An Ocean Apart, a World Away

by Lensey Namioka

  I had to blink away tears as I watched the Pettigrews walk out of sight. During the long journey I had been too excited to feel homesick, and besides, I knew that being on the boat and the train was only temporary. But now I realized that I was ten thousand miles away from home, and living in a strange town where I knew almost nobody. For the first time in my life, I was completely on my own.

  I was so overwhelmed with loneliness that I didn’t know how I could last even a week in Ithaca. The four years it would take to finish my undergraduate studies stretched like an eternity ahead of me.

  I went upstairs to my room and sat down on the narrow bed, feeling too wretched even to rouse myself to unpack my things. I didn’t know how long I sat there. Maybe an hour, maybe several hours. Finally there was a knock on the door. “Do you have everything you need, dear?” said Mrs. Harte’s voice.

  I got up and opened the door. “Yes, thank you, Mrs. Harte,” I managed to say.

  “Supper is at six o’clock,” she told me, and handed me some towels.

  After she left, I washed my face in the enamel basin in one corner of the room. I looked in the mirror above the basin, and I saw a frightened child with quivering lips.

  Suddenly I gritted my teeth. To think that I prized courage more than anything else! I had once pictured myself living with Baoshu in some remote Manchurian forest, and here I was sniveling merely because I found myself in a small American town.

  I opened my suitcases, grabbed my clothes, and stuffed them roughly away into drawers. It was time to get on with my life.

  At supper that night, I sat down at a table with three strangers, two men and a young woman. Mrs. Harte introduced me to the others as Sheila. The man next to me said his name was Joe, and that his friend across the table was Marvin. “We work in a bank downtown,” he said.

  I knew that banks were places where people kept money. “What is your job at the bank?” I asked Joe.

  “Tell her,” he said—or I thought he said.

  I glanced around at Marvin, waiting for him to tell me. But he just looked blank.

  Finally Joe said slowly and distinctly, “I’m a teller. That’s my job.”

  “Oh,” I said. I wanted to know what he was supposed to tell, but I decided to wait for some future occasion to ask him.

  I turned to the young woman, who smiled at me and told me her name was Sibyl. “Are you just visiting America?”

  “No, I expect to stay here for four years,” I said. “I’m a student, and I’m planning to attend Cornell University.”

  “That’s great!” said Sibyl. “I’m a librarian at the univeristy. If you like, I can take you with me to the campus tomorrow morning and show you around.”

  I was warmed by her friendliness, and so grateful for the offer that I didn’t take much notice of the food. Like the meals aboard the boat and the train, Mrs. Harte’s supper was very heavy on meat. The only vegetable was a yellowish mound. I poked at it.

  “It’s creamed spinach,” Sibyl told me. The vegetable didn’t resemble anything I had eaten before, and I resolved to look up spinach in my Chinese-English dictionary.

  When I went to bed that night, I expected homesick-ness to keep me awake, but I actually fell asleep fairly quickly. Next morning, however, when I awoke and saw my bleak little room, I was swept by another wave of miserable loneliness. Hearing sounds of the other roomers stirring, I forced myself out of bed and got dressed.

  There was no time for self-pity. Coming to America was a great adventure, I reminded myself. Besides, I had too much to do.

  First of all, I had to ask Mrs. Harte where I could find a laundress, since I was running out of clean underwear and blouses. On board the train, I had followed Mrs. Pettigrew’s example and rinsed out a few things by hand, but it was time for my clothes to get a thorough laundering.

  “I send my linens out to a laundry every Monday,” said Mrs. Harte. “Some of my roomers also include their laundry, and you can do that, too, if you want.”

  This was Wednesday. Monday was five days away. “Well, I need some clean clothes right away,” I said.

  “Why do you need to send out your laundry, anyway?” asked Mrs. Harte. “I thought all Chinese are experts at laundering.”

  “What makes you think that?” I asked, puzzled.

  Mrs. Harte looked a little embarrassed. “Well—that is—all the laundries in town are run by Chinamen.”

  I received the news with mixed feelings. It seemed that there were other Chinese in town, so I wasn’t totally cut off from those of my race. But why were all the laundries run by Chinese?

  Mrs. Harte tried to tell me how to get to the nearest Chinese laundry, but since I didn’t know the town at all, I decided to find it later. Sighing, I rinsed out a few things again by hand.

  After breakfast, my next problem was buying some pencils, notebooks, and other school supplies. Handling money was one of the things I needed to practice. In China I didn’t spend money, since I never went out shopping. All my clothes, and even my shoes, were made to order for me, and everything else I needed was purchased by my parents.

  On the train, Mrs. Pettigrew had showed me the different bills and coins of American money and told me the sort of things I could buy with them. Occasionally, when we had a stop that lasted for some time, I would go to the platform and practice spending some money. Of course I had no idea what to buy, so I just grabbed whatever was available that looked interesting. I usually got newspapers, magazines, and candy.

  Here in Ithaca, I had to learn how to shop all by myself. Sibyl turned out to be helpful again. She told me about a store on campus where students at the university did a lot of their shopping.

  We set off to the campus together. “Are we walking there?” I asked when we started up a very steep street that seemed to go up almost vertically.

  Sibyl looked surprised. “How else do you expect us to go?”

  “Well . . . ,” I faltered, “I guess you don’t have rickshaws in America, do you?”

  I had to explain what a rickshaw was to Sibyl. For an instant, I pictured Baoshu disguising himself as a rickshaw man.

  Meanwhile Sibyl was saying that it was cruel to make another person pull you along in a two-wheeled cart. “Besides, they’d never get it up this hill!”

  I had to agree with her. I was already panting hard, and we had barely begun our climb. “How do people get around in an American city, then? Do you walk everywhere?”

  “Some people have automobiles,” said Sibyl. She peered at me. “You do know what an automobile is, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do,” I said. Father had talked about them, only he had called them motorcars.

  “There are a few automobiles in Ithaca,” said Sibyl, “but they are expensive, so not many people have them. Mind you, some people have bicycles. Only they’re pretty hard to ride on a steep hill like this.”

  I knew what a bicycle was, having seen pictures of some in books at the MacIntosh School. “So you walk everywhere, here in Ithaca?” I asked.

  “No, you can ride omnibuses downtown,” said Sibyl. “They’re called buses for short, and they’re like big automobiles for use by the public.”

  “You mean like a train, then?” I asked.

  “No, trains run on tracks, and buses go on a regular street,” said Sibyl. “Trolleys are more like trains, and they run on tracks.”

  What with trolleys, buses, and trains, I was becoming very confused. I was also getting breathless. Sibyl seemed to be very fit, and she was striding up the hill with no difficulty whatsoever. I wondered how old she was. But when I asked her what her age was, she looked offended. “It’s none of your business!” she said curtly.

  I was shocked. In China we often asked people how old they were, but American customs could be quite different, as I had discovered while traveling with the Pettigrews. “I’m s-sorry,” I stammered. “Is it rude in America to ask people how old they are?”

  Sibyl’s face softened a little. “Yes, it
is. You must never ask people their age, unless it’s a very young child.” After a moment, she said, “Okay, I don’t mind telling you. I’m twenty-eight years old, and I’m still unmarried. That means I’ll probably be an old maid.”

  It was not hard to guess what an old maid was. “I’m going to be an old maid, too,” I said eagerly. “I’m studying to become a doctor so I can support myself and don’t have to marry anybody.” For a brief moment I thought of Baoshu again, but I firmly pushed that thought away.

  Sibyl smiled at me. “Long live old maids! We don’t need husbands, do we?”

  There was something so vigorous and independent about Sibyl that my heart lightened. Maybe America was a good place for me, if there were lots of women like her who walked everywhere and didn’t have to depend on anyone.

  We finally arrived at the campus of the university, and not a moment too soon. I had never climbed so hard before in my life, and my legs felt like overcooked noodles. “How much higher than the town is the university?” I asked.

  “It’s four hundred feet higher than the town proper,” she told me, grinning. “Scary, isn’t it? Students like you who live in town complain bitterly about having to climb so much every day, especially if they go home for lunch. But you’d be surprised how much easier it will be when you get used to it.”

  “If I live that long,” I gasped.

  Seeing that I was exhausted, Sibyl didn’t take me to many places. She pointed out the administration building, where I would have to go first thing next Monday when the university started. She also showed me Sage Hall, a dormitory for women students. If I eventually became a regular student, that was one place where I could live.

  Next, we went to a small store for students. I was able to buy a few things, such as soap, handkerchiefs, and a map of the town. Sibyl’s eyes widened when she saw the roll of money I took out of my handbag. “Don’t take so much money around with you,” she whispered to me as we left the store. “Better keep it locked up in your room.”

  For a moment I had a vision of the hoodlums in the Shanghai alley. “You mean you have robbers attacking people here in Ithaca?”

  “No, no,” she said quickly. “But there may be pickpockets.”

  “Pick pockets?” I asked. I didn’t understand what she meant.

  “Someone might pick your pocket,” explained Sibyl patiently—very patiently.

  I looked at the pocket of my jacket. There was nothing special about it. “Why should anyone choose my pocket?”

  Sibyl rolled her eyes. I recognized that expression, because I had seen it often on the faces of my mother and Second Brother. It was time to drop the subject.

  After the shopping, I was more than ready for some lunch and a rest. Sibyl had to go to work, so I made my way downhill back to Mrs. Harte’s house by myself. It had been an adventurous morning. I had gone shopping at a store for the first time in my life, and I had been able to walk all alone in a strange city. Maybe this wasn’t as heroic as joining Baoshu and his fellow conspirators, but I was still proud of myself.

  The exercise gave me an appetite, and I ate Mrs. Harte’s hearty lunch of macaroni and cheese. Cheese was something I usually avoided when it was served aboard the ship or the train. Like most Chinese, I didn’t care much for milk. Cheese, made from fermented milk, sounded even worse. The dish Mrs. Harte served consisted of a big mound of chopped-up noodles cooked in a sticky, yellowish sauce. I didn’t find out until afterward that the sauce was made of cheese. It wasn’t all that bad.

  Woozy with fatigue and heavy food, I lay down on my bed and fell asleep. I had intended to catch a brief nap, but when I woke up and looked at my bedside clock, I discovered that it was nearly four.

  I got up, still a little dizzy. The room was warm, and my clothes felt sticky. Suddenly, I hated my heavy Western clothes and longed for a loose tunic made of silk. My blouse was badly wrinkled, and the woolen skirt smelled from being worn continually for weeks. I decided to look for the laundry Mrs. Harte had mentioned earlier.

  She showed me on the map where the laundry was, and I set out with my bundle of dirty clothes. I had to go downhill, and my heart sank at the prospect of having to climb back up again.

  Fortunately the laundry was not far away. Compared to Nanjing and Shanghai, the only two cities I really knew, Ithaca was small and compact. I got lost only twice before I found the place. Several times, when I stopped to consult my map, passersby asked me if I needed help. I was not used to having strangers speak to me—my experience in the Shanghai alley didn’t help—so I just shook my head and backed nervously away. It was several weeks before I realized that kindness to strangers was an American trait.

  Finally, I found the laundry. What drew my attention to the place was not the sign in English, but the two big Chinese characters meaning “flowery stream.” My eyes fastened hungrily on them the way a starving man stares at a bowl of steaming rice. I hadn’t seen Chinese writing since stepping off the boat in Seattle, and that seemed like many years ago.

  I took a deep breath and entered the laundry. It was a small place and had a pleasant smell of soap. A tiny Chinese man came out. Then I realized that he was not really tiny but was actually a bit taller than I was. After so many days of seeing hefty Westerners, he only seemed small.

  I put my bundle of clothes on the counter and asked him if he could wash them for me. He just stared at me. Thinking he was hard of hearing, I repeated my question, speaking slowly and distinctly. Finally he said something, and I discovered that I couldn’t understand him at all.

  That was when I realized that I had spoken in Mandarin and he had answered in Cantonese. The two dialects were mutually incomprehensible. I tried again, speaking English this time. “Can you wash these clothes for me?”

  He finally smiled. “Yes. You need them soon?”

  I nodded vigorously, greatly relieved at being able to communicate at last. “Can I have them later this week?”

  “Yes,” he repeated. Then he looked curiously at me. “You’ve just come to Ithaca, miss?”

  “I came two days ago,” I said. It felt like two months. Suddenly, I had an urge to ask if I could rent a room with his family. It would be like being halfway back to China. But I knew it was a ridiculous idea. The laundry looked tiny, and living quarters would be very limited.

  Then another idea occurred to me. I had a sudden hunger for Chinese food. After more than a month of meat and potatoes—except for today’s macaroni and cheese—I felt an overwhelming desire for rice and crunchy green vegetables. I wanted a rest from huge slabs of red meat and mushy, yellowish, unidentifiable mounds of vegetables.

  “Is there a restaurant near here serving Chinese food?” I asked.

  The laundry man nodded. “Yes, two blocks down the street, on the right-hand side.”

  Although it was only five in the afternoon, I headed for the restaurant. I felt very daring. Eating in the Shanghai hotel restaurant with Eldest Brother had seemed like an adventure at the time. Now here I was, planning to eat in a foreign restaurant all by myself! But my desperate need for Chinese food drove me on.

  Again, it was the Chinese characters above the front entrance that drew my eyes. Tao Yuan, it said, “Peach Garden.” I took a deep breath, opened the door, and went in. There were a number of small tables, but no diners. I was apparently the first customer.

  A Chinese man appeared, and this time I didn’t make the mistake of speaking Mandarin. “Can I have supper here?” I asked in English, trying to appear nonchalant, as if I were quite used to dining out alone.

  He hesitated for just a second but did not seem scandalized. “Yes, of course,” he said. He led me to a table, pulled a chair out for me, and handed me a menu.

  I read the list of dishes—they were all in English— but none of the items on the menu made any sense. Finally I decided on chop suey, a dish I had never heard of before. I decided to gamble on sweet-and-sour pork, because at least I knew what pork was, although I didn’t recall ever eating i
t sweet and sour at home. I also ordered steamed rice, which was something I knew, at least.

  As my order was being prepared, several other customers came in. They were all Americans. They seemed to know what they wanted, and I was relieved to hear that their orders included chop suey and sweet-and-sour pork.

  When my food came, I stared at it in amazement. Everything was on a large dinner plate, and instead of chopsticks, my utensils consisted of a knife and a fork. The rice I recognized. Next to it was finely shredded cabbage, bean sprouts, and slivers of meat, all swimming in a brown gravy. The third component consisted of cubes of meat in an orange-colored sauce. I decided to tackle the chop suey first. The vegetables were crunchy and went well with the rice. Best of all, the dish contained soy sauce. I hadn’t realized how much I missed its distinctive flavor until I tasted it again, after being without it for more than a month.

  When the waiter came to collect the dishes, I asked him if the food was Cantonese. He looked apologetic. “Not really. I guess you can call it Chinese-American.”

  I understood. Since his customers all seemed to be Americans, he had to offer them what they wanted— or what he thought they wanted.

  Halfway to the kitchen, he turned back to me and whispered, “To stay in business, I have to give my American customers what they expect, you see. Next time, I can give you some real Chinese food, if you want.” I was touched and whispered my thanks.

  I was wrong about all the customers being Americans. As I rose to leave the restaurant, the door opened and three young Chinese came in, two boys and a girl. What riveted my attention was that they were speaking Mandarin.

  One of the boys was saying, “I don’t know why we have to come here! We can’t afford to eat in a restaurant very often. When we do, I’d rather save my money for some better place, either in Syracuse or Rochester.”

  “I’m sick and tired of the food at our rooming house!” said the other boy. “Tonight’s menu features corned beef and cabbage again.” He turned to the girl. “Why don’t you cook another dinner for us? Your last attempt wasn’t at all bad.”