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Like me, A
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 A
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.
There were some kids who were less well-off, though. One boy suddenly disappeared from school and no one knew where he’d gone. Another girl was picked up by her mother in the middle of the day once and her mother looked like she had been beaten up. Mr. Bogart didn’t blink an eye at this. He seemed used to it. Fights often broke out after school, and I’d seen a boy walking away with a cut above his eye that dripped blood. Mostly boys fought boys but sometimes it was girls and girls, or mixed.
The other boys and girls had just emerged from hating each other into a state of awkward interest, teasing and rude remarks. They were busy with cooties: catching them, getting rid of them and inoculating themselves against them. The transmission of cooties was an excuse for the boys to hit one another as hard as they could and to touch the girls. I had no idea what cooties were and often ended up as the recipient of all the cooties in the class. I’d been taught not to touch another person without permission, so it was hard for me to get rid of the cooties in my possession. Cooties were the one thing that transcended racial lines.
I’d never been a sickly child, but that winter, I had one flu or cold after another. My nose was rubbed so raw that a constant layer of peeling skin and small chapped cuts formed under my nostrils. We didn’t have a doctor because we couldn’t afford one. When I was trembling with fever, I lay in bed. Ma made rice with large slices of ginger in it. She wrapped the hot rice in a handkerchief and I had to hold it to my head until the rice cooled, so that it could soak up the germs. She boiled Coca-Cola with lemons and I had to drink it warm.
She went to the medicine shop in Chinatown and at great expense brought home many things I had to eat, all of which tasted terrible: deer antlers, crushed crickets, octopus tentacles, human-shaped roots. She stewed them in an earthen crock and cooked an entire pot down to a concentrated cupful. Even though I protested that these things only made me sicker, I still had to drink every drop.
I usually had to go to school even when I was ill, because the apartment was so bitterly cold that Ma was afraid to leave me there. Sometimes, the classroom swam before me, my face burning with fever, my nose dripping.
I’d hoped Mr. Bogart would start praising me once he saw that science and math were my best subjects, but he didn’t. He seemed to assume that girls couldn’t do these subjects, and often had a half-smile that suggested a girl would be incompetent whenever she went to the board to write down an answer. Then he would make a comment about “the fairer sex,” which I thought had something to do with being more honest. I enjoyed proving him wrong. Even though he cut down my grades for any deviation from the path he’d taught, I understood everything perfectly once I could see it written down, and I could learn those subjects faster than anyone else in the class.
But I was failing other subjects even with A
I used that dictionary for years. The cover fell apart, was taped together again and again until it became irreparable, then the top pages started rolling up and falling off as well. I kept using that dictionary even when I’d lost the entire pronunciation guide and most of the A’s.
I told Ma we weren’t allowed to keep our tests or homework here, which was why I couldn’t show anything to her, but promised her I was doing just fine. I said the teacher had recognized what a good student I was. These were lies that hurt me every time I said them. It seemed that Mr. Bogart went out of his way to choose assignments that were practically impossible for me, although now I think that he was simply thoughtless: write a page describing your bedroom and the emotional significance of objects in it (as if I had my own room filled with treasured toys); make a poster about a book you’ve read (with what materials?); make a collage about the Reagan administration using pictures from old magazines (Ma bought a Chinese newspaper only once in a while). I did my best but he didn’t understand. Halfhearted attempt, he wrote. Incomplete. Careless. A pictorial collage should not by definition include Chinese text.
I wasn’t the only child in the class who had trouble with Mr. Bogart’s assignments. He seemed unable to understand the abilities or interests of the sixth-graders he actually taught. Many of the other kids just shrugged when he criticized them or gave them failing grades. They had already given up. But I had just come from being the star at my old school, where I’d won prizes in Chinese and math in interschool competitions. I would have given anything to do well in school again because I didn’t know how else I would be able to help Ma and me escape from the factory. Mr. Bogart must have realized I was smart, but he seemed to dislike me anyway. Perhaps he thought I was arrogant or mocking him with my formal “sirs” and standing when spoken to. It was so much a part of my upbringing, I found it hard to stop. Or perhaps it was the opposite; perhaps I seemed uncultured in my cheap, ill-fitting clothes, low class. Either way, there didn’t seem to be much I could do.