Girl in Translation

We made another stop in what looked like A

We pulled into a large parking lot already filled with other buses like ours, all showing different numbers in the front window. There must have been at least nine buses there, and more kept coming in. Most were empty but a few had just opened their doors and kids were getting out.

I followed the other kids past the parking lot for normal cars. I didn’t see A

Just inside the door to my classroom stood a small huddle of boys and girls who seemed to be inspecting everyone who entered. I found out later they’d all gone to Harrison Elementary School together. A few of the girls had bracelets with sparkly shapes hanging from them and several of them were already wearing eye shadow and lip gloss.

When I went past them, one boy with hair as red as sugared ginger whistled and said distinctly, “Nice skirt.” There was a burst of giggling from the group.

I pretended I hadn’t heard and hurriedly sat down in a seat against the wall, but I wanted to keep walking, through the wall and into the distance. I resolved to remove the rhinestones from my skirt that night and I quietly picked at them with my fingernails as I watched the rest of the kids come in.

Although at first glance all of the blazers had looked the same to me, I could now tell that they were quite different from one another. Some of the girls had blazers that were shorter and more fitted than those of the boys. I was glad to see that many of their blazers had padded shoulders too, like mine did, although my blazer was much longer and wider than theirs. I had received a written description of the dress code at home (blazer required, no denim, no short skirts, no sweatshirts). Now I saw that quite a range of clothing was allowed within those rules. One girl, a part of the group of kids who had laughed at me, had on a tan skirt that ended a bit above her knee. Below that, she wore what looked like woolen tubes or footless, slouchy socks over a pair of short boots. A tall boy with a lion’s mane of sandy hair was playing around, arm wrestling with the ginger-haired one, and when the tawny boy’s blazer fell open, I saw that the T-shirt he had on underneath was spattered with paint.

I spotted the girl with the long brown hair from my bus sitting near the back. Like many of the other girls, she was wearing a headband to keep her fluffy hair in place. At that point, the homeroom teacher came in. She would also be our math teacher. She was blond and thin, moving with the quickness of a bird. She took attendance and gave us our schedules, then explained a lot of practical things like where our lockers were. I was thrilled at the idea of having a clean place where I could keep my own belongings.

I’d known A

In our classes, I didn’t volunteer to give any answers yet. By now, I could understand most of what the teachers said, although the effort of listening so hard in English was tiring. I was exhausted by the time I met A

A

She hadn’t gotten much browner over the summer although the density of her freckles seemed to have increased, making her look darker if you squinted from a distance. She’d become taller and a bit thi

“Do you have free lunch too?” I asked.

She giggled. “Silly. Everyone eats at the cafeteria here, it’s a part of the tuition.”

There was an extensive salad bar with all kinds of items I’d never had before, like olives and Swiss cheese. The main dish that day was sweet-and-sour pork over steamed rice, but it tasted as foreign as everything else. The rice was hard and tasteless, and the pork had only been painted red on the outside instead of actually being grilled in cha-siu sauce. But I felt happy again, sitting there next to A

After lunch, we had Life Science, which I enjoyed because we were being introduced to subjects like scientific notation and cell structure, which I hadn’t studied in Hong Kong. At the end of the class, the teacher wrote a challenge question on the board:

The E. coli genome is 4.8 million base pairs compared to a human genome of 6 billion base pairs. How many times larger is the human genome than that of E. coli?

“At home, think about how you would approach this,” the teacher said. “Anyone already have an idea?”

No one stirred.

Slowly, I raised my hand and at the teacher’s nod, said, “It is 1.25 x 103, sir.” I almost bit my tongue for allowing the “sir” to slip out again.

Without looking at his attendance list, he smiled and said, “Ah, you must be Kimberly Chang.”

Sca

The last subject of the day was gym, and I was glad I’d remembered to bring my sneakers from home. At my elementary school, gym had been a time for the kids to fool around, to hide behind other people when the ball came your way. At Harrison Prep, gym was a serious business. We would have it several times a week, we were told, and I could already see it was going to pose a problem for me. Ma had taught me never to do anything that could be considered either unladylike or dangerous: a lesson passed down from her own formal upbringing. “Unladylike” meant anything that allowed your knees to be parted from each other or that could cause a skirt to flip up. Whether you were even wearing one or not was irrelevant, it was the idea that counted. “Dangerous” covered most other categories of motion. I had often been in trouble with Ma because of my carelessness with the skirt issue and my penchant for ru