by Andrea Cheng
I shake my head. “I have Chinese class.” For some reason, I don’t feel weird telling Sam and Andee and Simone that I’m learning Chinese.
“I wish I knew Chinese,” Sam says. “The only thing I can say is Ni hao.”
“Wo hen hao,” I say in response.
“Wo hen hao,” he tries to repeat. “I think if I could pick a language to learn, it would be Chinese.”
“You could come to Saturday Chinese School,” I say. “They have a beginner’s level.”
Sam shakes his head. “My family’s Jewish, so I have to go to Hebrew school at least until I’m sixteen. Then I can decide if I want to quit or start another language.”
I can’t imagine learning any other language besides Chinese. Whenever Mom’s talking to her friends, I wish I could understand everything.
Sam is organizing the transportation to the cleanup. Andee and Simone and I start brainstorming about places where we can volunteer, like the Senior Center downtown, the Boys and Girls Club, and the Main Library Homework Central. Simone writes everything down on a legal pad and we try to make a schedule for the activities.
When I glance at the clock, it’s already almost three thirty. “I’d better go. My dad’s picking me up.”
“Thanks for coming.” Andee stands up. “And tell your friends to come to our next meeting, Wednesday at lunchtime.”
I nod even though I don’t really have any friends at this school except Camille, and she isn’t allowed to join another club. I walk past the gym. Camille is in her shorts, taller than everyone else, standing in a long line of girls who are trying to make it onto the track team. I bet her legs are shaking. I wish I had the lucky-day fortune to give to her, but it’s at home in my jeans pocket.
After dinner, I sit down at the computer and type “Lucky Family Orphanage, Beijing” into Google like I’ve done many times before. It always comes up with “Site Under Construction.” But suddenly there’s a picture of a drab-looking two-story building with Chinese characters on the front.
“It’s here!” I say.
I pick Kaylee up and hold her on my lap. “You used to live there.”
“No,” Kaylee says.
Mom looks at the computer screen. “That must be it.”
I zoom in on the front of the building and we can see a lady standing in the doorway. There is nothing else on the site yet except the navigation bars, which don’t work. “Why weren’t you allowed to go to the orphanage when you adopted Kaylee?” I ask again.
“The adoption agency said they always do it that way. Probably they don’t want wai guo ren going there and telling them all the things wrong with the orphanage.”
“Even if you’re a foreigner, I still think you should have the right to see where your baby lived,” I say. “That’s where you lived when you were a baby,” I tell Kaylee.
“No,” Kaylee says again. She puts her thumb into her mouth and looks as if she’s about to cry.
I rest my chin on the top of her head. “Now you live here. With Mom and Dad and Ken and me and Maow Maow.”
“And Kaylee,” she says, turning so that she can rub her face in my sweater.
Mom goes to the stove to stir the rice porridge that I love. “What did your family in China think when you and Dad decided to adopt a baby?” I ask.
“My sister said we already had two children, a boy and a girl, so why? In China you can only have one child. Two is already too many. But I told her that I miss a big family.” Mom adds water to the porridge. “And there is another thing. I think of the families who have to give up their second baby. Then my sister understood.”
“What about Grandma Nai Nai?”
Mom smiles. “She knows a big family is good. She had eleven brothers and sisters.”
“Do all the families in China now really only have one kid?”
“Not all. But most. If you have more children, you have to give them up for adoption or you have to pay a fine. And many people do not have this money.”
“I think that’s mean.”
“There are too many people in China. They have to solve this problem.”
It’s strange to think that if Mom and Dad had stayed in China, I probably wouldn’t have Ken for a brother or Kaylee for a sister. I also wouldn’t be living in this house and talking English and staring at this computer screen. I wonder if my parents ever considered living in China. I know they met when Dad was visiting his grandparents. Mom was working as a secretary in the hotel where he was staying. But I don’t know much else.
Kaylee is leaning her head against my chest and her eyes are starting to close. She opens them, looks at me, then closes them again. She looks so perfect when she’s falling asleep, with her black hair all messed up and her thumb in her mouth. I wonder who held Kaylee when she was a little baby. Or did she fall asleep alone in a crib?
“Are you sure you can’t take time off to go to China?” I ask.
Mom looks down. “In two or three years, Anna.” She picks Kaylee gently off my lap, lays her down on the sofa, and puts my jacket over her like a blanket. Then we sit together in the armchair like we used to when I was little. “This time you will go to China with the Sylvesters. And next time we will go together to see my family.”
“Are they all still in Shanghai?”
“One brother is in Singapore. I am the only one in America.”
“Do you miss them?”
“Every day,” Mom whispers.
I look at Mom’s face to see if being so far from her family makes her sad. “Sometimes do you wish you had stayed?” I ask.
Mom pulls me close. “No reason to look back and wish this or wish that. I do not wish anything. I have my family.”
Chapter Four
I Am From
The English teacher, Mrs. Smith, talks in a monotone. My stomach growls and I consider trying to sneak a bite of my bagel, but my seat is too close to her desk.
MEAL, Mrs. Smith writes in big letters. “Does anyone know what this stands for besides a time when we eat?”
Robert raises his hand. “I’m hungry.”
Mrs. Smith doesn’t give him a detention even though his comment is obviously disrespectful. I feel sorry for Mrs. Smith, but I don’t know what MEAL stands for and neither does anyone else. Finally she tells us. M is for main idea, E is for evidence, A is for analysis, and L is the last sentence. In other words, MEAL is the way we are supposed to write a paragraph.
Then she says she has been working with Ms. Remick on the “Who Am I” unit, and we will start by analyzing poetry. She passes out a piece of paper with a poem written on it.
“Would anyone like to read this poem out loud?” she asks.
Nobody volunteers, so she reads it to us. “‘Where I’m From’ by George Ella Lyons . . .
“I am from clothespins,
from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride.
I am from the dirt under the back porch.
(Black, glistening,
it tasted like beets.)
I am from the forsythia bush
the Dutch elm
whose long-gone limbs I remember
as if they were my own.
I’m from fudge and eyeglasses,
from Imogene and Alafair.”
A few students laugh because they think Imogene and Alafair are funny names. Mrs. Smith stops reading to quiet the class, giving me time to think.
I’m from honeysuckle bushes in our backyard and paper airplanes and Mom’s Chinese hamburgers. I wish I had one right now. Mrs. Smith starts again:
“Under my bed was a dress box
spilling old pictures,
a sift of lost faces
to drift beneath my dreams.
I am from those moments—
snapped before I budded—
leaf-fall from the family tree.”
When Mrs. Smith is done, people start to gather up their things, but she tells us that the bell has not rung yet and she wants us to begin to analyze the poem using MEA
L.
I like the poem, but I don’t know what to write. Ms. Sylvester used to let us just write what we thought of. I would have said that I like this poem because I used to play under the back porch, so I know what the writer means by the taste of dirt. But that certainly isn’t the main idea.
Camille pokes me with her elbow. “I don’t get it. What’s MEAL?”
Mrs. Smith tells her to stop talking.
Finally I start writing:
The main idea of this poem is that lots of things make us who we are. The part I like best is “Under my bed was a dress box spilling old pictures, a sift of lost faces to drift beneath my dreams.” I like how the box was so full that the pictures spilled out, and then she dreamed about them because those faces were part of who she was. If I was writing a poem about who I am, I would include all the pictures on my bulletin board of my family, but we only have a few pictures from before I was born.”
I reread the poem. I wish we had more old pictures. Once, Laura showed me her family photo album that had pictures from the 1800s. She said they traced their family’s roots all the way back to the Mayflower. I wonder if there might be some way that I could find out more about my ancestors. Maybe when Mom and I go to China together, we can try.
I doodle on the paper. Then I write,
I am from bulletin boards
with photos
of my family,
Mom and Dad in Shanghai
before I was born,
and my sister in China
the day she left.
Does she remember?
I am from a kitchen
that smells like anise and garlic
and Grandma’s seaweed soup.
I am from a slip of paper
with my fortune:
Today is your lucky day.
When the bell rings, I realize that I wrote the poem on the same paper as the MEAL paragraph, but it’s too late to copy it over. We put our papers in the teacher’s basket, and it’s time for lunch.
Chapter Five
Gathering Signatures
Dad takes me to school early on Monday because if I’m going to get an approved absence to go to China, I have to get a form signed by all my teachers and the principal and then submit it to the Board of Education for processing, which can take several weeks. The Sylvesters have not bought our plane tickets yet, but they said we will probably be gone from December 12 to 24. The semester ends on December 22, so I’ll have to miss eleven days of school.
First I go to Ms. Remick’s classroom. “Anna, so nice to see you bright and early.”
I take out the form and my words tumble over each other as I tell her about going to China with my teacher from last year, who is going to adopt a baby.
“My, aren’t you lucky.” She takes off her glasses. “I have always dreamed of visiting the Great Wall.” She signs the form and hands it to me. “Please take a lot of pictures to show us.”
“Thank you,” I say, hurrying out of the room.
The math teacher looks at my quiz grades, which are all above 90, and then signs the form. The life science and Spanish teachers ask me a few questions about the trip and then sign. The only one left is Mrs. Smith. I hesitate for a minute before knocking on her door.
“Come in,” she says, barely looking up.
I hand her the paper. “So, you are planning to miss almost two weeks of school?” she asks after a minute.
I nod.
“Didn’t you say that your sister was adopted from China?”
I blush, remembering the poem that I scrawled on the bottom of my paper. “Yes. Now I’m planning to go with my teacher from last year.”
“Two weeks is a lot to miss unless there is a very good reason.” She turns back to her computer. “I’ll give it some thought.”
I walk quickly out of the room.
“She didn’t sign it,” I tell Camille at lunch.
“Did you explain about how you’re going to help the Sylvesters?”
I shake my head. “She always seems too busy to talk. Plus, it’s not really true. I mean, the Sylvesters could adopt their baby without me.”
Camille tilts her head. “They don’t know much Chinese, plus they probably don’t know anything about babies since they never had one. You’re so good with your sister. Mrs. Smith doesn’t know that.” She picks up her sandwich. “You’re good at writing, too. Maybe you should write a paragraph about all the reasons you want to go.”
I think for a minute. “I’m not even sure what they are.”
“My tutor told me that sometimes you get ideas when you’re actually writing them down.”
It’s funny how when I talk to Camille, I feel so much better. I wonder if I do that for her, too.
“I’m still not sure who I should do for my oral history project,” she says.
“I thought you wanted to interview Teacher Zhao.”
“I think my grandpa would be better. But the problem is, he doesn’t live here, so he’s not really part of the community.”
I chew my apple slowly. Camille’s grandpa comes to visit every summer. She told me how he helped her learn to sound out words by reading her poems and songs that she loved. Just because he lives in Oklahoma doesn’t mean he isn’t part of her community. “He is, if you make the community bigger,” I say.
Camille smiles. “I never thought of that. Like the whole United States?”
“Or even the whole world.”
Really, couldn’t you interview anyone in the world? The definition of community in our packet said “a group of people whose lives are connected.” But isn’t everyone connected to everyone else? You start with people who are close to you and it goes out like a spider’s web. I am connected to my parents and they are connected to their parents and grandparents. When I go to China, if I get to go, my life could be connected to someone I meet there. Maybe I could interview the people who took care of Kaylee or the man who brought her to my parents at the hotel when they adopted her. I could explain to Mrs. Smith that going to China will be part of my oral history project. How could she say no to that?
As soon as I get home, I start my paragraph:
Almost one year ago, my teacher from fourth and fifth grades, Ms. Sylvester, told me that they wanted to adopt a baby from China. My mom and I thought we should go with them because the Sylvesters don’t speak much Chinese and they don’t know a lot about babies either. But it turns out my mom can’t go. I am hoping I can still go with them for many reasons. My little sister Kaylee was adopted from the same orphanage near Beijing, and I want to go and see where she came from. This is important because
I get stuck. Because what? I probably won’t even be able to go to the orphanage. Then what will I do for my oral history project? I turn the paper over and start again.
One day a little baby was wrapped in a blanket and left on the steps of an office building. Somebody found her and took her to an orphanage, where they called her Bao Bao. Now she is a three-year-old little girl named Kaylee, who is my sister.
It’s hard to explain why it is so important to me to go to China. Part of it is that I want to see where Kaylee is from. I want to talk to the people who work at the orphanage to see if they remember anything about my sister when they first got her. I want to meet the man who brought her to my parents. Maybe there is nothing more to find out, but I will do my best to learn what I can. I hope I can interview someone at the orphanage for my oral history project.
I also want to help my teacher, because a new baby is really hard. My sister cried a lot, and I sang her lots of Chinese songs to calm her down. I can do the same thing with my teacher’s new baby.
The other thing is that I am Chinese, so I think it’s important to see what China is like.
I reread that line. It seems unnecessary to write that I am Chinese when of course Mrs. Smith knows that from my face and my name. But it also seems like the most important line in my essay.
At the end, I add a note: I know we are suppose
d to use MEAL, but I don’t have any evidence about the orphanage yet.
Chapter Six
Fortune Cookies
As soon as I get to school, I go to Mrs. Smith’s room to deliver my essay. She’s not there, so I put my paper on her chair and hurry to social studies.
I’m really starting to look forward to Ms. Remick’s class. I like the way she connects everything. We’re talking about slavery now and our responsibility to keep stories alive and how those stories are part of who we are.
“What if nobody writes down stories of the past?” she asks.
Lucy raises her hand. “Then we forget them.”
Ms. Remick nods. “And what if we only read one story about what happened?”
I raise my hand. “Then we don’t know if it’s true.”
Ms. Remick nods again. “How do you think we can learn the stories of people who were enslaved?” she asks.
“Did some slaves write down what happened to them?” Simon asks.
