Girl in Translation (19 page)

It was also in the eighth grade that we finally got a phone at home. I knew the monthly payments pained Ma, but I was too ashamed to be the one omission in the stapled school telephone directory everyone received. It seemed to be a public declaration of poverty that came too close to showing everyone the truth about the way we really lived. Ma had finally agreed to the phone, persuaded by the argument that I needed it to discuss homework.

But most things hadn’t changed, they’d simply become routine. I grew into the space that Ma’s foreignness left vacant. She hadn’t learned any more English, so I took over everything that required any kind of interaction with the world outside of Chinatown. I pored over our income tax forms every year, using the documents the factory provided for us. I read the fine print repeatedly, hoping I was doing it right. If Ma needed to buy something at a store or to make a complaint or a return, I had to do it for her. The worst was when Ma wanted to bargain, the way she had in Hong Kong, and I had to translate for her.

“Tell him we’ll only pay two dollars,” Ma said to me at the American fish store near our apartment.

“Ma, you can’t do this here!”

“Just say it!”

I gave the fishmonger an apologetic smile. I was only thirteen. “Two dollars?”

He was not amused. “Two dollars and fifty cents.”

Later, Ma scolded me for not having had the right attitude. She was sure that if I’d been firmer, we would have gotten a discount.

At school, I still kept mostly to myself. In the middle of winter, some kids started coming to school with tanned cheeks and white rings around their eyes from their ski goggles, exultant about places like Snowbird in Utah and Vallery in France. There was a rage for a certain brand of ski jacket, tight and short, with a high collar around the neck, and soon most kids in my homeroom class were wearing one. I heard the jackets cost at least 20,000 skirts each.

More of the girls in class also started wearing makeup to school, or applying it in the restrooms or at their lockers. This interested me more than the ski jackets. It seemed to have a magical quality that would somehow make you more normal. Once, in the girls’ bathroom, Annette had pulled out what she called a cover-up stick and rubbed it over the surface of a pimple she had on her chin. I couldn’t believe it. The pimple hardly showed afterward. I immediately thought about using it to cover my nose, sometimes raw from the colds I got.

“Take it,” Annette said. “The color’s too dark for me anyway.”

Moments like this showed me that despite my constant evasions, Annette understood my situation in a way that no one else at school could even begin to, but I still couldn’t bring myself to talk about it. And even as kind-hearted as she was, there was no way she had any idea exactly how poor we really were.

Now that I was older, I wasn’t as sick all the time, although a runny nose often plagued me. What worried me more was when sometimes Ma became ill. Whenever she coughed, I worried she would have a relapse of tuberculosis, though fortunately it never happened. Our living conditions didn’t change but with time, I stopped allowing myself to be conscious of my own unhappiness.

At home, Ma and I kept hoping for the wrecking ball to appear outside our building, forcing Aunt Paula to move us to a new apartment, but it never did. Ma had asked her one last time about when we’d be able to move, and Aunt Paula allowed her black face to be seen for a moment.

“If you’re really so unhappy there, no one is stopping you from making other choices.”

After that, Ma didn’t dare to ask again. We were still paying Aunt Paula back and it was clear that she simply did not care to move us. As far as she was concerned, it was most convenient and best to leave us where we were. And the truth is, caught up in the vortex of work and school, we had become too exhausted to fight against the roaches and mice, our frozen limbs, the stuffed animal clothing, and life in front of the open oven. We had been forced into acceptance. Sunday was our only free day, but it was packed: we did all our grocery shopping then, but also had to catch up on factory work, my schoolwork, and prepare for any Chinese holidays. Our one bright spot was when we went to the Shaolin temple in Chinatown. It was on the second floor of a building in the Lower East Side and was my sanctuary.

It was run by true Chinese nuns, complete with shaved heads and black robes, and they always served free and delicious vegetarian food: fried noodles with tofu, rice and thin, ruffle-edged black mushrooms called cloud ears. When the nuns handed me my food, I could feel how present they were in every gesture of kindness. After lighting incense and bowing to the enormous triple Buddhas in the main room, we would pay our respects to our dead, and most especially to Pa. I felt at peace in the temple, as if we had never left Hong Kong. As if there were forces of compassion that were watching over Ma and me.

I couldn’t get away from the factory much. Once in a long while, when we had a bit of time before the next shipment went out, I lied to Ma and snuck off with Annette for a few hours in the afternoon.

On one of those days, Annette tried to convince me to go with her to a movie. I had never been to one in this country and I hesitated for a moment, wondering if it was even possible.

Misunderstanding my hesitation, Annette tried adding more incentive. “I’ll bring my makeup and we can put it on before the movie. Don’t worry, we’ll wash it off afterwards.”

I made up an excuse for Ma, and Annette and I went to see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom at a theater close to her house. I worried about what it would cost, and if I would have enough, but when we got to the ticket window, Annette insisted on paying. I protested but secretly felt relieved. I didn’t have any spending money of my own. The money in my pocket was change I had borrowed from the grocery budget, which I would have had to make up for in skirts.

We were early for the film, and the theater was huge, half empty and cavernous, with lights set into the floor, as there had been on the airplane from Hong Kong. I inhaled the smell of popcorn and butter, and then Annette rushed me into the ladies’ room, where, grinning, she pulled out a pink plastic makeup case. It looked new. She sifted through small packages with different colors of powder and explained the set had been a gift from her cousin.

“You have great cheekbones,” Annette said, putting more blush on me and giggling.

“You too.” I wasn’t sure what made a cheekbone “great” but that seemed irrelevant.

When we were done, I peered in the mirror and was amazed at how different I looked. Heavily shadowed eyes, tons of blush and lipstick: hardly an inch of my skin had been left its original color. It would be very American to look like this all the time. I touched my great cheekbones with my fingers.

A woman leaving the bathroom smiled at us as she left. “You look lovely, girls.”

We felt beautiful. Then we sat in the dark for a few hours watching the film, which I didn’t follow at all. I kept feeling the velvet of my seat with my hand and imagining the glow of my face. Indiana Jones did seem very heroic. The movie was similar to martial arts films I had seen on television in Hong Kong, only less comprehensible, with too many villains, tribal people, and children needing to be rescued. But it was so exciting. When the film was over, Annette and I went back to the bathroom to scrub our faces. She wasn’t allowed to wear any makeup either. I didn’t mind. Now we had a secret together, a happy one.

When school let out for the summer, Annette went off to a camp at a college upstate and I returned full-time to the factory. I needed to lighten Ma’s burden as much as I could, and any extra work I did meant more income. That was the summer I learned exactly the pattern in which my bra would get soaked by sweat: first the band below the breasts would begin to get wet; then the sweat would slowly move upward. It traveled more quickly under the arms and in the center of the back, then would rise between the breasts to soak the cups and finally the straps. The entire thing was wet within half an hour of work.

My specialty in the finishing process was the bagging. This was the most physically demanding job, but I learned to do it fast. There was a tall black metal rack with an enormous roll of plastic garment bags at the top. You took a garment from the right side, hung it on the hook on the rack, then opened the plastic bag and fit it over the item. Then you had to separate the bag from the previous ones in the roll and, finally, lift the entire garment up over the rack and hook, and hang the garment on the rack to the left. It was important to be careful not to rip the bag or you would have to start all over again.

The finishing process started when we got the garments and ended after they were bagged; it included hanging, sorting, belting, tying sashes, buttoning, tagging and bagging each item. For all of this work, we were paid one and a half cents per skirt, two cents per pair of pants with a belt, and one cent for an upper garment. I was still too short for the rack so I had to stand on a chair. I timed myself with the large factory clock that hung on the opposite wall. It took Ma about thirty seconds to bag a piece, which worked out to bagging about 120 pieces an hour. It was easy to figure out that Ma was making much less than two dollars an hour.

This was no way to survive. At first, when I was doing it the slow way, separating each bag with two hands and carefully fitting it over the garments, it took me twenty seconds to bag a piece. Then I tried different tactics to refine my methods.

I figured out that the fastest way was to grab the next bag in the roll with my hand, which was moist with sweat and thus sticky, give the bag a slight twist so that the bottom dropped open and then, as I pulled it down and over the hanging garment, to strike the serration line with my other hand so that the bag separated from the others in the roll as it fell. Before the plastic had fully dropped to cover the entire garment, I was lifting it up by the hanger to get it off and onto the rack on my left. Then I grabbed another one with my right hand.

Pants took slightly longer because most of them were belted, which made them unbalanced on the hanger, and if you didn’t grab them with both hands as you lifted them, they would slip off. I developed hard muscles in my arms from all of the lifting.

By the end of that summer, when I’d hit my rhythm, I could get almost five hundred skirts bagged in an hour, about seven seconds per skirt. Later, when I was older and stronger, I would reach a top speed of a bit less than five seconds per skirt, doing more than seven hundred in an hour.

Despite my dislike of Aunt Paula, I worked harder and faster whenever she passed by to show her that we were industrious people, valuable workers and loyal to the factory. I still hoped that maybe we would be rewarded for our good behavior.

Once, Matt was hanging around the finishing station, helping us tag some skirts in his free time. On the days a shipment went out, we finished in the order we were placed in the garment procedure. Since he helped his ma with thread-cutting, a much earlier part of the process, his part of the work for the final shipment had been done earlier in the day. As the finishers, Ma and I were always last. Matt could leave but sometimes he stayed to hang around me.

Ma gave him a smile. She had to speak loudly to be heard over the noise the steamers made. “You’re growing up, Matt. I never realized what fine human material you were made of.” She was saying that he was handsome.

Matt grinned and flexed his muscles. “It’s all that thread-cutting, Mrs. Chang. Makes a guy strong.”

I was a few feet away, bagging as usual, but I couldn’t help sneaking a glance at his shoulders. He was still skinny but the white undershirt he wore revealed the broad frame of a young man’s body. Matt glanced at me, as if to see if I had heard Ma’s compliment, and caught me looking at him.

He struck a pose, with one arm raised and the other on his hip. “How do I look?”

I giggled. “Like the Liberty Goddess!”

He pretended to be insulted. “What would you know about that? You probably don’t remember what she looks like.”

I sobered up, remembering all my old dreams of New York. I’d thought we’d be living in Times Square, known in Cantonese as the Tay Um See Arena, and what I’d gotten was the slums of Brooklyn. “No, actually, I’ve never seen it.”

“You must be talking the big words.” He meant I had to be lying.

“I’m serious.”

“You mean, you haven’t seen Min-hat-ton?” He pronounced “Manhattan” the Cantonese way.

“Only Chinatown.”

“Hey, I’ll take you out on Sunday. You can’t live in New York and not see the real Liberty Goddess.”

I could feel my lips form a small, delighted “O” but I didn’t know how Ma would react. She had her back to us, working and pretending not to be listening.

“Mrs. Chang?” Matt said. “How about I act as your tour guide on Sunday?”

I felt a rush of disappointment even as I recognized his cleverness. Ma would be much less likely to say no if she’d been invited too.

Ma turned around with a teasing smile on her face. “Now, I wouldn’t want to be a lightbulb.”

“Ma!” I was glad I was already flushed from the heat, or I would have turned bright red. Her joke, that she would be there as a chaperone-stopping the lovers from kissing because of her presence, like a lightbulb in a darkened room-made public my private hope: that Matt’s invitation might actually be a date.

Matt shook his head like a dog, hiding his embarrassment, but he managed to look flirtatious at the same time. “No, no. You look so young, everyone would think you were only coming along to shell peanuts.” It was a good line. He meant the younger brother or sister who is sometimes sent to accompany a couple to the movies, shelling peanuts and preventing them from making out.

Ma laughed. “You have such good mouth skills. All right, I’d like to-”

Suddenly, one of the men at the steamers started to scream. It was Mr. Pak. I didn’t know much about him except for his name. I didn’t think he had any other family working at the factory. He was surrounded by steam, so it was hard to see what had happened, but the other three men who worked on the steamers raced to his side. They were working to release the metal top of the steamer as Matt, Ma and I rushed up. Finally they got it open and Mr. Pak clutched his hand. He was still howling. I didn’t dare look at his hand directly.