Room to Dream: Chapters 39–58

“Mia Tang, columnist,” I told her, with as much confidence as I could muster.

Mr. Hadden listened intently, scribbling notes in his reporter’s notebook.

He reached for a pamphlet from the document tray in the hallway and handed one to me. It said Anaheim Times Journalistic Integrity—Source Credibility and Guidelines on Objectivity.

“Has Rob given you our guide to journalistic integrity and objectivity? You’d have to promise not to do anything different with your motel for the inspection. You can’t secretly dust everything to perfection.”

I flipped through the pamphlet on journalistic ethics as I waited.

In the interest of presenting truthful, fair information to our readers, the journalist must approach stories with an open, skeptical mind; must try to examine contrary information and viewpoints; and must keep their personal biases and opinions from influencing their story.

I definitely did not keep my personal biases from influencing my stories about Lupe, nor did I get her side of those stories.

I’ll admit I have “impulse control issues,” as my culinary teacher says, which I know I have to work on if I want to be a good chef—but it's hard.

I gawked at Jason walking into the dance with Bethany Brett.

As the music blared, I nodded my head to the beat and got ready to do Hank’s dance!

The glass shattered, and a tidal wave of sticky fruit juice cascaded onto the dance floor.

It was impossible to continue dancing after Jason’s outburst. Even after Mrs. Beadle and Ms. Swann dragged him away, there were too many shards of punch-bowl glass to clean up.

My mind started sifting through every single thing he’d said to me and every single thing I’d said to him, like a scientist.

All day Saturday, the Calivista phone rang off the hook, leaving me no time to wallow in my Da-Shawn rejection.

“I can finally pay off the second mortgage on my house!” Mr. Lewis declared.

“Oh, hi, Hank. You’re not high-end enough,” Mr. Cooper said bluntly.

“They want to go after an upscale clientele.”

“The high school kids are pretty ruthless too. They tease me all the time, and then they still copy off my work!”

“Owned by Mega Magna Hotels, they took over our neighbors, the Topaz and the Lagoon, stole our business model and our cleaning personnel, and undercut our prices.”

“You guys are not thinking rationally,” Mr. Cooper protested.

I talked—on camera!—about the plight of our small motel, urging folks to support independent businesses.

Mr. Cooper scoffed. “It’s terrible news,” he barked. “With an attitude like that you’ll never make it in business, Mia.”

Mrs. Yao looked warily at me as I climbed into her car after school.
“Are you sure it’s a good idea for Mia to come?” she asked Jason.

“It’s hard enough getting those snobby judges to take him seriously,” she explained, meeting my eyes in the rearview.

“The whole industry’s like that.”
He told me about a food critic in New York who actually wrote that a restaurant was pretty clean “for a Chinese restaurant.”

Jason gazed nervously out the window at a huge group of white kids with whisks and pristine aprons, all marching into the convention center. Then he looked down at his own apron, which had splotches of soy sauce on it.

Pierre looked positively radiant as he offered the judges some more of his meringue and chocolate cream pastries, but the judges declined.

On and on they judged, mincing no words, until they finally got to Jason.

Others were reading my pieces for the school newspaper and my article on restaurant discrimination. Inspired by what Jason told me in the car on the way to the cooking competition, I’d done some digging, and Jason was right—elite restaurant reviewers did discriminate against Chinese restaurants, sometimes to the point of openly making fun of our food!

Both girls' parents came to the United States in pursuit of the American dream. Now the kids are forging their own paths...one dream at a time!