Girl in Translation

by Jean Kwok

  Annette’s room was almost as big as our classroom at school. There was a wall jammed full with toys: stuffed animals, board games, building blocks. She had a bunk bed with a ladder for going up and a slide for coming down. No one slept on the bottom bunk, she said, but she had a bunk bed because she liked sleeping high. I climbed up after her and at first I was afraid of getting too close to the edge of the mattress, despite the wooden rail. Once I got used to it, though, it was glorious, heady, to be so close to the ceiling, with my shoes off, a friend at my side, and the anticipation of a slide to return to floor level. It was so warm in their house, I could take off several layers and I lay on her bed in just my undershirt. I felt weightless and happy, as if I were in Hong Kong again.

  “Ooooooh . . . the girls are playing in their tree house! Better watch out for bugs!” Her brother’s little head stuck out like a dandelion from behind the door.

  “I’m going to kill you!” Annette yelled, and she started down the slide but he disappeared before she got to the bottom. She ran to her bedroom door and poked her head out. “You come in here one more time and I’m telling!”

  She slammed the door. “I wish I could keep him out, but we don’t believe in locked doors in the house.” From the way she said it, I could tell it was a phrase she was quoting from her parents. I wished Ma had the luxury of worrying about my behavior; she could barely do more than keep the both of us alive.

  I glanced at the clock by her bed. Snoopy’s hands showed the time and it wasn’t long before I had to leave. “Maybe we start work now?”

  Mrs. Avery had set up all our materials on Annette’s desk. Everything was new and clean: a large shoe box, sheets of colored cardboard, green and gold glitter paint, watercolors and two types of markers, glue and scissors. Alone at home, I would have needed to do things differently: taking boxes out of other people’s garbage, cutting figures out of old newspaper to stick to the box with packing tape, drawing everything with a ballpoint pen. With our pretty materials, Annette and I quickly finished our diorama, which showed some people sitting in a circle on the ground, holding hands and smiling. We used glitter paint to draw the letters of the word “Communication” behind the figures on the ground. It had been Annette’s idea and I was glad she knew what we were supposed to do.

  When Mrs. Avery drove me home, I asked her to drop me off at the school.

  “No, I’ll drive you home, dear,” she said. “Just tell me where you live. I work part-time as a really state agent, I can find anyplace something.”

  “School is okay,” I lied. “Ma wait for me at school.”

  “But the school is cl—” She broke off in the middle of her sentence. She took a breath, then said, “The school? You’re sure?”

  I nodded.

  “The school it is, then. Here we go!” She sounded very bright.

  When we got there, all of the windows were dark and there was no one on the pavement. I was afraid Mrs. Avery would protest because, like Ma, she didn’t seem to be the sort of mother to let a kid out alone at an empty building.

  She pulled up to the curb. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I wait for Ma, she come soon. Bye-bye.” I slid out of the car and closed the door behind me. I turned back toward her. This was another moment I’d rehearsed. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

  “You’re very welcome.” She leaned toward me and hooked a ringed hand around the edge of the open window. “You know, Kim, we’d love to have you over for dinner sometime. You let Annette know when you can come, all right? Just about somethings okay with us!”

  I thanked her again, and then, to my surprise, she didn’t offer to wait. I watched her disappear down the street and suddenly felt lonely. But when I got to the end of the long walk from school and finally opened the door to our building, a car the same style as hers passed behind me. Could she have followed me all this way?

  I headed up the stairs.

  I thought about the Averys’ warm, animal-hair-covered house often. I dreamed of staying in Annette’s room. She already had an extra bed and she could smuggle food to me. Sometimes, when I felt the most alone and overwhelmed, I had the fantasy of going to Mrs. Avery for help. Even just the possibility of it gave me real comfort.

  But when Annette invited me to her house again, Ma said I couldn’t go. I pleaded until finally Ma held me by the shoulders, looking into my eyes, and said, “Ah-Kim, if you go too many times to her house, we will have to invite her back to ours one day and then what? Little heart’s stem, we already have too many debts we can’t repay.”

  It was always easy to see who had a green card and who was illegal on payday. The illegals all got paid in cash, in Uncle Bob’s office. The others had their piecework converted to an hourly wage and that amount was given in check form. We received a check but we also had to go to the office. Each payday, Uncle Bob would limp heavily into our workstation and escort us into the manager’s office, where he would cash our check and divide up the money in front of our eyes.

  “I want to make sure everything is absolutely clear,” Uncle Bob said, sounding resigned. He wrote the different amounts on a pad of paper and put the green bills into separate piles. “So, this is for your medicine, when you were sick in Hong Kong. This is for the plane tickets, this is for the visas, this is the interest over the full amount, this is for the rent—no interest on that, of course—this is for the water, gas and electricity, and this is for you.” And then he handed us the smallest pile with a sigh.

  The first time this happened, I had been shocked by how little money was left for us. Luckily, we didn’t have a phone, or we would have had to pay for that as well. I hadn’t known that we were repaying anything else and I hadn’t realized how much Ma’s tuberculosis treatment and the immigration expenses had been. So this was a part of the reason we couldn’t afford a better apartment, although I wished Aunt Paula had given us more time to repay our debts to her. Uncle Bob took their share every week, and we paid our rent and everything else in installments.

  One day, Ma tried to talk to Uncle Bob about the apartment too. “Ah-Kim is always sick. The apartment is too cold. When will another one be available?”

  He looked at me and my perpetually red nose. His face was not unkind. “That’s hard to say. Aunt Paula takes care of all that stuff. But come on, let me buy you an iced tea. Have you ever had one?”

  Uncle Bob took us to the soda machine and bought me my first American iced tea while a few kids looked on with awe. It was so cold and lemony, better than any drink I’d ever tasted.

  “Thank you, Big Brother Bob,” Ma said. “Will you keep watch for a new place for us?”

  “Hmm? Oh, sure, sure,” he said.

  In preparation for Christmas, the school was hung with lights and cutout snowflakes and we all sang songs in assembly. I knew Annette was planning to give me a present, because she spent weeks asking me to guess what it was. I thought only of things like pencil cases or schoolbooks, and so I was continually wrong, to her delight.

  If Annette was going to give me something, I had to get her a gift too. Ma and I went to Woolworth’s to look for a present. She skipped the toy department because everything was either too expensive or too small. Ma didn’t know what we should buy for a white person either. She didn’t have much money but she wanted the present to be big enough to look like we’d spent a decent amount on it. She finally decided on a big plastic plant for $1.99, which was 133 skirts. The store wrapped it for us for free and I couldn’t wait to give it to Annette.

  The last day of school before Christmas vacation, I saw Annette getting out of their car in the morning. I ran up to her, lugging my package.

  “Kimberly!” she shrieked. “What’s that?!”

  I thrust it into her hands. “For you.”

  “Hi, Kim,” Mrs. Avery called from inside the car.

  Annette had already torn off the paper. As the green and red mottled leaves were revealed, she held the plastic plant
at arm’s length, puzzled. “Does it make music?”

  I was just getting over another cold and I wiped my nose with a bit of toilet paper while I tried to figure out what she meant. Why would a plant make music? Only much later did I realize that Annette had thought it was a toy, that she couldn’t figure out why I’d given her such a thing.

  Mrs. Avery’s voice interrupted us. “What a lovely plant, Annette. We’ll put it right on the winnie seal in your room. Thank you, Kimberly.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Annette mumbled, and then she brightened as she drew a tiny package from her pocket. “This is for you.”

  When I opened it, I saw it was a little panda clip-on bear, similar to the other stuffed animals she had clipped to her book bag. It had soft brown eyes and neat black ears that were politely folded down; its paws had tiny claws on them that held on to your finger. I had longed for such a bear without even knowing it, although I think Ma felt a bit disappointed that we’d gotten such a tiny present in return.

  On that last day of school before Christmas vacation, Ma surprised me. Instead of leaving for the factory in the morning as she always did, she walked to school with me.

  “You’ll be late,” I said.

  “Aunt Paula is usually collecting rent today,” Ma answered. “And I have a bit of time before the shipment goes out.”

  “You can’t be sure she’ll be gone.” I had seen Aunt Paula correcting the other workers for small faults like being late. Sometimes, she fired them on the spot.

  “I know.” Although I was trying to catch her eye, Ma looked only at my school, now appearing in the distance.

  “Ma.” I pulled on her thin coat. Ma was risking her job and our survival. I was sure that Aunt Paula would fire us too if she got angry enough. In the freezing morning air, puffs of white rose from my mouth. “What are you doing?”

  She didn’t answer me, but I saw she had looped through her arm a small plastic bag with a take-out container in it. Could this have something to do with my problems with Mr. Bogart? Was she going to throw food at him? With each step, the sidewalk pounded against the rubber of my boots in time with the frightened thud of my heart.

  When we arrived at school, I tried to say good-bye to her at the door, but she walked right past the guard and followed me into the school basement, where I had to line up. Mr. Bogart was standing against the wall, talking to the other sixth-grade teacher, Miss Kumar. Ma marched up to them and I trailed behind her, wishing I had the power to make us both disappear.

  “Yes?” Mr. Bogart said, drawing the sides of his mouth down into a frown.

  “Merry X-y-masy,” Ma said in English. Her voice shook. She placed the take-out container in Mr. Bogart’s hands.

  He raised his eyebrows and then slowly flipped open the cover of the container to reveal a large soy sauce drumstick inside. It was worse than I had expected. For Ma, this was a luxury that we could rarely afford ourselves, but to give Mr. Bogart something as common as a drumstick . . .

  His expression was caught between disdain and something else I couldn’t identify—could it have been surprise, or even gratitude? I waited for some sarcastic comment, but because of the unusual nature of the gift or Miss Kumar’s presence, Mr. Bogart seemed stunned into silence.

  Miss Kumar, on the other hand, was smiling openly. “And Nick, you always say you never get any appreciation,” she said. She turned to Ma. “Kimberly seems to be settling in just fine, Mrs. Chang.”

  Ma didn’t understand a word Miss Kumar had said, of course, but Ma knew enough to answer, “Dank you.”

  Mr. Bogart nodded abruptly at Ma and then gathered together our class, most of whom were gaping in surprise at the hated Mr. Bogart’s getting any kind of present from a parent.

  Ma left quickly and Aunt Paula was indeed away that morning, so we didn’t get fired. That incident made Mr. Bogart neither kinder nor crueler to me, for which I was grateful, but I understood Ma was doing what she could to help me with him.

  One day close to Christmas at the factory, I saw Matt working with his mother, and I rubbed the panda’s forehead in my pocket with my finger.

  I walked over and said, “Joyful Christmas.” Then I swiftly pulled out the panda and offered it to him. I had thought about this. Much as I liked Tyrone at school, I had never really spoken to him. I was grateful to Matt and he was my only friend who knew what my life was really like; he shared it. I wanted to give him a present even more than I wanted to keep the panda for myself, because it was the only thing I had.

  Matt tossed it up in the air and caught it with a quick flick of his wrist. “What’s this for?” he asked.

  “You helped me before,” I said. I wanted to add, “And I really like you,” but I didn’t.

  He smiled at me then, and I saw that he had a bruise smudged across his cheekbone. “Seems to me that this panda wants to be with you,” he said, and gently, he put it back in my hand.

  I was torn between relief and disappointment that he’d refused my present. I stared at my fingers, then looked up and asked, “What happened to you?” I nodded at the bruise.

  “Oh, that. Some jerks were trying to pick on my brother.” He gave a shrug, trying to appear nonchalant, and he looked so small and skinny that I hurt for him.

  I already knew the answer but I couldn’t stop myself from asking. “Do you get into fights a lot?”

  “Nah,” he said, grinning at me again. I knew he was lying. “You’re a sweet kid.”

  “I’m not a kid, I’m just as tall as you are.”

  “Just wait a couple of years,” he said, as he walked away with a swagger.

  I’d heard about the myth of Santa Claus in Hong Kong, although we’d assumed that he chose not to visit the warmer countries. Since he wasn’t an active presence there and no one talked about him much, I hadn’t learned that he wasn’t real, unlike most other kids my age. Now that I was in the U.S., I assumed he would be appearing like all the other strange things I had heard of but had not seen until now, like red hair and mittens.

  We gave Mr. Al a small wooden elephant from Chinatown, to bring him money and a long life. Ma wasn’t afraid to give him things she actually liked, because she knew he was crazy about everything Chinese. His wife had died long before and he said that he was going to settle down with a nice Chinese woman someday. He always made me ask Ma if she had any pretty friends and how to say things like “I love you” in Chinese.

  “I’m going to keep this next to my cash register, bring me good luck,” Mr. Al said. And he’d given us a small red desk lamp from his store. I put it on the table I did my homework on.

  We didn’t have a Christmas tree or lights in the apartment, but Ma did her best. She bought a used paperback book of Christmas carols and we sang them together. I’d heard some of them at school, and Ma could read the music if not the English words. She provided the melody wordlessly while I sang in English loudly and off-key. She tried accompanying us with her violin, but it was much too cold and she couldn’t play with her gloves on.

  I didn’t have a stocking, though on Christmas Eve, I laid one of Ma’s socks, which was bigger than mine, on the low table I did my homework on. When I woke up, there was an orange and a Chinese red envelope with two dollars in it, a fortune. I saw immediately there was no Santa Claus, only Ma, but that was enough.

  A few days after the Western New Year, we found a true gift. Our regular route to the subway took us past a big building and one morning we saw some men working near its dumpster. Soon, they left and we saw what they’d thrown away: several rolls of the plush cloth used to make stuffed animals. The building must have been a toy factory.

  We both stopped short, riveted by the sight of the warm material.

  “Maybe if we are very fast—” Ma began.

  “No, Ma. We can’t risk being late with Aunt Paula again,” I said. “We have to come back later.”

  Throughout the long day at the factory, Ma kept asking me questions. “Do you think other people would take somethin
g like that? Is there trash collection today?”

  The only answer I had for her was, “I don’t know.” It would be my fault if the material was gone by the time we could leave the factory that evening.

  When we finally hurried out of the subway station and rushed to the toy factory, we saw that everything was still there. Ma laughed with joy at the glorious find. Yards and yards of material that could keep us warmer. Even though the cloth was fake fur, lime green and prickly, it was better than anything we had. The streets were deserted in the bitter cold but Ma and I made several trips to pull as many rolls out of the trash as we could and dragged them home.

  Ma made us robes, sweaters, pants and blankets out of the toy factory cloth. She used it to cover parts of the floor and windows. She even made tablecloths out of it. We must have been a funny sight, dressed up at home as two large stuffed animals, but we didn’t have the luxury of minding. Since then, I have wondered if we would have survived the winter without that gift from the gods. The material was heavy and carpetlike, not having been intended as clothing, and when I slept under our new blankets, I woke with my limbs aching from the weight. However, at least they covered our entire bodies at once, unlike the piles of clothes we’d used in the past, and they were warm.

  All of the gods leave at midnight on the night before Chinese New Year, which came at the end of January then. Every year, they return to us at a different time and from a different direction. Ma consulted the Tong Sing to find out when and where we had to go to welcome them as they returned. She rubbed a sewing needle against a magnet and then floated the needle in a bowl of water to figure out where the directions were. At four in the morning, Ma and I ventured into the deserted streets, the white clouds of our breaths drifting upward in the frosty gleam of the streetlamps. We headed southeast to greet the returning gods, our gloved hands filled with offerings of mandarin oranges and peanuts.