrong” (168).

In 1991, Jonathan and his family take a plane to New York with Sima and her family to attend Jane’s book talk. During the months prior to the book talk, Jonathan and Sima develop an intimate relationship with each other over the course of numerous conversations, with Jonathan grows attracted to Sima. Though Jonathan briefly ceases his obsessive “desire and guilt about desire” following Adam’s concussion and subsequent hospital stay (174), Jonathan regains his attraction to Sima on the trip to New York. When Jonathan visits Sima’s hotel room to drop some things off, they kiss and have sex. However, the noise of the elevator in the hallway prompts the two to stop, and Jonathan quickly leaves.

In 1999, Jonathan makes a trip to New York to visit college-aged Adam, who has had a breakdown after his girlfriend, Natalia, broke up with him. Though Adam is a junior at Brown, he decides to do a fall semester at Columbia while Natalia does a semester abroad in Barcelona. Jonathan feels that moving to New York was traumatic for Adam, “like leaving home all over again” (177). Though Adam and Natalia planned to stay together, with Adam visiting Barcelona at the end of the semester, Natalia broke up with Adam over email after developing a romantic relationship with a Spanish man. Adam is so distraught by the breakup that he calls his parents. Adam’s “confused and fragmented […] speech” worries Jonathan and Jane (179), so Jonathan decides to travel to New York to pick Adam up.

As a child in elementary school, Darren attended a school party at a skating rink. While Darren was typically clumsy, the roller skates gave Darren some measure of grace. During an activity called “the Snowball,” when the boys are meant to find a girl to dance with (186), something Darren typically sat out, he danced with several girls, one of whom actively selected Darren to dance with.

Now, “seven years later in a twilit basement redolent of marijuana, beer, and kitty litter,” where Darren is attending a school party (186), a freshman pushes a drunk girl onto Darren, imploring Darren to “kiss her, dog, kiss her” (188). When Darren hesitates, the drunk girl moves away from Darren and calls him a “faggot” (189). Darren grows angry, and several partygoers begin to egg Darren on to start a fight between Darren and the girl. Darren walks towards the girl, resolved to tell her “to watch her fucking mouth” (189).

Jane considers the real-life Reverend Fred Phelps, who leads an extremist rightwing fringe group in Topeka called the Westboro Baptist Church. Phelps’ congregation publicly harasses funerals and other local events with homophobic vitriol, holding signs with incendiary language and hate speech: “[Phelps’] spiritual mission and full-time job [is] to eradicate homosexuality from the planet” (193). Though the Westboro Baptist Church has typically left Jane alone, they protest a keynote speech she gives at the Kansas Association­ of Women Conference. As Jane arrives at the conference with her family, Adam yells at the protestors, calling one of them a “bitch” (198). Jane is livid and in disbelief that Adam would use such misogynistic language.

When Jane was a child, she was disappointed one Christmas because her father gave her a cheap, painted tissue box. Jane’s sister, hoping to cheer her up, made up a story that these boxes were rare treasures made by animals on a special island. Jane believes this story for most of her life, until she sees the box on sale in a store in 1969. She cries as she realizes the story her sister had told her was false, feeing “a fiction collapsing inside [her]” (201).

Jane and Jonathan travel to Minneapolis to observe Adam compete in a national debate championship tournament held at the end of Adam’s senior year. Adam easily wins the first rounds of the championship, and Jane is “both fascinated and unnerved by his fluency, his dominance” (209). However, Adam loses in the quarter-final round of the Lincoln-Douglas Debate. This loss is due to the fact that Adam’s opponent employs the technique of the spread typically only used in policy debates. Though Adam challenges his opponent’s usage of this technique by “elaborating an analogy between the spread and a blind commitment to economic growth,” the judges ultimately side with Adam’s opponent (213).

Prior to the final round in the Extemporaneous Speaking (extemp) category, the family visits Sonia Semenov in her nursing home. Sonia is a distant relative of Jonathan’s from Russia, whom Jonathan had helped move to Minneapolis with her family some years earlier. On the way to the nursing home, Adam asks Jane if he could have one of her anti-anxiety pills to take for the extemp finals, to help with his own anxiety about his upcoming performance. Though Jane is first hesitant, she agrees to give Adam a half-dose of a pill to test out its effects, without first asking Jonathan. Later, Jonathan and Jane get into a fight about her decision to give Adam the pill, with Jonathan claiming that Jane has “no respect for boundaries” (222). While Jonathan is first aggressive towards Jane, he confesses to Jane “the worst thing he had ever done”—his infidelity with Sima (224).

At Adam’s extemp finals at Minneapolis’ Mall of America, Jane sits in the auditorium and watches the first extemp speaker, “a boy mimicking the language of politics and policy, the language of men” (226). As she sits, Jane takes the other half of the anti-anxiety pill she had given Adam. Adam walks onto the stage and Jane imagines he is looking directly at her.