Year of the Rat

by Grace Lin

  “The kids don’t like the soup.” Dun-Wei’s mother laughed. I looked and saw that Lissy, Ki-Ki, Teddy, and Phil had pushed their soup away, too.

  “Ah, it’s because it’s bitter-melon soup,” Dad said, “and they are young. You can only appreciate bitter-melon soup when you are old and have tasted the bitterness of life.”

  I thought about that. With Melody moving, my bad grade in school, my worries about the cold door, and all the other changes during the Year of the Rat, I felt like I had tasted the bitterness of life. I should be able to eat the soup. Carefully, I took another spoonful. Yuck! Nope, I still didn’t like it.

  But, then, I looked up again and saw Dun-Wei eating it. He was the only one who liked it. He kept putting spoonfuls into his mouth and swallowing.

  And suddenly I began to think about the bitterness he had tasted. Ever since Melody left, I had felt alone in school. I realized that he probably felt the same way, only a hundred times worse. He probably hated that he was fresh off the boat. He probably wished he had never come to upstate New York, to the school where kids made fun of him and I thought he was the enemy and ignored him. And suddenly, I felt guilty.

  Mrs. Liu came over with round paper lanterns. Dun-Wei handed me a softly lit circle.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Bu ke qi,” Dun-Wei said. Then he stopped and smiled and said, “I mean, you’re welcome.”

  As he moved away, I clutched my lantern. It was as if the soft light was making me see clearly at last. Because I finally saw that all this time I had been calling Dun-Wei the enemy when I was a traitor. I turned my back on him because he was Chinese; and that was horrible because I was kind of Chinese, too.

  So when the moon filled the sky like a mango-colored pearl, I was surprised at my secret wish. I didn’t wish for Melody to come back or for Sam Mercer to like me or for me to become an author and an illustrator. I didn’t even wish for the changes of the Year of the Rat to go away. Instead I found myself wishing that I, too, could change.

  Chapter 26

  Fall

  THE LEAVES ON THE TREES SEEMED TO WANT TO give one last glorious burst of color before falling to the ground like brown-colored ashes. Mom and Dad were the same way; they both had things they wanted to do before winter came. Dad wanted to play golf and Mom wanted to fix our house.

  Dad was golf crazy. He played golf with Dr. Pan, who was Sandy Pan’s father. He lived an hour away from New Hartford, but Dad drove thirty minutes one way to the golf course and Dr. Pan drove thirty minutes the other way. The fall weather didn’t discourage him, either. If frost covered the ground, Dad just layered on an extra jacket and hat. And every day, he hit golf balls in our backyard, practicing his swing. Mom would find golf balls in her garden, like a new kind of flower seed.

  Mom wanted to make changes to our house. She especially thought we needed to change our carpets. I kind of agreed with her. Our carpet was supposed to be white, but now it was the beige color of a brown egg.

  “I don’t know,” Dad said, unconvinced. “Do we really want to change the carpet? I think I’m too busy.”

  “Too busy playing golf,” Lissy snorted.

  Dad laughed. “Yes,” he agreed, “too busy playing golf. I still haven’t beaten Dr. Pan.”

  “Dr. Pan always beats you,” Ki-Ki said.

  “I know, I know,” Dad said. “I think it’s my putting. If I could just hit the ball in a straight line, I could beat him.”

  “Wait, we’re not talking about golf,” Mom said, interrupting. “What about the carpet?”

  The side of Dad’s face squished down in a grumpy grimace as he thought. But in the next instant, Dad’s eyes lit up, transformed. “You want to change the carpet?” he asked. “Even the hallway carpet upstairs?”

  “Yes,” Mom said. “It all has to be changed.”

  “Okay,” Dad said. “That’s fine. You can change the house any way you want.”

  We were all surprised. Dad usually didn’t change his mind that fast. But Mom was so glad he was convinced that she didn’t ask any questions. “Good,” she said. “I’ll call the carpet company tomorrow.”

  That night, after dinner, while I was trying to write a new story, Daddy called me.

  “Pacy,” Dad called from the hallway, “I need one of your art markers.”

  “Why?” I asked as I brought them to him.

  “Oh, I just need one,” he said as he picked out a red one. Then he started laying out a measuring tape.

  “What are you doing?” Lissy asked as she came up the stairs.

  “Here, you can help,” Dad said, handing her the end of the tape. She stretched the measuring tape down the long hallway.

  “Is it straight?” he asked us. We helped him make sure it wasn’t crooked. Lissy held one end and I held the other. Then Dad took the red marker and drew a red line down the whole hallway, right on the carpet! He followed the measuring tape, so the line was exactly straight.

  “Good!” he said. “Now I can practice my putting.” And he did. He took his golf ball and tried to hit it so it followed the line.

  When Mom saw the red line in the hallway, she was so shocked. Lissy and I laughed and laughed.

  “No wonder you said it was okay to change the carpet,” Mom said. “You just wanted an excuse so it would be okay for you to draw on it.”

  Mom scheduled for the carpet man to come and change the carpet the next week. That gave Dad a whole week to practice his putting in the hallway. We helped him watch the golf ball roll down the red line. Every day, Dad hit the ball straighter and straighter.

  When the carpet man came, we watched him pull out the old carpet. It made a RR-rrr-iii-p!sound. “Good-bye, red line!” Ki-Ki said. We felt bad for Dad; he was going to be sad when he came home.

  But we were wrong. Dad came home very happy.

  “Guess what?” he said. “I beat Dr. Pan today!”

  Chapter 27

  Thanksgiving

  IT WAS ALREADY NOVEMBER, BUT IT STILL HADN’T snowed. I wished it would; outside everything was gray and brown like a dirty oyster shell. The wind blew as if it were trying to sweep the dead leaves away, but all it did was scatter them, and the ground was covered with crumbled leaves. But at least we had a couple of days of school off. It was Thanksgiving!

  This year for dinner we had huo guo. Instead of rice, we cracked a raw egg in our bowls and mixed it with soy sauce. In a hot pot in the middle of the table, moon-colored broth simmered. All around it were plates of thinly sliced raw meat, shrimps, scallops, and vegetables that we would cook in the hot pot, dip in our raw egg to cool, then eat. It was always fun to eat huo guo. Everyone would get confused about whose food was whose because it was hard to keep track of what was cooking. “Where’s my shrimp?” Dad would ask. “Did it swim away?”

  There was also a small cooked turkey on the table too. That’s because it was Thanksgiving and you have to have turkey on Thanksgiving! We never let Mom forget the turkey, though she tried to.

  “You know Dad and I don’t like turkey,” Mom said. She said this every year. “You’re going to have to eat it all. It’s just going to be your lunch until it’s all gone.”

  But we didn’t care, because we knew it wasn’t a Thanksgiving dinner without turkey. No matter what else there was when we sat down at the table for dinner, the turkey made it Thanksgiving. At least we thought so.

  “Mrs. Lafontaine said that at Thanksgiving we should say what we are thankful for. I said I was thankful for our family and that I have a loose tooth,” Ki-Ki said as we were eating. Mrs. Lafontaine was Ki-Ki’s teacher, and Ki-Ki loved her. Ever since school began, a lot of Ki-Ki’s sentences started, “Mrs. Lafontaine says . . . ”

  “That’s a good way to celebrate the holiday,” Mom said. “Let’s say what we are thankful for. I am thankful for everyone’s good health, our good food, and our nice house. Who’s next?”

  “Hmm, you took all of mine,” Dad said. “I’m thankful that I don’t have to work today and
. . .”

  “And you beat Dr. Pan in golf,” I added.

  “Yes, that, too,” Dad agreed. “Okay, Lissy, how about you?”

  Lissy made a face. “I’m thankful that we don’t have school tomorrow,” Lissy said.

  My turn. This was annoying. What did I have to be thankful for? Melody was gone, I wasn’t sure if I was really friends with Becky and Charlotte, I was ashamed of how I acted toward Dun-Wei, and my talent was a cold door that I couldn’t even use in the talent show.

  “I don’t have anything to be thankful for,” I said.

  “Of course you do,” Mom said. “Think.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m thankful that I’m going to have a turkey sandwich on Monday.”

  “You’re not really thankful for that,” Lissy said. “Liar.”

  “Well,” Mom said, “you should be thankful for that. Did I ever tell you the story about my school lunch?”

  MOM’S SCHOOL LUNCH

  When I was in school, we didn’t bring our lunch in a paper bag or buy it from a school cafeteria. We carried it in a bamboo box. And when we entered our classroom, we all placed our boxes in a large mesh bag, like a fishnet, by the door. At lunchtime, one of the teachers would take the bag of lunches and put it in a giant steamer in another room. And when she brought it back to us, our lunches were so hot that I was afraid they would leave burn marks on our desks.

  Nobody really liked their lunch food after it had been reheated. No matter how delicious the food was when it was packed, the steamer made everything tasteless. And it gave the pork dumplings, sticky rice, or soy sauce eggs a strange texture, kind of like melted wax.

  A few of the luckier and richer students in my class had a hot lunch delivered to them at lunchtime. Old grandmothers or aunts or sometimes servants would come at lunchtime and hand the student his or her lunch, bowing to the teacher the whole time. I begged and whined to my mother to do the same thing, but she just shook her head.

  There was one girl in my class who got her lunch delivered to her every day. Her name was Chan and her older brother brought her box in promptly at noon. I didn’t like her, and it wasn’t just because I was jealous that she got a fresh lunch every day. It was because she never shared it.

  Whenever Chan got her lunch from her brother, she would go to the far corner of the room and secretly eat. She’d hold the lid so it would block her food and mouth from view, but we could see her chewing and swallowing. And whenever someone came over, she’d quickly cover it. While the rest of us would divide our cementgray pork dumplings and rubbery buns, she just sat alone in the corner. Her lunch was probably really good; probably sweet, meaty pink and white lobster or tea-smoked duck with crispy skin, and she wanted to eat it all herself. I thought she was mean and selfish.

  One day, my mother told me that since she had an errand to run near the school, and because she was tired of hearing me complain, she would bring me a fresh hot lunch. I was so excited. The whole morning I had a hard time paying attention to the lessons because I was so eager for my mother to come with my lunch.

  To my dismay, our lessons were running late. When noon came, my teacher was still talking, so when my mother and the other fresh lunches came they had to pile them in a corner on the desk. I was so worried. Was my fresh lunch going to get cold? Would the teacher say we had to reheat them? I hoped not! That would be horrible—the one time I got a fresh lunch and it might be ruined!

  So when the teacher finally called time for lunch, I rushed to the desk and grabbed my box. At least I thought it was my box. It felt very light, like a paper balloon. I opened it and was shocked. The lunch box was empty!

  “That’s my lunch box,” I heard a voice say. I looked up and saw Chan. She quickly grabbed it and covered it so no one could see. Her eyes were large like a scared rabbit as she looked at me. “Don’t tell anyone, okay?” she whispered.

  During the rest of lunchtime, she told me how her family was too poor to give her lunch. Chan and her brother didn’t want everyone to know how poor they were so they had saved their pennies to buy the lunch box. And every day, in his high school, he pretended to eat lunch from it and then afterward, brought it to her, so she could pretend to eat, too. She begged me not to tell anyone.

  I had been completely wrong about Chan. All this time, I thought she was the lucky one, with fresh lunches full of rich food, while she had really been eating shadows from a shared lunch box. That afternoon, I divided my wrapped sticky rice in half and shared it with her. After that, I shared my lunch with her every day, and I never told anyone about Chan’s empty lunch box.

  “Until now,” Lissy said.

  “Yes,” Mom said, “but that was a long time ago, so I think it’s okay. Anyway, the point is that I should’ve been thankful that I had any lunch—fresh or not. Just like you should be thankful that you get a lunch, even if it is a turkey sandwich.”

  I stirred my sliced meat in the hot broth and as it turned brown, I thought about Mom’s story. Maybe Mom was right. There were always things to be thankful for and I was just looking at things wrong. Maybe, instead of wishing Melody hadn’t left, I should just be glad that she had been here and that Charlotte and Becky still were. And, even if I couldn’t use my talent for the talent show, at least I had a talent. Maybe I should be thankful for all the bad things because they could be even worse. But if that was true, that meant what I should really be thankful for was that I was me, which seemed strange because of all of my mistakes and worries.

  Somehow, it seemed a lot easier to be thankful for a turkey sandwich.

  Chapter 28

  Using my Talent

  BACK AT SCHOOL, IT SEEMED LIKE EVERYONE WAS busy with the talent show except for me. I knew that wasn’t really true; there were lots of people who didn’t get in or didn’t try out, like me. But it seemed like every day, people were practicing or rehearsing while I just watched.

  Most people were singing or dancing or lip synching songs. Even Dun-Wei was in the talent show. Sam Mercer found out that Dun-Wei could play the piano and got him to play keyboards for his band, the Black Spiders. I had thought about singing or playing the violin or joining Becky and Charlotte in their dance of cartwheels and kicks, but in the end I didn’t. None of those things were what I wanted to do.

  The truth was that I already knew what my talent was. It was writing and drawing books. I remembered Mom’s story and tried to be thankful for my talent, but it was hard. Not only was my talent wrong for the talent show, it was a cold door. I used to think my talent was so great, but now I was starting to change my mind.

  “For the talent show,” Mr. Davidson said, “we’ve decided that someone in our class will do the poster, while someone in Mrs. Janey’s class will create the programs. So, who would like to design the poster?”

  A poster! Even though it wasn’t making a book, I had the talent to do that. I raised my arm so fast it was as if it were being pulled by a string. Mr. Davidson smiled.

  “Well,” Mr. Davidson said, “I think our resident artist wants the job. Okay, Grace, after class I’ll give you the poster board and you can bring it home to work on it.”

  The poster board was big. It came up to my shoulders and I had to place it on the top of my toes when I carried it so I didn’t kick it. Since this was the only way I was going to be able to show my talent at the talent show, I wanted to do a good job. I remembered how for our quilt-square project we had to do practice drawings, so I did a couple of rough drafts first. I was glad I did. Mr. Davidson told me the poster had to have the words “Oxford Rd. Elementary School Talent Show” as well as the date and time, and it was hard to fit everything in.

  I put “Oxford Rd. Elementary School Talent Show” in a box in the middle and the date and time on the bottom. And then all around the border I drew pictures of some of the acts in the talent show. I drew Becky and Charlotte dancing, Sam Mercer’s band, the Black Spiders (I drew them the biggest), Holly Honchell singing, even Kurt and Rich lip synching. I used all th
e colors in my marker set. I used my black marker so much that it dried up and I had to get another one. It took me a long time; so long that I didn’t bring it to school until the night of the talent show.

  But when I brought it to school, no one paid attention to me. Everyone was rushing around putting makeup on, going over music, or tying dance shoes. When I brought the poster to Mr. Davidson, all he said was, “Oh, good, the poster.” And quickly, without even looking, he hung it up on the wall right next to the door of the auditorium and ran to check the sound equipment for the microphones.

  I was starting to feel like a popped balloon. As the audience started to go into the auditorium, most of them didn’t even look at my poster. The ones that did only glanced at it and kept walking. It was so unfair. No one cared about my talent at all.

  I guessed it was because the talent show was showing the real talent. Becky and Charlotte did their dance and got a standing ovation, Sam Mercer’s band made the walls shake (and some parents cover their ears), and Kurt and Rich’s lip synching made the crowd shout with laughter. These talents were the important ones, the ones people liked and cared about. My talent was just a cold wind on a winter day.

  So after the final clapping, while the lights went up and the crowds outside the auditorium were congratulating and photographing all the performers, I carefully took down my poster and carried it home. No one was looking at it anyway.

  Chapter 29