Girl in Translation

I braced myself: Where is your mother? Why didn’t she bring you here today? What do people wear for Easter? Which hand should you hold your knife in when you eat? I gripped the armrests of my chair.

“Would you please count from one to forty in threes? I’m going to time you. It begins one, four, seven…?”

I blinked. This, I could handle. “Ten, thirteen, sixteen…”

“Good. Now, a boy is sixteen years old and his sister is twice as old. When the boy is twenty-four years old, what will be his sister’s age?”

She went on like this for about an hour. It was the strangest conversation I’d ever had with anyone but I liked it. I understood it was a test, of course, but all such conversations are tests and this, at least, was one for which I understood the rules. In a world of uncertainties, I was on concrete ground. When I didn’t know a word, she explained it to me. I had to skip a question only a few times and then she asked me something else. Finally, she stopped and looked up at me.

“Excellent,” she said. “Now, there is one last thing.”

She handed me a sheet of paper and a pencil. “Draw a picture for me. Anything you like. A house, a girl, whatever.”

I didn’t want to draw a picture of our house. For a girl, I imagined she meant a non-Chinese girl, and I drew the only kind of girl I knew about, the sort I’d read about in books: a princess. She had long blond hair with a crown on her head and a Cinderella ball gown with puff sleeves and an impossibly narrow waist.

When Dr. Weston took the sheet of paper and saw the drawing, she gave a short bark of laughter. She contained herself immediately and riffled through her papers, but I didn’t know why she had laughed. I must have looked hurt as I wondered if it was because of the incongruity between my clothes and the beautiful ones I’d drawn.

She glanced at my face. “Your results on the test were so impersee, I’d forgotten how young you were. Listen, why don’t you take a tour of the school and we’ll talk again afterwards, all right?”

I nodded. The first lady came in and took me around. First, she showed me their trophy showcase, which was in the main hall where I’d entered. I heard her talking about the awards the school had received, but I was looking at the pictures of the kids who had won them. They were all wearing blazers. No one wore blazers at my school. We made them sometimes at the factory, but these were different. I could tell they weren’t made of polyester. These blazers looked stiff, reining in the students’ shoulders, making sure that they didn’t take up any more space than they were allowed.

The students who were smiling showed even, white teeth to match their even, white skin. Was I going to be the only Chinese person in the whole school? Was that why they were interested in me? The framed pictures were arranged one above the other, with the older classes at the bottom. The older classes contained only boys, and then there were both boys and girls, but as the photos moved forward in time, one thing hardly seemed to change: a few darker faces appeared here and there, but those were rare exceptions.

Then, to my surprise, I was taken to several other buildings, all large and spacious, the walls paneled with wood. I had thought the first building was the entire school. Inside the other buildings, I tried not to stare at the statues of women with bare breasts, their whiteness glowing in the alcoves; they even had nipples. This too was something Western. As we passed some classrooms, I saw they were filled with students who looked just like the kids in the pictures.

We took a walk around the campus, and I gasped. I was completely dumbfounded. I had never imagined there could be such a place in New York. The woman pointed out the te

SIX

When we arrived back at Dr. Weston’s office, she was on the phone. She excused herself, hung up and gestured for me to sit down again.

“What do you think of the school?” she asked.

I had to think a second. “It is quiet.”

“Of course it’s quiet.” She looked a bit irritated and I knew I had said something wrong. “That’s how our students can achiff such spectacles academic results. Did you hear about the prizes we’ve won?”

I said yes even though I didn’t remember, because I didn’t want the younger woman to get into trouble.

“ Harrison is one of the best college prepator schools in the country, comparable in terms of the facilies we offer to schools like Exit and Sand Paul, only with the advantage that you don’t need to bord here. We are actually a boring school without the boring.”

She’d used more words I didn’t understand in one breath than she had in the entire time I’d been there. I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about, only that she was repeating a memorized speech like a person in a play and I should acknowledge that by smiling and nodding, which I did.

Then there was a silence while Dr. Weston flipped through her legal pad, sca

“All right, then. For the final scholarship decision, I am going to need to consle with the financial aid committee but I can tell you now that no school in their right mind would denee you admissee.”

I was trying to understand if this was a good or a bad thing when she switched tactics.

She smiled at me and this time, her smile was truly kind. “We like you, Kimberly. We want you to join our school. Is that something you want too?”

I could breathe more freely now. I even smiled back. “I like school.”

“But…” She waited for me to finish her sentence.

I hesitated a moment. “The kids look different from my school.”

“You mean our dress code? Everyone has to wear a dark blue blazer but you can choose your own. It’s not really a uniform.”

I started to nod again just to be agreeable but then felt compelled to add, “Maybe I am too different.”

“Ah.” Her small eyes were sad. “We truly try to recruit children from different backgrounds, but it isn’t easy. Harrison is quite expensive, and due to financial limiteetees, we ca

She kept talking, but I had stopped listening after I heard what she said about the school. Now that I’d actually seen it, I knew it had to cost a lot of money. I’d expected a simple concrete building like the one I went to now. How naive I’d been, to think that such a school would let me in for free.

“Kimberly?”

I looked up and she was waving her right hand, trying to get my attention.

She spoke again. “Don’t worry. We do have a financial aid program. You are applying after the normal process has closed, but I’m sure we can make an excession for you. Sometimes we even offer up to fifty percent of the twosheen costs.”

I swallowed something in my throat. “Thank you.”

I didn’t know what the fifty percent that we would have to pay would mean, but I knew we could never afford it. Now that it was impossible, I wished I could stay. This was a chance to get both Ma and me out of the factory, out of that apartment, and I realized I wanted it desperately.

“What are you thinking? Please tell me, Kimberly. I need to know so I can help you.”

I felt myself grow hot. “I’m sorry,” was all I said.

“We may even be able to go up to seventy-five percent, although I can’t make any promises.”