As soon as Curt and I were out of their hearing range, I turned to him and asked, “Why did you do that for me?”
He shrugged. “Because I did see you. And I heard Sheryl give Tammy the idea.”
“You mean, to put the note in her sleeve?”
“Yeah.”
I looked at him for a long moment. “Thank you.”
He grinned. “I’d hate to see you get kicked out since I always cheat off of your tests.”
I stopped short. “What?”
He gave me a playful punch. “Just kidding.”
When we entered the classroom, all the kids looked up from their tests in progress, their curiosity plain across their faces. Tammy’s eyes were swimming in tears. I angrily wondered if the tears were from guilt or having to work through the test without her cheat sheet. I was sure everyone else thought I was a cheater, and felt grateful that Curt had come and walked back with me, as indirect proof of my innocence. I took the test with even more care than normal because I knew the school’s final judgment of the situation would depend partly on how I performed without any notes. The assistant teacher kept a keen eye on me. After a short while, Mrs. Reynolds came back and resumed her seat at the front of the room as if nothing had happened.
When the bell rang, everyone got up and handed in their papers. Mrs. Reynolds said, “Kim and Curt, you have ten more minutes since you started late, but no more than that.” Her tone was hard to read, but I was afraid I had lost the respect of a teacher I liked a great deal.
When our time was up, she took our papers and silently handed us late passes for our next class, which had already begun. So it wasn’t until lunch that Tammy was able to catch up with me.
She slipped in next to me on the lunch line and squeezed my arm. Since she hadn’t been called to the office, she knew I hadn’t told on her. I stared at her hand on my blazer sleeve, torn between fury, confusion and the desire to forget the whole incident. She didn’t say a word, and then moved away again.
The next day, I found a card she’d slid into my locker that said, “I’m so sorry! Thank you!!!!” I wondered if she might feel closer to me now. I had hoped we were developing a friendship. Would we really become close now? But after that, she avoided me.
I was hardly able to eat or sleep until our Physical Science class the next day. I didn’t dare tell Ma or Annette about this. The whole experience made me feel ill and I was not at all sure I had handled it right. Most of all, I was embarrassed and disgusted at myself for thinking Tammy might pass me a note. Would I be summoned to the office again, or simply get a letter at home telling me I’d been expelled?
The class came at last and Mrs. Reynolds solemnly handed back everyone’s tests. She’d graded them faster than usual. I saw Mrs. Reynolds give Tammy a hard look when she returned her test. She knew as well as I did who had been sitting in front of me. By craning my neck, I could see Tammy had failed. I felt sorry for her, but vindicated as well.
Mrs. Reynolds laid my test on my desk. I’d gotten a 96. She bent down and whispered, “We’re going to give you the benefit of the doubt.”
She put her hand on my shoulder with a smile, and I saw that she, at least, was convinced of my innocence. I glanced at the other students surreptitiously and saw most of the class watching us. The knot in my stomach began to loosen.
I only hoped that Dr. Copeland didn’t have any remaining doubts either.
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.
I immediately knew what had happened. When the men at the steamers are under pressure, they need to work so quickly that they simply slam the top lid down hard enough that it latches closed by itself. Then they open the lid and switch garments at lightning speed. Matt had told me that if they weren’t fast enough when they slammed the lid again, their hands could get caught.
Aunt Paula and Uncle Bob had arrived, and they pushed their way to the front of the crowd that had formed.
“Why are you so clumsy?” Aunt Paula yelled. She grabbed Mr. Pak, who was sobbing and hunched over his hand, and she pulled him in the direction of the exit. Uncle Bob hurried after her, with his swinging limp. She called over her shoulder, “Nobody call a lifesaving-car! We’ll take him to the factory doctor! Everyone, get back to work, tonight the shipment goes out!”
As the crowd dispersed, I turned to Matt. “I didn’t know there was a factory doctor.”
His voice was low, shaking a bit from what he’d just seen. “He’s just a friend of Dog Flea Mama’s. Someone who won’t report the accident.”
I was trembling too. “You probably want to go home, Matt. Don’t worry about us.”
“No one’s at home anyway. My ma is getting the needle-rescue treatment for her pains.”
Later, I was working as fast as I could bagging skirts-I still had to finish them all before the shipment could go out-when I saw Aunt Paula had returned to our work area. She moved briskly, and I thought she seemed stressed by what had just happened.
“I was going to talk to the two of you about something anyway when that incident occurred. There’s been a change in the factory policy.” She didn’t bother to use her false smile. “Due to bad economic conditions, after this shipment goes out, the rate for skirts will have to drop to one cent a skirt.”
“What?” Ma said.
“Why?” I asked. And then I knew. Aunt Paula had seen me working fast. Too fast. We’d started earning more, and she’d calculated that we could receive less and still survive. And I’d imagined I was impressing her.
“Sorry, but that’s the way it is. Company policy. For all the finishers.”
We were the only finishers at the factory.
“That’s not fair,” I blurted. Ma, standing behind me, poked me under my shoulder blade.
Aunt Paula turned her attention to me. Her lipstick was smudged in one corner. “I wouldn’t want the two of you to be unhappy. You’re free to make your own choices if you feel uncomfortable. There’s no slavery in America anymore, is there?” And she started to walk away.
Ma, who never touched anyone casually, shoved past me, ran after Aunt Paula and grabbed her arm. “Older sister, I’m so sorry. She is such an outspoken child.”
“No, no,” Aunt Paula said. She sighed. “Those bamboo shoots, they’re like that. Don’t worry about it.”
“Bamboo shoot” was a term for a kid who’d been born and raised in America, meaning he or she was too westernized. I’m a bamboo knot, I wanted to say: born in Hong Kong but brought over here young. A bamboo knot blocks the hollowness of the bamboo shaft, yet the knot gives the bamboo its strength as well.
“Thank you,” Ma said. “Thank you.”
I suddenly heard Matt’s voice. I’d forgotten he was there. “You enjoy having bamboo shoots for your midnight snack, don’t you, Mrs. Yue?”
I stopped breathing, even my heart seemed to stop beating. What was he doing, what had I done by starting this whole fight?
Aunt Paula started to laugh and her laughter chilled me. “The older Wu brother is turning into quite a man, isn’t he? All right, if you’re so grown-up, you can take over the empty steamer spot tomorrow.”
“No!” I realized we had played right into what Aunt Paula needed. “You know Matt, he’s always joking-”
Matt interrupted me. “It’s okay. No problem, Mrs. Yue, I’ve been wanting to build up my muscles anyway.” And with a shrug, he set off slowly for the exit. “Bye, Mrs. Chang, Kimberly.”
Aunt Paula stared at his back and then stalked off in the direction of her office.
Once she was gone, Ma whirled on me. “Don’t interfere when adults are talking! Who will fill our mouths with food when we don’t have any work?”
“It is a free country, Ma. Why do we have to work for her?”
“Free country! Who do you think owns the other clothing factories? They’re all family or friends with each other. The whole Chinatown garment industry. And what is going to happen to Matt now?”
I looked down. The ragged edge in her voice had turned into frustration and despair. Like me, Matt was only fourteen, and who knew what would become of him when he worked on the enormous steaming press, which only grown men operated.
Ma’s voice became gentler. “Ah-Kim, I know you mean well. It’s just that everything in you gets spoken right out.” She meant I was too honest, and at that moment, I agreed with her.
The next day, I lingered by the steamers. The three men who worked them were constantly appearing and disappearing behind billows of steam. They laid garment after garment across the steamers with military precision and as the massive lids clamped down, scorching clouds were expelled in enormous gusts. When the lids were pulled open again, remnants of steam trailed behind like saliva between jaws. Even an accidental touch of the steamer surface resulted in a rush of blisters.
Matt was a small figure in between the muscled men. I saw he wasn’t as fast as the others yet, but he was working hard with his left foot on the vacuum and his right foot on the steam paddle. He lifted a skirt onto the surface of the steamer. He ducked his head away when a cloud of steam poured over him and was lost in the fog. The next thing I knew, he was coming up to me with his fist clenched.
I shrank back. I saw that his undershirt, all that he was wearing, was soaked, and droplets of sweat and steam rolled from his neck down onto his chest.
“Guess I got a big mouth,” he said.
“Me too.”
“Hey, someone has to find the rice, right?” To earn the money.
I felt so guilty, I couldn’t answer. It made it worse that he was being nice to me. “Can I help?”
“Maybe when you’re older. Work pays well and you get into shape too. You work here, you’ll become a stud like me.”
Normally I would have laughed and I tried to, but something in my body stopped me and it came out as a kind of a cough instead.
At that, he looked at me seriously. “I need this anyway. My ma can hardly earn a dime anymore. Her heart hurts, her lungs hurt. And Park can’t work. I’ll be okay.” He didn’t wait for an answer but changed the subject. “Hey, can you take this to her for me?”
I held out my hand and he poured something metal from his closed fist into it. It was a necklace made of gold, with a jade Kuan Yin hanging from it. This Kuan Yin was carved with a multitude of arms, each hand holding a different tool. People call her the goddess with an infinite number of arms to help all those in need.
I had noticed Matt wearing the necklace before, but thought nothing of it. It was common for parents to have their children wear gold and jade jewelry underneath their clothing to protect them from evil. They never take it off. Some families with barely enough money for food save until they can afford this kind of protection for their children.
I must have looked puzzled that Matt had just handed it to me, because he said, “Look.” He pulled open his T-shirt and I saw the red marks the necklace had burned onto his skin.
“It’s too hot for you to wear any metal so close to the machine,” I said flatly, the guilt flooding over me again.
“Duh. Hey, we’re going to the streets on Sunday, right?”
I couldn’t stop the huge smile from breaking across my face. “Really? You still want to?”
“Sure, have to get back to work so I don’t fall behind too much.” And he went back to his spot by the steamer.
The jade Kuan Yin glowed as green as tender leaves in spring and I could see how valuable that necklace had to be. I brought it immediately to Mrs. Wu, whose back was to me. She was scolding Park for something. He was half turned away from her and there was no way he could have read her lips. To my surprise, he responded by turning to her and clumsily patting her arm.
I looked at her face more closely and I saw that Matt was right, she didn’t look healthy. In addition to the large bags she always had under her eyes, both her skin and her lips were sallow, and the whites of her eyes seemed very yellow. That was when she saw me.
“You,” she said.
Terrified, I held out Matt’s necklace, but she only cast it a scornful look. “You going to be nice to my son?”
I didn’t dare speak. She clearly knew I was responsible for Matt’s being at the steamers.
“And to think I thought you were a boy,” she said. Her disgust made her Toisanese accent in Chinese even more pronounced. “He has a good heart.” She took the necklace from my hand. “Course, he would give this to you,” she muttered.
Suddenly, I heard Ma’s voice behind me. She must have come over when she saw us talking. “Mrs. Wu, I cannot face you. We are responsible.”
Mrs. Wu gazed at Ma, then the tension seemed to leave her. “We all have no choice. He’s a good boy. He’ll be all right.”
“Kimberly’s not a bad girl either.” Ma’s glance was warm. “They’re both so young and impulsive. We have to give them time.”
The two mothers looked at each other.
“Kids,” Mrs. Wu said.
I ran back to our workstation but their words flickered on the walls of my mind. Was Mrs. Wu implying that Matt could actually like me, perhaps just a little bit? I thrilled to the thought, but it was also strangely painful, like an ache in my lungs.
Matt didn’t just take Ma and me to see the Liberty Goddess, he started by meeting us at Times Square, the Tay Um See Arena. We got out of the enormous subway station, drawn along by the sea of people, and I was relieved to see Matt at the Burger King on the corner, just where he’d said he would meet us. Standing by his side, Ma and I looked around. Finally, this was the New York I’d dreamed of. A long white limousine drove by, surrounded by dozens of yellow taxis. We strolled by movie theaters and restaurants, signs that said “Girls Girls Girls” and massive billboards advertising Broadway shows. I felt strangely at home. The crowded streets and bustling city reminded me of the fancy parts of Hong Kong, although the Tay Um See Arena was bigger and richer. The people on the street were dressed in every imaginable way, but some of the women were especially elegant, with high heels and suits with shoulder pads. Many people were white, but I saw an Indian man with a turban, some black people in traditional African dress, and a group of singing monks in melon-colored robes. Ma put her hands together and bowed to them. One monk paused in his chanting to bow back.
“Oh, look at that!” Ma said to me, pointing to an enormous musical instrument store. I shielded my eyes from the hot sun to see through the window: an expanse of grand pianos, cellos and violins. In the back were what appeared to be cases filled with musical scores.
“Let’s go in,” Matt said.
“Oh no, we can’t buy anything,” Ma said.
“No harm in looking,” I said because I knew how much she wanted to enter, and Matt and I ushered her in through the double doors.
A burst of air-conditioning met us. It felt like heaven. There were enough customers wandering around, examining instruments and looking at musical scores, that Ma started to relax. Some were seated at the pianos, testing them out. I longed for this clean and carpeted life. Ma was as wide-eyed as a young girl. She started leafing through a stack of scores by Mozart, completely absorbed.
Matt and I walked around by ourselves.
“I didn’t know your ma liked music so much,” Matt said.
“She was a music teacher.” I paused. “Back home. What about your parents? What do they care about?”
“My ma’s so busy, just taking care of Park. And my pa’s gone. So I have to look after everybody.”
I smiled. Matt always took his responsibilities so seriously. But this was the first I’d ever heard about his father.
“You mean he’s passed away?”
Matt nodded without meeting my eyes, then said, “Where’s your ma?”
I turned around to look for Ma and found her lingering by a grand piano. I cocked my head in her direction, and Matt and I crossed over to her.
“This is a handsome instrument, isn’t it?” Ma said, flipping through the sheet music that someone had left on the piano. “It must sound lovely.”
“Try it out,” Matt said. “You’re allowed to push a few keys.”
“Oh no,” Ma said.
“Please.” I caught her eye. I desperately wanted her to play for Matt, to show him that we were more than what we seemed to be at the factory.
Slowly, Ma sat down. “Your pa used to love this piece,” she said, and ran her fingers up and down the keyboard in a series of runs before she started playing Chopin’s Nocturne in A-flat.
Matt’s mouth was slack.
I closed my eyes, listening and remembering how it had been when we had our own piano in our apartment, how Ma’s delicate fingers had moved so gracefully over the keyboard. She played the beginning and then stopped. By then, we had attracted the attention of a salesman, despite our simple clothes.
“Madam plays beautifully,” he said. “The piano has a wonderful tone, doesn’t it?”
I wondered how I could turn him away politely, but Matt spoke first.
“Yeah,” Matt said in English. “Thanks, but we’re just looking.”
For once, someone had taken the burden off me.
We wandered around the Tay Um See Arena, looking at the skyscrapers.
“Oh my, I have to look up three times before I can see the top,” Ma said, laughing as she peered up at one particularly high building.
“I can span it with my hands,” Matt said, stepping back and pretending to measure it.
That reminded me of something I didn’t want to bring up, but I needed to know.
“What’s going to happen to Mr. Pak?” I asked Matt. Since he lived in Chinatown and knew a lot of people from the factory, he heard most of the gossip.
“He won’t be coming back to the factory. His skin was badly burned and his wife thinks the work is too dangerous.”
“What will happen to him, then?”
“She works for that jewelry factory on Centre and Canal, so I bet he’ll do that with her when he heals.”
“What is that?”
“Making bead bracelets and other costume jewelry. You can bring all your work home, but it pays even worse than our factory. And you need to have very fast hands.”
I looked at Ma. Could this be a way to get out of the clothing factory?
She shook her head. “Remember how cold it gets at home, ah-Kim?”
I nodded. In our unheated apartment, we would never be able to string beads with a needle and thread.
Finally, we went to see the Liberty Goddess. Ma had tried to pay for Matt’s subway tokens but he’d been too quick for her.
“Now, we’re not going to actually get off at the Liberty Goddess,” Matt said. “That boat costs too much. What we’ll do is to take the Staten Island Ferry, which is only twenty-five cents, and you get an even better view.”
“Perfect,” Ma said.
We climbed aboard the large yellow ferry, which reminded me of the ferries in Kowloon Harbor, and Matt led us up to the top deck. Ma said it was so windy there that she had to go back downstairs to sit down.
It was wonderful, standing against the railing with Matt by my side, the cool wind blowing the heat away. The ocean stretched out before us.
“We’re going to get a first-rate look soon,” Matt said, and he left to go downstairs to get Ma. I marveled at how he could be tough yet considerate.
I held my breath when we finally got a good view of the Liberty Goddess. She was so close and so magnificent. Ma and Matt were right next to me. Ma squeezed my hand.
“How long we’ve dreamed of this,” she said.
“We’re here,” I said. “We’re really in America.”
Matt was looking thoughtful. “Doesn’t she remind you of Kuan Yin?”
We nodded.
Later, when Ma and I were finally back in our apartment, she said to me, “I was wrong about that Wu boy. He’s more than handsome, he’s got a human heart too.” She meant he had compassion and depth.
I didn’t answer but I hid my face in my pillow, thinking about Matt.
Ninth grade marked the transition to high school. Most of us had been there for seventh and eighth grade but some new students entered in ninth, and the school year began with placement tests in math and science to determine which level classes we should be in. The other students, especially the better and more competitive ones, were nervous about the tests because spots in the accelerated science and math program were limited and coveted. Although the tests were supposed to be a simple evaluation of our abilities, many kids had tutors to help them do some extra studying on their own. There was a rumor that some colleges accepted only students who had gotten into the accelerated program.
After the dusty, physical work of the factory, the scientific world created a clear and logical paradise where I could feel safe. Just for pleasure, I had started reading library books about subjects we’d touched upon in school: amino acids, mitosis, prokaryotes, DNA forensics, karyotyping, monohybrid crosses, endothermic reactions. And mathematics was the only language I truly understood. It was pure, orderly and predictable. It gave me great satisfaction to work on mathematical puzzles and forget about my real life at the apartment and factory. So I might have been the only student who actually looked forward to the placement tests and enjoyed taking them.
When I received my scores, they seemed impossibly high, even to me. I was overjoyed. However, after a few weeks in the accelerated science and math program, Dr. Copeland, the director of the science and math department, called me into her office. My heart thudded in my throat. I didn’t have good memories of that place.
“Kimberly, I am concerned by your performance in your classes,” she said.
My breath seemed to lodge in my throat. What could be wrong this time? I’d been getting close to perfect scores on every test so far. As an extra credit assignment in Biology, I’d devised a lab activity my teacher had raved about: using dehydrated juice to identify solutes, solvents, solution, concentration, and to simulate enzyme activity. “Is there a problem with my grades?”
“To tell you the truth, you’re doing a bit too well.” Dr. Copeland stared at me with narrowed eyes to gauge my reaction.
Now I understood. She hadn’t forgotten that incident with Tammy last year. With the fear clogging my throat, it was hard to get the words out. “I’m not a cheat.”
“I hope not. All of your teachers seemed to be convinced of your intelligence, and I do want to believe them. However, no student your age has ever gotten the results you got on those placement tests. And you are doing extremely well in your classes, while your middle school grades were less consistent. You may or may not know this, but tests have been stolen in the past.” Her face was filled with suspicion. She leaned in closer to me. When she finally spoke, her voice was so low I could barely hear her. “I was a pretty bright student too, as smart as they come, and I couldn’t have learned as quickly and as well as you claim to be doing. If you prove me wrong, I’ll be glad-glad to have such a brilliant young girl in science-but, well… you understand why we need to be sure of this, I think. You will be taking a new combined placement exam, an oral one, conducted by the entire science and math faculty. Each teacher will contribute his or her own questions.”
I didn’t answer. I was terrified of losing everything Ma and I had worked for. What if I couldn’t understand the English well enough, since it would all be spoken? What if I happened to make a few mistakes or just did less well than usual on her test? They could wrongly decide I’d been cheating and I would have to leave the school. I stared at her but her face no longer made sense to me. It had become a blur of shapes and light.
“I’m not out to get you, Kimberly. If you’re doing everything honestly, you have nothing to worry about.” And she turned back to her desk.
I walked slowly out of her office. Why couldn’t I just be like everyone else?
“You okay?” Curt was passing by, arm in arm with Sheryl.
Sheryl turned her head, her forehead furrowed. Perhaps she was as surprised as I was that he’d spoken to me. Maybe he also remembered the last time I’d been in that office.
“Sure,” I said. I blinked my eyes a few times. “Thanks.”
“See you,” he said, moving away.