Pandas on the Eastside

by Gabrielle Predergast

  Then I looked up individualism. It took me a while, but I finally figured out that it means when someone chooses their own path, which is what I’ve always been taught to do, so I don’t quite know how they can think something different in China. But I guess they do.

  I was pretty confused. Mom was in the kitchen making dinner, so I yelled out to her.

  “Mom? What’s a capitalist?”

  “Someone who’s not a communist!” she said. That didn’t really help. Although I had heard that David Schuman’s parents were communists, of all the kids in my class David is the only one who lives in a whole house, so that must mean they’re rich, which means they must be capitalists, and Mom had just said…

  See? This is the reason I prefer pandas to people.

  Just as we finished dinner, which was hot dogs and macaroni, someone knocked on our door. I was surprised to find Patty Maguire there. Patty lives on the ground floor of our building. Her father is the building manager, and he’s a good guy who doesn’t get upset if we need a pipe fixed on the weekend. Patty and I don’t play together that much, though, because she has two older sisters and a younger sister who take up all her time. But I like Patty. I was just surprised that she was at my door after dinner.

  “Hi, Patty,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “There’s a man downstairs to see you,” she said, a strange expression on her face.

  “You mean to see my mom?”

  “No, he asked for you.”

  “That might be my dad,” I said uncertainly. I wasn’t all that thrilled about the idea of explaining the whole dad thing to Patty, given that her dad was so helpful and nice. And my dad stayed up all night watching kung-fu movies.

  “Not unless your dad is a Chinese man in a suit,” Patty said. “Is your dad Chinese?”

  A few weeks ago I might have said, How the heck would I know? but, of course, I did know. “No, he’s Cuban,” I said.

  “Well, the guy downstairs is definitely Chinese. He said he’s a counselor or something. Are you coming down or not?”

  I yelled to Mom that I was going to Patty’s, and then I followed her down the stairs. It was four flights, with no elevator, so I had a few minutes to think.

  The whole thing seemed a bit weird. Why would a Chinese man come to see me? I thought for a second that it might be one of the sailors who was taking care of the pandas, but why would he be wearing a suit? And how had he found out where I lived? Also, I knew what a counselor was—Nancy and I had to speak to one once after we saw a man nearly die in a fight outside the Astoria Hotel. I didn’t know why a counselor would be coming to see me after supper on a weeknight. I hadn’t seen any bad fights recently. Now I was a bit worried.

  “Hey, Patty,” I said, “will you come with me to talk to him? You know, since he’s a stranger?”

  “Okeydokey,” Patty said.

  The man was standing outside the front of the building, under the awning. It was raining a little, and the awning was just big enough to keep him dry.

  He turned as I opened the door. “Good evening, Miss Journey Song?” he said. “I am Mr. Cheung. How are you this evening?” He had a real strong accent, like Mr. Huang, but his English sounded pretty darn good.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” I said. “What can I do for you?” I’d heard Mom say that lots of times on the phone and stuff, so I thought I’d try it out. It sounded a bit silly.

  “I am from the Chinese Consulate,” Mr. Cheung said.

  “What’s a consulate?” I said.

  “Do you know what an embassy is?”

  “No,” I said.

  He looked irritated for a moment, then sighed. “I represent the Chinese government.”

  Behind me, Patty whistled. I turned and glared at her.

  Mr. Cheung didn’t even notice her. He fixed me with a serious stare and spoke firmly and clearly in that way adults do when they want to be sure you’ll understand how much trouble you’re in.

  “The Chinese government does not appreciate children meddling in its affairs,” Mr. Cheung said.

  I crossed my arms. I do that when I’m trying not to look scared.

  “The Chinese government is perfectly capable of caring for its property,” Mr. Cheung said.

  “Property? You mean the pandas? You’re taking care of them now? Are they all right?”

  He pressed his lips together. “The boat workers will not let us see them. Your note in the newspaper is not helping matters.”

  Inside, I cheered the boat workers. China had given the pandas as a gift. It was wrong for the Chinese government to take them back. But I knew this wasn’t a feeling I should share with Mr. Cheung.

  “I thought the note was super,” Patty said suddenly.

  “The opinions of children do not matter,” Mr. Cheung said.

  “They do in this country,” Patty said. “You probably make your children work in factories and eat bugs, or you cook them in pots with noodles!”

  For a moment I thought Mr. Cheung might reach out and slap Patty across the face. Even she seemed to realize that she’d gone a bit far. I did the first thing that came into my head. Mom always says to try saying something nice to someone who is mad at you.

  “You speak English very well,” I said.

  Mr. Cheung’s eyes bulged as he turned to me. “You children are clearly poorly educated and hopelessly ignorant about the world. You no doubt think Chinese people are dull, ignorant and stupid too,” he said.

  “I do not,” I protested. “Mr. Huang is smart enough to run a store, and he’s a good artist too, though he only speaks and reads Chinese. He’s actually from Taiwan. But Jen Chow is Chinese, and she got a gold star on her report about ant hills. Plus she can multiply from one end of the school to the other, all the way up to twelve times, which is a lot harder than ten times or eleven times. Eleven times is surprisingly easy if you know the trick to it. Just like five times. But, of course, I’ve known the five times for ages. So has Patty here, and math isn’t even her best subject. Is it, Patty?”

  “No, it isn’t,” Patty said. “Art is. But I know the times tables up to eight pretty good.”

  Mr. Cheung hung his head down and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Nevertheless,” he said after a moment, “you are hereby entreated to desist in your efforts to affect the destiny of the animals in question or the diplomatic relations between our country and the United States.”

  His English really was good, but I didn’t understand a word of that last sentence. I looked at Patty for help, but she just shrugged.

  “No more notes. No more bamboo. Leave the pandas to us. We are going to retrieve them and return them to China.”

  “No! You can’t!” I cried.

  “And who is going to stop us?” Mr. Cheung said as he turned to leave. “You? A child?”

  I probably should have backed down then or just ignored him and let him have the last word. Maybe I should have thought a bit more about what I said next. But Mom says I’m real bad at backing down, letting other people have the last word and thinking before I speak, so all in all, what happened next wasn’t really a surprise.

  “I might be one child,” I told Mr. Cheung, “but there are at least 150 other children in my school who love pandas too. There are grown-ups all over the city who read the newspaper. And they love pandas. And I bet there are people in China too—yes, in China—who read the note in your newspaper and see it differently than you do. I bet lots of Chinese people think that the pandas were a gift given for good reasons, and that those reasons are bigger than someone having their feelings hurt about something they did or didn’t do in the war. So I don’t know how many people there are in China, but I think it’s probably at least a million, and some of them probably don’t want the pandas to be taken back. So just you wait, mister. We will stop you taking the pandas.”

  Now Mr. Cheung crossed his arms, a little smile growing on his face. “Well. I stand corrected,” he said. “I certainly look
forward to finding out exactly how.” Then he stepped into the rain and disappeared down the dark street.

  “Journey Song,” Patty said after a few seconds had gone past, “you are by far the most interesting person I know.”

  Sixteen

  David Schuman

  When I got back up to our apartment, Mom asked what Patty and I had been doing. I told her Patty needed help with math homework.

  I’m not even sure why I lied. I know you should never lie to your parents, but you should especially not lie when what you really need is someone to talk to, someone to tell you everything will be okay. And that’s what moms are for. So it was really stupid to lie, but lies are like that. Once they leave your mouth, everything is ruined and won’t be fixed for ages.

  I just went to bed instead of telling Mom everything that was bothering me. And instead of falling asleep feeling snug and secure, I lay awake worrying about the Chinese government. What ten-year-old lies awake worrying about her own government, much less one on the other side of the world? When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed I was in a zoo in China and people kept speaking to me in Chinese and feeding me donuts. Finally a giant hand came down and picked me up and threw me into a pot of noodles.

  I woke up with a jolt. That’s when I figured I should tell Mom about the whole mess.

  I could tell from the light coming in the window that it was still pretty early. Mom sometimes started early at the office, so I hoped this was one of those days. She was in the kitchen, laying out some breakfast stuff for me.

  “You’re up,” she said, surprised.

  “I didn’t sleep very well,” I said. Then I told her about the man from the Chinese government. By the time I finished, her face was bright red.

  “We need to find your father,” she said through gritted teeth.

  Mom phoned her work and told them she would be late. The whole place would fall apart if it weren’t for Mom, or so she says, so they’re fine with her sometimes coming in late. I got dressed and ate my breakfast while Mom made a few more phone calls. As I was pulling on my socks, I overheard her say, “Has he been staying there the whole time? Boy, I don’t know what they see in him.”

  That last part made me feel funny. I knew Mom didn’t love Dad anymore, but I had just started to love him. And I loved Mom too. No one had explained the rules about how that’s supposed to work. I think I was starting to get a complex.

  Mom came into my room as I was brushing my hair. “Do you have David Schuman’s phone number?” she asked.

  David Schuman and I sometimes do projects together because we are the best at writing. But he isn’t my friend because he’s a boy, and boys and girls can’t be friends without everyone saying, “He’s your boyfriend,” and I hate that. So I didn’t have his phone number. Mom had checked the phone-book, but the Schumans weren’t listed.

  “I know where he lives,” I said.

  By that time it had started raining. Mom grabbed two umbrellas and we walked out into the rain. It was still so early that I didn’t need to be at school for nearly two hours. It was pretty neat, actually, walking across the neighborhood in the early morning with my mom. We stopped at the bakery down from Mr. Huang’s, and Mom bought me a pork bun. It was so fresh it melted in my mouth, like sweet and salty cotton candy.

  David’s family lived on the other side of our neighborhood, in a small blue house on Union Street. I knew the house because once we’d walked past it on a field trip to the ice-cream factory. David had pointed it out. I remembered it because a couple of times since then I’d walked past it on purpose to look at it again. I didn’t have a crush on David or anything. I mean, he is nice and smart, but he really likes radios and spy books, and I really like bugs and pirate books, so it would never work. But I sure did have a crush on David’s house.

  It was like something from a storybook, right down to the white picket fence around it. Sometimes when I walked past, there was a big orange cat basking in the sun on the path. I longed to have a cat, but Mr. Maguire would never let us. And I longed to have a yard and a path and a picket fence and a little blue house with a yellow door.

  It had stopped raining by the time Mom and I got to the blue house, but the big orange cat was still curled up on the porch, looking at us in the way that cats have, as if they own the whole wide world. Mom looked at the cat for a second, then took a deep breath.

  “Well, here goes,” she said.

  David’s mom opened the yellow door. “Hi, Birdy,” she said. “Long time no see. Hiya, Journey.”

  “Hello, Miriam. I understand Tom is here,” Mom said.

  “He sure is. He’s downstairs. Let’s go wake him up. It’ll be like old times.”

  I didn’t know what old times they were talking about, and from the look on Mom’s face, I didn’t want to find out. Anyway, David’s mom suggested I go into the kitchen, where David was having breakfast.

  David was toasting some buns with holes in them under the grill. At first I thought they were donuts, but David told me they were called bagels. He offered me one. I was about to explain that I’d already eaten a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and a pork bun, but then David got some cream cheese out of the fridge. I really love cream cheese. So I sat down and started eating breakfast number three.

  “So,” I said between mouthfuls. “My dad’s living here?”

  “Yeah,” David said. “He’s funny.”

  Just for a second I had an urge to smack the bagel right out of David’s mouth—a really bad urge. It wasn’t right that my dad was living with David, who had his dad living there too. And it was worse that my dad was making jokes and being funny with him. I might have been okay if he’d been cranky and dull. I chewed my bagel, feeling the scowl growing on my face.

  “Do you have any Dr. Pepper?” I said as miserably as I could.

  David didn’t seem to notice my mood. “For breakfast?” he said. “Radical.” But he stood up and got two glasses and a bottle from the fridge.

  “How are the pandas?” David asked.

  “They’re about to be kidnapped by the Chinese government,” I said.

  “Bummer, man,” David said, which made me want to smack him again.

  “And the Chinese government is not very impressed with me.”

  “Double bummer,” said David.

  Just then my dad came up the basement stairs with our moms.

  “Hey, kid,” Dad said. He bent down and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek like that was nothing. I sat there hoping David wouldn’t notice me blushing.

  “Mom wants you to tell me about the man from the Chinese Consulate,” Dad said. He sat down next to me and set a little tape recorder on the table. I waited while he pressed a couple of buttons, and then I told him everything. I could see him getting madder and madder as I spoke. Meanwhile, Mom was chewing her fingernails in the background.

  “Am I in trouble?” I said.

  “You’re not in trouble,” Dad said. “You’re in the middle of something big, that’s all.” He looked up at Mom when he said that, and she looked back at him. Then it was as though a book opened in my mind. I could see they were thinking of me, caught between them—two people who couldn’t get along even though they cared about the same thing.

  “I’m sorry, Heather,” Dad said suddenly.

  “I’m sorry too, Tom,” Mom said.

  I felt like crying, but since I had already cried in front of David once that week, in class, I didn’t want to do it again. So instead I asked a question.

  “Will someone please explain to me what communism is?” I said.

  David finished his Dr. Pepper and wiped his hands on his bell-bottom jeans. “It’s a way of building a perfect society,” he said. “No poverty, no hunger, no inequality.”

  By this time David’s dad had wandered into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of black coffee. He was wearing a tie-dyed caftan and purple fuzzy slippers. “Wow, well done, son,” he said. “That, like, moved me.”

  David grinned proud
ly.

  “Your perfect society has been harassing my daughter,” Mom said.

  “Your daughter has become a tool of capitalist imperialism,” David’s dad said.

  “She is not a darn tool!” Dad shouted. Only he didn’t say darn. He said something much worse.

  Then all the adults started arguing. Mom and Dad were both yelling, and David’s parents were yelling too. The interesting thing was, Mom and Dad seemed to be on the same side. It was them against David’s parents. David just looked bored. He stood up and grabbed his jacket and schoolbag.

  “Come on,” he said. “They’ll be at it for hours.”

  We said goodbye to the orange cat and headed off to school.

  “I’m not really sure what just happened,” I said.

  “It has to do with the old days,” David said mysteriously. “Your parents and my parents were friends. Then your dad left, I guess, and your mom blamed it on my dad.”

  “Why?”

  “No idea. It was the sixties.”

  He said this last thing sagely, as if that explained everything, but it didn’t explain anything to me. As we walked on in silence, apart from David’s tuneless whistling, I tried to figure it out in my head. Why had my dad left? Did it really have something to do with David’s dad? I realized I had been assuming it was because of me. Everything—him leaving, going to jail, not ever calling or coming back—I’d thought that was all my fault. Because before I was born he was with Mom, and after I was born he left. It just made sense. But now David was saying it was his dad and something about communism and the sixties. I didn’t even care what. It wasn’t me—that’s all that mattered.

  It was nice to see my parents defending me together. Obviously, I knew they didn’t get along. And I was beginning to understand that they believed different things. But when it came to me, they were a united force. They were both furious that the Chinese consul guy had tried to scare me. And they didn’t like it when David’s dad called me a tool. And they were both proud, I knew that. Proud that I’d stood up for the pandas and for the people in this neighborhood. Proud about the note to the sailors. Proud of me.