Dumpling Days

by Grace Lin

  Then, unexpectedly, everyone stood up. The teacher was motioning all of us to come around his desk. We watched as he squeezed drops of black ink into his small bowl, mixed the ink and the water with his paintbrush, and then, with just a few strokes and movements of his hand, painted a stalk of bamboo with blowing leaves on the paper. It looked easy. I hoped he would show us harder things, too.

  “You do not erase in Chinese painting. You cannot take back anything you do,” said the teacher in his hesitating way. He painted more bamboo leaves. “The only way you can change your picture is with your next stroke, your next motion. It will take a lot of practice before you will be able to do a painting for our exhibit at the end of the summer. First, we paint bamboo.”

  He sent us back to our desks. What was that about an exhibit? I must have missed something else, too. But now we were painting bamboo. That was disappointing. It seemed so dull and boring. And it was just black ink, no colors. I was hoping to open those tubes.

  But painting bamboo wasn’t easy! The ink had a sneaky way of swelling on the paper, making careful lines into blobs. And holding the paintbrush was tricky. The teacher kept pushing my arm. “Wrist up!” he said, shaking his head when I let my hand rest on the table. He shook his head again and pointed at the painting. “Try again,” he said to me before moving on. “Think about the idea of the bamboo. Only the bamboo.”

  I tried to think about the bamboo, but the watery ink and the paintbrush seemed to have their own ideas. Strokes spread and bent in directions I didn’t want, and I couldn’t erase them or cover them up. A shock went through me. I had thought my special art skill was going to make it easy and my painting would be the best in the class. But my painting didn’t even look like bamboo. Instead, it looked like strange, sickly gray sausage. Where was my art talent?

  I stole a look at Audrey Chiang. She was concentrating hard on her painting, flicking her wrist to make a jointed bamboo stalk. I was glad to see that her painting was even worse than mine. Her bamboo looked like dark storm clouds.

  And, actually, so did her face. She saw me looking at her painting and scowled.

  “Anyway, it’s not like painting counts or anything,” she said. She was looking at her painting, so I wasn’t sure whom she was talking to.

  Still, just in case, I said, “What?”

  “This class is just extracurricular,” she said, now looking at me. “We don’t get grades, so if I don’t do well, it won’t go on my record.”

  “Oh,” I said. I didn’t really understand what she was talking about, but I felt surprised and relieved at the same time, as if I had caught a falling glass ornament without breaking it. Maybe she hadn’t been thinking about my being a Twinkie. She seemed to have been spending a lot of time thinking about something else. Audrey noticed my confusion.

  “I know you don’t get grades for the summer geometry and science classes, either,” she said. “But those make sure that you get A’s during the school year, and that counts.”

  Audrey was only making me more confused. The only summer math class I had heard of in New Hartford was if you failed something and had to make up for it. But Audrey was definitely talking about something else. A summer class so that you get A’s? It must be so when you took the class again in school, it would be easier. Taking a class twice made sense if you were doing it just to get a good grade. But I thought it was kind of weird.

  “I don’t take summer math classes,” I said to her.

  “You don’t?” she said. Obviously, it wasn’t weird to her at all. But the way she was talking about it was making me uncomfortable. Her words were shooting over each other like fast flying bullets. It made me feel like I was being attacked. “How do you make sure you stay the best in your class, then?” she said.

  “I’m not,” I said. Maybe I should have lied. But it was my worst subject.

  “Oh,” Audrey said, and her eyebrows went up over the rims of her glasses. If she hadn’t been thinking I was a Twinkie before, she was definitely thinking something like that now. She looked at me like I was a dog that had been hit by a car, half-pitying and half-disgusted. Then, as if I had faded away into worthlessness, her eyebrows went back down, and she turned back to her painting. The sinking feeling came back inside me.

  I squeezed more ink into my bowl and watched black drops balloon like evil genies. I wished I wasn’t here. I wished we hadn’t come to Taiwan. I wished I was home. How many days until I could go back home? Twenty-six days. These were going to be the longest twenty-six days of my life.

  Chapter 12

  FOR DINNER THAT NIGHT, A FRIEND OF DAD’S WAS taking us to a Japanese restaurant.

  “Japanese food?” Lissy asked. There wasn’t a Japanese restaurant in New Hartford, so we had never eaten Japanese food before. “Isn’t that, like, sushi and raw fish? Are we going to eat raw fish?”

  “I hope so!” Dad said. “You know, Taiwan has a mix of Chinese and Japanese culture, so the Japanese food is very good here.”

  “But raw fish!” I said. Ki-Ki and I wrinkled our noses, but Lissy’s face took on a look of daring. I could tell she was thinking of bragging to her friends at home about how she ate raw fish.

  “You should try it!” Dad said. “And I bet this restaurant will have the best!”

  It was a fancy restaurant. I was glad I wore my nicest dress, the one with the strawberries on it. All the waiters were dressed in suits, and we could see chefs dressed in black with black hats behind a glass wall. Ki-Ki’s shoes squeaked on the floor.

  Dad’s friend smiled at us. “I ordered for us already,” he told us. “But if you want something special, let me know.”

  I didn’t know what there was to ask for, but I said hopefully, “Dumplings?”

  “Pacy!” Lissy groaned and rolled her eyes as Mom and Dad laughed and said something in Taiwanese to Dad’s friend and his wife. I shrugged. Maybe they didn’t have dumplings in Japan.

  “How do you like Taiwan?” Dad’s friend’s wife asked us.

  “It’s nice,” Lissy said, answering for all of us. “It kind of feels like Chinatown in New York City.”

  “That’s because we’ve only been in Taipei so far,” Mom said, and then to Dad’s friend, “Next week we’re going to go to Taichung.”

  “Ah, Taichung!” Dad’s friend said. “Better be careful traveling during Ghost Month!”

  The Ghost Month again!

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Ah, don’t you know?” he said, with a teasing look in his eyes. “Some ghosts want to make you into one! During Ghost Month, if you aren’t careful, they can come and erase you away!”

  We laughed because we knew he wasn’t serious. But the idea of getting erased gave me a shiver. Mom had said that people thought hungry ghosts could make trouble, and the fortune-teller had said that my fingers had told her that I would get into trouble. Was I going to get into ghost trouble? Could I be erased?

  A waiter came by with metal tongs and handed each of us a warm, moist white towel, taking my mind away from ghosts. As I rubbed my hands in it, I was embarrassed to see that my fingers left gray streaks on the snowy fabric. I quickly folded it over.

  “I thought a Japanese restaurant was supposed to have those bamboo mats,” Lissy said, “and make you kneel on cushions on the floor to eat.”

  I didn’t know how Lissy knew about Japanese things, but in one of my favorite books at home, Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, a girl made a Japanese dollhouse with bamboo floor mats and a low wooden table. I looked around the room. Everyone had white stone tables and black leather chairs like we did. The only thing bamboo was a plant in the corner.

  “Maybe that’s only when you are in Japan,” I said to Lissy. “Maybe this is a Taiwanese-style Japanese restaurant.”

  “I think we are getting cheated,” she hissed at me behind Mom’s back. I shrugged.

  But we were definitely getting real Japanese food. As soon as the waiter took away the towels, he put an odd-shaped, shallow black bowl in
front of each of us. A mossy-green soft mound lay nearest to me, like a lump of clay waiting to be molded. But beyond that, on top of crystals of ice, cool pink rectangles lay fanned out against one another with a squid head peeking out from behind. I didn’t need anyone to tell me what they were. I knew they were the raw fish!

  Lissy’s eyes took on a bold look, and she swooped into her bowl with her chopsticks and put one of the pink pieces in her mouth. Ki-Ki and I looked at each other. We couldn’t let Lissy be braver than us! I took a big gulp of air, reached with my chopsticks (holding them the wrong way, of course), took a piece of raw fish, and chewed.

  And it wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t slimy, as I’d expected it to be. The fish was cool and tender in my mouth and slipped down my throat easily. I swallowed proudly.

  “Your kids can eat sashimi,” Dad’s friend said. “Good for them!”

  “It’s their first time,” Dad said, looking at us, pleased.

  “Try it with this,” Mom said, nudging an eggcuplike bowl full of soy sauce at us.

  I dipped another piece of fish into the soy sauce and took a bite. The salty soy sauce with the soft fish tasted… good! Maybe I actually liked eating raw fish?

  “Is this mashed peas?” I asked, poking at the mound of green stuff. It seemed more like green mashed potatoes, though.

  “No,” Dad said. “It’s wasabi. You can mix it in the soy sauce. It gives the sauce a spicy flavor.”

  Lissy took a big chunk from her plate and dumped it into the soy sauce. She mixed it with her chopsticks, and the wasabi swirled into the soy sauce, making it the color of a dirty puddle after a rainstorm.

  But I wasn’t afraid. So far, eating raw fish had been easy. I plopped my third piece of fish into the muddy mixture and bit it without waiting.

  Ooowww! The flavors burned up through my mouth into my nose as if I had sneezed the sun, and my eyes started to tingle with tears. I spit the fish out on my plate, not caring that it was rude. I stuck my tongue straight out of my mouth, hoping that the air would put out the fire running through my face. I grabbed my cup of tea and poured it into my mouth.

  It was only after I’d swallowed the tea that I realized everyone at the table was laughing at me.

  “I guess you don’t like it,” Dad told me. “Wasabi does have a very strong flavor.”

  “Pain is not a flavor!” I said hotly.

  Luckily, the waiter showed up and placed new dishes in front of us, and everyone forgot about laughing at me. This new plate had a big bright-orange crab sitting on it like a majestic king, its round eyes staring at me coldly.

  “Yum!” Lissy said, attacking the crab and ripping off one of the legs savagely. She plucked the delicate snow-white meat popping from the leg shell with her chopstick and closed her eyes as she swallowed. Ki-Ki whined about not being able to eat her crab, so Mom helped her crack the shells. I liked crab, but the fiery flavor of the wasabi was still in my mouth, so I just drank tea, hoping the burning would leave.

  And I kept drinking tea. Cup after cup, during the next dish—a bowl of thin-sliced meat in a souplike sauce—and when the main dish, the one Dad called “the masterpiece,” was served. It was a huge platter with a blue glass bowl of raw fish on ice, but this time pieces of fish were coral orange and reddish purple. Against a fan of brown twigs, a rainbow-glowing pillar rose from the bowl, holding two large pieces of pale pink fish (later Lissy took it out and saw there was an electric light inside). Pieces of sushi—black seaweed–rolled rice with bright patterned centers that looked like they were slices of a kaleidoscope—were arranged around the bowl on the plate so that the whole thing looked like an exotic floral arrangement. There were a lot of “oohs!” and “aahs!” when the waiter brought it out, and not just from our table.

  By that time, I had drunk so much tea that I had to go to the bathroom. Everyone was so busy eating that no one noticed when I got up to go to the restroom in the back of the restaurant.

  Like the restaurant, the bathroom was also very fancy. Everything was shiny and white, except for the floor—which was a soft-gray stone. It was a one-person bathroom, and as soon as I locked the door, I could make faces at myself in the big mirror that lined the whole wall.

  But when it was time to flush the toilet, I was confused. There wasn’t a silver lever to flush, like what I was used to. Instead, there were all these buttons! I counted twelve of them and each one was labeled—but the labels were in Chinese! I couldn’t read any of them!

  I wasn’t sure what to do. Why did they need so many buttons? What did all those buttons do? I was kind of scared to find out—maybe something really gross would happen and the water would come shooting out. Ew! But I didn’t want to not flush the toilet, either.

  I stared at the buttons. None of the symbols looked even a little familiar. Most of the buttons were gray circles, but there was a square yellow button and a red button. I tried to think. They would make the one that was most used the most noticeable, right? So it was probably the red or the yellow one. But which? I reached out my finger and pushed the red button.

  Beep! Beeep! Beeeeep! A screeching noise like a fire engine filled the room. I covered my ears. Oh no! I had hit the wrong button!

  Underneath the screaming sirens, I could hear quick footsteps coming and a shout through the door. I didn’t know what to do. I was going to get in trouble! I started to hit the other buttons to try to make the alarm stop. The toilet started to vibrate and even play music! If I hadn’t been so scared about the alarm, I would’ve thought it was funny.

  Then I heard a scraping at the door. I stood frozen as the door burst open and a crowd of waiters and the receptionist stared at me.

  I looked at them with big eyes. “Sorry?” I offered. The receptionist, who was in the front, shook his head and said something to everyone else. The alarm stopped, and everyone began to leave. It was only then that I saw Mom, Dad, Lissy, and Ki-Ki standing there, looking puzzled and worried. They had been in the back of the crowd.

  “What happened?” Ki-Ki asked.

  “I didn’t know which button to push to flush the toilet,” I said.

  “Which one did you push?” Lissy said.

  “The red one,” I said, pointing.

  “The red one!” Lissy said, making a face at me. “Out of all the buttons to push! Haven’t we watched enough of Ki-Ki’s cartoons? The red button is always the trouble one! You never push the red button!”

  Mom pushed the yellow button, and the toilet flushed. “It’s a Japanese toilet,” she said, laughing. “And a very fancy one with all kinds of luxuries—it can even play music!”

  I already knew that. Everyone else went back to the table as I washed my hands. I thought about what a bad day it had been. The ice-cream truck had turned out to be a garbage truck this morning, Audrey Chiang had made me feel bad, I had burned my mouth with wasabi, and now I had triggered the bathroom alarm!

  I still felt embarrassed when I went back to the table. People were probably looking at me and thinking about how I was the one who’d pushed the red button. My face felt about as red as that button.

  But when I sat down, Dad’s friend smiled.

  “They almost forgot,” he said as he pushed a plate in front of me. “Gyoza, Japanese dumplings, for you!”

  Five fried dumplings sat on the plate, like nuggets of gold. I grinned and grabbed at them with my chopsticks. Gyoza were a little different from jiaozi, the Chinese fried dumplings I was used to. The dumpling skin was thinner and crispier. But they were still delicious.

  “Feel better?” Mom asked me.

  I nodded, my mouth full of food. There was no day that dumplings couldn’t make better.

  Chapter 13

  GOING TO CLASS THE NEXT MORNING WAS JUST AS hard as it was the first time. “Come on!” Mom said to me as I stumbled out the door. “You’re going to be late again!”

  And I was late again. But it didn’t matter—we were still painting gray bamboo. Even though the ink was black, we were supposed
to mix it with water so that there could be different shades of gray. We had to paint bamboo “with variation,” which to me just meant painting bamboo over and over again.

  “What’s so important about bamboo?” a girl asked. I was pretty sure her name was Eva Wong. She had long hair that went all the way down below her waist. She could sit on her ponytail.

  “Bamboo is a symbol for long life because it never loses its leaves, even in winter,” the teacher said. “Also the Chinese word for bamboo sounds like the word wish. So if you want to wish someone something, you paint a picture of that something along with bamboo.”

  That wasn’t really what Eva was asking, but we all kept painting. Or at least, tried to paint. It bothered me that I couldn’t erase or even cover up any of the paint strokes I made. My art skill didn’t seem to be working here in Taiwan. I was used to my talent making me a good artist, but one look at my paper told me I was not. It made me feel uneasy and worried, like part of me was vanishing.

  So every time I lifted the brush, I was nervous. Whatever mark I made I was stuck with. It made me feel afraid to paint. Would this stroke be okay? Would I make a mistake?

  I looked around at everyone else’s paintings. No one’s paintings were great, but some people were getting their strokes to actually look like bamboo. Eva and the boy sitting next to her (I thought his name was Rex, but I didn’t know his last name) were even painting leaves.

  The teacher saw me with my brush frozen above the paper. “Relax,” he said, moving my hand. “Press down, stroke, press, stroke, press.”

  His fingers loosened my grip on the brush and the paint glided gracefully on the paper like a figure skater on ice. Aah, I thought. That’s how it’s supposed to look. Too bad the teacher couldn’t hold my hand while I did the whole painting. I wondered if I would ever learn his name.