The Cooked Seed (7 page)

I didn’t expect Takisha to treat me like an old friend, which made me feel wonderful and grateful.

“I am Takisha,” she said, opening her arms. “I am eighteen, and I am from Alabama.”

My English escaped me. All I could do was smile.

“Oh, gosh, is it A.Q., An-Qu, or An-Qui?” Takisha giggled. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Forgive me if I don’t pronounce your name correctly.”

I tried to figure out what she was saying. I took out my dictionary and said to her, “English. Help.”

“Where are you from?” Takisha asked, gesturing with her arms. “East, west, south, or north?”

I opened my
English 900 Sentences
book. “I name are … my name is …”

“I see, so you don’t speak English.” Takisha smiled broadly. “It’s okay. No problem. Now follow me. Where … are … you … from? Where, watch my mouth, wh …
ere
…” She pointed her hand at me. “Don’t look at your book. Look at me. Now tell me your home. Home. Do you understand? Home? Papa, mama, milk, dog. Do you understand what I mean?”

“No understand—”

“Hey, listen carefully!” Takisha pointed at herself. “Home Alabama.”

I pointed at her. “Your home.”

“That’s right! My home, Alabama. Now tell me yours. Your home.”

“Home? Do you mean h-o-m-e?”

Takisha laughed. “I mean your motherland—”

Yes, I knew the word
motherland
. It was one of the few slogans in English taught in China in 1972 during the visit of the American president Nixon. “I love my motherland” was taught along with “Long live Chairman Mao,” “Long live the Communist Party of China,” and “Albania is a great socialist country.”

“Motherland is China,” I said.

“Oh, you talk!”

“China, Papa, Mama, is China.”

“You’re from China! How wonderful! I want you to tell me all about China.”

“Me English poor.”

“You’ll learn.”

Takisha wanted to know how I had enjoyed America so far. I wished that I could have told her that I enjoyed air-conditioned rooms. I loved the flow of warm water from the faucet, I enjoyed sitting on a toilet, and of course the big moving room—the elevator. I loved the American city nights with the streets and buildings all ablaze. I couldn’t imagine the cost of electricity, though. Most of all I enjoyed Takisha, the way she accepted me without reservation.

Takisha wanted to know what had brought me to America, and what life was like for me in China. With the help of my dictionary, I composed
and wrote down my answer: “It was like you are hung, your neck bone is breaking, but death doesn’t arrive.”

“What?” Takisha frowned.

Takisha wrote words for me to look up in my dictionary. This was how I discovered that she was studying to become a doctor. I asked what motivated her to study medicine. She replied that she wanted to find a cure for her mother, who was severely diabetic.

“My mother is in bad shape,” Takisha said. “You know what ‘bad shape’ means? Her doctor wants to cut off her legs. I said no way. I will not let anybody cut off my mother’s legs. ‘You will keep your legs,’ I told my mother. ‘I will be your doctor.’ ”

As I looked for words to express my admiration, I heard a ringing sound and saw that the room had a telephone. Takisha picked up the phone. “Excuse me, it’s my mother!”

“My roommate IQ is from China,” I heard Takisha say. “Hey, IQ, my mother says hello to you. Hey, wait a minute. Oops, her name is not IQ. It’s A.Q. A … An … Qui … Oh, never mind, I’m sorry. How do I pronounce your name again? Ah-Choo? Ah-Chi? Ann? What? Oh, I see, An like Ann. Chee like cheese. Ann-Cheese. That should do it. I got it. Ann-Cheese, without the ‘s’! Did I get it right this time? What? A-n. Not A-n-n. An-c-hee. Oh, one more try. Okay, Anchee. Is it Anchee? Yes, I got it! Anchee!”

I turned to my
English 900 Sentences
while Takisha continued on the phone. It was hard to concentrate with the noise. I left the room and went to sit on the floor in the hallway. I buried myself in the book for hours on end. What confused me the most about English was its sentence structure, which was completely different from Chinese. For example, “You are not a thief,” a policeman might ask. “You didn’t steal, did you?”

In English, one would answer, “No, I didn’t.” But in Chinese, you must answer yes, meaning, “You are correct, I didn’t steal.” But it would be wrong in English if I said, “Yes, I didn’t steal.”

I also had great difficulty with
on, in, the, am, was, are,
and
were
. I could never figure out where and when to use them.
Have been, has been,
and
had been
also gave me trouble.

“Good night, Ann Chee,” Takisha said, turning the light off on her
side. I covered my lamp with my jacket and the room was instantly dark and quiet. I was tired and wished that I could go to sleep, but I knew I couldn’t waste any time.

The next morning, the sound of a door slamming jolted me awake. It was followed by Takisha’s loud voice: “Oh, I am
soooooo
sorry!”

This would be my alarm clock from now on. Takisha had a habit of slamming the door and then saying, “Oh, I am
soooooo
sorry!”

It was still dark outside after Takisha took her shower. She was drying herself with a towel in front of me. She didn’t seem to be concerned about revealing her naked body in front of a stranger.

I left the dorm as soon as Takisha did. The day’s task I had set for myself was to go to downtown Chicago. I planned to look for a job waitressing or dishwashing. I would knock on the doors of Chinese restaurants.

The tall buildings in Chicago were fantastic in my eyes. I didn’t feel real walking between them. I was reminded how far I had come from home, that my feet were truly on American soil. I remembered the news clip depicting America’s poor as I walked past the Chicago city hall, where a small group of people was picketing. It was as if I had stepped into the same TV scene, except it was not black-and-white.

I was surprised by how fancy the post office was. A large American flag hung above its entrance. I wanted to take a picture of myself under that flag and mail it home. My parents were worried about me. My letter to them would take three weeks to arrive in China.

I found a sign that read CHINESE RESTAURANT on Michigan Avenue and let myself in.

A lady greeted me asking, “How many?”

I put on my best smile and replied politely in Chinese, “Do you need a waitress or a dishwasher?”

The lady looked disappointed. She shook her head and waved me away.

I tried another restaurant and received the same response. I kept on. The begging part was the most difficult. I told myself that I must learn to get used to it.

I went as far as my legs could carry me. By the end of the day, I was tired and starving. I had visited every Chinese restaurant in downtown Chicago, but without luck. The one Chinese carry-out-only restaurant owner who had a help-wanted sign in his window said to me, “No English, no job.”

On the sidewalk I was blocked by a fat lady who looked like a wrestler. She wore a dirty, grease-covered, brown knee-length coat. Holding a cardboard sign, she approached me. A strong scent of cheap perfume came from her messy orange hair. She spoke to me, but I couldn’t understand.

“Sorry me no English,” I apologized.

She flashed the sign in front of my face and stuck out her hand. “Spare some change?”

I took out my dictionary and looked up the words on her sign, HUNGRY & HOMELESS.

I said to her, “Yes English, yes job!”

The students in my English class came from all over the world. Since I had trouble pronouncing and memorizing their names, I tried to memorize their faces. It was not easy because black people looked alike, as did the whites and Hispanics. My classmates told me that they had a similar problem—to them Oriental people all looked the same.

A man from Italy with dark wavy hair sat on my right, and a beautiful high-nosed girl on my left was from Greece. With a lot of hand motions and make-believe words, we tried to communicate. Unfortunately, nobody understood anybody.

Our teachers were Americans. One was heavyset with curly blonde hair and the other slender with short dark-brown hair. I made it easier for myself by calling one Light Head and the other Dark Head. I secretly gave names to my classmates. I called the Italian man Michelangelo and the Greek girl Goddess Helena. I called another Middle Eastern–looking man Ali Baba, and a Russian Comrade Lenin.

What fascinated me was not the way the teachers taught, but what they taught. For example, the textbook featured a world that seemed unreal to me. It described an American small town where all the residents
could vote and the people decided whether to give permission to a developer to build a shopping mall near the town square. Besides the town’s mayor, there were also other elected officials.

Where I came from, everyone was considered “a bolt on the Communist machine.” Unless you wanted to be arrested and spend the rest of your life in a prison or labor camp, you wouldn’t ever voice your opinion against the authorities. I asked if the world described in the textbook was an accurate reflection of American reality. The teacher, Dark Head, turned to me and said, “Pretty much.”

I didn’t want to be too hard on my teachers, but I did want my money’s worth. I was unsatisfied by the speed of the teaching. The teachers didn’t press for results and allowed the class to run at its own pace. They assigned little homework, and only a few students turned in the work that was assigned. The teachers were okay with that, as if they didn’t care. I seemed to be the only one who really drilled at the grammar.

Miss Light Head suffered a cold for several days. She carried a box that looked as if it had toilet paper in it. She called it “tissues.” She kept sneezing. It made me want to laugh when I saw her cover her nose with toilet paper.

Each time she would blow her nose she would say two words: “Excuse me.” I wondered why. There was nothing to be excused for—you couldn’t help it when you sneezed.

In China, in order to ask to be excused, you had to commit a crime, such as wipe your behind with newsprint that had Mao’s portrait on it, as my mother had once done accidentally. My mother didn’t mean disrespect. She wasn’t plotting an anti-Mao event. She was simply out of toilet paper and used the newspaper instead. It was hard to avoid Mao, whose portrait was printed on every page.

I found “excuse me” very useful. It was almost like saying hello. You would say it not only when you sneezed, but also when you entered a building, joined a line, walked past someone, or stepped off a train. I started to practice saying “Excuse me.”

Then I couldn’t stop saying it. “Excuse me,” I said to the man who opened the door for me. “Excuse me,” I said to the school janitor. People gave me the friendliest looks when I said “Excuse me.” I loved saying “Excuse me.”

I didn’t mind Miss Light Head’s “excuse me,” but I did mind that she let the students do the teaching. She seemed exhausted by her sneezing and excuse me’s. She sat in front of her desk, and the language cripples took over the class. I didn’t pay to listen to the cripples!

Michelangelo loved to express himself in class. He had a thick Italian accent and would take forever to complete one sentence. Although I enjoyed his good looks, I couldn’t understand much of what he was saying. What he said didn’t sound like English to me.

The Greek Goddess Helena spoke with a thick accent, too. She told the class that she had just celebrated her twentieth birthday. “Happy birthday” was about the only English we understood from her. She threw up her arms and tried to interrupt the Italian. They got into a fight. Eventually they quit speaking English and went with their native tongues.

People started to drift away. Comrade Lenin excused himself to get coffee while Ali Baba took his smoke break. A Frenchman said to a Korean girl who sat in front of him, “I love you! I love you! I love you!” like a parrot. A Hispanic woman wrapped in a bright-colored shawl started a heated conversation with a black man dressed in yellow patterned cloth like an African tribal chief. She told him that the trick to mastering English was to sing it, and she was sure it was something he would do well since he was from Africa.

The black man in the yellow patterned cloth explained that he was not from an African tribe. He had been born in Germany and grew up in France. The woman ignored him and kept going on about singing English until he started to yell at her in French. A Polish man with a thick beard told an Egyptian man who had an even bigger beard, “English is ah … aard vark!”

I was appointed to partner with a short Asian man named Suzuki. We were supposed to figure out where the other was from.

“Japan?” I said, and he nodded.

“China?” he said, and I nodded, and that was it. We sat in silence and wasted our time waiting for the others to finish.

During the last week of the class, the teacher came out of her sneezing spell. She smiled warmly for the first time and took control of the class. “We’re going to play a game called Pass on the Story,” she announced.
She whispered into the ear of a student who repeated the story to the next student.

When it was my turn, I listened with full concentration, but I had a hard time understanding the accent of the Greek Goddess Helena. I did my best to guess. The only word I understood was
ox
.

I was supposed to pass on the story to Michelangelo. Since I didn’t get the full story, I decided to add my own version. I whispered into Michelangelo’s ear a story about China’s national hero, known as the People’s Ox.

“He died pulling his rickety cart toward Communism,” I said into his ear.

Michelangelo nodded as if he understood, and then he turned to the student next to him.

After the circle was completed, our teacher announced that her original story was lost.

I was excited about an ad I found in a free newspaper. The description read, “No skill necessary.” With the help of my dictionary and Takisha, I came to understand that the job was to be part of an “experimental drug trial.”