Girl in Translation (15 page)

I was as ready as I ever would be to start Harrison Prep.

Now that I was a student, I could take a private bus to Harrison that stopped close to my old elementary school. I stood there in my ill-fitting clothes, and when the bus pulled up, I didn’t recognize it for what it was. It was sleek and gray, with a white board showing the number 8 in the front window. Inside, the seats were arranged around the perimeter instead of in rows. The bus was half full, with about seven other kids of different ages already on board, all of them white, all in blazers. I slid into the closest seat, next to an older boy who was so tall he stretched his legs out into the middle of the bus.

We made another stop in what looked like Annette’s area, and three more white kids got on. Their parents waved as we drove away. Annette was going to school with her mother today, but after this, she would be on my bus too. Although I’d been in the U.S. for almost a year now, I had never seen so many white people in one place before. I didn’t want to stare, but their coloring was so interesting. The boy next to me had hair that was the pale yellow-orange of boiled octopus. His skin was as light as Annette’s but blotched. A girl who had gotten on the bus at Annette’s stop was sitting diagonally across from me. She had dark brown hair and eyes, very much like a Chinese person, only everything was lighter and her hair was flipped back from both sides of her face. Some of the other kids made a lot of noise welcoming one another back from the summer and chatting about their new classes.

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 Annette or her mother. A father hurried by me, asking his child, “Are you sure you know where your classes are?” I went by a small group of older students laughing together outside the main building. Everyone I saw was white. I had studied the Harrison map carefully and I found Milton Hall, which was covered in vines, with no problems. My homeroom and most of my classes were there. As I walked up the steps, I felt so nervous, I could take only shallow breaths. Two girls who looked like they could be my age went into the building before me.

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 Annette wouldn’t be in my homeroom but I still missed her. I followed the other kids when we traveled together from room to room, trying to stay away from that group of kids and especially the mean ginger-haired boy. Our Social Studies teacher was Mr. Scoggins, a heavyset man in a suit and tie. He told us in his deep voice that we would need to keep up with the news in his class. We would also be simulating buying stocks on the stock market, following our stocks’ ups and downs in the coming weeks to see if we earned or lost money. I bit my lip, wondering where I would get access to a newspaper for the stock prices.

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 Annette at the cafeteria at lunchtime.

Annette hugged me and the metal of her braces gleamed. “I’m so glad to see you!” she said. “Everyone here is so weird.”

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 thinner but the buttons on the shirt around her stomach still strained against the fabric. Her hair had grown as well, and instead of balling out around her head, it now jutted out like a pyramid behind her neck. To my surprise, she took a tray and got into line with me for the hot food.

“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 Annette.

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 10
³
, 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.”

Scanning the faces I passed throughout the day, I saw that I wasn’t the only minority in the school, but I was one of only a handful. Everyone else in my homeroom was white but I had seen an Indian girl and an older black boy in the hallways.

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 running too fast. Standing in that gym, I felt guilty toward Ma before we even began to move.

But it was after we lined up to be given our gym uniforms (green T-shirts and the wide shorts I had seen earlier) and crowded into the locker room that I knew I was really in trouble.

SEVEN

All of the other girls began stripping down. We’d never had to change for gym at my old school. We’d only had to switch to sneakers if we weren’t wearing them already. I clutched my new clothes as I saw everyone else was wearing store-bought panties. Some even had on cotton bras or sleeveless camisoles. All of their underwear was colorful and expensive.

Some of the girls were completely flat-chested and I envied them. I had begun to develop small breasts that summer and I did everything I could to hide them. It was inevitable that a solution would have to be found for them, and I would have to be the one to find it. Everything under my clothes had been made by Ma and thus was badly sewn: a pair of thick cotton shorts unevenly trimmed in red for good luck, a stained and pilling long-sleeved undershirt. All the girls were checking one another out from under lowered eyelids. Then I spotted the toilet stalls against the wall. I silently thanked the gods and ducked into one to change.

This first gym class was to be our individual evaluation. We were timed in our running, measured in our jumping, counted for our push-ups, and then the gym teacher put a racket in our hands, fired balls at us and counted the number we hit. Working in the factory had made me strong. I was far from the best but I was also not the worst. It was such a relief that I stopped feeling guilty for acting unladylike.

I was beginning to see the importance Americans put on a kind of general athleticism, which was new to me. Back home, a student was praised if she did well in her classes at school, but for these kids, good grades were not enough. They were also expected to play sports and an instrument, and have straight teeth as well. I too would be expected to become attractive and well-rounded.

By the end of the day, I’d learned some of the kids’ names: Greg was the mean one, Curt the one with hair like a lion’s, Sheryl was the girl in the leg warmers (I’d heard the term when another girl admired them) and Tammy was the brown-haired girl on my bus.

After gym, school was over for the other kids but I was scheduled to work in the library three days a week and to get special tutoring in English on the fourth-though I had yet to figure out how I was going to fit all of this in with helping Ma at the factory too. The library work was a requirement of the scholarship I’d been given.

I knew that the library I would be working in, the one in Milton Hall, wasn’t the main research library but rather a minor one mainly used for studying. I expected a modern sterile space, similar to the public library in Brooklyn. I opened the door to the library and caught my breath. It was small, intimate and lovely. Long streams of sunlight drifted through the high stained-glass windows. A few students were curled up in large leather armchairs, reading.

A man in a striped maroon silk tunic was watering a gardenia on one of the tables. Aside from the gym teacher, he was the only man I’d seen the whole day who wasn’t wearing a suit and tie. He looked up and saw me, then approached. I saw his tunic had an embroidered stand-up collar and he was wearing white cotton trousers.

His hair would have been as dark as mine, only his was shot through with silver. “Are you the new scholarship student? I’m Mr. Jamali.” He spoke English with a slight lilt.

We shook hands and then I couldn’t help asking, “Where are you from?”

“Pakistan,” he said. He saw me looking at the intricate thread work on his tunic.

“Ah. You noticed. The headmaster has tried to get me in a suit for many years but I have resisted. I am also the theater director and that justifies a bit of flair, don’t you think?”

Mr. Jamali showed me the mechanics of my work, which were very simple. He told me that since this library had a limited selection of books, most students came just to read or study. I understood this meant I would have some free time when working there, maybe even enough to do my own homework. There was even a typewriter in the back office I was allowed to use. I wanted to clap my hands for joy.

“Mr. Jamali, can I change the hours I have? I like to be here more early in the day.”

“Why?”

“Because…” My voice trailed off. “My mother work and I must help her after school.”

“I see.” He looked at me with his intelligent eyes. “Well, in that case, we shall see what we can do.”

At the factory, Matt noticed my new clothes right away. “Well, if it isn’t the landlady’s daughter,” he said.

I must have looked hurt, because he immediately added, “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant, you look pretty.”

I knew he was only being kind, and also that I’d never forget it: the time Matt said I was pretty.

But it made me realize that coming to the factory in my school clothes could cause trouble for me with the other factory kids or even with Aunt Paula, who clearly didn’t need to be reminded of my new private school. From now on, I would make sure I changed into my work clothes as soon as I arrived and never mention my new school.

“How did it go today?” Ma asked. Seeing her warm, familiar brown eyes, I relaxed for the first time in hours, and I realized how much stress I’d been under the whole day, how foreign the entire world of Harrison was.

I stood close to Ma and, without answering, leaned my forehead against her shoulder. I wanted so much to be her little girl again. Her shirt was made of polyester and was damp with sweat.