Girl in Translation

by Jean Kwok

  When it became too cold for me to look any longer, I put the garbage bags back into place.

  The next day, I’d just shut the factory door behind me when I saw Matt dragging a massive canvas cart piled high with mauve skirts in the direction of the hemming station. The mountain of clothing loomed over him and he had to walk backward using both skinny arms to drag the cart along. I slung my book bag over my shoulder and started heading for Ma’s and my work area in the back, but to my surprise, he called out to me in Chinese.

  “Hey, help a hand?”

  I went over and grabbed the back part of the cart. Even with him in the front, the floor was so slick with dust that I had to dig my feet into the ground to keep the back wheels from veering off to the side.

  He cocked his head to one side to see me around the skirts. “So, had fun at school?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Funny school you got. ’Cause no other school in New York’s open today.”

  My eyes stretched wide.

  “C’mon, lighten up. Any idiot could tell you were playing hooky,” he said.

  “Shhhhh!” I looked around to see if anyone was listening.

  He went on as if I hadn’t said anything. “I didn’t see you doing any homework.”

  “You never have homework either.”

  “I don’t ever do any. You, you’re a real homework-doer.”

  I voiced my real fear. “Do you think my mother knows?”

  “Nah, I only know because I did it myself.”

  “Really?” I warmed to him.

  “But I just heard a lady complaining to your ma about having to work today because it’s Turkey Day. That’s a big holiday here. Anyway, you better think of something fast.”

  My mind whirled upon itself, panting and empty. “What? What?”

  He thought for a moment. “Say you only found out after you got to school, then you went home and did your homework first because you got a big project due next week.”

  By then, we’d reached the hemming area, which was at the front end of the factory, near the manager’s office. We released the cart and it rolled forward a foot more on its own before stuttering to a stop.

  “I really owe you.” Ma had taught me that all debts had to be repaid. I turned my pockets inside out to see if there was anything I could give him, but I found only scraps of leftover toilet paper that I had used as tissues stuck to the inner lining.

  “Gross,” he said. “Forget it.” He turned and went back to the seamstresses’ area.

  I caught a glimpse of Aunt Paula’s tall figure in the manager’s office and hurried away. I walked down the length of the factory to the finishing station.

  Ma’s hair was hidden under a kerchief and there was a mauve smudge on her right temple, where she had probably tried to wipe away the sweat beading along her hairline.

  I said immediately, “Hi, there was no school today.”

  Ma folded her arms. “So why didn’t you come earlier?”

  “I had a big project to work on for next week.”

  “What’s this project on?”

  I thought fast. “Current events. I needed to watch the news.”

  Ma nodded but she still seemed thoughtful. “So you happened to come to the factory at just the same time as you usually do after school?”

  I paused a second too long. “I never took the trains at any other time.” Ma started looping a belt through a skirt she had in her hands. Then she said, “What were you and the Wu boy talking about just now?”

  “N-nothing,” I stammered.

  “You seemed surprised at something.”

  “No, he just wanted me to play with him later.” I tried to laugh. “He’s always goofing off.”

  “I think you should be careful with that one.”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  Ma put aside the skirt and sat down on a stool. She looked at me. “Don’t get too close to the other children here. Ah-Kim, you must always remember this: If you play with them, learn to talk like them, study like them, act like them—what will make you different? Nothing. And in ten or twenty years, you’ll be doing precisely what the older girls are doing, working on the sewing machines in this factory until you’re worn, and when you’re too old for that, you’ll cut thread like Mrs. Wu.”

  She paused a moment, as if she were unsure if she should continue or not. “Most people never leave this life. It’s probably too late for me. My days of being a refined music teacher are over.” At my stricken look, she hastened to reassure me. “That’s all right. That’s what a parent is for, to do whatever is necessary to give her child a good life. But you, don’t forget you were the smartest student our primary school in Hong Kong had ever seen. Nothing can change how bright you are, whether your current teacher knows it or not. Most important, nobody can change who you are, except for you.” She drew me close to her for a moment. “I’m sorry I brought you to this place,” she whispered.

  It was the closest Ma would ever come to expressing regret at her choice to come to America. I understood what my task was now and I laid my cheek against her shoulder. “I’m going to get us both out of here, Ma, I promise.”

  I had to go back to school on Monday. Pa was dead and no one else could save Ma from this life. The image of Ma cutting thread as an old lady in the factory was unbearable. I thought back to what Aunt Paula had said in passing about my cousin Nelson, that his teacher thought he could become a good lawyer. I wasn’t sure what lawyers did exactly, but I knew they made a great deal of money; if even Nelson could become something so powerful, then so could I.

  In a way, I was relieved at my decision. The hours in the apartment had been guilt-ridden and fearful. Cold, hungry and lonely. In the back of my mind, I had known that I couldn’t get away with it forever. The gods were giving me a second chance. With the turkey holiday, I had a few more days before I had to go back to school and could make up an excuse for the five days I’d missed.

  I had hardly any appetite that weekend, anticipating my return to Mr. Bogart’s class. Even as I helped Ma finish the factory work, I kept seeing his face before me, the light round head that seemed so malevolent in its hairlessness. Only much later did I realize that he did have very thin hair: it was hair I hadn’t recognized as such because it was blond. I imagined not being able to understand anything, getting a zero again. I thought about my teachers in Hong Kong, how they’d always showered me with praise and prizes. I’d felt sorry for the dumb kids who fumbled with their thumbs and stuttered when they gave the wrong answers, but now I was the stupid one with a weight on my heart.

  The first thing Mr. Bogart said to me after we filed into the classroom was, “Where’s your accent note?”

  Luckily, I understood the word “note” and I’d known I would have to hand in something to explain my absence from school. I gave him a note I’d forged as best I could, based on my old English schoolbooks:Dear Sirs,

  Kimberly was sick. Sorry with the trouble.

  Your obedient servant,

  Mrs. Chang

  Mr. Bogart glanced at it and then filed it away without further comment. I slid into the seat I’d had the first day.

  We had a test. Since I hadn’t been to class, I had no idea what it was about. Then I saw that we’d been given tables with figures and there was text above each one. There are three different basketball teams and each has played five games. . . . It took me a few minutes to try to understand what the word problems were asking, but then I figured out they were simply mean, median and mode problems mixed in with a few decimal problems. It was like unexpectedly running into old friends. They were doing subjects we’d covered in Hong Kong more than a year before.

  However, I was still scared under Mr. Bogart’s eye. I misunderstood a sentence, then realized too late that I’d made a mistake and I had nothing to erase it with. Would he be angry if I crossed out my work? Probably. And then I wouldn’t have enough room for the new answer. I didn’t dare ask any of the other kids in case he
would think I was cheating again.

  My only choice was to ask Mr. Bogart himself. I stood and walked to his desk. At least I knew what I had to say because this exact situation had been covered in one of my old English lessons.

  “Excuse me, sir.” I tried to enunciate clearly. “May I borrow a rubber?”

  He stared at me for a moment and a low titter swept through the classroom.

  One of the boys called, “Don’t your boyfriend have one?”

  At this, the entire class burst into laughter. Why? I wished my hair were long enough to cover my face.

  Mr. Bogart’s face was flushed. He studied me as if trying to decide whether I’d disrupted his class on purpose. “That’s enough. Silence! Kimberly, return to your seat.”

  Filled with shame for something I didn’t at all understand, I hurried back to my seat. I would leave school that day and never come back.

  Then the frizzy-haired girl leaned over.

  “It’s called an eraser here,” she whispered. She tucked a strand of her feathery hair behind her ear and pushed a pink eraser across the gap between our desks.

  In the end, that day turned out to be a good one. I knew I’d gotten all the answers right on that test, even if I wasn’t sure I’d done the equations the way they’d been taught. Later, it turned out that the way I’d carried over numbers from the tens to the hundreds column, writing them down at the bottom of the equation instead of at the top, was not the American way to do it. Mr. Bogart took off some credit for this, so I didn’t get a hundred on that test, but I’d seen enough to know that a few minor adjustments were all I required for the next time. This was a fight where I actually had a chance.

  Even more important, I’d met Annette, the frizzy-haired girl. After the rubber incident, she subtly elbowed me. I glanced at her, then down at her notebook, where she’d written “Mr. Boogie” with a stick figure of Mr. Bogart, complete with a hole for a yelling mouth. I didn’t even know what a boogie was then, but I understood the intention and was delighted. Annette normally didn’t raise her hand in class—I think because she didn’t like Mr. Bogart—but she often knew the answer. Whenever he asked a question, she wrote the answer down on her notebook paper and showed it to me. Since I could read far better than I could speak, this way of communicating was ideal.

  And so Annette made school bearable for me again.

  With the freezing cold of December, Ma and I started keeping the oven on day and night, leaving the door open to give us some heat. A few steps away from the small circle of warmth created by the open oven, it was hard to say which felt icier, the kitchen or the room we slept in. The kitchen contained the oven but its windows were only covered by the garbage bags and the other room didn’t have any heat at all.

  In Hong Kong, I’d had a light blue and white uniform for school, and as soon as school was over, I’d revert to sandals and bare skin in the sun. I was used to seeing the tips of my toes, my bare calves and shoulders; now that they had to be constantly covered, I missed myself. I was embalmed in clothes, layer after layer, and sometimes it was days before I saw my own body. The brief moments when my skin had to be exposed were to be avoided as much as possible. The touch of the air was a bitter hand laid against the flesh, and getting dressed in the morning was an ordeal, shedding the garments my body had warmed in the night and replacing them with clothing that stung my skin.

  I didn’t have panties like other girls did. Rather I wore two layers of thick pajamas under my corduroy pants. I had several undershirts on under the one red cotton sweater we’d brought from Hong Kong. The sweater had once been pretty, a red cardigan with two pandas on the pockets, but it had shrunk and the white of the pandas had been dyed a light rose through repeated washings. It became harder and harder to pull the sweater over all the under-layers I wore, but I had no choice. Then I put my jacket on over everything. Even stuffed into my clothes, like a lump of sticky rice tied in bamboo leaves, I was still freezing. The only positive of the cold was that it seemed to lessen the number of live roaches and mice.

  We did everything we could next to the oven: my homework, folding laundry, getting dressed, working on the sacks of clothing we brought home from the factory. It was practically impossible for Ma and me to keep up with the demands of the factory, and many evenings, she sent me home alone while she stayed to finish as much of the work as possible. When she could, she brought the clothing home in plastic bags. No matter how late I stayed up to do my homework, I almost never remember Ma going to bed before I did. She was always a thin figure bent over those clothes, nodding off and then waking herself up again to go on. If a shipment was going out, we had to stay at the factory until our work was finished, even if that meant staying all night.

  The heat from the oven never reached the walls, the floor or the furniture. Everything radiated cold back to our bodies, which were the only other sources of warmth in that dead building aside from the mice. Even in front of the oven, extremities like the tips of my fingers were constantly numb and it was hard to keep them flexible. This was particularly problematic because we often had to finish small tasks on the garments, such as turning sashes the right way around or buttoning jackets. Ma tried to play her violin for me as often as she could, even if it was only on Sundays, but it soon became impossible due to the cold. Her music would have to wait for spring.

  Despite Mr. Bogart, I looked forward to school: for the joy of seeing Annette, and for the heat. Whenever I got to the delicious warmth of school, the outer ring of my ears, my palms, the bottoms of my feet tingled with needles of regained feeling.

  Annette told me she was a serious braces case. When I looked blank, she wrote it down for me and then opened her mouth like a horse to show me. Her teeth looked uneven and bruised because of them. I’d never known anyone with braces. Back home, we just grew up with bad teeth.

  She had a blue backpack with little bears and squirrels clipped onto the zippers. I never brought anything for snack time because this concept was still unknown to Ma, but Annette pulled fascinating things from her backpack: crackers with peanut butter and jelly, small blocks of orange cheddar, eggs or tuna fish mashed with mayonnaise, celery sticks filled with cream cheese. She seemed to enjoy my surprise and delight when she shared with me.

  I was also secretly fascinated by Annette’s coloring. Her skin wasn’t the opaque white of a sheet of paper that I’d thought white skin would be; it was actually transparent, and the red you saw was the color of the blood underneath. She was like an albino frog I’d seen at a market in Hong Kong when I was very small. Once, she lifted up her sweater to show me her round stomach and I jumped back in surprise. It wasn’t smooth and tan like mine. The skin was blotched and reddened by the waistband of her pants, and fine blue veins ran under the surface. I thought that her skin had to be very thin and easily torn. She had blue eyes, which I had only seen in Hong Kong in blind people with cataracts. It was as if I could look into her brains, and I found it strange that she could see out of such light eyes as well as I could from mine.

  She told me my hair was pretty even though it was so short, she said it was so black that it sometimes looked blue, she told me I should grow it into a pageboy. For years, I had the ambition of growing my hair into a pageboy without even knowing what that meant because I was so sure that Annette wouldn’t steer me wrong. She thought it was neat that I came from somewhere that wasn’t America. She wanted to learn Chinese words, especially insults.

  “Crazy melon,” I taught her in Chinese.

  “She’s a guw guah,” she said, giggling, her tones for crazy and melon so off that I barely knew what she was saying. No other Chinese would be able to understand her, which was a good thing. Annette was referring to a girl in our class she didn’t like because she said the girl was a know-it-all, which she also wrote down for me. It confused me because wasn’t it a good thing to know so much?

  Like me, Annette didn’t have any other friends. It was mainly because she was one of three white kids in the
class and the other two were boys, who stuck together. All of the other kids were black. There was clearly a division between the white kids and the black ones. There may have been a few Hispanic kids too but at that time, I mostly thought they were black kids with straighter hair.

  I found out that the school was close to a rich white neighborhood. Parents in the rich area who wanted their kids to go to public school had no choice but to send them there. The other kids came from the neighborhood immediately surrounding the school itself, which was a fairly middle-to-lower-class black area. It was only later that I understood it in these terms, but what was immediately clear to me was that Aunt Paula had been right: the neighborhood of my school wasn’t nearly as bad as the projects neighborhood, which I’d learned was the name of where I lived.

  In many ways, I thought of myself as one of the black kids. The white kids brought sandwiches in brown paper bags. The two white boys sat together at a separate table and kept to themselves. I ate free hot lunch with the black kids, with Annette as the only white person at our table. I also lived in a black neighborhood. However, the black kids were friends with one another and I wasn’t. They spoke English rapidly and easily, they sang the same songs in the courtyard, they knew the same jump rope games. One popular song went: You look like a monkey, you smell like one too. We hate you, Mr. Bogart, we really really do.

  The other kids thought I was strange, of course. I didn’t fit in, with my homemade, ill-fitting clothes and boyish hair. Ma cut it as soon as it reached the nape of my neck. She said it was more practical that way, since it took less time to dry in our icy apartment. Although the black kids in my class were mostly poor as well, they had store-bought clothes. On my way to school, I looked more closely at the tall apartment block close to school, where several of them lived. A bit of broken glass littered the ground and some of the walls were covered in graffiti (I had learned what the English writing was called). But the buildings were surrounded by a border of shrubbery, and most of the windows didn’t have bars on them. Those people definitely had central heating.