Girl in Translation

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 ski

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

“Nah,” he said, gri

“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 something 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 fu

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.

For the Chinese New Year, the factory was closed because no Chinese would work on this day. I was even allowed to stay home from school. Ma made us the traditional yellow steamed pastries and a vegetarian monk’s meal for lunch, and for the night she’d bought us a roasted chicken from Chinatown. Anything that happened on this day was symbolic of the entire year to come, and so we were extremely careful, making sure we didn’t break or drop anything.

The next day was the opening of the year, and Ma and I prepared the religious ceremonies to honor the dead. We always celebrated the important holidays first at home and then later at temple. Ma had found one in Chinatown. How many times had my hands laid the small squares of sacred paper into the required patterns over the years: first silver, then gold, then the two rectangular pieces laid horizontally.

Then we set food and wine in front of all five altars in the kitchen, lit incense and bowed to them with stacks of the sacred papers in our hands. We included a set to bring good luck for Ma and me: a promise to the gods that if we made it through this coming year safely, we would offer them roast pork next year. The kitchen was hazy with incense and the smoke crept into our clothes and hair. Ma invoked each of the gods by name, our most vital ancestors, and then our own dead, which meant all of the grandparents on both sides of my family, and Pa. When Ma chanted the prayers for her parents and Pa, she said, “Drink another cup, loved ones,” and she poured an extra cup of wine on the floor in front of the ancestor altar.