by Jamie Gilson
“You two again?” The policeman shook his head at Tuan and me. “On to bigger things?”
“They didn’t throw it,” Caroline told him.
“They just didn’t catch it,” Suzanna said. “He threw it.” We all turned and looked at Quint, who wasn’t smirking. He looked scared.
“I didn’t throw it at you.” Quint stuck his hands in his pockets like he’d never had them out. “It was an accident. Your car ran into my snowball.”
“No kidding,” Tuan said.
The policeman took off his hat and rubbed his forehead. “What you’re saying is that it’s my fault? I don’t believe this.” He shook his head. “You might have caused an accident,” he told us. “You know that, don’t you?”
We didn’t have time to answer.
Tuan started talking suddenly, excitedly, in Vietnamese that sounded like one long singing word. And he ran. The blue van was turning the corner, its horn honking.
“That’s his mother,” I told the policeman, who did not look impressed.
“And his baby sister,” Caroline went on.
“They’ve come all the way from Vietnam, and he hasn’t seen them in months. This is their first day in this country,” Suzanna told him. “You wouldn’t spoil that because of a snowball, would you?”
The policeman sighed. “I can’t believe I’d give you two another chance.”
Mom hurried out the front door and started down the steps, hesitating as though she didn’t know whether to save us from prison or welcome the Nguyens. She chose the Nguyens.
“Thank you, officer,” Caroline said. “You are a good person.”
Tuan’s dad got out of the van. Then his grandmother, and, finally, a small, pretty woman carrying a baby.
“Can I go now? I’ll probably never see you again for the rest of my life,” I told the policeman.
“You,” he pointed at Quint. “You keep those snow bullets off the street.” He tipped his cap at Tuan and his family, who stood in the driveway looking at us with interest. Then he pulled his car off the curb and drove away.
Caroline, Suzanna, Quint, and I ran over to meet Tuan’s mother. But as we hurried up, another woman climbed out of the van, carrying yet another baby. Then two more men, and after that, a kid about ten or twelve years old. He was carrying a guitar.
I didn’t know where they had come from or where they were going. Tuan was racing around, talking to them all.
Jeff hopped out of the driver’s seat. “Come meet the Nguyens,” he called to us.
And that’s what he’d been talking to Mom and Dad about. The people were from Galang camp, and they were staying at our house until our church found a home for them.
Quint wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. Jeff had seen that Tuan’s dad and grandmother were lonely, too, and had been trying for weeks to get another family to join them. It hadn’t been all that easy, and he didn’t want to announce that they were coming if it turned out they weren’t. The two men were cousins of Tuan’s dad, and all of them were Nguyens.
We said hellos, but nobody shook hands. We were going by the old rules.
Suzanna and Caroline gave the duck to one baby, the brown bear to the other, and then hurried off, waving. The babies stared back silently as they were hurried into the warm house.
Propping his guitar against the van, the new kid began whooping and scooping snow up and flinging it in the air so it covered his hair like a white cap. Quint hurried over and showed him how to pack a proper snowball. He did his three-ball juggling act, lobbing each one over the van.
“Come on, Quint,” I told him, “you know you’re teaching him trouble.”
Quint watched the new boy shiver as he pushed a fat, funny-shaped ball together with bare hands and heaved it just past the van’s rear tire. “Listen, Zilch, he can’t be an Illinois kid and not know snowballs.”
“His name is Minh,” Tuan explained. “He speaks almost no English … now.” Picking up the guitar and talking to Minh in Vietnamese, Tuan headed him toward the house, taking charge.
“They will stay, you know,” I told Quint, feeling suddenly smug and happy. “They’ll all stay. Maybe Minh’ll show you how to play the guitar … or how to do your extra-credit math.”
He tried to stuff a fistful of snow down my back. “Zilch, you …” But I whirled around and got a handful of my own.
“The name,” I said, shoving my clump of snow under his collar, “is Harvey. I’ve had all the Zilch and Scrambled Eggs I ever want to hear.”
He yelped and shook the snow out. Then he reached in his pocket. I didn’t know what he was going to try next, but I balanced on my toes, ready to skid him down the sidewalk if I had to. With sleight-of-hand magic, he slipped something into my pocket. “Give that thing to Julia, will you?”
I drew it out carefully. It wasn’t a soft-boiled egg, a water balloon, or even a blob of just-chewed gum, but the old blue marble, not chipped to bits in the street at all.
“Didn’t it smash the police car?”
“Nope. Kept its eye shut tight in my pocket all the time. It would have made cobwebs of his windshield, for sure, and we’d all be down in the pokey right now. See you around.” He ran, and called back over his shoulder, “S.E.”
I showered him with snow.
Because she had known there might be a batch of people, Mom had fixed her huge pot full of stewed chicken, an enormous bowl of rice, and two applesauce cakes. There wasn’t room enough for all of us in the dining room, so just the adults ate there, and the babies. Tuan, Julia, Minh, and I sat at the kitchen table.
As Tuan showed Minh how to use a fork, Minh asked him something.
“The name is porcupine.” Tuan grinned at me.
“Fork,” I told Minh. “Fork.” I scooped food into my mouth and held out the fork again, repeating it.
“Fork,” Minh said, smiling. I wondered, just for a minute, if he might like to start a beer can collection better than anyone else’s in town. Even mine. And if he might be good at learning I before E except after C.
“Can he come to the Thanksgiving dinner?” Julia asked. “Mom is taking three pumpkin pies.”
“Pumpkin? Like my …?” Tuan drew a long-stem nose from his face like the one on the jack-o’-lantern he’d carved.
“Right. It is made from that, only without the moustache.” I wasn’t sure what he thought he’d be eating on Thanksgiving. Fried funny faces, maybe.
“My father and Ba Noi bring back many things to eat. I think we bring pho tai to the dinner.”
“Pho tai?” Minh recognized a familiar word among all the strange ones. He was struggling to keep the rice on his fork.
“What’s pho tai?” Julia asked him.
“Soup,” Tuan told her, “made with cow.”
“Beef.”
“Made with beef, rice noodles, a little lime.”
“Pho tai,” Julia repeated. “They didn’t have that at the first Thanksgiving.”
“When is first?”
I’d forgotten he didn’t know. We’d studied all that in fifth grade, but not again in seventh. “On the first Thanksgiving Day the pilgrims ate with the Indians,” I told him. “The Indians had lived in this country for a long, long time. The pilgrims were new here. They came from England.”
“Far away,” Julia told him.
“We came from far away,” Tuan said.
Minh’s head was drooping. He looked very sleepy. I was not going to give him my hair dryer if he took a shower.
“At the first Thanksgiving,” Julia explained, “the Indians brought five deer. The pilgrims cooked turkeys, corn bread, and eel pie. I learned that yesterday.”
“Pho tai OK?” Tuan asked.
“Sounds good to me. Pho tai and pumpkin pie.” I leaned back, full. “Hey, Tuan, after Minh goes to sleep, let’s you and me go out and build a snow pig.”
Tuan grinned. “OK,” he said. “No kidding.”
Afterword
Q: Hello, My Name Is Scrambled Eggs
is a weird title. Is the main character really called Scrambled Eggs?
A: Nope. Nobody in the book has an eggy name. Here’s what happened. I started thinking about the story when a lot of refugees were coming to the United States just after the war in Vietnam. I wondered what living here would be like for them.
So I did research. Before writing I always do research. This time I read books and articles. I interviewed refugees. I talked to teachers of English as a Second Language. I even questioned people who’d taken refugees into their homes while the newcomers looked for work and places to live. All of my research helped me develop my story.
One of the Vietnamese had been shocked and scared when someone gave her a hair dryer. She’d never seen one before, and thought it was a gun. An ESL teacher explained that the word for “bicycle” in Vietnamese sounds almost exactly like “shut up.” And a woman from one of the host families said that when her kids were learning to read she’d labeled things around the house to help them out. She did that for her Vietnamese visitors, too.
So I had Harvey, the American boy in my story, decide to name things to help his new friend Tuan learn English. All he could find to write on, though, was a batch of sticky “Hello, my name is …” labels.
He used them. All over his house the labels read “Hello, my name is Chair,” “Hello, my name is Rug,” “Hello, my name is Ceiling,” and even “Hello, my name is Scrambled Eggs.”
That’s how the book got its title.
For answers to other mysteries go to my website at www.jamiegilson.com. It tells about me, my books, and where my ideas come from. Or just email me at [email protected].
About the Author
“‘I know why you write about us,’ a sixth-grade boy once told me. ‘It’s because we’re middle-aged and things are happening to us.’ And it’s true. My characters are all in the process of growing up, of being astonished by the strange way their world works.
“You can see yourself and your weaknesses in someone else as easily when you are laughing at his muddle as when you are weeping at his despair. That’s what I try to do—make my readers laugh and understand at the same time.
“Before writing I always do research. I’ve talked to boys about collecting beer cans, to refugees about what it was like coming to America, to teachers of children with learning disabilities. I once went with a class to outdoor education camp. I’ve asked kids what it was like to be in programs for the gifted and talented. It is this close observation that I hope makes my books seem real.”
Born in Beardstown, Illinois, Jamie Gilson spent her early years in several small midwestern towns where her father worked as a flour miller. After graduating from Northwestern University, she married Jerome Gilson, then a law student and now a trademark lawyer. In addition to writing, Mrs. Gilson has worked as a junior high school speech and English teacher; a staff writer and producer for the Division of Radio and Television of the Chicago Public Schools; and as continuity director for radio station WFMT. The Gilsons have three grown children, Tom, Matthew, and Anne, and live in a suburb of Chicago.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Also by Jamie Gilson
Can’t Catch Me, I’m the Gingerbread Man
Dial Leroi Rupert, DJ
Do Bananas Chew Gum?
Double Dog Dare
4B Goes Wild
Hobie Hanson, Greatest Hero of the Mall
Hobie Hanson, You’re Weird
Soccer Circus
Sticks and Stones and Skeleton Bones
Thirteen Ways to Sink a Sub
Wagon Train 911
Westward Ha!
Copyright
“YELLOW SUBMARINE” (John Lennon & Paul McCartney) © 1966 Northern Songs Ltd. All rights for the U.S.A. and Mexico controlled by Maclean Music, Inc. c/o ATV Music Corp. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Text copyright © 1985 by Jamie Gilson
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JANUARY 2012 ISBN: 978-0-062-12815-7
FIRST EDITION 13 14 15 16
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Gilson, Jamie.
Hello, my name is Scrambled Eggs.
Summary: When his folks host a Vietnamese family that has come to settle in their town, Harvey tries to Americanize twelve-year-old Tuan.
1. Children’s stories, American. [1. Vietnamese Americans—Fiction. 2. Americanization—Fiction]
I. Wallner, John C., ill. II. Title.
PZ7.G4385He 1985 [Fie] 84-10075
ISBN 0-688-04095-0
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1 Auckland,
New Zealand
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com
