by Grace Lin
“That’s okay,” Melody said. “Everyone knows English; some of them don’t know how to speak Taiwanese either. Anyway, I can help you. You should come, too! It would be fun!”
“Maybe she will,” Mom said. “I think it would be good for Pacy to make more Taiwanese friends. I’m going to call your mother about this camp.”
Mom found out more about the TAC camp. Melody’s mother explained to her that it was really a Taiwanese-American Convention, which was kind of like a camp but it was for the whole family, not just kids. The adults would meet other Taiwanese-American parents and listen to speeches and things. The kids would get together and do crafts and watch movies. Mom thought it sounded good not just for me, but for the whole family, so we all drove down to the convention.
The first week of the convention was fun. Melody and I spent most of our time together. Sometimes we’d get bright-colored Popsicles in the shape of rockets and eat them, turning our mouths as purple as the pansies decorating the stairs we liked to sit on. Sometimes we drew ice cream–colored chalk pictures of dogs or hearts (with our names and Sam Mercer’s in them) or unicorns on the faded playground pavement. Once we held a stuffed animal wedding with Ki-Ki and Benji—Danny Dog married Sabrina (Benji’s toy cat), and Butterscotch (my teddy bear) was the minister. It was a lovely wedding. Ki-Ki’s pony toys carried away the bride and the groom. Lissy spent all her time with the big girls, dancing and shopping.
But after the first week, Melody’s family had to leave. They were going to see her Aunt Alice in New Jersey. I was sad she was leaving.
“It’s not going to be any fun now,” I told her.
“Well, I’d rather stay here with you,” Melody told me. “My Aunt Alice is strange.”
“What do you mean strange?” I asked. “Does she have purple hair?”
“No,” Melody said, “she looks normal. But she believes in ghosts. Did I tell you that the last time I visited her, I sat on a ghost?”
“What?” I asked. “How could you sit on a ghost?”
HOW MELODY SAT ON A GHOST
The last time we went to my Aunt Alice’s, she invited us over for dinner. I think it was for Chinese New Year. I can’t remember. Anyway, there were two chairs at the end of the table that were empty. Even though no one was sitting in the chairs, there were big plates of food there. I could smell the stir-fried noodles, the shiny roasted duck, and dragon red pork—they seemed to invite me over. So I sat down in one of the empty chairs, ready to eat.
Aunt Alice rushed over like a typhoon and hurried me out of the chair. She told me those chairs were for the ghosts of her parents. I thought she was joking, but she wasn’t. She poured hot tea in two fancy cups and served them to the empty chairs. When she finished, she bowed with deep respect, her nose almost touching her knees.
It made me think, maybe there were ghosts there. Do you think they minded that I sat on them? I wonder if I sat on her father or her mother. But then again, maybe they weren’t sitting down yet. I couldn’t tell. I kept watching the chair cushions to see if they got wrinkled or anything when the ghosts sat down or stood up, but not one gold thread of embroidery moved.
My parents told me it was a way of honoring the dead. I was worried that the whole dinner was going to be for the ghosts and we weren’t going to eat anything, but my mother told me we would get to eat after the ghosts were done. Then I was worried, because how would we know when the ghosts were done eating? I didn’t see any food disappearing. We could be waiting a long time and the food would be cold.
But Aunt Alice seemed to know. She served all the courses, one by one, to the ghosts. After the last course was served, she took all the food back in the kitchen and reheated it. Then we got to eat.
“I sat next to one of the ghosts for the whole meal. At least I think I did. Maybe they moved around,” Melody finished, “but they were pretty nice, as far as ghosts go.”
“Do you know what that means?” I said. “You ate ghost leftovers!”
“Mmm,” Melody said, “and they were delicious.”
Chapter 23
A Twinkie
MOM SAID IT WAS GOOD MELODY WAS LEAVING early, that I should make new friends—that was the whole reason why we came to TAC camp. So, she signed me up for an art class with kids my age.
When I got to the room, there were four other girls there.They were all chattering like squirrels, so I went up to them.
“Hello!” I said.
One girl said something to me that I didn’t understand. I shook my head.
“I can’t speak Chinese,” I said.
“I wasn’t speaking Chinese,” the girl said to me, her eyebrows flying to her forehead, “I was speaking Taiwanese.”
“I can’t speak Taiwanese either,” I said.
“You can’t speak Chinese OR Taiwanese?!?” the girl said. “Why not?”
I didn’t know what to say. Mom and Dad spoke to each other in Taiwanese and Chinese at home, but they always spoke to us in English. Once when a girl in my school asked me the same question, my teacher had answered for me.
“Your parents are Italian, right?” Mrs. Whitton had said to her. “Do you speak Italian?”
She had shaken her head, no.
“Well, then,” Mrs. Whitton said. “Why should Grace have to speak Chinese? It’s the same thing. You’re both Americans, and in America we speak English.”
I had been happy with that answer then, but now, my tongue felt frozen to my mouth and I couldn’t say anything. The Chinese girl looked at me as if I were a filthy cockroach crawling on her food, her fat face wrinkled in disgust.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled.
“I know why,” one girl said, her nose arching toward the ceiling. “It’s because you’ve been Americanized. My mother says she would never let me become Americanized. She said that when you’re Americanized you don’t have any culture.”
“You’re a Twinkie!” another girl said. “My brother said Chinese people who are Americanized are Twinkies. Yellow on the outside but white on the inside!”
The girls cackled and jabbered at each other in Chinese like mockingbirds. I felt like a helpless fish frying in oil, with a red-hot heat burning my face and stinging my eyes. I turned around so they wouldn’t see me cry.
More kids and the teacher came in. I breathed in my tears and sat down. We sat at small tables and the teacher put paper and crayons in front of us. I sat as far away from those girls as possible.
The teacher taught us a little bit about colors. She asked us to draw something red, so I drew a piece of watermelon. Then we had to draw something blue, so I drew a blue bird. Then she had us draw something white, and I drew a unicorn. Then she asked us to draw something yellow. But I couldn’t think of anything yellow that I wanted to draw.
The teacher walked around the room and looked at everyone’s drawings.
She stopped and looked at my drawings. “This is lovely,” she said, looking at my picture of a bluebird. She showed the rest of the class, “Look at the beautiful drawing of a bluebird that Pacy did.”
All of a sudden I felt better. I didn’t have to speak Chinese to be a good artist. But my smile disappeared when I saw one of the girls at the other table scowling at me.
The teacher kept walking around the room and I heard her stop at the girls’ table and say, “Now this is nice and yellow. Is it a banana?”
The girls laughed. “No,” I heard them say, “it’s a Twinkie!”
I pressed down on my crayon so hard that it broke. The hot oil inside of me was blistering and bursting. In my head I wanted to shout, “I never want to speak Chinese ever if it makes me mean like YOU!” But I didn’t say anything.
When the class was over, I went back to our room and I threw myself on the bed. And then I cried and cried. I HATED, HATED, HATED those girls. They were so horrible. Ki-Ki saw me crying and ran to get Mom.
“What’s wrong?” Mom asked me. “Did something happen?”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to tell anyone
what those girls said. But I kept crying.
Dad went and asked the art teacher if anything happened at the class, but the teacher said I had been fine. She even said I did very good drawings. I stopped crying and started hiccuping.
“Did she really say that?” I asked. Maybe things weren’t so bad. I probably would never have to see those girls ever again. I blew my nose and rubbed my eyes. Then I asked Mom, “Why did you want me to have more Chinese friends?”
“Was someone mean to you in your class?” Mom asked. “What did they say to you?”
“No.” I shook my head. I still didn’t want to tell any-one what had happened. “No one said anything.”
Mom sighed and sat next to me. “I thought it would be good for you to have friends from your own culture,” Mom told me, “so you could know people who are like you. Did I ever tell you about my first friend in America?”
MOM’S FIRST FRIEND
When Dad and I first came to the United States, I was very lonely. Dad was in medical school and I was going to college. But I had never lived away from my family before. I was used to having my four sisters and brother, my parents, my grandparents, uncles, and aunties around everywhere. In Taiwan, we used to all eat dinner together, laughing and talking—everyone bubbling over like simmering soup. When I came to the United States, everything seemed quiet and cold. Usually, I ate dinner all by myself, because Dad was too busy. I would shiver on my way to school, the wind biting me the whole way. People would talk and laugh and walk by me as if I were an invisible ghost. I was scared to talk to them because my English was so bad. I didn’t understand the TV or my teachers or anyone. They all spoke so fast, their words sounded like monkeys jabbering. I didn’t know how to make friends with any of them. I was sad and lonely and homesick. I felt like a thistle in a rose garden.
Every day I would come home from class and cry and cry. One day, while I was crying, someone knocked on the door.
“Are you okay?” someone called out in Chinese.
I was so surprised that someone was talking in Chinese that I stopped crying and opened the door.
At the door was a Chinese girl, with a grin like a melon slice. Her name was Mei. She had been visiting a friend next door and had heard me crying. When she learned I was Chinese, she decided to come over.
What a difference it made knowing Mei! We became fast friends. I clung to her like a vine and she supported me like a tree. She told me how she had been homesick, too, when she first came, but now she never wanted to go back. She introduced me to her American friends, helped me with my English and my studies. She never was impatient with my bad English or my fear of American things, because she had had them, too.
Slowly, I started to feel like the United States wasn’t so bad. I stopped thinking so much about all the things I missed and started thinking about all the things I could do. I made more friends. I ate pizza. I went to the movies. America began to feel like home. And now it is.
“But that is why I wanted you to have friends from our culture,” Mom told me. “Because it’s easier when you know people who understand.”
“But just because they’re Chinese doesn’t mean they’re the same as me,” I said. “I don’t think they understand at all.”
“That’s true,” Mom said. “But because they are Chinese they are more likely to understand. Look at you and Melody. Don’t you think she understands?”
I nodded, but I wasn’t convinced. “It’s not fair. To Americans, I’m too Chinese, and to Chinese people, I’m too American. So which one am I supposed to be?”
“Neither and both,” Mom told me. “You don’t have to be more one than the other, you’re Chinese-American.”
“Or Taiwanese-American,” I complained. “It’s so confusing.”
“Good thing you’re so smart,” Mom said. “You can keep it from getting mixed up.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But everyone’s not as smart as I am.”
Chapter 24
New York City
SINCE IT WAS SUMMER, MOM AND DAD PLANNED for a family vacation after the conference. This time we were going to go to New York City.
I was always confused about New York City. Was the city named after the state or was the state named after the city? Whenever we told people where we lived, we had to say upstate New York, not New York. If we only said New York, they thought we were from New York City. I didn’t think that was fair. New York City was a lot smaller than the rest of the state.
New York City meant Chinatown and that meant we could buy all the things we couldn’t get in New Hartford. So, Mom did all her grocery shopping. She took us to a Chinese grocery store and told us to pick whatever we wanted.
The Chinese grocery store was cramped and crowded and had a strange smell, kind of like the way your feet smell after you’ve walked in the rain. Lissy said it was because of the dried mushrooms in the window. There were blue crabs in a basket by the stairs and boxes and boxes of sunshine yellow mangoes and sand-colored Chinese pears on the floor. We had to pick things that could keep for a long time, so Lissy pulled out some canned lychees while I picked up a bag of Chinese Popsicles and Ki-Ki grabbed some Chinese New Year candy. When we brought the items to the cart, Mom told us to get more.
“Get three or four packs,” Mom urged us. “They will have to last you the whole year.”
By the time we finished picking out everything we wanted, we had two whole carts full of groceries. It took us a long time to check out, and Dad went to go get the car while Mom paid. The owner of the grocery store came out and helped us put the groceries in the car. He bowed to Mom and thanked her for coming. He gave Ki-Ki, Lissy, and me each a box of chocolate caramels for free! Mom said it was because we gave him such good business. And we had. The whole car was full and I had to sit on six cans of baby corn for the rest of the trip.
After we went grocery shopping, Mom and Dad brought us to a Chinese bakery for a treat. Dad ordered five diamond-shaped pieces of thousand-layer cake—one piece for each of us. It didn’t really have a thousand layers, but it was soft, sweet, and very yummy!
“Can someone get a job eating cake? Like a professional cake eater?” I asked. It was August already and I still hadn’t “found myself.”
“No!” Mom laughed at me. “Anyway, you would get tired of eating cake all the time.”
“I wouldn’t,” Lissy said. “I can eat cake every day. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The whole thing! Chomp! Chomp! Chomp!”
“You sound just like your uncle,” Mom said. “He loves cake. Did I ever tell you the story about your uncle and the cake?”
UNCLE SHIN AND THE SPECIAL CAKE
Well, when we were kids we weren’t very rich, so we rarely got anything special. Sometimes Grandma gave us little candies or cookies, but never anything much better than that. However, one day, a rich auntie came to visit us. She brought us a big box wrapped with a silky bow. Do you know what was in it? There was a cake inside. We had never been lucky enough to have a whole cake before. It was a frosted white rectangle with sugary pink flowers and pastel green leaves. Every inch of that cake held a promise of sweet delight. My sisters, my brother, and I stared at it with big eyes and licked our lips. We wanted to eat it so badly! The worst was my brother, Shin, you know—Uncle Shin. He loved to eat and he usually got the best of everything. He was the only boy in the family, so Grandma spoiled him. “That’s mine,” he growled, like a starving wolf, his eyes devouring the cake. He wanted that whole cake for himself.
While my auntie was talking to Grandpa, Grandma took the cake into the kitchen. She cut it into eight equal slices. One slice for each of us. I couldn’t wait. We crowded around her and inspected each slice to make sure they were all the same size. Uncle Shin kept circling us as if he was a hunting tiger. “I want all the cake,” he kept hissing. “I want all the cake. Give me ALL of it.”
But just as Grandma finished slicing the cake, Auntie called out to say she was leaving. We all had to go and say good-bye. We left the
cake on the table and bowed good-bye to Auntie in front of the house. All of us said good-bye and waved, except for Shin. He had disappeared.
When we went back to the kitchen, there was Shin. He was devouring the cake like a hungry pig, crumbs and frosting decorating his mouth and nose. He was such a greedy boy and he was determined to have the whole cake to himself. But we had only left him alone with the cake for a minute, so he wasn’t able to eat the entire thing. Do you know what he did instead? He SPIT on all the other pieces!
It was so gross; he ruined everyone else’s piece so he could have it all. And he did. We watched him eat every piece. What a spoiled boy he was! But that night he had a horrible stomachache and no one felt sorry for him.
“I would have just eaten around where he spit,” Lissy said.
“Ew!” we all said together. “Yuck!”
Chapter 25
Halloween at School
I COULDN’T BELIEVE THE SUMMER WAS OVER, but it was. The leaves turned as yellow as a Chinese pear and the air felt like it came from an open refrigerator. Too soon, it was time to go back to school. Lissy took the big bus to junior high school and Ki-Ki went with me to the bus stop. Ki-Ki was in kindergarten now.
My new teacher was Mrs. Piterassi. She was tall and had curly, short hair the color of cinnamon. Melody was in my class, and so was Sam Mercer. That made us happy. But Becky was in Mrs. Wynne’s class, across the hall.
Mrs. Piterassi had been Lissy’s teacher, too; she remembered that. On my first day she said, “Oh, I taught your sister Beatrice.” I hoped she didn’t think I’d be good at math like Lissy was.
Mrs. Piterassi was a fun teacher. If your birthday was on a school day, Mrs. Piterassi gave you a big lollipop. I was sad because my birthday was on a Sunday this year, so I wouldn’t get a lollipop. But for Halloween she let me draw a big picture of a laughing jack-o’-lantern and she taped it on the window.