Dumpling Days

by Grace Lin

  From the subway to Grandma’s house, we had to walk under the street—in kind of a tunnel but one just for people walking. “These were made because the traffic above is so crazy,” Mom told us. “It’s the only way to cross the street without getting run over!”

  There weren’t too many people in the tunnel, so I let Mom and Grandma walk ahead. It was a wide passageway, and on one side, there were all these women sitting, each with a table in front of her. I stared at them as we walked by. At first I thought maybe they were offering things for ghosts for the Ghost Festival, like what Dad had talked about, but most of the tables were bare with just red cloths. Some had notebooks and candles, but not much more. There didn’t seem to be anything a ghost or a person would be that interested in.

  One of the women saw me staring and smiled. For a moment I thought it was Melody’s mom, whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. She had the same wavy black hair and smile.

  The woman beckoned me over, as if she wanted to tell me something. What did she want? It couldn’t be Melody’s mom—Melody would’ve told me if her mom was going to be in Taiwan. But still, I had to go over to get a better look. Her moon-shaped face was smooth except for the lines around her mouth, and she had brown freckles on her cheeks, like sprinkles of cinnamon. No, she wasn’t Melody’s mom. This woman’s eyes were different, black and small like watermelon seeds, while Melody’s mom had eyes that were wide and brown like the color of tree bark. I started to turn away, but the woman grabbed my hand and started to examine it as if she were looking for a splinter.

  “Where’s Pacy?” I heard Mom say, and I watched Mom and Grandma turn around. “Aiya,” Grandma said when she saw me with the woman, which I knew meant she was surprised and not pleased. I started to feel a little nervous then. What was this woman doing? Mom and Grandma both rushed back over to me, Lissy and Ki-Ki tagging behind with excitement.

  The woman began to speak to me in Taiwanese. I didn’t know what she was saying at all. Mom tried to nudge me away, but the woman’s warm, dry fingers held on to my hand tightly. Mom said something to the woman and then Grandma said something, but the woman ignored them. Mom sighed. But since she didn’t seem scared, I relaxed. I was starting to feel like I was having an adventure.

  The woman traced each one of my fingers, talking the whole time. The short, black curls of her hair didn’t move, even when she moved her head to squint at the tips of my fingers. She kept pointing to parts of my hand and saying things to me. She kept nodding and looking at me as if I understood, and somehow it felt rude that I didn’t. So I just pretended, nodding and smiling back.

  Suddenly, the woman laughed a throaty noise, kind of like a witch’s laugh. I thought she might have figured out that I didn’t know what she was saying. Without letting go of me, she said something to Mom, who shrugged and nodded. The woman raised her hands over my head, closed her eyes, and started to chant. I glanced over at Lissy and Ki-Ki. They shrugged, and Lissy snorted back a giggle.

  She kept chanting an odd song that seemed to roll over me like ocean waves. I stole a look at Mom and Grandma. They didn’t look worried or bothered by the woman anymore, just kind of bored.

  Finally, the woman stopped chanting and held out her hand. Mom gave her a piece of paper money and pulled at me. The woman nodded good-bye as Mom pushed quickly through the tunnel.

  “Pacy, don’t do that again! You shouldn’t go off with a stranger like that,” she said, shaking her head at me. She wasn’t yelling, but I knew she was mad at me. “You know better than that!”

  “I didn’t mean to,” I said. And it was true, it had just kind of happened. I thought I should try to change the subject. “Who was that, anyway?”

  “She was a fortune-teller,” Mom told me.

  “She was?” I said. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I thought fortune-tellers would look the way they were described in my books at home—long, colorful skirts; crystal balls and gold earrings; maybe even a turban. I turned my head for a quick look back. In her plain, yellow shirt, sitting in her chair, she still looked more like Melody’s mom than a fortune-teller.

  “Yes,” Mom said. “She tricked us into having your fortune told. By the time Grandma and I saw you with her, she had already started, so we had to let her finish.”

  “She did?” I said. I didn’t really feel that bad about getting tricked. I was more excited about my fortune. I’d never had my fortune told before. “What was my fortune? What did she say?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Mom said, trying to wave me off. “Something about how the lines on your fingers are a circle, so it means you have a special skill you’ll always use.”

  “Really?” I said. I did a hopping step as we exited the tunnel. “What else? What else?”

  “She also said the shape of your fingers means you are sensitive and creative and live in your own world,” Mom said, and laughed a little. “She said because of this, you are going to get into trouble, so she wanted to give you blessings to protect you.”

  “Blessings?” I asked. “Was that what her singing was?”

  “Yes.” Mom nodded. “She said her blessings would help you. They would help keep you safe and happy.”

  I thought about my fortune. I was pretty sure I knew what the special skill was that I’d use all my life. I knew my talent was writing and illustrating books. It had taken me a while to figure that out—three years ago, I had thought about it for a whole year. But now I knew, so I wasn’t too worried about that. But I was worried about the trouble the fortune-teller thought I was going to get into. What kind of trouble? How would her blessings protect me? And for how long? Would her blessings run out?

  “Why does Pacy get to have her fortune told?” Lissy said. “Can I get my fortune told, too?”

  “Yes!” Ki-Ki said. “Me, too! I want my fortune, too!”

  “No!” Mom said, shaking her head hard and walking faster toward Grandma’s building. “It’s just a lot of nonsense. We don’t believe any of those things. Just forget it.”

  Lissy looked at me jealously. She made a disappointed face, and as she passed me to go up the stairs, she whispered, “Lucky!”

  Was I? The more I thought about my fortune, the more I wasn’t sure.

  Chapter 9

  THE NEXT MORNING, MOM HAD TO SHAKE US AWAKE again.

  “Wake up! Wake up!” she said. We all groaned, and Ki-Ki tried to push her hands away.

  “It’s early!” I moaned.

  “Not very early,” Mom said, “but early enough. You have your art classes today!”

  “I don’t care,” Lissy mumbled, turning over. I did the same thing.

  Somehow, Mom got us all out of bed, but I felt like I was sleepwalking. Lissy bumped my arm while we were brushing our teeth, and I nudged her back. She elbowed me, and it would’ve turned into a fight except Mom came in with Ki-Ki to wash her face. Still, I stepped on Lissy’s foot on the way out the door. I was very grumpy.

  And slow. I felt like a turtle caught in a puddle of honey. Mom had to push me to the table, and none of us smiled a morning greeting to Grandma, Grandpa, and Dad or even to Auntie Jin, who was at the stove heating something.

  “Jet lag, still,” Grandma, nodding, said to us.

  Mom had said jet lag was when your body was confused, but I didn’t feel confused at all. Instead, I felt like an irritated mosquito bite. In fact, I was certain that I was very, very grumpy.

  “How many days until we go back home?” I asked, grumbling.

  “We’ve been here for only two days!” Dad said. “You still have twenty-six days to go. Are you ready to leave so soon?”

  “It’s important you get to know Taiwan better,” Mom said. “You’ll learn about our culture. It’s a part of who we are.”

  “I don’t want to know who I am, then,” I said rudely.

  “Pacy!” Mom said in a shocked voice. Lissy and Ki-Ki looked at me sideways, and I shrank a little in my chair.

  “Never mind, never mind,” Auntie J
in said, interrupting us and coming over with a big platter. “Eat. You will feel better after you eat.”

  Things that looked like long, golden-fried hot-dog buns were on the platter. When Auntie Jin put one on a plate in front of me, I jabbed at it with my fingers. I didn’t want to end up eating something weird again, like the chicken feet.

  “What is this?” Lissy said. She was probably thinking about the chicken feet, too.

  “It’s called youtiao,” Mom said. “It’s kind of like a donut. You’ll like it.”

  “Are there any Lucky Charms?” Ki-Ki asked. That was our favorite cereal at home. It had hard, sweet marshmallows in it that tasted like candy.

  “We’ll get some later,” Mom said. “Today, eat this.”

  I rolled it back and forth on my plate like a rolling pin. “I’m not hungry anyway,” I said.

  Auntie Jin came back to the table with big cups of warm soy milk, the steam drifting from them like disappearing ghosts. “Try it with this,” she said. “Dip it in the milk and eat. It’ll taste good.”

  I watched Ki-Ki dip half a youtiao into a cup of soy milk and rip at it with her teeth. I picked up my piece.

  Then, just when I was about to dip it in the milk, we all suddenly heard a noise outside. No, not a noise—a song! A chiming, jolly song was playing out on the street. Ki-Ki, Lissy, and I looked at one another in amazement. We knew that song! It was the ice-cream truck song!

  “Aiya!” Auntie Jin said, and without another word, she jumped up and rushed out the door. Lissy, Ki-Ki, and I followed her. Was Auntie Jin going to get some ice cream? As we hurried, the ringing song got louder and louder, sounding like a music box with a microphone. I jumped down the stairs two at a time, and Ki-Ki kept chirping “Wait for me! Wait for me!” like a repeating bird. None of us wanted to miss the ice-cream truck. I hoped they had the chocolate-dipped ice-cream cones—the ones where the ice-cream man dipped the soft, white ice cream into a fudge sauce that hardened into a thin, delicious chocolate coating as it was handed to you. Those were my favorite. Would they have them here in Taiwan? Even so early in the morning? Maybe people in Taiwan always had ice cream at breakfast time.

  So, when we finally got to the street, it was a shock to see Auntie Jin dragging a trash bag over to a big, stinky garbage truck! There was no ice-cream truck anywhere. Auntie Jin waved to the garbageman as the garbage truck drove away, playing the jingly music that echoed through the streets. As Auntie Jin turned, we stared at her and the truck with our mouths open.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked us.

  “Where’s the ice cream?” Ki-Ki said.

  “What ice cream?” Auntie Jin said, looking around, confused.

  Lissy was the first one to get over our shock.

  “There’s no ice cream,” Lissy said, and then explained to Auntie Jin, “In the United States, the ice-cream truck plays that song.”

  “Ice-cream truck?” Auntie Jin said. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a truck that goes around and sells ice cream. It plays music, the same song, just like that,” I said, motioning to the leaving garbage truck, “so everyone knows they can come out and buy ice cream.”

  “Ah,” Auntie Jin said, nodding. “Here, the garbage truck plays that music so everyone knows they can come out and throw away their garbage!”

  With that, Lissy, Ki-Ki, and I looked at one another. For a moment, we didn’t say anything, because we were so embarrassed. But then Lissy let out a snort. “Garbage!” she said. “We came out for garbage!” And we all started to giggle. It was silly. We had run all the way for ice cream, and instead it was garbage! We laughed back up the stairs to our breakfasts, and our jet lag bad moods flew away like airplanes through the clouds.

  Chapter 10

  AFTER BREAKFAST, MOM GAVE US EACH A NAME CARD.

  “Put this in your bag or your pocket,” she told us. “I want you to carry it with you all the time, so if you get lost, you can always give that to someone who can bring you back.”

  I looked at it. All the writing on it was in Chinese, a mix of symbols that I couldn’t understand. I knew that the first line was my name—those characters were familiar. Mom had shown me my Chinese name a long time ago. But I had never thought about it as symbols meaning something the way Dad had talked about at the art store. It was strange to think these symbols that I couldn’t read were supposed to mean me.

  “Lin…” I said as I drew my fingers over the characters. “Pacy.”

  “No,” Mom said. “It says Lin Pai-se. See, there are three characters, one for lin, one for pai, and one for se. We made Pacy a nickname from Pai-se.”

  “What’s mine, then?” Ki-Ki asked.

  “Lin Kai-se,” Mom told her. “Ki-Ki is a nickname from Kai-se. The word se means ‘thought.’ Kai means ‘victorious,’ so your name, Kai-se, means ‘victorious thought.’ ”

  “What does Pai-se mean, then?” I asked.

  “See the symbol for Pai? It is similar to the character for jade,” Mom said. “So your name means ‘precious’ or ‘treasured thought.’ ”

  “What does Lissy’s name mean?” Ki-Ki asked.

  “Lissy is a nickname from Li-se, which means ‘beautiful thought,’ ” Mom told us. I made a face. I didn’t think Lissy was a beautiful thought at all. They should have called her “bossy thought”—that would’ve been better.

  “Lin means ‘forest,’ ” Mom continued. “See how Lin is made up of two of the same symbols? Each means ‘tree.’ So when you put two ‘trees’ together, it means ‘forest.’ So Lin means ‘forest’ or ‘woods.’ ”

  Pacy. Pai-se. Precious thought. Lin. Forest.

  That made me feel strange. I didn’t feel like a precious thought, much less a forest of them. Still, I liked the idea. I could imagine it like something out of a fairy tale where precious thoughts, glittering and glistening, grew from diamond trees. Maybe I could paint that idea with a white horse in class.

  Chapter 11

  THE BUILDING THAT AUNTIE JIN TOOK US TO DIDN’T look like a place that would have painting classes. It was just a building, almost like a hospital. We had to ride an elevator to get to the floors of our classrooms. Ki-Ki’s class was in the basement, so Mom brought her there, and Auntie Jin brought me and Lissy to our classes.

  We were late when we got to my classroom. Now that I was awake, I wished I hadn’t taken so long to get up. Everyone stared at me as I came in, and I stared right back. All of a sudden, a heavy, hard feeling filled my stomach as if I had swallowed a stone.

  It felt just like that Taiwanese-American convention. Everyone in this class was Asian, just like in the class I had taken there. At home in New Hartford, Lissy, Ki-Ki, and I were the only Asian girls. When I was in first grade, a mean bus driver asked me where I was from and got angry with me when I said I was from up the street. “No,” he had said. “Where are you really from?” He had made me cry. I had cried at that convention, too.

  But I wasn’t going to cry here. Stop it, I told myself. Maybe it won’t be like that.

  Auntie Jin talked to the teacher, a man in a black T-shirt who was older than Dad but younger than Grandpa. Most of the back of his head was bald, but he had some hair brushed over, like thin wisps of gray smoke. When he smiled a greeting at me, I could see his teeth were yellow. I sat down in the nearest empty seat.

  “Okay,” the teacher said as Auntie Jin left. “Back to what I was saying. Chinese painting is not about a picture; it is about telling a message. Each object in the painting has a special meaning. So we don’t look at a Chinese painting; we read a Chinese painting.”

  He spoke English slowly and with a thick accent. His English was kind of like Mom’s and Auntie Jin’s, but it was harder to understand him. Or maybe it was what he was talking about that was so hard for me to understand. Read a painting?

  He kept talking and holding up pictures in books while I looked around the room. The other students already had their paintbrushes and paints neatly on their desks. As quietly as I co
uld, I started to take out the art supplies from the bag Mom had given me. I wondered what the teacher’s name was. I guessed I had missed the part where he introduced himself. As I shifted the thick roll of paper that was still in my bag, things rolled around the bottom like marbles. I peered in. Color paint tubes! Bright rose red, golden yellow, leaf green, and blue in small tubes, like little traveling toothpastes, just for me. I had never had paints in tubes before—at school the paint always came in shared jars or in flat colored disks you added water to. Suddenly I felt better about the class. At least I would get to paint like a real artist.

  “Chinese artists paint flowers together that do not grow together in real life,” the teacher continued. He stumbled over some of his words, sometimes repeating them. “It is more about the idea or memory of the flowers or birds or the bamboo—not what it actually looks like. We have the idea of bamboo, and we paint the idea.”

  I didn’t know if the teacher was going to be that good. He seemed kind of awkward and kept bumbling. I couldn’t imagine him as an artist. I glanced around the room. Most of the students were looking blankly at the teacher. One boy was scratching his leg, and a girl was looking out the window. Whether or not he was a good artist, the teacher was definitely dull. No one seemed to be having any ideas about bamboo.

  The girl next to me looked at me, as if studying me. Her hair touched her chin, and she had glasses with gold wire frames. She didn’t seem very friendly. There was no way she could tell I was a Twinkie yet, was there? I wondered if being a Twinkie showed up in the way I walked or on my face. I quickly looked away.

  On her desk was a piece of black felt with AUDREY CHIANG written in a corner in perfect white letters. That must’ve been her name, and I wondered how she was able to get her name to show on the black cloth. Had she used white paint? I unfolded and laid out my piece of black felt, placed my paintbrushes on the side, and took out my paper.