Girl in Translation

by Jean Kwok

  The popular girls at school eyed the cheap factory samples I wore, and any warmth they showed me was far from genuine, but every weekend, after we got home from the factory, the phone would ring and it would be a boy. I would lean against the yellowing wall and twirl the long knotted cord around my fingers as we spoke—twirl, untwirl, twirl—and when I finally disentangled the cord from my hands and hung up the phone, it would ring again and it would be another boy. This drove Ma crazy, especially if they phoned late in the evening. Talking to a boy on the phone was bad enough but doing it in the dark really crossed the line.

  Ma’s standard way of answering the phone became “Kimberly not home” and then hanging up. She spent her time pacing around me, calling loudly, “Dinnertime! Dinnertime!” which was pretty much the only other word she had learned in English. Ma was particularly anxious because she couldn’t understand what the boys and I were talking about, but she needn’t have worried. The calls were all about inconsequential things like homework, motorcycles, mean teachers.

  I didn’t consider myself pretty at all. With time, I had grown too long-limbed and skinny for Chinese tastes, and despite Annette’s best efforts, the intricacies of makeup and clothing remained incomprehensible to me. I was not beautiful and I was not funny, nor was I a good buddy or a particularly good listener. I was none of the things that girls think they need to be for boys to love them. Mostly, I stayed on the call with my eyes closed, listening to the thrum of the phone line underneath our words. I knew what these boys really wanted—freedom. Freedom from their parents, from their own unsurprising selves, from the heavy weight of the expectations that had been placed upon them. I knew because it was what I wanted too. Boys weren’t my enemy, they were co-conspirators in a mission to flee. My secret was acceptance.

  At school during my free periods, I spent a lot of time taking walks hand in hand with boys. We would walk and we would make out. This was exactly what Ma had warned me not to do with boys, which only made it more fun. I was forced to be responsible in so many other ways that I was glad to have the freedom over my own body. I could only go so far—there’s only so much you can do in fifty minutes on school property—but the boys didn’t seem to mind much.

  “I don’t know how you stay so detached,” said Annette. “Don’t you ever fall in love?”

  The fact was, I didn’t worry about these boys the way other girls did. The details of whether a particular boy called or not, of an invitation to a dance or a party or a movie, didn’t matter to me. Despite my own strange access to the popular crowd, I didn’t care if a boy was popular or not, a good athlete or not. Of course, I did have a slight preference for a smart boy, sometimes a handsome boy, but I could also be won over by a certain shy way of smiling or even the shape of their hands. The boys at Harrison Prep were merely a dream to me: delightful and delicious but evanescent. The blistering reality was the deafening thunder of sewing machines at the factory, the fierce sting of cold against my skin in our unheated apartment. And Matt. Despite Vivian, Matt was real too.

  Even though Curt was now back at school, we still met once a week for me to tutor him in whatever he needed. The subject was usually math, at which he was atrocious. The school scholarship program counted this as working time for me, so I was initially glad to do it. As Curt emerged from the immediate danger of failing out, however, he reverted to his old ways. Sometimes he came to our sessions with a joint in his hand. And stoned or not, he never missed an opportunity to flirt with me. I didn’t take him seriously because I’d seen him doing the same with other girls. I understood he was just practicing.

  There was quite a bit of swooning over his eyes, which were a startling dark blue with a glimpse of white in their depths, but I found them to be too empty to be intriguing. He was not interested in math or most of his other subjects at all, and was hardly ever prepared when we met, which annoyed me. A few times, he was late or didn’t come at all. I learned that when he was working on a piece of sculpture, he forgot about the time. Curt had taken over a corner of the enormous room used for Shop and he had a pile of wood pieces there that he worked on endlessly.

  Finally I asked him, “Why do you bother coming, Curt?”

  He raised his eyebrows flirtatiously. “Don’t you know?”

  “Maybe another tutor would be better for you. Someone stricter.” I hated feeling like I was wasting my time.

  Now he looked alarmed. “No. I like you. Sometimes I even understand stuff after you talk about it.”

  “It should not be sometimes, it should be all the time. You don’t listen very well.”

  “Yes, I do. And for me, sometimes is really good.”

  “All you do is flirt with me. I would like it more if you just do your homework.”

  “Sorry about that. It’s kind of a habit. And you have such great legs.”

  I glared at him and he immediately added, “Oops, did it again. I’ll try, okay?”

  After our talk, Curt did improve. He stopped coming stoned and he was usually punctual. Most of the time, he still hadn’t done his homework but at least he seemed to make a real effort to listen more. I realized that he was intelligent; it was only that he didn’t care for school. He was my complete opposite.

  I found that he was more present in his workspace and I started trying to have more of our meetings there. He made abstract carvings out of separate pieces of wood that he glued together and then polished. I was walking around one piece that looked almost like the simplified Chinese character for water, a vertical stroke in the middle with two wings on the sides.

  “This is beautiful, but why do you not ever sculpt something from real life?” I asked.

  He wiggled his eyebrows at me. “If you’d pose for me, maybe I would.”

  He saw my annoyed expression and sighed. “Believe it or not, some girls like it when I say things like that.” Then his face turned serious. “Because when something is not realistic, it becomes a container for whatever you want it to be. Like a word or a symbol or a vase. You can pour anything you want into it.”

  I hated the idea of so much choice. “But that means it’s empty by itself.”

  “That’s the beauty of it. There doesn’t have to be any meaning.”

  “I cannot live a life without a purpose.”

  He looked at me. “You don’t care about superficial things, do you?”

  “Like what?”

  “Money, clothing.”

  I had to laugh. “Yes, I do. I need to.”

  “No, you don’t, not really. I’ve been watching you—you don’t even notice what the other girls are doing.”

  “You think that because my clothing is different from theirs. It is actually only because I do not understand what they are doing.” It felt good to admit this to someone. “I wish I could look like them!” An image of the lovely Vivian flashed across my mind. “But I don’t know how.”

  “Because you don’t really care. Even if you could, tell me you would really spend your free time in front of a mirror trying to make your eyelashes look longer?”

  I was silent.

  He continued. “You’d be too busy inventing something to save the world.”

  “Just because I am better at math than you are does not make me into a paragon of virtue.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “What?”

  “Where did you learn that—I mean, did you hear someone say ‘paragon of virtue’ at home or something?”

  I paused. “I memorized it from a book.”

  “See?”

  “Don’t they talk like that at your home?”

  “Actually, they do. I’m the son of two editors—my parents talk like that all the time, God help me.”

  “So how come you didn’t think they’d do that at my home?”

  “Do they?”

  I looked away. “No.” To change the subject, I started talking about his sculptures again. “But I do wonder if you could make something real. It is very difficult.”

/>   Curt didn’t answer but the next week, he had made a small carving of a swallow. I immediately saw it lying next to his usual sculptures.

  “This is wonderful,” I said.

  “You like it?” His eyes were a bright, warm blue. “You can have it, if you want.”

  “Oh no,” I said quickly. I had been trained by Ma not to be beholden to anyone. “Someday this will be worth a lot of money. I cannot take it.”

  The light in his eyes was quenched then but it was already time for us to start our tutoring session anyway.

  In eleventh grade, Annette fell in love with the theater. It started when she was at the library, visiting me, and talking about Simone de Beauvoir.

  “She’s writing about how women are excluded when they’re seen as the mysterious Other and how that has led to our male-dominated society. People from different races and cultures can also be classified that way and it has always been done by the group in power.” Annette gestured with her hands, as she always did when she was passionate about something.

  Mr. Jamali had come up behind me. “Look at her, her gestures. Everything is so big, so dramatic. You should be onstage.”

  “Really?” Annette put her hands on her hips, thinking. “I never thought about it.”

  “Tryouts are in two weeks. You could explore your relationship with otherness by being yourself and yet not-you in a role.”

  That was enough to pique Annette’s interest. Although she only started in small roles, I saw that Mr. Jamali was right: she did have a certain flair onstage. Her flamboyant hair and her passionate, questioning nature combined to make her compelling under the spotlight. Mr. Jamali said she had a great deal of talent but it needed to be channeled and refined.

  He was always there in his beautiful embroidered tunics, saying, “Very good, that was almost perfect. Now, shall we see it again, with just a bit more restraint, yet losing none of our intensity?”

  I was filled with pride when I sat in the darkened theater and watched Annette rehearsing. Since the actual performances were often in the late afternoons or evenings, I never got to see her perform otherwise.

  Nelson was on the debate team of his school, and since he was sure to be so good in competition, we’d been invited to come admire him as well. We were all crammed into their minivan together. Ma and I sat in the rear-most row of seats, but we could hear everything that was going on in the front of the car.

  “It’s my nicest shirt,” Uncle Bob said. He’d put on a silk shirt for the occasion. “I brought it back from China. I was just trying to—”

  “You’re going to embarrass me in front of my friends,” Nelson said.

  “Yeah,” Godfrey, who was now thirteen, piped up. “What a stupid shirt.”

  “You look gay,” Nelson said. “You look like a pimp.”

  Finally, we had to turn the car around and go home so Uncle Bob could change. Nelson also made Aunt Paula take off her gold jewelry because he said gold was tacky, especially Chinese twenty-four-carat gold.

  “Ah, the children develop their own taste,” Aunt Paula said. “What about you, Kimberly? You must have many extracurricular activities too?”

  “I don’t have time,” I said.

  “What a pity. They’re so important for colleges.”

  Aunt Paula still believed that I was doing as badly as I had been at the beginning of Harrison Prep. Ma and I had never corrected this impression, since it seemed to lessen Aunt Paula’s anger and jealousy.

  “And how are you doing on your standardized tests?”

  “Fine.” I was doing well but Ma, on the other hand, had failed the naturalization exam, as we’d both known she would.

  Before we left their apartment again, Nelson looked Ma’s simple clothes up and down. He opened his mouth to comment.

  I stood in front of her and said in English, “Don’t even think about it, Nelson.”

  “What?” he said.

  “Just don’t.” And he didn’t.

  I saw that his private school on Staten Island was much smaller than Harrison. Nelson seemed to shrink once he was onstage, becoming a red-faced, shy boy. His debating team lost.

  It should have been obvious that the oven wouldn’t be able to take the constant abuse of being on morning and night, winter after winter, but it was still a great shock when it finally broke. The cold crept in over the floor, freezing the water in the toilet, thickening the layer of ice over the inside of the windows. Ma and I huddled together on her mattress for warmth the whole night long, with everything we owned heaped on top of us.

  Ma called a man recommended by one of the button-sewing ladies. He was cheap, he worked under the table, and the lady said he had some kind of certification for his work from China, which told me he didn’t have any here.

  The man’s dirty shirt and overalls were too big for him, as if they’d been stolen. He dragged his toolbox across the floor, leaving a mark on the vinyl. I winced when I saw him bang on the control valve with his hammer. I knew it was a delicate piece of equipment. After a great deal of noise, which I believe was designed mainly to impress us with his exertion, he emerged from behind the oven to tell us that it was unfix-able and his visit would cost us a hundred dollars.

  “I don’t have that much money here,” Ma said, lifting her hand to her cheek.

  At this, I spoke up. “You’ve made it much worse than it was! You are trying to beat on our leg bones!” He was trying to take advantage of us. Indeed, the stove had been dismembered and some of its entrails now rested in the kitchen sink.

  He loomed over me. His accent was from the north of China. “I spent my time here, I want my money.”

  Ma tried to push me aside. “Let me handle this, Kimberly.”

  “Get away, kid,” he said.

  I was afraid Ma would cave in and agree to pay him later. I was sixteen and I had the confidence then of a teenager who’d had to act like an adult for too long. I didn’t know enough to be afraid but I did know that I helped earn our money and I wasn’t going to give it up so easily. A hundred dollars was 10,000 skirts, a fortune.

  “You want your money, you show me your papers first,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “Your passport, please.”

  At this, my implied threat, he seemed to swell up like a blowfish. “You want my papers?!”

  I was standing close to the phone on the wall of the kitchen and I strode over and grabbed the receiver. I started to dial Annette’s number.

  “Who are you calling?”

  “The police.”

  His eyes were very still, wondering what he should do. I heard Annette’s little brother pick up the phone on the other end.

  “Hello,” I said in English. “Could you please send someone over to house number—”

  At this, the man grabbed his things and ran down the stairs, though not without one last baleful look at me. Time seemed suspended until we heard the door slam downstairs. Ma slumped into one of the chairs in relief.

  “Wrong number,” I said rapidly, and hung up, hoping Annette’s brother hadn’t recognized my voice.

  “What a thief’s head and thief’s brain he had,” Ma said weakly.

  “With a wolf ’s heart and a dog’s lungs.” Untrustworthy and vicious. My heart was still leaping about like a frog in my chest.

  At least he was gone. But the stove was still broken and temperatures were expected to be below freezing for the coming days.

  ELEVEN

  I called Brooklyn Union Gas, and a repairman was sent to our house. He was a heavyset African American man in a blue uniform that covered him from head to toe. The belt cut into his belly, and when he came in through the door, he looked around our apartment with pity in his teddy-bear eyes.

  “I’m going to do my best for you folks, all right,” he said, “but I can’t promise nothing. That last guy really broke this thing up.”

  “Please,” I said. I tried to keep the panic from my voice. “Please do your best.” My breath ca
me out in white puffs. I didn’t know how we would even get through that night if he couldn’t fix the oven. The apartment had grown steadily colder with every day the oven remained broken. It was already getting dark outside and I could hear the wind gusting against the walls.

  “I know, honey,” he said. “You and your mom just take it easy and I’ll try to figure this out.”

  And he did. With his blunt fingers, he smoothed the pieces back into place and when the stove came to life again with a burst of blue flame, Ma clapped her hands from happiness.

  She tried to give him a tip, only a dollar, but he folded the money gently back into her hand.

  “You keep that,” he said in his slow, deep voice. “You get something nice for yourselves.”

  I would have liked to have a man like that as my father.

  Matt had dropped out of high school so he could work full-time. Now that he was working the entire day, he could often finish his work earlier and got to leave before we did. By then, I’d received special permission to take freshman and premed classes at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. On the days when I had Polytech classes, which usually ended later in the afternoon, I sometimes saw Vivian waiting for him to leave when I had just arrived.

  One spring day when I got to the factory in the early evening, Vivian was standing outside as usual, waiting for Matt to finish work. As was often the case, there was a group of Chinatown teenage boys huddled around her, and I was surprised to see one of them holding a large hanging plant. The acne-faced boy with the plant leaned toward Vivian and I saw the striped leaves sweep against her pretty cowboy boots. Then she murmured something to him and he immediately lifted the plant higher, so its leaves wouldn’t brush against the sidewalk. Of course, the plant was hers and he was just holding it for her.