Girl in Translation

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 A

And so A

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 A

A

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 A

I was also secretly fascinated by A

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 A

“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. A