Dumpling Days

by Grace Lin

  Big Brother threw the coins. Up, up they flew in the air and then—cling, cling—landed on the floor. Our heads bumped into one another as we all crouched to see how they landed. Both tails! Great-Uncle Zhuzhan finally liked the food! And we could finally eat.

  “So ghosts have favorite foods and flavors, just like we do,” Dad said. “And for the whole month, we try to make them as happy as possible.”

  “Ghost Month is a whole month,” I said, “and we’re here for a whole month, too! Are we visiting like the ghosts are?”

  “I guess so,” Dad said. “Are you hungry?”

  Lissy, Ki-Ki, and I looked at one another.

  “Yes!” we all said at the same time.

  Chapter 6

  I REALLY WAS HUNGRY, WHICH WAS WHY I WAS GLAD TO see Uncle Flower, Aunt Bea, Grandma, Grandpa, and the cousins waiting for us at a big round table at the restaurant. It was good they had left earlier, at least good for us, because that meant we could walk past all the people waiting in line and just sit down and eat.

  And we began to eat right away! For dim sum, no one ordered from a menu. Food just came to us! Women slowly pushing silver carts went from one table to the next, calling like birds. All the carts had different foods, and as they stopped one by one at our table, Aunt Bea and Uncle Flower would shake their heads or nod. If they shook their heads, the woman would push her cart to the next table. If they nodded, the woman would take a dish out of her cart, put it on the table, and stamp our bill.

  “Ha! Dim sum is like a backward buffet,” I said. “Instead of going up to the food at a buffet and choosing, the food comes to you!”

  “But better than a buffet,” Dad said. “See how all the dishes are small? It’s so you don’t get too full on one dish, so you can taste a little of everything—because there is a lot more to choose from in dim sum than at a buffet.”

  I looked around the restaurant. There were so many women pushing carts, it was like an endless parade. I tried to count them all, but they kept moving, and there were so many people that I gave up after thirty-eight.

  “What do you want to do today?” Aunt Bea asked Mom as she nodded at a woman pushing a cart and held up two fingers. The woman stopped calling out “xia jiao, xia jiao” and placed two small plates on our table. She uncovered them, revealing in each three freshly steamed dumplings with filmy, light skins that showed the delicate pink of the shrimp inside, before wheeling away.

  “After brunch, we have to go shopping,” Mom said. “We have to buy the art supplies for their art classes tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow!” Lissy said. “The classes start already?”

  “Yes.” Mom nodded.

  I was only half paying attention. I was reaching for a brown ball of meat held in a yellow silklike wrapper. Shaomai, the cart woman had called it. But it also looked like a dumpling and it looked good. I kept trying to use the chopsticks the “right” way, like how Lissy showed me on the plane, but the food kept slipping.

  I looked around the table. No one was paying attention to me. They were all eating or talking or watching for the next cart. I changed the position of my chopsticks so that they were the wrong way, the way I had always held them before. And I grabbed a dumpling. I did it! The wrong way worked, at least for me. The chopsticks gripped the dumpling tightly until I dropped it into my mouth, the rich, savory meat tingling my tongue with flavor. Yum.

  “What do they need?” Grandma asked. “I have a lot already.”

  Mom took a list out from her purse. I looked over her shoulder, but since I couldn’t read the Chinese writing, I focused my attention on the food. Aunt Bea and Uncle Flower kept nodding at all the carts, and dish after dish were getting placed on the table. Some things I had eaten before—like the snow-white buns bursting with sweet, barbecued pork and the golden-fried rectangles of turnip cake. But there were things I had no idea what they were. I picked up something crispy and brown that looked a bit like a large twig from a tree. Uncle Flower had grabbed it eagerly, and Julian had one on her plate, so I thought I’d try it. It was hard to bite, and even though I was holding my chopsticks better, I ended up grabbing it with my hands and gnawing on it like a puppy with a bone.

  “Lissy needs an inkstone and an ink stick. They both need rice paper, brushes…” Mom said, but then she saw me eating. “Pacy, do you like that?”

  I stopped in midchew. The twig was kind of chewy and really hard to eat, but the spicy taste was okay. Mom’s face looked amused, though, as if I were doing something funny. It made me suspicious. “Why?” I asked.

  “It’s chicken feet, did you know?” Mom said.

  Chicken feet! I was eating chicken feet! Eww! I put it back on my plate and made a face.

  “Bawk-bawk!” Lissy whispered. Mom said something in Taiwanese to the rest of the table, and the adults laughed. But Julian and Shogun gave each other a shrug. Obviously they didn’t think eating chicken feet was that weird.

  But I felt weird. I kept thinking about chickens scratching in the dirt with their wiry claws, and my mouth felt all rubbery. I swallowed all the tea in my cup and reached for the teapot for more. Three drops seemed to squeeze out of it, like tears from laughing too hard.

  “It’s empty,” Uncle Flower said, and took the teapot from me. He lifted the lid, turned it upside down, and put the teapot on the table. Almost immediately, a waiter took the teapot and replaced it with another. Uncle Flower tapped his fingers twice on the table.

  “Is that a secret code?” I asked.

  “What?” Uncle Flower asked.

  “Tapping your fingers,” I said. “Is that how you got the waiter to give us more tea?”

  “No,” Uncle Flower said. “Turning the lid upside down told the waiter we needed more tea.”

  “Then what was the tapping for?” Ki-Ki asked.

  “It’s a way to say thank-you,” Uncle Flower said. “You know that dim sum is not from Taiwan? Like a lot of food and customs here, it is from mainland China. Taiwan has a mix of many cultures—a lot of Chinese, some Japanese, and even a tiny bit of Dutch! Tapping your fingers to say thank-you is from a story in Chinese history.”

  THANKING THE EMPEROR

  A long time ago, the emperor decided to visit his kingdom in disguise. Discarding his brilliant yellow silk robes for the coarse, dull dress of a commoner, he and his advisers (also plainly clothed) stopped at a teahouse for rest and refreshment.

  After the waiter placed the small, round teacups on the table, he lifted the teapot high in the air so that the tea flowed like a waterfall. Skillfully, with quick flicks of his wrist, he served the tea without spilling a single drop. The emperor watched with great interest, impressed by the waiter’s expertise. After the waiter left, the emperor decided to try pouring the tea himself. As soon as the cups were empty, the emperor grasped the teapot and poured the tea in the same manner for his aides.

  Of course, the assistants were incredibly surprised by the act of the great emperor pouring their tea! They were dumbfounded at the honor he had bestowed upon them. They wanted to jump onto their knees and bow low in gratitude, but they knew that such actions would give away the emperor’s identity.

  Instead, one of the assistants bowed with his hands. He curled his two fingers the same way his legs would have bent if he were bowing and tapped the tips of them on the table, in the same manner his head would have knocked on the floor in a kowtow. The other aides quickly copied him, and they all tapped their thanks to the emperor.

  “And that became a tradition,” Uncle Flower said. “Now, when you want to thank someone for pouring tea, you tap on the table.”

  All throughout Uncle Flower’s story, dishes had continued to arrive on the table and we had continued to eat. As I slowly bit into a sunshine-yellow egg tart, I watched a waiter count up all our dishes to figure out the bill. The flaky crust crumbled, and the bits fluttered down to my plate like falling snow. I put the rest of the tart down. It was delicious, but my tight stomach was telling me I had eaten enough. If
I had been the emperor’s assistant, I would have tapped on the table, too, but only because I was too full to get up.

  Chapter 7

  AFTER BRUNCH, EVERYONE WENT IN DIFFERENT directions. Uncle Flower and Auntie Jin went to the bookstore; Aunt Bea, Grandpa, Shogun, and Julian went to buy groceries; and Ki-Ki, Lissy, Dad, Mom, Grandma, and I went to the art store. Mom said we were going to take the subway this time because we were getting spoiled taking taxis everywhere.

  As we pushed through the crowds to the subway, Ki-Ki hung on to me and I hung on to Lissy. There were so many people! We weren’t used to so many people. I felt as if the crowds wanted to crush me away into nothingness.

  “Ouch!” Lissy said, shaking me off. “Don’t grip me so hard!”

  “Sorry!” I said. My fingers were white from clutching her. No wonder it hurt. Lissy looked at me.

  “Here,” she said, taking a firm grasp of my arm, her annoyance gone. “I’ll hold on to you instead, okay?”

  Somehow we made it to the subway, Lissy dragging me and me dragging Ki-Ki through the doors. It was only then that I felt like I could finally breathe. After almost running through the hot streets, the cold air of the air-conditioned subway car made me feel as if I were going into a freezer. I was afraid the sweat on my face was going to turn into ice.

  Compared with the busy city streets full of cars and black smoke, the subway felt white and shiny. Ki-Ki sat down on one of the molded plastic seats, the color of a bright blue sky, but Lissy and I stayed standing, holding on to one of the gleaming, silver poles. I watched my warped reflection in it as we swayed back and forth with the subway’s movement. It was my first time on a subway. Ki-Ki and I had never ridden one before, even when we visited New York City.

  When we got off the subway, there were fewer people, but it felt even hotter and stickier. When we got to the art store, I felt like a panting dog. The art store was small and crowded, full of papers and shelves. A big fan stood cramped in the corner, its head swinging back and forth quickly like a man shaking his head.

  Mom took out the paper from her bag again, and she and Grandma started to speak to the man behind the counter in Taiwanese. As they talked, I wandered around the store. I was looking forward to painting class. I always got an A+ in art in school, and it would be good practice for the pictures I was going to make for books. I decided I’d paint something really beautiful, like a unicorn with big blue flowers. Were there unicorns in Chinese paintings? Probably not. Maybe just a white horse, then.

  I walked past piles of paper held down by round, gray-black rocks. The corners of the piles waved at me every time the wind from the fan blew by. Bamboo paintbrushes, the pointed tips looking like cattails, hung from polished wooden racks. Stacks of blue-and-white-painted bowls, dark gray slabs of stone, and ink sticks lay on the shelves with dust.

  At the next aisle, I stopped. Hundreds of little carvings stood in neat rows on the shelf before me. Small stone figures of yawning turtles and snakes, cheerful rabbits, and laughing old men looked back at me from the shelf. I smiled as I looked closer at one figure with a carving of a lazy-looking pig.

  Lissy and Ki-Ki followed me.

  “Name chops!” Lissy said, taking one and rubbing it with her fingers.

  “Name chops?” Ki-Ki asked.

  “You know,” I said to her, “haven’t you seen Mom’s in her desk? The ink-stamp thing that has her Chinese name on it?”

  “Oh,” Ki-Ki said, nodding. “So they’re like rubber stamps but made of stone.”

  “Not exactly,” Dad said, coming up from behind us. He had heard us talking. “A name chop is much more important. A name chop is someone’s identity. It tells who you are. In the olden days, officials had to carry their seal with them wherever they went.”

  “Really?” Ki-Ki asked. “Why?”

  “The chop was proof that they were the important person they said they were,” Dad said. “Everyone has his or her own name chop specially carved only for him or her. It used to be when you signed an important document, you had to stamp it with your name chop as well. They still do that sometimes nowadays.”

  “What happens if someone steals your chop?” I asked. “Or if you lose it?”

  “Ah,” Dad said. “Then you are in trouble! You would have a hard time proving that you are who you say you are. Losing your chop would be like losing yourself.”

  I lifted the chop with the pig on it. The cloudy-gray stone was cold and hard. A shiver ran up my back as I touched the smooth bottom.

  “These don’t have any names or words,” I said, and showed Dad the flat bottom.

  “These are probably for people to buy to get their names carved into them,” Dad said, picking up a caramel-colored chop with a top shaped like a lotus leaf. “Chinese words and names are an art, you know. It’s not like English, where words are made of letters—A-B-C. In Chinese, everything has its own symbol.”

  “What?” Ki-Ki said. “I don’t get it.”

  Dad pointed at a framed painting of a Chinese word on the wall.

  “See that?” he said. “That’s yong. It means ‘forever.’ In English, the word forever is made up of seven letters, right? In Chinese, that one character is the word forever—and that’s it. Every object or person has its own symbol.”

  “So your name chop is your symbol, then?” I asked.

  “Yes, in a way,” Dad said. “Like I said, your name chop is your identity.”

  “We don’t have chops,” Ki-Ki said suddenly. “Does that mean we don’t have identities?”

  I hadn’t thought about that. Did that mean we didn’t exist? I didn’t like that at all. I wanted an identity! “We need to get chops!” I told Dad, waving the one in my hand. “Can we get them?”

  “Yeah,” Lissy said, joining in. “It would be a good souvenir.”

  “Okay, okay,” Dad said. “But only one each!”

  “Why would we need more than one?” Ki-Ki said. “Unless we decide to become spies and have secret identities!”

  “A lot of people have more than one,” Dad said, “so they can use whichever chop suits their mood. They sometimes use a poetic phrase or word—anything that they think symbolizes who they are.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “I had a teacher who had a chop that said something like ‘never too tired for knowledge,’ ” Dad said. “And my friend had one that said ‘thoughts as evergreen as a pine tree.’ ”

  Dad looked at the chops in our hands. “Pacy and Lissy, you should switch. Lissy was born in the Year of the Pig, and Pacy was born in the Year of the Tiger.”

  We were all a little shocked that Dad was really going to buy the chops for us. Dad never bought us things at home. I gave Lissy the chop with the pig and took the one with the tiger. It was a warm brown, the color of wood. The small tiger’s mouth was wide open, showing its teeth. From one side, it looked to me like the tiger was smiling, but from the other, the tiger was scowling. I wasn’t sure if I liked it and kind of wanted to pick a different one, but I was afraid that if I did, Dad might change his mind. And I really wanted a chop.

  “And Ki-Ki needs a horse,” Dad said, squinting at all the figures on the shelf. “Here’s one!”

  Ki-Ki grabbed the chop quickly. It was almost pure white, with pale peanut-colored streaks. The carving of her horse looked like the white horses princesses rode in fairy tales, like the one I was planning to paint. I wished I had been born in the Year of the Horse.

  We followed Dad as he walked to the counter. Mom and Grandma were still talking to the man there, but now there was a big pile next to them. Lissy, Ki-Ki, and I looked at the rolls of paper and felt, paintbrushes, tubes of paint, and black inkstones and ink stick, and then looked at one another. I wondered which of the stuff was mine.

  Dad spoke to the man in Taiwanese, and I put my name chop on the counter with the rest of the supplies. I thought Mom and Dad were much more likely to buy it if it was mixed in with the things that they were already buying. Lissy and Ki
-Ki did the same.

  “We can’t get your names carved on them today,” Dad said. “They don’t do that here. We’ll have to take them someplace else. Do you still want to get them?”

  “Yes!” we all said together.

  “Okay,” Dad said. “This way it gives you some time to think about what you want carved on it. Remember, this is your symbol! It is the mark of your identity.”

  Dad said this in a dramatic way that meant he was joking, but I didn’t see what was so funny. Getting my name chop carved seemed really important to me. Even so, I didn’t think there was that much to think over.

  “I’m just going to get my name,” Lissy said. “What else would I do?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m not going to get anything like ‘never too tired for knowledge’!”

  “Maybe you should,” Dad said. “Then maybe you would get better grades in math.”

  I made a face. Math was my worst subject, but I didn’t do that badly. Just not as good as Lissy and Ki-Ki, who always got A’s in math.

  “I guess you do need something different. Maybe something like ‘never tired of fun,’ ” Dad said to me before I could say anything. “Or maybe ‘never tired of TV’ would be better…. Or… I’ve got it! It’s the perfect one for you. ‘Never tired of dumplings!’ How’s that?”

  Everyone laughed at that. I looked at my name chop on the counter, and it looked like the tiger was laughing, too.

  Chapter 8

  DAD’S NAME CHOP COULD HAVE SAID “NEVER TOO tired for knowledge,” too, because after we left the art store, he decided to go off on his own to look for a bookstore. I liked books, too, but since I thought all the books would be in Chinese, I went with everyone else back to Grandma’s.