Girl in Translation (11 page)

“It’s her heart,” Matt said. His eyes were warm as he glanced up at the both of us. “And she has her own medicine, but thank you very much, Mrs. Chang.”

Ma smiled at me as we walked on. “He’s a nicer boy than I thought.”

I had to perfect my English. Not only did I write down and look up the words I didn’t know in my textbooks, I started with the A’ s in my dictionary and tried to memorize all the words. I made a copy of the list and stuck it to the inside of the bathroom door. I had learned the phonetic alphabet in Hong Kong and that made it easier for me to figure out how the words were pronounced, even though I still often made mistakes. Our class went to the public library once a week and I always took out a stack of books, starting with the embarrassingly thin ones for little kids. I slowly worked my way up in age. I took these books with me to the factory and read them on the subway. Almost all of my homework was done either on the subway or at the factory. For the bigger projects, I caught up on Sundays.

By the time report cards were given out at the beginning of February, I wasn’t doing well but I was passing most subjects. I’d taken the national reading and math tests with the other kids but I didn’t know what the results were yet. On my report card, I got a few Satisfactories for Science and Math, a few Unsatisfactories, and the rest were all Fairs. In the comments section, Mr. Bogart wrote, “Kimberly must learn to apply herself with more effort. Please come see me at the PTA meeting. Submit dental note!” How were we supposed to pay for a dentist? I didn’t know what a PTA meeting was, but I wasn’t about to let Ma see any of this. I let her believe that we got report cards only once a year, at the end. I forged her signature, which was easy since I’d been signing her name since the beginning.

The ice across the inside of the windowpanes in our apartment slowly dissolved and I could see through to the outside world again.

At the end of February, the class bully started staring at me in class. His name was Luke and he’d been left back a few times so he was a head taller than the rest of us. He had a barrel of a chest covered loosely by the same stained gray top that he wore every day. His nostrils were flared like a bull’s, and even Mr. Bogart seemed to have given up on him, leaving him alone most of the time. I saw Luke shove the other kids around. If a kid dared to fight back, Luke became doubly vicious. His main weapon was his legs and he liked knocking people to the ground and kicking them. There was a rumor that once a kid had rammed him in the stomach with his head and Luke had pulled a knife and cut him. He also used a lot of words I didn’t know, like cock and mother finger.

I asked Annette if she knew what cock meant.

“Everyone knows that.” Her smile was confident. “It means poop.”

Annette had recently told me that she was going to a private school called Harrison Prep next year. I would go to a public junior high school, of course. How would I manage without her?

We said good-bye to Mr. Al. A large moving van had taken away most of his inventory, although he’d saved a few folding chairs and a single mattress for us.

“Thank you, Mr. Al,” I said. I was thrilled to have my own place to sleep again.

“Mmm sai,” he said, trying to say “You’re welcome” in Cantonese.

“Your Chinese is very good,” I lied. Luckily, I knew exactly what I’d taught him, so I could usually guess what he was trying to say.

“You beautiful ladies take care of yourselves,” he said, and he gave us each in turn a big hug. He smelled like tobacco.

“May you have the strength and health of a dragon,” Ma said softly in Chinese. She looked in her shopping bag and pulled out a short wooden sword she’d bought from the kung fu store in Chinatown. She gave it to him.

His broad face shone with pleasure as he ran his finger over the carvings on the handle.

“She say, ‘Good health,’” I said, not knowing how to translate it further. “You supposed to lay that under pillow.”

“What? And waste a good weapon?”

“It takes away worry and bad dream.”

“All right, then. If you say so.” He grinned at us as he walked away to the subway, waving his sword like a ninja.

I felt sad when I saw Mr. Al’s empty store downstairs. Up in our apartment, I took a look at his building, pulling up the garbage bags over the kitchen window.

I wanted to see the sleeping black woman and baby in the apartment above his store. The mother wasn’t there but I could make out the baby, bigger now, alone in an old mesh playpen. He was hanging on to the sides. He had his mouth wide open, crying, but no one came.

I had always liked toy cars more than dolls and I had no interest in real babies at all, but I wished I could pick him up and comfort him.

Through all of March and into April, I continued to feel the bully Luke’s eyes on me but I pretended I didn’t notice anything. He had started grabbing girls by their hair and kissing them whenever Mr. Bogart wasn’t looking. Finally, one lunch period I was crossing the cafeteria, holding my tray, and passed the table where he was sitting with some other boys. He stuck out his foot. I stepped over it and kept going. The rubber legs of his chair screeched against the floor as he pushed himself away from the table and stood up.

“Hey, Chinese girl.”

I didn’t look around. I had just set my tray down at my usual spot across the table from Annette when I felt his hand on my shoulder. On reflex, I lowered my shoulder and turned at the same time, so that his hand fell off.

“Wow, that’s kung fu,” one of Luke’s friends said.

“You know karate?” Luke asked, with real interest.

“No,” I said. That was the truth.

“She does,” his skinny friend said.

“I want to try out your moves. Let’s fight after school.” Luke said this as if he were inviting me to play at his house. Then he and his friends went back to their own table.

Annette was staring at me from across the table. I sat down, trembling.

“Are you crazy?” she asked, her voice pitched higher than normal. “He’ll kill you!”

“What must I do?”

“You gotta tell somebody. Tell Mr. Bogart.”

I just looked at her.

“Okay, forget that.” Annette wrinkled her forehead in thought. “My mom’s got to work today, so my housekeeper’s picking me up from school. We could tell her.”

I thought about her housekeeper, who had looked so dry and serious. She didn’t seem like someone I could trust. If only Mrs. Avery were going to pick Annette up that day instead. “No, I don’t want you tell her.”

“Why not?”

“She don’t help.” I knew it was true. “And I’m not a telly-tale.”

Annette lowered her voice to a hiss. “Look, Kimberly, I think Luke carries a knife. It’s okay to tell someone!”

I shook my head. I was afraid of Luke but I was more afraid of grown-ups. Maybe Annette’s housekeeper would try to talk to Ma or Mr. Bogart. Everything I had hidden from Ma could come out: the forged signatures, the failed tests, the dental note, the report cards, the PTA meeting.

Annette grabbed my wrist. “Okay, you just come home with me, then. We’ll get in the car and drive away. We can drop you off at your place.”

I wanted to agree. But how could I show them where I lived? And Ma was expecting me at the factory. Besides, Luke would just wait for me tomorrow, or the day after that. It would only get worse. He’d been staring at me for a while now.

“No,” I said. “I fight him.”

After school, I could taste the sour from my stomach in my mouth. I’d never been struck before. Even though I’d often seen fights in the school yard, I’d never been punched or kicked or spit upon. I had never hit anyone either. I’d done some tai chi in the park with Ma back home, but since most of the other students had been in their seventies, what we’d learned had hardly trained me for a street fight in Brooklyn.

Everyone had heard about the brawl, and a tight circle of kids reined us in. The words fight fight fight pulsed in the air like drumbeats. Annette disappeared into the ring of faces and I stood in the center alone, facing Luke. He was waiting: large, gray, a battleship. I came up to his chin and he weighed twice as much as I did. He came from one of the toughest neighborhoods in Brooklyn, where the mailman wouldn’t even go to deliver parcels, and had only recently moved to this area. I was so scared, I would have given anything never to have come here.

I did not run. There was no place to run to. I felt a great stubbornness rising from my core, even though my fingers were numb and cold. The calm of terror swept over me. I am born from a great line of fighters; my ancestor was one of the greatest warriors during the Tang dynasty, and I wouldn’t flee. Methodically, barely audible, I began to curse him in Chinese: You have a wolf’s heart and a dog’s lungs, your heart has been eaten by a dog.

“What the fuh you saying?” Luke said.

I didn’t answer. I continued under my breath as if I were praying. We circled each other, his shadow looming over me.

“You’re so weird,” he said. Suddenly, he took off his book bag and swung it, thwacking me in the side. The blow twisted me around, so that my back was to him, and I felt a thud on my book bag, from where he’d kicked me. I took off my bag and connected with his arm. Left, right, I beat him on either side of his fleshy body, the material of his jacket catching against my bag. To my surprise, he didn’t try to hit me back. Then I swung my right leg and connected with his calf.

“Shit!” he cried. For a second, something wild flared in his eyes but he still didn’t strike me again. Instead, he took my shoulder in one hand and gave a casual push, so that I stumbled back a few steps. Then he swung his bag over his shoulder and sauntered away.

Annette was hugging me. “I didn’t know you could fight!” she said. “You can do kung fu!”

I didn’t tell her otherwise, but I knew that I couldn’t fight, that I hadn’t fought. I walked home in a daze. He could have killed me. What had happened?

The next day, Mrs. LaGuardia, the principal, opened our classroom door in the middle of Social Studies and said, “Mr. Bogart, I need to see Kimberly Chang.”

A number of kids whispered “Ooooooh” and clasped their hands against their mouths. Even though quite a number of jokes about La Guardia Airport were made behind her back, Mrs. LaGuardia was well respected and universally feared. I felt my chest freeze. I glanced over at Luke, who didn’t meet my eyes. Who had told on us?

Mr. Bogart nodded. “Do try to be good, Kimberly.”

I had to hurry to keep up with Mrs. LaGuardia’s smooth strides. When we reached her office, she shut the door behind us and took off her spectacles, letting them hang over her bosom on a silvery chain. I sat on the chair facing her desk and my feet barely brushed the floor. I knew what happened to students in the principal’s office: they were annihilated.

“The results of the national test scores have just arrived. Miss Kumar noty yours and asked me to take a look. Especially your math scores are very something. Of course, your reading scores are low.”

I stared at my fingernails and my blood thudded harder. I understood this meant that my English scores were not good enough, an embarrassment to the school. I was going to be suspended on the grounds of grades and fighting. Or perhaps they’d found out about my forgeries of Ma’s signature too.

“Tell me, what are you planning to do next year?”

So that was it. I was going to be kept back. Everyone else would graduate from the sixth grade except for me. How could I hide this from Ma? I was really going to be in trouble when I got home. I slunk down lower and tried to think of an answer that would appease her.

“Honey, look at me.”

I was so startled by the word “honey” that I obeyed. I had heard Mrs. Avery using it for Annette. This was not a word principals used back home. Mrs. LaGuardia’s face looked strangely naked without her glasses. Her lashes were short but her eyes were kind.

“You’re not in trouble,” she said.

I straightened a bit in my chair even though I knew better than to believe her.

“Unfortunately, there aren’t many good choices when it comes to public junior high schools in this area. I’ve been lobbing to change this fact because all of our children deserve to go someplace first-rate after graduation, but this is still the way it is. The closest public junior high school is still quite far from here and it’s not in the safest neighborhood. A child of your cola brr usually gets into one of the specialized public schools for bright children, but your English scores aren’t high enough yet. I also know you haven’t had the easiest time here so far.”