OTHER DELL YEARLING BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY
YANG THE YOUNGEST AND HIS TERRIBLE EAR, Lensey Namioka
YANG THE THIRD AND HER IMPOSSIBLE FAMILY, Lensey Namioka
YANG THE SECOND AND HER SECRET ADMIRERS, Lensey Namioka
YANG THE ELDEST AND HIS ODD JOBS, Lensey Namioka
WHEN MY NAME WAS KEOKO, Linda Sue Park
A SINGLE SHARD, Linda Sue Park
THE IRON DRAGON NEVER SLEEPS, Stephen Krensky
YEAR OF IMPOSSIBLE GOODBYES, Sook Nyul Choi
THE STORY OF TRACY BEAKER, Jacqueline Wilson
TADPOLE, Ruth White
DELL YEARLING BOOKS are designed especially to entertain and enlighten young people. Patricia Reilly Giff, consultant to this series, received her bachelor's degree from Marymount College and a master's degree in history from St. John's University. She holds a Professional Diploma in Reading and a Doctorate of Humane Letters from Hofstra University. She was a teacher and reading consultant for many years, and is the author of numerous books for young readers.
To my half-and-halves
“your form isn't complete, Fiona,” said the recreations director. “I can't let you enroll in the folk dancing class until it's completely filled in.”
The recreation center is located at a park not far from my school. For years the center had been used for adult education classes, such as pottery and language lessons. Recently the building was remodeled and expanded, and they started having classes for young people, too.
When I heard there were folk dancing classes, I immediately went over to enroll. I had never filled out one of their forms before, and I didn't know what the director meant by the form not being completely filled in. I looked it over again.
NAME: FIONA CHENG
AGE: 11
ADDRESS: 2134 HILLSIDE BLVD. E. SEATTLE, WA
CLASS: FOLK DANCING
It looked good to me.
“You didn't check a box for race,” she said. “To get government funding, we have to let them know how many kids we have in each of the race categories.”
This was a problem I'd bumped into before, but I still wasn't sure how to handle it. I took the form from her. “I'll finish it later,” I muttered, and quickly left the recreation center.
On the way home, I tried to decide on the best way to complete the form. I had to check one of the boxes that said, “White,” “Asian,” “Black,” “Hispanic,” “Native American,” or “Other.” None of them would be right, though, because I'm not any one of those things. I'm half and half: my father is Chinese and my mother is Scottish. I couldn't just check either “White” or “Asian” since I'm half of each.
I suppose I could have checked the box for “Other,” but I didn't want to. It would make me feel like an outsider, a weirdo who didn't belong anywhere. I wanted to fit in like everyone else. Why didn't they have a box for people like me, who were half and half?
When I got home, Mom was in the kitchen, pouring herself a cup of tea. She teaches math at the university, so she's often home in the afternoon. She drinks tea instead of coffee, even though we live in Seattle, the nation's coffee capital. Tea is cheaper than coffee since you can use the tea bag over again. You see, Mom is very thrifty.
She says it's because a mathematician's aim when proving a theorem is to use as little as possible to prove as much as possible. In other words, you always spend a teeny bit to get a whole lot. After doing this for years and years, you wind up being ver-r-r-y thr-r-r-ifty.
I took a seat at the kitchen table. “Mom, what am I?” I asked.
She frowned. “What do you mean? You're Fiona Cheng, last time I looked.”
“I'm not asking you who I am,” I said. “I'm asking you what I am.”
“What brought this on?” asked Mom, sipping her tea and looking at me over the rim of the cup. I think she suspected that the problem had something to do with our family being racially mixed. It's not something the two of us often discuss.
I told her about the form I had to fill out for the folk dancing class. Mom didn't answer right away. The expression in her hazel eyes didn't tell me much. “Why not check two boxes, one for ‘Asian' and one for ‘White'?” she suggested after a while.
“I don't think they'll accept that,” I sighed. Suddenly I became angry. “Why do grown-ups always have to sort people into boxes anyway?”
“They like to do that, don't they?” said Mom. “But you can't always sort people by the way they look.”
To be honest, though, I sorted people, too. Whenever I met another racially mixed kid for the first time, I thought about percentages. I said to myself, “Let's see … 65%/35%,” meaning that he looks 65% one race and 35% another. Later, when I got to know the person well, I'd forget about the percentage business for the most part. But it was a tough habit to break completely. Maybe I get it from Mom's love of mathematics?
Since Mom wasn't any help, I went upstairs to Dad's studio. He writes and illustrates children's books. His best-known books are a series about a dragon living in ancient China. Dragons are supposed to do all sorts of good things, like bringing rain to lands suffering from drought. But Dad's dragon is secretly scared of water, and just about everything else, too. So how can his dragon present a majestic and fearsome image to the world while preserving his shameful secret? Each of Dad's books puts his dragon in a tight spot, but the dragon always manages to get out of it somehow.
I knew Dad was working on the illustrations for his latest dragon book. Normally I don't like to interrupt him, but this time I needed help.
Dad looked up from his drawing board and placed a large sheet of paper over the picture he was working on. He always does this automatically whenever anyone comes in while he's in the middle of something. He hates having people look at his work before he's satisfied with it.
“What's up, Fiona?” he asked.
I asked him the same question I had asked Mom. “I have to fill out a form for the folk dancing class, and they want to know what race I am. Should I check the box for ‘Asian,' or the box for ‘White'?”
Dad looked at me. His eyes are a dark brown, just like mine. “Would it bother you to check the box for ‘Asian'?” he asked.
“Of course it wouldn't,” I said quickly. I've always known that I look more Asian. I have my dad's brown eyes, straight dark hair, and dark skin. By checking the box for “Asian,” I would be telling him that I belonged with his people.
“It's just that I have to be accurate,” I told Dad. “The recreation center has to report the number of kids they have in each race to get money from the government.”
“Then you should do whatever feels right to you,” said Dad.
The problem was that I didn't know what felt right to me.
There was only one person left to ask: my brother, Ron. He's twelve years old and has reddish hair and much paler skin than mine. He takes after Mom. I look about 30% white and 70% Asian, while Ron looks maybe 75% white and 25% Asian.
Ron is small for his age, and he's sensitive about his size. He's very conscious that he's exactly the same height as me, even though he's a year older. Mom keeps telling him, “Boys get their growth spurt later, Ron. By the time you're sixteen, you'll overtake Fiona in height.”
That's not much comfort to Ron. If you're twelve, sixteen seems an awfully long way off.
Ron used to get picked on by some bullies in school, so Dad had him enroll in kung fu classes to give him confidence. Nobody picks on Ron now. But I know he's still conscious of being one of the shortest boys in his class, and more than anything else, he hates being called a sissy.
I went up to his room. “Say, Ron, you're signing up for the kickboxing team at the recreation center, right?”
He looked up from his homework
. “Yeah. So?”
“Have you filled out the form yet?” I asked.
“It's filled out and ready to hand in.”
“Which box did you check for race?”
Ron looked at me. His eyes are a light brown, not quite Mom's hazel, but not dark brown like Dad's, either. “Let's see …,” he said. “I guess I checked the box for ‘Other.'”
“And was that okay with you?” I asked.
“Why should it?” he asked. “None of the other boxes seemed to fit.”
“But doesn't that bother you? That anyone who doesn't fit into one of the categories on the form is just lumped into ‘Other'?”
Ron shrugged. “I kind of like it when they can't fit me in a box so easily.”
It really didn't bother him. Ron didn't mind not belonging. He was perfectly happy to be a loner.
If only it was that easy for me.
Next morning, on the way to the school bus, I still hadn't decided how to fill out my form. If I didn't do it soon, I'd miss the deadline for enrolling in the dance class.
Suddenly I had a brilliant idea: since Ron and I were both half and half, I could check the box for Asian and he could check the box for White.
I was so pleased with my idea that I didn't hear my name being called until I had nearly gotten to the bus stop.
“Hey, wait up, Fiona!”
I turned around and saw my friend Amanda Tanaka. Amanda is Japanese American, and she never has to worry about her race. People think they know all about her since she looks 100% Asian.
I remember the first time I met Amanda. It was a year ago, when our family had moved to Seattle from San Francisco. I was starting school that fall.
Being new, I felt kind of lost. It didn't help that the teacher was also kind of lost. She was a substitute, and she was very young and nervous. Reading the roll, she came to my name and had trouble pronouncing it. “Fee … Fee…,” She began. Then she looked up at me. “Or is it Fi, as in hi-fi?”
There were some snickers from the class. I heard one boy whisper, “Fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!”
“It's Fee,” I said. I took a deep breath and said calmly, “My name is pronounced Fee-OH-nah.”
“Really?” said the teacher. “Is it a Chinese name?”
“No,” I muttered. “It's Scottish.”
“You're Scottish?” asked the teacher, unable to hide her surprise. Somebody giggled.
“I'm half Chinese and half Scottish,” I explained for what seemed like the millionth time.
That first day in school seemed to last forever, and I was glad when it was finally over and I was able to escape.
“Is Fiona a common name in Scotland?” asked a voice behind me as I walked toward the school bus.
I turned around and saw a girl from my class who looked Asian.
“It sure is,” I told her. “My mom gave me that name because her folks came from Scotland.”
“My folks are from Japan, but they didn't try to stick Japanese names on us,” said the girl. “I wound up Amanda, and my sister's Melissa.”
“Are Japanese names that hard to pronounce?” I asked.
“Some of them are,” said Amanda. “I know a girl called Yukiko. Her parents want to make sure everybody knows she's Japanese. Her last name is Kakimoto, so her full name is Yukiko Kakimoto.”
I tried to pronounce the name and got tripped up by all the ks.
Amanda grinned. “Yukiko has a lot of trouble with people messing up her name. But she's good about it, just like you.”
I liked Amanda right away. She made that first day in school seem not so bad after all. We got on the bus together, and we also got off at the same stop.
I saw Amanda again the next day in the lunchroom. I was joining the line to pick up the hot dish, and after putting it on my tray, I looked around the crowded lunch-room. Where did I fit in? I passed by a table where some kids from my class were seated. One of the boys looked up. “Fee fi fo fum,” he whispered to the boy next to him, and they both snickered.
I flashed him my brightest smile. “Hello, Fee-Fi Boy!” I said, and quickly looked for another table. I thought I heard someone laugh.
“Over here!” said Amanda, and I saw her waving at me.
I joined Amanda's table, and this time my smile was real.
Since grown-ups like to put people into boxes, they'd have to call this table the Odds and Ends Box. The kids there included African Americans, Hispanics, whites, Asian Americans, and all sorts of mixtures. It just seemed natural for me to sit at a table where there was variety. Because we were such a mixed bunch, nobody felt different. We were all different and our percentages were all different, too.
Soon after Amanda and I became friends, I pointed out Ron to her. We were in the schoolyard during recess, and Ron was up on the bars swinging himself along. “That's my brother over there.”
Amanda stared at Ron. “Your brother doesn't look like you at all!”
I sighed. “That's what everybody says. He's got that red hair and everything.”
From the way Amanda looked at Ron, I suspected she was getting a crush on him. Was it because he looked 75% white? Or maybe she just liked the easy way he swung himself along?
I didn't have the heart to tell her that Ron was basically a loner and would be hard to get to know. In all the time that Amanda and I have been best friends, she and Ron probably haven't exchanged more than twenty words. As far as I remember, “Pass the soy sauce, please” was the only thing he'd ever said to her directly.
While we waited for the school bus, I told Amanda about filling out the form for my dance class. “Would you believe it, I can't enroll in the dance class until I decide what my race is!”
“You're kidding!” she said. “What are you going to do?”
“Ron and I are both signing up for classes,” I said. “So I've decided that I'm Asian and he's white. That way, the two of us will average out, and the recreation center will get the right amount of money.”
Amanda giggled, and we were still laughing when we got on the bus. After I sat down, I glanced across the aisle. That was when I got a shock.
The boy sitting across the aisle was Harry Kim, a Korean American boy who sat at our lunch table. That day he looked so different that I didn't recognize him at first. He had bleached his black hair a light blond.
It got me thinking. What would happen if I dyed my hair, too? All my dolls were blondes or redheads, with long, long legs. In most movies and TV shows, the women have blond hair and very blue eyes. Obviously this is how most girls want to look.
With Harry's Asian features, the combination was kind of exotic. But I still couldn't decide whether or not I liked it. Since my own features were 70% Asian, I'd look exotic if I dyed my hair, too.
Amanda was also looking at Harry. “My sister Melissa has been talking about dyeing her hair blond. She and my mom had a terrible fight about it.”
“Why won't your mom let her?” I asked. “I see lots of kids with dyed hair, not just Harry.”
“Mom says Melissa wants to change her hair to blond because she wants to deny her Asian heritage and try to look white.”
I don't always get along with Melissa. She's usually in a sour mood, and when I go over to Amanda's house, Melissa calls me “That Scotch Girl” in a sneering kind of way.
But this time I was on Melissa's side. “Your mom's not being fair. Lots of white kids bleach or dye their hair, sometimes in really weird colors, too. Black hair is so boring! Maybe Melissa just wants to show her independence, or make a fashion statement.”
Amanda looked thoughtful. “I wonder if my mom would still say no if Melissa wanted to dye her hair blue or green. Then she couldn't accuse her of trying to look white.”
“What if I dyed my hair red?” I asked.
Amanda laughed. “Well, you'd be denying only half of your heritage since half of you is Scotch.”
If I did dye my hair red, would my percentage go from 30%/70% to 50%/50%? Tha
t way my outside would match my inside percentages better.
Then I remembered one good reason not to change my hair. Nainai was coming to visit soon, and she would be staying with us for a few days.
nainai is what Ron and I call our Chinese grandmother. It's the Chinese word for your father's mother. There is a different Chinese word for your mother's mother, and that's waipo. But I don't call my other grandmother waipo, because she wouldn't understand. My mother's parents are the MacMurrays, and they came over from Scotland thirty years ago, when Mom was only five years old.
Mom still speaks with a bit of a Scottish accent. My friends think it's cute, but frankly I wish she wouldn't roll her rs quite so hard. I think she does it on purpose.
Nainai has an accent, too, but since she spent most of her life in China, I don't mind it so much. She tells great ghost stories, and her Chinese accent makes them sound even scarier.
“Nainai will have to sleep in your room when she visits,” Mom told me. “She'll have your bed, and you can use your sleeping bag. I know you won't mind.”
Mom was right. I didn't mind sharing my room with Nainai. She and I are close. I love the way she smiles at me and says, “You look more and more like your father.”
Dad is Nainai's favorite son, so this is a real compliment. That's why Nainai would have a terrible shock if I dyed my hair red. She might be hurt, because she would think that I was trying to look like my mom instead of my dad.
Nainai had to share my room because Mom's parents, the MacMurrays, were coming, too, and they'd be using the guest room. They were coming down from Vancouver, British Columbia, for the annual Folk Fest.
The Folk Fest is held once a year during a weekend in spring, and it's when all the ethnic groups in our region put on programs showing their arts, crafts, costumes, food, drama, dance, and music. Our teachers and the local papers and TV are always talking about how “ethnically diverse” Seattle is, and the Folk Fest is supposed to show off our diversity. Our family goes every year and we squeeze in as many shows as we can. In three days you can see performances from every continent on earth, from countries I hadn't even heard of.
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