Girl in Translation

by Jean Kwok

  “What’s the problem with the one I would go to normally?”

  “Nothing!” Aunt Paula shook her head, clearly frustrated by my lack of gratitude for what she had done for me. “Go see if your ma needs you.”

  Now, trying to find this better school, Ma and I walked across several big avenues and then past a number of governmental buildings with statues in front of them. Most of the people on the street were still black, but I saw more whites and lighter shades of black people, possibly Hispanics or other nationalities I couldn’t identify yet. I was shivering in my thin jacket. Ma had bought me the warmest one she could find in Hong Kong, but it was still made of acrylic, not wool.

  We passed an apartment complex and a park. Finally, we found the school. It was a square concrete building with a large school yard and a flagpole waving the American flag. It was obvious I was late—the yard was empty of people—and we rushed up a broad flight of stairs and pushed open the heavy wooden door.

  A black woman in a police uniform sat behind a desk, reading a book. She wore a tag that said “Security.”

  We showed her the letter from the school. “Go downda hall, two fights up, classroom’s firsdur left,” she said, pointing. Then she picked up her book again.

  I understood only that I had to go that way and so I started slowly down the long hallway. I saw Ma hesitate, unsure whether she was allowed to follow me. She glanced at the security guard, but Ma couldn’t say anything in English. I kept going, and at the staircase, I looked back to see Ma in the distance, a thin, uncertain figure, still standing by the guard’s desk. I hadn’t wished her good luck for her first day at the factory. I hadn’t even said good-bye. I wanted to run back and beg her to take me with her, but instead, I turned and made my way up the stairs.

  After a bit of searching, I found the classroom and knocked weakly on the door.

  A deep, muffled voice came from behind the door. “You’re late! Come in.”

  I pushed it open. The teacher was a man. I learned later his name was Mr. Bogart. He was extremely tall, so that his forehead was level with the top of the blackboard, with a raspberry nose and a head bald as an egg. His green eyes seemed unnaturally light to me in his wide face and his stomach stuck out from under his shirt. He was writing English words on the blackboard, from left to right.

  “Our new student eye-prezoom?” He gave a strange smile that made his lips disappear, then he looked at his watch and his lips reappeared. “You’re very late. What’s your exsu?”

  I knew I had to answer so I guessed. “Kim Chang.”

  He stared at me for a second. “I know what your name is,” he said, enunciating each word. “What’s your exshus?”

  A few of the kids snickered. I took a quick look around: almost all black with two or three white kids. No other Chinese at all, no help in sight.

  “Can’t you speak English? They said that you did.” This came out as a kind of grumbled whine. Who was he talking about? He took a breath. “Why are you late?”

  This, I understood. “I sorry, sir,” I said. “We not find school.”

  He frowned, then nodded and waved at an empty desk. “Go sit down. There.”

  I sat down in the seat he had indicated, next to a chubby white girl with frizzy hair that stuck out in all directions. My fingers were shaking so much that I fumbled with my pencil case. It opened and everything in it clattered on the floor. Now most of the class laughed and I scrambled to pick up my things. I was so flushed I could feel the heat not only in my face but in my neck and chest. The white girl also bent down and picked up a pen and a pencil sharpener for me.

  Mr. Bogart continued writing on the blackboard. I sat up straight and folded my hands behind my back to listen even though I couldn’t follow it at all.

  He glanced at me. “Why are you see something that?”

  “I sorry, sir,” I said, but I had no idea what I’d done wrong this time. I looked around at the other students. Most of them were sprawled in their chairs. Some had sunk so low that they were practically lying down, some were leaning on their elbows, a few were chewing gum. In Hong Kong, students must fold their hands behind their backs when the teacher is talking, to show respect. Slowly, I loosened my arms and placed my hands on the desk in front of me.

  Shaking his head, Mr. Bogart turned back to the blackboard.

  Our class went to the school cafeteria for lunch. I had never seen children behave the way these Americans did. They seemed to be hanging from the beams on the ceilings, shrieking. The lunchroom ladies roamed from table to table, yelling instructions no one heard. I had followed the other children and slid a tray across a long counter. Different ladies asked me questions and when I only nodded, they plopped foil-covered packages on my plate. I wound up with this: minced meat in the form of a saucer, potatoes that were not round but had been crushed into a pastelike substance, a sauce similar to soy sauce but less dark and salty, a roll and milk. I had hardly ever drunk cow’s milk before and it gave me a stomachache. The rest of the food was interesting, although there was no rice, so I felt as if I hadn’t really eaten.

  After lunch, Mr. Bogart gave out sheets of paper with a drawing of a map.

  “This is a pop quick,” he said. “Fill in allde captal see T’s.”

  The other kids groaned but many of them started writing. I looked at my piece of paper and then, in desperation, glanced at the white girl’s sheet to try to see what we were supposed to do. Suddenly, the sheet of paper slid out from under my fingers. Mr. Bogart was standing next to me with my test in his hands.

  “No cheap pen!” he said. His nose and cheeks were flushed as if he were getting a rash. “You a hero!”

  “I sorry, sir—” I began. I knew he wasn’t calling me a hero, like Superman. What had he said? Although I’d had basic English classes in school in Hong Kong, my old teacher’s accent did not in any way resemble what I now heard in Brooklyn.

  “ ‘I’mmm,’ ” he said, pressing his lips together. “ ‘ I’m sorry.’ ”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. My English mistakes clearly annoyed him, although I wasn’t sure why.

  Mr. Bogart wrote a large “0” on my paper and gave it back to me. I felt as if the zero were fluorescent, blinking in neon to the rest of the class. What would Ma say? I’d never gotten a zero before, and now everyone thought I was a cheat too. My only hope was to impress Mr. Bogart with my industry when we cleaned the classrooms after school. If I’d lost any claim to intelligence here, I could at least show him I was a hard worker.

  But when the last bell finally rang, all of the other kids ran out of the room. No one stayed behind to mop and sweep the floors, put up the chairs or clean the blackboards.

  Mr. Bogart saw me hesitating and asked, “Can I help you?”

  I didn’t answer and hurried from the classroom.

  Ma was waiting for me outside. I was so happy to see her that when I took her hand, my eyes became hot.

  “What is it?” she said, turning my face to her. “Did the other children tease you?”

  “No.” I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand. “It’s nothing.”

  Ma looked at me intently. “Did some child hit you?”

  “No, Ma,” I said. I didn’t want to worry her when there was so little she could do. “Everything is different here, that’s all.”

  “I know,” she said, still looking concerned. “What did you do today?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Ma sighed, then gave up and started teaching me how to get to the factory by myself. She went through a long list of things for me to be careful of: strange men, homeless people, pickpockets, touching the dirty railing, standing too close to the edge of the platform, etc.

  Once we passed the entrance of the subway, the roar of an incoming train blocked out her words. Behind the grimy windows, we could see the walls of the tunnels speed by in a blur. There was so much noise that Ma and I could speak little on the subway ride there. There were two boys about my age sitting a
cross from us. As the taller one got up, a bulky knife fell out of his pocket. It was sheathed in leather, the black handle grooved to fit a large hand. I pretended I wasn’t looking and willed myself to be invisible. The other boy gestured, the first one picked it up, and then they left the train. I peeked at Ma and she had her eyes closed. I huddled closer to her and concentrated on learning the stops and transfers so I wouldn’t get lost by myself.

  When we got out of the train station, Ma turned to me and said, “I wish you didn’t have to take the subway by yourself.”

  That was the first time. Going to the factory after school would become something so automatic that sometimes, even when I needed to go someplace else years later, I would find myself on the trains to the factory by accident, as if that were the place to which all roads led.

  Chinatown looked very much like Hong Kong, although the streets were less cramped. The fish store was piled high with sea bass and baskets of crabs; grocery store shelves were stocked with canned papayas, lichee nuts and star fruit; peddlers on the street sold fried tofu and rice gruel. I felt like skipping beside Ma as we passed restaurants with soy sauce chickens hanging in the window and jewelry stores that glittered with yellow gold. I could understand everyone without any effort: “No, I want your best winter melons,” one woman said; “That’s much too expensive,” said a man in a puffy jacket.

  Ma brought us to a doorway that led to a freight elevator. We took the elevator upstairs and exited. When Ma pushed open the metal door of the factory, the heat rushed out and wrapped itself around me like a fist. The air was thick and tasted of metal. I was deafened by the roar of a hundred Singer sewing machines. Dark heads were bent over each one. No one looked up; they only fed reams of cloth through the machines, racing from piece to piece without pausing to cut off the connecting thread. Almost all the seamstresses had their hair up, although some strands had escaped and were plastered to the sides of their necks and cheeks by the sweat. They wore air filters over their mouths. There was a film of dirty red dust on the filters, the color of meat exposed to air for too long.

  The factory took up the entire floor of a massive industrial building on Canal Street. It was a cavernous hall bulging with exposed beams and rusting bolts covered in ever-thickening layers of filth. There were mountains of fabric on the floor next to the workers, enormous carts piled high with half-finished pieces, long metal racks hung with the pressed and finished clothes. Ten-year-old boys rushed across the floor dragging carts and racks from section to section. The fluorescent light swirled down to us through the clouds of fabric dust, bathing the tops of the women’s heads in a halo of white light.

  “There’s Aunt Paula,” Ma said. “She was out collecting rent earlier.”

  Aunt Paula strode across the factory floor with a load of red fabric in her arms, distributing work to the seamstresses. The ones to whom she gave the bigger loads seemed grateful, nodding repeatedly to show their thanks.

  Now she had seen us and she came over.

  “There you are,” she said. “The factory is impressive, isn’t it?”

  “Older sister, can I talk to you?”

  I could see this wasn’t the response she wanted. Her face seemed to tighten, and then she said, “Let’s go to the office.”

  Although no one dared to stare openly, the workers’ eyes followed us as we walked with Aunt Paula to Uncle Bob’s office at the front of the factory. We passed women using machines I had never seen before to hem pants and sew on buttons. Everyone worked at a frantic pace.

  Through the window of the office door, we could see Uncle Bob sitting behind a desk. His walking stick leaned against the wall next to him. We entered and Aunt Paula closed the door behind us.

  “First day, eh?” Uncle Bob said.

  Before we had a chance to reply, Aunt Paula spoke. “I’m sorry, but we don’t have much time,” she said. “I can’t let the other workers think I’m showing you any favoritism, just because you’re family.”

  Ma said, “Of course not. I know you’re both very busy and you haven’t seen the apartment we’re in, but it is not very clean.” Ma meant that it was below acceptable living standards. “And I don’t believe it is a safe place for ah-Kim.”

  “Oh, little sister, don’t worry,” Aunt Paula said, with such warmth and reassurance in her voice that I believed her despite myself. “It is only temporary. There was no place else available that you would be able to afford, not with the many expenses you have. But Mr. N. has many buildings, and as soon as another place opens up that you can pay for, we will move you there.”

  Ma visibly relaxed, and I could feel myself beginning to smile again.

  “Now, come,” Aunt Paula continued, “we’d better all get back to work before the employees think we’re having a family party in here.”

  “Good luck,” Uncle Bob called as we left.

  Aunt Paula walked us to our workstation, passing an enormous table I hadn’t seen earlier. A combination of very old ladies and young children were crowded around it, clipping all the extraneous threads off the sewn garments. This seemed to be the easiest job.

  “They enter at this table as children and they leave from it as grandmas,” Aunt Paula said with a wink. “The circle of factory life.”

  From there, we walked into an enormous cloud of steam. I could hardly see but I realized that this was where most of the heat was coming from. Four massive steaming stations were connected to a central boiler that made a loud hissing sound every few minutes as air escaped from it. One man stood in front of each station, placing garments on the surface of the steamers, then slamming the lid shut, expelling huge gusts of steam. Each man had a large sawhorse where he piled the pressed pieces for “finishing,” which was Ma’s job. The piles were already growing.

  Finally, we reached our work area at the back of the factory. It was larger than our entire apartment. There was a long table and a towering stack of pressed clothing, which we were to hang, sort, belt or sash, tag and then bag in a sheath of plastic. Aunt Paula left us with the warning that the shipment was going out in a few days, and Ma and I were expected to get everything done on time.

  Ma hurried to start hanging up the pants and she asked me to sort by size an enormous rack filled with pants already on hangers. She gave me an air filter as well, a rectangular piece of white cloth tied behind the ears, but we were next to the steamer section. The heat was stifling. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe and took it off after a few minutes. Ma didn’t wear hers either.

  I spotted a wrinkled piece of Chinese newspaper in the industrial trash can and stealthily took it. It gave me heart to see the familiar characters. I spread it out on an empty stool next to me as I began my sorting.

  After less than an hour in the factory, my pores were clotted with fabric dust. A net of red strands spread themselves across my arms so that when I tried to sweep myself clean with my hand, I created rolls of grime that tugged against the fine hairs on my skin. Ma constantly wiped off the table where she was working, but within a few minutes, a layer would descend, thick enough for me to draw stick figures in if I’d had the time. Even the ground was slick with dust, and whenever I walked, the motion displaced rolls of filth that tumbled and floated by my feet, lost.

  Something mingled with the stink of polyester in my nostrils. I turned around. A boy was standing next to me. He was about my size, dressed in an old white T-shirt, but there was a tension in his shoulders and arms that told me he was a fighter. His eyebrows were thick, crossing his face in one line, and underneath them, his eyes were a surprising golden brown. He was munching on a roasted pork bun. The crisp crust glistened and I could almost taste the sweet and luscious meat in my mouth.

  “You can still read Chinese,” he said, cocking his head at the newspaper.

  I nodded. I didn’t mention that it was all I could read.

  “I forgot everything. We’ve already been in America for five years.” He was showing off now. “You must be smart, reading and all.” Thi
s wasn’t a compliment, it was a question.

  I decided to be honest. “I used to be.”

  He thought about this a second. “Eat a bite?”

  I hesitated. It isn’t Chinese to eat from someone else’s food. No kid in Hong Kong had ever offered any to me.

  The boy waved the bun under my nose. “Come on,” he said. He ripped off a clean piece and held it out.

  “Thanks,” I said, and popped it in my mouth. It was as delicious as it had smelled.

  “You can’t tell though.” He spoke with his mouth full. “I swiped it from Dog Flea Mama’s station.”

  I stared at him, confused and appalled. “Who?” I’d already swallowed my part of the theft.

  “The Sergeant.” A sergeant is any cruel person in a position of authority.

  I must have still looked confused.

  He sighed. “Dog. Flea. Mama. You must have seen her.” Then he scratched himself on the neck, a perfect imitation of Aunt Paula’s habit.

  I gasped. “That’s my aunt!”

  “Ay yah!” His eyes were wide.

  Then I started to laugh and he did too.

  “I don’t normally take things, you know. I just like bothering her. Come find me at the thread-cutters’ when you take a break. My name’s Matt,” he said.

  When Ma urged me to take a break later, I edged up to the thread-cutters’ counter. The tiny old ladies and kids were busy examining the garments in their hands, snipping off the excess threads with special scissors that spring back open after each cut. Some of the children were as young as five years old. I spotted Matt working with fast hands next to a younger boy in glasses. A woman who must have been their mother sat next to the smaller boy. She wore large rose-tinted glasses that barely covered the enormous bags under her eyes.

  When the mother saw me, she squinted through her thick lenses.

  “Are you a boy or a girl?” she asked. Matt stifled a laugh.

  I knew I looked like a boy, completely flat-chested, with my hair cut short by Ma because of the Hong Kong heat. I wished I could disappear.