Girl in Translation (7 page)

And so Annette made school bearable for me again.

With the freezing cold of December, Ma and I started keeping the oven on day and night, leaving the door open to give us some heat. A few steps away from the small circle of warmth created by the open oven, it was hard to say which felt icier, the kitchen or the room we slept in. The kitchen contained the oven but its windows were only covered by the garbage bags and the other room didn’t have any heat at all.

In Hong Kong, I’d had a light blue and white uniform for school, and as soon as school was over, I’d revert to sandals and bare skin in the sun. I was used to seeing the tips of my toes, my bare calves and shoulders; now that they had to be constantly covered, I missed myself. I was embalmed in clothes, layer after layer, and sometimes it was days before I saw my own body. The brief moments when my skin had to be exposed were to be avoided as much as possible. The touch of the air was a bitter hand laid against the flesh, and getting dressed in the morning was an ordeal, shedding the garments my body had warmed in the night and replacing them with clothing that stung my skin.

I didn’t have panties like other girls did. Rather I wore two layers of thick pajamas under my corduroy pants. I had several undershirts on under the one red cotton sweater we’d brought from Hong Kong. The sweater had once been pretty, a red cardigan with two pandas on the pockets, but it had shrunk and the white of the pandas had been dyed a light rose through repeated washings. It became harder and harder to pull the sweater over all the under-layers I wore, but I had no choice. Then I put my jacket on over everything. Even stuffed into my clothes, like a lump of sticky rice tied in bamboo leaves, I was still freezing. The only positive of the cold was that it seemed to lessen the number of live roaches and mice.

We did everything we could next to the oven: my homework, folding laundry, getting dressed, working on the sacks of clothing we brought home from the factory. It was practically impossible for Ma and me to keep up with the demands of the factory, and many evenings, she sent me home alone while she stayed to finish as much of the work as possible. When she could, she brought the clothing home in plastic bags. No matter how late I stayed up to do my homework, I almost never remember Ma going to bed before I did. She was always a thin figure bent over those clothes, nodding off and then waking herself up again to go on. If a shipment was going out, we had to stay at the factory until our work was finished, even if that meant staying all night.

The heat from the oven never reached the walls, the floor or the furniture. Everything radiated cold back to our bodies, which were the only other sources of warmth in that dead building aside from the mice. Even in front of the oven, extremities like the tips of my fingers were constantly numb and it was hard to keep them flexible. This was particularly problematic because we often had to finish small tasks on the garments, such as turning sashes the right way around or buttoning jackets. Ma tried to play her violin for me as often as she could, even if it was only on Sundays, but it soon became impossible due to the cold. Her music would have to wait for spring.

Despite Mr. Bogart, I looked forward to school: for the joy of seeing Annette, and for the heat. Whenever I got to the delicious warmth of school, the outer ring of my ears, my palms, the bottoms of my feet tingled with needles of regained feeling.

Annette told me she was a serious braces case. When I looked blank, she wrote it down for me and then opened her mouth like a horse to show me. Her teeth looked uneven and bruised because of them. I’d never known anyone with braces. Back home, we just grew up with bad teeth.

She had a blue backpack with little bears and squirrels clipped onto the zippers. I never brought anything for snack time because this concept was still unknown to Ma, but Annette pulled fascinating things from her backpack: crackers with peanut butter and jelly, small blocks of orange cheddar, eggs or tuna fish mashed with mayonnaise, celery sticks filled with cream cheese. She seemed to enjoy my surprise and delight when she shared with me.

I was also secretly fascinated by Annette’s coloring. Her skin wasn’t the opaque white of a sheet of paper that I’d thought white skin would be; it was actually transparent, and the red you saw was the color of the blood underneath. She was like an albino frog I’d seen at a market in Hong Kong when I was very small. Once, she lifted up her sweater to show me her round stomach and I jumped back in surprise. It wasn’t smooth and tan like mine. The skin was blotched and reddened by the waistband of her pants, and fine blue veins ran under the surface. I thought that her skin had to be very thin and easily torn. She had blue eyes, which I had only seen in Hong Kong in blind people with cataracts. It was as if I could look into her brains, and I found it strange that she could see out of such light eyes as well as I could from mine.

She told me my hair was pretty even though it was so short, she said it was so black that it sometimes looked blue, she told me I should grow it into a pageboy. For years, I had the ambition of growing my hair into a pageboy without even knowing what that meant because I was so sure that Annette wouldn’t steer me wrong. She thought it was neat that I came from somewhere that wasn’t America. She wanted to learn Chinese words, especially insults.

“Crazy melon,” I taught her in Chinese.

“She’s a guw guah,” she said, giggling, her tones for crazy and melon so off that I barely knew what she was saying. No other Chinese would be able to understand her, which was a good thing. Annette was referring to a girl in our class she didn’t like because she said the girl was a know-it-all, which she also wrote down for me. It confused me because wasn’t it a good thing to know so much?

Like me, Annette didn’t have any other friends. It was mainly because she was one of three white kids in the class and the other two were boys, who stuck together. All of the other kids were black. There was clearly a division between the white kids and the black ones. There may have been a few Hispanic kids too but at that time, I mostly thought they were black kids with straighter hair.

I found out that the school was close to a rich white neighborhood. Parents in the rich area who wanted their kids to go to public school had no choice but to send them there. The other kids came from the neighborhood immediately surrounding the school itself, which was a fairly middle-to-lower-class black area. It was only later that I understood it in these terms, but what was immediately clear to me was that Aunt Paula had been right: the neighborhood of my school wasn’t nearly as bad as the projects neighborhood, which I’d learned was the name of where I lived.

In many ways, I thought of myself as one of the black kids. The white kids brought sandwiches in brown paper bags. The two white boys sat together at a separate table and kept to themselves. I ate free hot lunch with the black kids, with Annette as the only white person at our table. I also lived in a black neighborhood. However, the black kids were friends with one another and I wasn’t. They spoke English rapidly and easily, they sang the same songs in the courtyard, they knew the same jump rope games. One popular song went: You look like a monkey, you smell like one too. We hate you, Mr. Bogart, we really really do.

The other kids thought I was strange, of course. I didn’t fit in, with my homemade, ill-fitting clothes and boyish hair. Ma cut it as soon as it reached the nape of my neck. She said it was more practical that way, since it took less time to dry in our icy apartment. Although the black kids in my class were mostly poor as well, they had store-bought clothes. On my way to school, I looked more closely at the tall apartment block close to school, where several of them lived. A bit of broken glass littered the ground and some of the walls were covered in graffiti (I had learned what the English writing was called). But the buildings were surrounded by a border of shrubbery, and most of the windows didn’t have bars on them. Those people definitely had central heating.

There were some kids who were less well-off, though. One boy suddenly disappeared from school and no one knew where he’d gone. Another girl was picked up by her mother in the middle of the day once and her mother looked like she had been beaten up. Mr. Bogart didn’t blink an eye at this. He seemed used to it. Fights often broke out after school, and I’d seen a boy walking away with a cut above his eye that dripped blood. Mostly boys fought boys but sometimes it was girls and girls, or mixed.

The other boys and girls had just emerged from hating each other into a state of awkward interest, teasing and rude remarks. They were busy with cooties: catching them, getting rid of them and inoculating themselves against them. The transmission of cooties was an excuse for the boys to hit one another as hard as they could and to touch the girls. I had no idea what cooties were and often ended up as the recipient of all the cooties in the class. I’d been taught not to touch another person without permission, so it was hard for me to get rid of the cooties in my possession. Cooties were the one thing that transcended racial lines.

I’d never been a sickly child, but that winter, I had one flu or cold after another. My nose was rubbed so raw that a constant layer of peeling skin and small chapped cuts formed under my nostrils. We didn’t have a doctor because we couldn’t afford one. When I was trembling with fever, I lay in bed. Ma made rice with large slices of ginger in it. She wrapped the hot rice in a handkerchief and I had to hold it to my head until the rice cooled, so that it could soak up the germs. She boiled Coca-Cola with lemons and I had to drink it warm.

She went to the medicine shop in Chinatown and at great expense brought home many things I had to eat, all of which tasted terrible: deer antlers, crushed crickets, octopus tentacles, human-shaped roots. She stewed them in an earthen crock and cooked an entire pot down to a concentrated cupful. Even though I protested that these things only made me sicker, I still had to drink every drop.

I usually had to go to school even when I was ill, because the apartment was so bitterly cold that Ma was afraid to leave me there. Sometimes, the classroom swam before me, my face burning with fever, my nose dripping.

I’d hoped Mr. Bogart would start praising me once he saw that science and math were my best subjects, but he didn’t. He seemed to assume that girls couldn’t do these subjects, and often had a half-smile that suggested a girl would be incompetent whenever she went to the board to write down an answer. Then he would make a comment about “the fairer sex,” which I thought had something to do with being more honest. I enjoyed proving him wrong. Even though he cut down my grades for any deviation from the path he’d taught, I understood everything perfectly once I could see it written down, and I could learn those subjects faster than anyone else in the class.

But I was failing other subjects even with Annette’s help: Physical Sciences, Social Studies, Language Arts, everything that had too much to do with words. I relied on my ability to read and I had Ma scoop out my ears with an earwax spoon so that I could listen better. Ma also gave me $2.99 to buy a paperback Webster’s dictionary. This cost us almost two hundred finished skirts, since we were paid 1.5 cents per skirt. For years, I calculated whether or not something was expensive by how many skirts it cost. In those days, the subway was 100 skirts just to get to the factory and back, a package of gum cost 7 skirts, a hot dog was 50 skirts, a new toy could range from 300 to 2,000 skirts. I even measured friendship in skirts. I learned you had to buy Christmas and birthday presents for friends, which cost at least a few hundred skirts each. It was a good thing I only had Annette as a friend.

I used that dictionary for years. The cover fell apart, was taped together again and again until it became irreparable, then the top pages started rolling up and falling off as well. I kept using that dictionary even when I’d lost the entire pronunciation guide and most of the A’s.

I told Ma we weren’t allowed to keep our tests or homework here, which was why I couldn’t show anything to her, but promised her I was doing just fine. I said the teacher had recognized what a good student I was. These were lies that hurt me every time I said them. It seemed that Mr. Bogart went out of his way to choose assignments that were practically impossible for me, although now I think that he was simply thoughtless: write a page describing your bedroom and the emotional significance of objects in it (as if I had my own room filled with treasured toys); make a poster about a book you’ve read (with what materials?); make a collage about the Reagan administration using pictures from old magazines (Ma bought a Chinese newspaper only once in a while). I did my best but he didn’t understand. Halfhearted attempt, he wrote. Incomplete. Careless. A pictorial collage should not by definition include Chinese text.