Girl in Translation

by Jean Kwok

This time, I stayed a bit behind Annette. She went up to each of the perfume ladies and stuck out her round wrist with confidence. I followed. The spritzes of perfume were cold against my skin. Then we put our noses up against our own and each other’s arms, although we could have smelled each other from the other room.

  After we’d been to all of the perfume ladies, we circled the glossy white counters, picking up the test bottles and spraying each one on a new spot. It became hard to find an exposed piece of our bodies that hadn’t been sprayed: we started with our wrists, moved up our arms, then did our necks and collarbones and chests as well. Annette and I giggled like mad, and I felt as glamorous as the ladies in the posters by the time we said good-bye.

  When I showed up at the factory a few hours later, though, Matt looked up from the steamers. Then he started convulsing with laughter while he waved his hand in front of his nose.

  I was aghast. Despite the enormous clouds of steam, he could still smell me.

  I doubled back to the bathroom and scrubbed off as much as I could but it was impossible to remove it all. When I approached Ma at our workstation, she said, “Ay yah, ah-Kim! What have you done?”

  “Annette had a bottle of new perfume with her. She let me try some.”

  “Some! You must have taken a bath in it!” Luckily, Ma didn’t pursue it any further.

  But that night, as I bent over my books, I could still smell the lingering perfume on my clothes and wrists, and I felt surrounded by the warmth of Annette’s friendship, by her confidence in me. I wondered if that had been her plan all along.

  I’d gotten my working papers and Mr. Jamali gave me extra hours at the library. I was actually paid for this time since my work was beyond what I was required to do for my scholarship. I made sure I only filled up some of my free time slots during the day so I could help Ma at the factory as much as possible after school. I had opened a bank account in Ma’s name and we put everything extra there for college.

  I had mostly lost my interest in makeup. It wasn’t that my looks didn’t concern me, because they did, but I just couldn’t fathom ever being popular or beautiful. I didn’t understand how that all worked. No matter what colors Annette put on my face, I realized I was still the same underneath. I was also so busy, working at the library and the factory, trying to keep up in my classes, doing papers and homework and tests. Even aside from the upcoming oral exam, I was always worried I would come across something I couldn’t handle. If I didn’t understand an assignment or a topic in class, Ma couldn’t help me. She had never been good at school, only in music, and with the added confusion of the different methods and language here, it became impossible for her to be useful. Ma had told me that Pa had been a brilliant student, with a talent for both languages and science, and that I’d gotten my intelligence from him. I used to take comfort from that, but now I just wished he were here to help me.

  All I wanted was to have a break from the exhausting cycle of my life, to flee from the constant anxiety that haunted me: fear of my teachers, fear at every assignment, fear of Aunt Paula, fear that we’d never escape. In the library one day, I picked up Car and Driver instead. Paging through the photos of glossy convertibles, I felt something open up in my head. Car and motorcycle magazines became my escape. I wanted just to ride a Corvette into the wild night and not have to fill out the income taxes for Ma, not have to be responsible for everything that was in English. I was always afraid I had done something wrong and an inspector would appear at our door, demanding answers to questions I didn’t even understand.

  One day at the library, I was leafing through an old copy of Cycle that Mr. Jamali had given me. An article about a particular motorcycle caught my eye. I didn’t understand at first why this model seemed so familiar but then I recognized the Indian head on the gas tank. It matched the toy replica Park always kept with him.

  Later that afternoon at the factory, I looked for Park. He’d wandered away from his mother again, as he often did, but as long as he didn’t cause anyone else any trouble, people tended to ignore him. He was standing next to one of the sewing machine ladies, staring at the spinning wheel at the end of her machine. He seemed hypnotized by its whirring. As usual, he was holding his Indian motorcycle.

  “Scares me to death,” the sewing lady said to the one sitting next to her, never pausing in her work. Each piece of clothing was a blur as it raced through her machine. “Wish he’d find someone else to watch.”

  “As long as it’s not me.” The other lady laughed.

  “Glad I don’t have a boy like that. He has the white disease.” She was calling Park retarded. I felt annoyed at her remark, but then wondered if Park could actually have a deeper problem than simply not being able to hear.

  It was more to startle them than anything else that I called, “Park, I have an article on your motorcycle.”

  To my surprise, he turned around with an eager look on his face. Both sewing ladies froze.

  “Here,” I said.

  He grabbed the magazine, brought it inches away from his face and turned it around and around, rotating it around the picture of the bike.

  I gently pried the article out of his hands and read him the beginning:

  “The 1934 Indian Chief is a true classic, featuring Indian’s famous headdress logo on the gas tank. The company’s enormous factory in Springfield was called the Wigwam. . . .”

  When I finished reading, both Park and the ladies were staring at me. Whispering to each other, the ladies turned back to their sewing. I handed the magazine to Park.

  “Matt can read you the rest later.” I waited to see if he would respond.

  A slow smile started in the corner of his mouth. It took time to cross his face, as if he wasn’t used to smiling much. He looked almost handsome, and very much like Matt.

  I went back to work but over the last few months, I’d become constantly alert to where Matt was. When he was on his way to the bathroom this time, I saw Park intercept him and show him the magazine. They flipped through some of the pages together.

  An hour or so later, Matt came up to me, dripping with sweat. “Thanks. Where’d you get it? Can I pay you for it?”

  “From school. Don’t worry, they gave it to me for free.”

  “Wow. They must like you a lot.”

  “Mmm.” I stared at the floor, then up at him. “I’m not so sure.”

  “Oh?”

  “They think I’m sending out the cat.” Cheating.

  He raised his thick eyebrows. “You? What’s wrong with them?”

  I smiled at his faith in me. “How do you know I’m without crime?”

  “No bad-hearted person could be as nice to Park as you are.” Matt looked at me through his lashes.

  I flushed. To change the subject, I asked him the question that had been on my mind all day. “Why do you pretend he’s deaf?”

  He coughed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Kimberly.”

  I persisted. “Are you just covering up?”

  “What?”

  “That he doesn’t talk. Or that he can’t talk.”

  There was a pause. “Never heard him talk. Not even when he was little. Only sounds.” His golden eyes were sad. “Should’ve been me. I could have handled it better.”

  “Being born like that?”

  He nodded. We weren’t just talking about being deaf or dumb. Park’s problems were clearly much bigger. I was touched that Matt let me know this. I also understood why they tried to disguise Park’s limitations. In Chinese culture then, having a disability in the family tainted the entire group, as if it were contagious.

  “You could take it better? You don’t seem so tough to me,” I said, ribbing him. I knew this kind of talk would snap Matt out of his melancholy.

  He grinned. “And what about you, then?”

  From then on, Matt still signed to Park in front of other people but not me. I slowly learned some of Park’s signs, so that I could understand most of what he wanted to say to me.
There was something restful about him. Now that I’d made contact with him, he didn’t completely ignore me the way he did most people, and the truth was, I was glad to have someone who liked the same things I did. I could babble away at him about motor sizes and cylinders and he always nodded, as if my talking pleased him, even though he often didn’t meet my eyes. I often brought my car and motorcycle magazines to the factory after that and I showed them to Park, pointing out the ones I wanted the most.

  A shipment needed to go out at the factory the night before my big oral exam, so we didn’t get home until past two a.m. I stayed up the rest of the night studying and didn’t sleep at all. Wrapped over many layers of clothing, I wore a robe made of the stuffed animal material, which Ma continued to recycle as I grew. There was only Ma’s sleeping body to give me comfort and the night was damp, filled with the taste of my own fear. Beyond the circle of my lamp was only darkness. I found myself close to despair that night but far from slumber.

  “You shouldn’t have come to the factory with me,” Ma’s voice, clogged with sleep, came from the depths of the mattress. Then a pause. “I shouldn’t have let you come. Your exam tomorrow is too important.”

  “You couldn’t have finished without me.”

  “Let me make you some tea.”

  “Ma, I really need to study. Go back to sleep.”

  The next morning, my entire body was trembling as I stood in front of the blackboard on a stage. Dr. Copeland and the rest of the science and math faculty sat in the first two rows. The rest of the room was empty. The rounded backs of the vacant chairs formed a field of doubt before me. I felt as if I were a scarecrow in a high wind. At any moment, I could be blown out of balance, all of the pieces that composed me would scatter and I would wake to find nothing left of myself, nothing left of the person I wanted to be. I knew my lack of sleep would affect my concentration. What if I floundered now and led them to think that I’d actually been cheating all along?

  A man in a blue shirt stood up. He wasn’t one of my teachers but I recognized him as an upper-grade chemistry teacher. He approached me and silently handed me a copy of the periodic table. He stared intently over his glasses.

  Finally, he spoke. “Good morning, Kimberly. Could you please tell us how you would write the formulas of the ionic compounds formed by the following elements: nickel and sulfur, lithium and oxygen, and bismuth and fluorine?”

  I took a deep breath. Although I had read about how to predict formulas of ionic compounds, I had never actually done it before. “May I have some paper?”

  “The blackboard would be fine.” He gestured toward the chalk.

  I picked up a piece in my shaking hand and started writing on the board.

  At the end of the long session, there was a silence, and then slowly, the teachers started to clap. Startled, I stood frozen in front of the blackboard, the front of my blazer covered in white chalk dust, until the chairperson of the program stood up and strode over to me. She was flushed with excitement.

  “I’m afraid I’ve misjudged you, Kimberly,” she said, extending her hand. We shook and then, smiling broadly, she said, “Thank you for the lesson. I’m delighted we have such a brilliant student at our school.”

  Instead of skipping me one year ahead in the accelerated science and math program, they decided to let me skip two.

  “I have to give my pa something today. You want to see where he works?” Matt asked. His face had suddenly appeared in front of me at the factory, floating above a maze of cream-colored shirts.

  “Sure,” I answered, surprised. Hadn’t Matt told me that his father was dead?

  I made an excuse to Ma that I had homework and left early. This wasn’t something I normally would do, but the temptation of being with Matt for a few hours was too much.

  “What about you?” I asked.

  Leaving early was easier for Matt. Now that he worked the steamers, he was treated as a grown-up. He could come and go as he pleased as long as he fulfilled the tremendous daily quota. That often meant working late, like Ma and me.

  “Don’t worry about me, I have it covered,” he said.

  I took that to mean he’d have to come back to work late into the evening but I simply shrugged. The fabric dust had accumulated on my jacket and book bag, which I kept inside a plastic bag on the work counter. At the end of every work shift, I had to shake long strands of filth off the bag before I could get my things out.

  Matt met me downstairs wearing a light jacket and holding a cargo bike. The large wooden box attached to the back of the bike was painted green. “Antonio’s Pizza,” it said in curly letters that grew out of the glossy mustache of a beaming Italian man.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked.

  “My other job. Bet you didn’t know I had so many talents.”

  “How do you have time to work as a delivery boy? I mean, with school and all.”

  “Aw, school doesn’t take up much time,” he said, staring at his steering wheel. I realized he was cutting school for his other job. I was sure his ma didn’t know.

  He swung his leg over the bike and waited for me. “Get on.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly where I could do such a thing, but the only choice seemed to be to climb onto the box behind him, which is what I did. Then I scooted around so that my legs dangled from either side of him, almost kicking him in the process, and carefully wrapped my hands around the underside of the bicycle seat. He started pedaling and we were off with a lurch.

  The bike swung as he gained momentum. Then he really started to race.

  “You sure you don’t want to hold on to me instead?” he asked. “It’d be safer.”

  “I’m okay,” I breathed. I did desperately want to put my arms around him but I was already so aware of his body that shyness overwhelmed me at just the thought of it.

  Gaps opened up for us in the solid wall of people on the street as they sprang back with fear when they saw us coming.

  “You flying boy!” one woman yelled. A gangster, one of those kids that hung out on the streets, definitely not a compliment.

  “You have the nose of a pig and slits for eyes too!” Matt called over his shoulder.

  I was looking back at the woman apologetically when he swerved to avoid a delivery truck and we bumped onto the curb, pedestrians leaping out of our way; then we were in the street again. He seemed to slow down by the Chinese American Bank, and I wondered if his father worked there. Then I saw he was just looking at a pretty girl in tight jeans. I hated her at that moment, and him too. But seconds later we were past and out of Chinatown, and the traffic was less congested.

  As we zoomed up the Bowery, I tossed my hair back and started to relax. After all of my dreams of traveling at high speed, this was the closest I’d come. Everything passed behind us, the wind streamed through our clothes and I wasn’t even cold, thrilled as I was at being close to Matt. The late-afternoon sun shone on my upturned face. Ahead of us, a pigeon spiraled upward between the concrete buildings, its wings extended as it headed for the sky.

  He turned back to look at me. “You scared?”

  “You trying to scare me?” I felt I was glowing, all of my happiness emanating for the world to see.

  He grinned and turned back around. “Nah, you’re not going to hold on to me anyway. You have one big gall bladder.” He meant I was brave.

  Finally, he slowed down by an alleyway. I knew we were still in Manhattan because we hadn’t crossed a bridge, but where we were exactly, I didn’t know. We stopped by one of the abandoned buildings, then Matt held the bike still while I climbed off. A homeless man and his shopping cart sat sprawled a few doorways away. Everything was boarded up, but from the upper floors, I could hear a baby wailing. Laundry fluttered from the fire escapes and the chatter of Spanish drifted in the wind. I was breathing shallowly, trying to avoid the stink of urine and car exhaust, but I wound up with their taste in my mouth instead. It looked like my neighborhood.

  Then he went down a few
steps to the doorway of an abandoned storefront. That sunken area served as a collection point for trash, and he had to kick away an empty can and a pile of what looked like toilet paper before he could get to the door. The glass window was completely covered by yellowing newspapers. I followed him down the stairs and stood next to him. When I peered more closely at the writing, I saw it was made up of Chinese characters.

  He rapped out a drumbeat on the door, obviously some kind of code. The whole building looked so forsaken that I was still surprised when a tiny corner of newspaper was peeled back and a pair of eyes gleamed in the darkness.

  “Wu, it’s your kid,” a man’s voice said.

  The door was unlatched and we went in. I felt curiosity and anticipation but no fear, maybe because I was with Matt. The back of a man was disappearing down the murky hallway. The hallway was cramped and made even more so by the boxes piled high on either side, and in an alcove, a dark stairway led upward to nowhere. A bicycle tire, twisted and bent, leaned on top of a heap of magazines.

  “From your last bike?” I murmured to Matt.

  He gave a snort of laughter and we followed the man into a crowded room. It looked like it had once been a bar. The air was thick with smoke, and a group of Chinese men gathered around a card table piled high with cash. The bills were worn but lay on top of one another in neat stacks, except for the large mound in the middle of the table. The men had made sure that the room was entirely invisible to the outside world by boarding up every window, though tiny cracks of sunlight squeezed past the slits and caught the tarnished bronze of the barstools.

  And in the yellow glow of the few dangling lightbulbs, Matt was watching me as if to ask if it was okay that he’d brought me there. By showing me his father in such a sordid place, he was letting down his face, which told me I was as close to him as anyone could be. I gave him a little nod. He seemed satisfied and turned away.

  By this time, the men had seen me. “This isn’t a tourist stop,” one man said.

  “She’s with me.” Matt had unfolded a chair in a corner behind the table. He let me sit down and stood next to me, shielding me from the rest of the room.