An Ocean Apart, a World Away

by Lensey Namioka

  The girl pouted. “Why do I have to do all the work? Why don’t you—” She stopped as she caught sight of me.

  The two boys followed her glance, and I found myself being studied by three pairs of eyes. Flustered and excited at the same time, I smiled weakly at them. They just stared with their mouths open. I finally groped my way to the door and left the restaurant.

  They were Chinese students, and there was a good chance I might see them again on campus! Suddenly I felt a lot less lonely.

  After arriving in Ithaca, I had been too depressed even to write letters. But when I returned to my room at Mrs. Harte’s house, I finally picked up my pen and pulled out my writing pad.

  Dear Ailin,

  Here I am in Ithaca, New York, the small town where I will be living for the next four years. The streets are very, very steep, and I got more exercise in one day than I got in four years of gym classes at the MacIntosh School.

  I thought at first that I would be the only Chinese in town, but I found a Chinese laundry and even a Chinese restaurant. I missed Chinese food so much that I went in all by myself and ordered a meal! They served me some pieces of pork in a bright orange-colored sauce that was both sour and very, very sweet. Do you serve it in your restaurant, too? How about something called chop suey? Suey must come from the word meaning small pieces, and chop must be the English word for cutting things up. You’ll have to teach me some basics about Chinese-American restaurant food!

  I’m still hoping that we’ll get a chance to meet soon.

  Yanyan

  CHAPTER 7

  Before classes began at the university, Mr. Pettigrew took me to see the student advisor to decide on what courses I should take. “Since I want to be a doctor, I should enroll in science classes,” I told the advisor. “I want to take physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics.”

  The advisor frowned. He was a painfully thin man with a deeply lined face. Perhaps he wasn’t really frowning, and the line between his brows was permanent. Nevertheless, I could tell he wasn’t pleased by my choices. “Female students generally take home economics when they enter the university,” he told me.

  I didn’t know what home economics was, and Mr. Pettigrew had to explain. “In a home economics course, you learn the most efficient ways to cook, sew, and clean house. You also get important information on nutrition and how to promote the health of your family.”

  “My family’s health is important, and that’s why I want to study medicine,” I said. “But I don’t need to learn about cooking, sewing, and cleaning house. We have a chef to do the cooking, seamstresses to do the sewing, and maids to do the cleaning.”

  This time there was no mistaking the advisor’s frown. It made a deep indentation in his brow, like a knife gash. “Here at Cornell, we teach young ladies all the womanly arts in order to make them proper wives and mothers.”

  “But I don’t intend to—” I began.

  Mr. Pettigrew interrupted me, and he spoke in Chinese. “I think it would be a good idea for you to do what he says, Sheila. If you want to be admitted as a regular student, you have to show yourself willing to take the courses that regular students take.”

  “You mean all the students at Cornell learn to cook and sew and clean house?” I asked.

  Mr. Pettigrew laughed. “No, only the female students. You see, in America, very few families have servants. Women are more independent here, and they do most of the household tasks themselves.”

  His mention of independent women reminded me of Sibyl. She didn’t wait for a rickshaw, but set off on foot and climbed up that steep hill to the university.

  I decided to enroll in the home economics course. To be accepted as a regular student I had better do what was expected of me. For an instant, I thought of the cook at the Chinese restaurant. He made chop suey and sweet-and-sour pork because that was what his customers expected from him. Maybe he had taken a home economics course too.

  Learning to cook might even be useful and fun. I was reminded of the letter I had just received from Ailin.

  Dear Yanyan,

  Guess what? I’m doing more than just washing dishes at our restaurant. I actually did some cooking the other evening! Our customers liked my food, especially the stir-fried pork and mushrooms. I hope you can come to our restaurant and taste some of my dishes.

  Ailin

  After I told my advisor that I would take the home economics course, he said I should also take a course in English. “And you should think twice about that physics course,” he added. “It’s usually taken by second-year students. It will be much too hard for you.”

  That immediately made me determined to take the course. “I’m prepared to work very hard in the physics course,” I said firmly.

  “Sciences such as physics are not really suited to the female mentality,” said the advisor. The line between his brows became deeper and darker. “You would do better to take a foreign language. French adds an elegant gloss to a young lady’s education.”

  “I don’t need an elegant gloss,” I said. Anyway, Father had said that it was hopeless trying to make me into a refined young lady.

  Despite the advisor’s obvious disapproval, I chose the physics course, as well as a freshman mathematics course (“Also unsuited to the female mentality,” I thought I heard him mutter). But I compromised by accepting his suggestion to take the English course. I could already speak English, but there was a lot of room for improvement.

  I was losing weight from all the climbing and found the waistbands of my skirts getting looser. Since childhood, I had always been a little on the plump side. Was that why people thought of food when they saw me? But when I looked in the mirror now, I saw that even my cheeks were not as round as they used to be. Mother would have a shock if she saw me, and she would insist on stuffing me with sweetmeats. I wondered what Baoshu would think of my face now.

  By the time classes began, I was proud to make it up to the university campus with only a little bit of wheezing. On the first day of school, I found myself jostled on all sides by throngs of other students rushing to their classes. The MacIntosh School in Nanjing had about two hundred pupils. More than ten times that many attended Cornell. The campus was very large, and sometimes the distance between classrooms was so great that I had to dash frantically to reach my next class in time. When a thousand other students were also dashing to their next class, I had to be careful to avoid a collision. Since most of the students were much bigger than I was, I was constantly in danger of being knocked down and trampled underfoot. It was worse than trying to swim in a fast current.

  Schoolwork turned out to be hard, much harder than I had expected. Since my classes at the MacIntosh School had been easy for me, I had thought that they would be easy here as well.

  My home economics course turned out to be a real challenge. The lectures were not hard to follow, being mostly about things like the nutritional values of beef, mutton, dairy products, and so on. We never ate beef at home, since it was considered an inferior kind of meat, and mutton was eaten only by northerners, who didn’t mind the smell. The lectures about sanitation, however, I found very interesting. The discussion of germs really made me sit up, because I recalled seeing them in Father’s microscope. It seemed that some germs caused wounds to fester, while others could turn food and water poisonous.

  The hard part for me was when we had to do things with our own hands. The teacher led us to a big, black, iron box with round holes in the top. The box was so hot that I could feel the heat even from three feet away. “Is this thing a stove?” I whispered to the student next to me.

  The girl stared. “Haven’t you seen a stove before?”

  I shook my head. She laughed. She laughed even harder when it came time to beat a bowl of eggs. I wanted to show that I was willing to work hard. I beat the eggs so vigorously that most of them spilled on the floor.

  One day we had to cut little red radishes in the shape of flowers. “What’s the point?” I asked. “Once yo
u put a radish in your mouth and start chewing, all your hard work will be wasted!”

  “The art of radish sculpting is important,” insisted the teacher. “The radish flowers add a touch of graciousness to your dinner table.”

  Personally, I believed that only some real Chinese food would add graciousness to my landlady’s dinner table, but I obediently did what the teacher told me. I wanted to master the use of a kitchen knife. The only time I had held a knife before, I had been digging out a bullet. Through sheer determination, I did manage to improve, and my fellow students congratulated me when I finally fashioned a radish into something resembling a rose.

  I was so elated that I had to write about my success to Ailin that very evening. So far I had had nothing to write about except how difficult school was for me. I wanted to tell Ailin about my successes, not my failures. The home economics course finally gave me some progress to report.

  Dear Ailin,

  Yes, I’m very eager to go to San Francisco and try your cooking. But you may even be able to sample MY cooking someday! I’m taking a course called home economics, and it’s supposed to make me better at cooking, sewing, and other skills necessary for an American housewife. Don’t laugh! I’m learning to sculpt a radish into a rose. Do you do that in your restaurant?

  You never tell me how hard you have to work in your restaurant, only that the business is improving. But now that I’ve done some kitchen work myself, I’m beginning to have an idea of what you go through every day.

  Yanyan

  If cooking was hard for me, sewing was even worse. The first time I handed the teacher the grubby handkerchief I was hemming, she looked at it incredulously. “I thought Chinese girls are supposed to be experts at sewing! Their embroidery is exquisite, simply exquisite!” It took a while to convince her that not all Chinese were capable of exquisite embroidery, and that I had trouble even threading a needle.

  In my English class, I had hoped to improve my pronunciation. Instead, the class concentrated on studying great works of English literature. We started out with Beowulf, which had been written more than a thousand years ago. When I looked at the first page of the book, I thought I had picked up a German book by mistake. It even sounded like a foreign language when the teacher started reading a passage, and it certainly didn’t help with my pronunciation of English. The language of Beowulf is as different from modern English as Classical Chinese is from modern spoken Chinese. Well, I had learned some Classical Chinese in our family school back home. If I could manage that, I thought grimly, I could learn Beowulf too.

  I was dismayed to find out that even my best subject, mathematics, was hard for me. I was one of only three girls in the mathematics class, and I discovered that the other two girls were very, very good. Soon the three of us began sitting together, to give one another support. A couple of the boys in the class made a point of jeering at us whenever we made mistakes. The first time I gave a wrong answer and heard a boy snicker, I thought it was because of my Chinese accent. Then I heard even louder snickers and snorting noises when one of the other girls made a mistake.

  “They don’t like us here,” one of the girls said to me. Her name was Maureen, and she had short, red curls, which she pulled nervously when she was thinking hard. We had a little time to chat before we went to our next classes.

  “Why don’t the boys in the mathematics class like you?” I asked. “You’re just as good as they are— better, sometimes.”

  “That just makes them madder,” Maureen said bitterly. “They think science and mathematics are men’s subjects, and that we’re invaders.”

  It reminded me of what my advisor had said about sciences not being suited to the female mentality.

  “Girls should take home economics classes,” said the other girl, Ellen, putting on a high, mincing voice. “Young ladies should learn the womanly arts, so that they will become fitting wives and mothers.”

  I laughed. She reminded me of something too: Second Brother used to lecture me about how I had to behave modestly, so that I would make a fitting wife and mother. “So girls in this country have to keep their places, too,” I said. Then I thought of something. “But at least you American women don’t have to suffer the torture of having bound feet.”

  The two girls were interested in what it was like to be a woman in China. “Is it also true that you’re not supposed to understand things like mathematics?” asked Maureen.

  I thought about my mother and my female cousins. “Actually, Chinese women are supposed to be good at figures. They have to keep track of the family money, for instance.”

  “Women keep track of money?” exclaimed Ellen. “So their position is not so low, after all!”

  “A woman’s position is low,” I said. “That’s why she handles the money. It’s supposed to be too unimportant for a scholar and a gentleman to think about.”

  Both Ellen and Maureen were astounded. “Money is supposed to be unimportant?” cried Maureen. “Wait till I tell my father that!”

  “Sometimes I wish I had gone to a women’s college,” Ellen said, after the boys in the mathematics class had been particularly nasty one day and the teacher had done little to stop them. “Then I wouldn’t have to listen to all these jeers!”

  “I’m not sorry I came to Cornell!” declared Maureen. “It takes guts to study so-called men’s subjects. I’m determined to prove that I can do it!”

  Guts? I was puzzled at first by her reference to intestines. I finally guessed that she meant the equivalent of what we Chinese call qi, in other words, courage.

  Maureen and Ellen were the first friends I made at Cornell, and I felt a little less lonely than before. But I didn’t see much of them after classes, because they were staying at a dormitory. I had to tramp downhill back to Mrs. Harte’s house every day.

  I didn’t have a chance to make any friends in my other classes, either. In my physics class, I thought I saw a Chinese boy among the students. The class was big, and he was sitting on the other side of the room. When the bell rang, everyone rushed out. I hugged the wall, to stand out of the way of students running for their next class. By the time I looked around for the Chinese boy, he had already gone. I thought he looked a bit like one of the two boys I had seen in the Chinese restaurant.

  The physics course involved a weekly session in the laboratory, but compared to cooking and sewing, the lab experiments were relatively easy. I was the only girl in my lab session. Whenever I made a mistake, the teaching assistant would give a loud sigh of impatience. He always answered curtly when I asked him a question.

  I thought at first he was annoyed because my female mentality was unsuited to lab work. Then I discovered another reason. One beautiful fall day, many of the students were eating their lunches on a patio with a gorgeous view of Cayuga Lake. Carrying my tray, I went outside and looked for a place. The physics teaching assistant was sitting at a table with a friend. His back was toward me, but I could recognize his disagreeable, nasal voice anywhere.

  “That Chinese girl is not only clumsy, she doesn’t have the proper mental discipline for a subject like physics,” he was saying.

  I felt the heat rushing into my face as I realized that he was talking about me.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” said his companion. “Those Orientals have brains that are fundamentally different from ours. Even the shape of their skull is different! The Chinese do all right as long as they stick to light, wispy things like that Taoism of theirs. But you can’t expect them to cope with a hard science like physics, which requires a logical mind.”

  Angry tears blurred my eyes as I turned and made my way back into the cafeteria. I felt like giving that teaching assistant a good kick in the intestines. Then a scene in a railway car suddenly popped into my memory: Eldest Brother and Baoshu were discussing how the shape of a foreigner’s nose made it impossible for him to master Chinese, and how his deep-set eyes prevented him from seeing subtlety in art—all this they said in Mr. Pettigrew’s hearing.
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br />   So the physics teaching assistant was only ignorant, not deliberately malicious. Very well, then, if he thought I suffered the double handicap of being both a female and a Chinese, I would use all my guts to pass that physics course, just to show him how wrong he was!

  During those grueling early days at Cornell, I worked so hard that I didn’t have time to be homesick. Every night I fell into bed exhausted by hard work and exercise, and went to sleep without even dreaming. Or if I had dreams, I forgot about them during my frantic morning rush to gulp down breakfast and struggle up the hill to school.

  Even on weekends, when there were no classes, I had to work from morning to evening, just to keep from falling behind in my work. I saw very little of the downtown part of Ithaca. I did go there once to pick up my laundry. As I stood waiting for my turn, a man came inside, and when he saw me he said, “You put too much starch in my shirt! It’s as stiff as a board!”

  Totally baffled, I just stared at him. “Just try to do a better job next time!” he snapped when I didn’t reply.

  I finally realized that he was mistaking me for an employee at the laundry. “I don’t work here,” I told him. “I’m a student at the university.”

  He was the one who stared this time. “Well, I’ll be doggoned! I did hear there were Chinks at the university. Never thought I’d see one in person, though.”

  He used several words I didn’t recognize, so I said nothing. I took my bundle of laundry, and as I climbed back to Mrs. Harte’s house, I thought over what the man had said. I couldn’t make any sense of the dog that was gone, but from the context, I suspected that Chink was his term for a Chinese. It didn’t sound very nice, the way he had said it. Maybe he expected all Chinese to work in a laundry, not study at the university. On the other hand, I had thought that all Indians wore feathers in their hair and lived in tents.

  Again, I was reminded that people got annoyed when things didn’t come out as they expected. A Chinese husband called his wife neiren, “person of the inner chamber,” because she was supposed to stay shut away and out of sight. Men became furious when their wives came out and spoke their minds. Foreigners too expected all Chinese women to be meek and downtrodden. I remembered that Miss Scott had become furious with me when I spoke up in class and told her that there had been powerful women in Chinese history, such as the late Empress Dowager of the Qing dynasty.