I stared at the crumbling dough. “Those aren’t dumplings,” I said. Then Amah let out a deep sigh and put her hands to her face.
“I miss my home,” she sobbed into her hands.
Amah had left her family in the countryside years ago. Da said she stayed with us because she had nowhere else to go. She had always worked for foreigners in the city, and now the foreigners were all gone, except for Ma. He promised to pay her when the war was over and told her that at least with us she had food and a place to live. I had never heard her mention home before.
“Oh, Amah,” Mei–mei said soothingly, putting her hand on Amah’s arm. “We are your home.”
“When I was a little girl, my mother told me stories, and we ate moon cakes. I want to make moon cakes, but there is no flour—just ground up corn!” Amah dropped her hands to the table and stared at what she was making.
“That’s all right, Amah. We can pretend to eat moon cakes,” Mei-mei smiled.
“Why are they called moon cakes anyway?” I asked.
Amah burst into tears. A strand of her hair fell across her face. Mei-mei coaxed her onto the bench next to the wall and then patted her knee. When she quit sobbing, Amah sniffed, “You don’t even know what moon cakes are! You are not Chinese.”
“But we are Chinese!” I insisted. “Da is full Chinese. Mei-mei and I are half Chinese.”
“Da will tell us what moon cakes are,” Mei-mei said.
“No, he won’t!” Amah snorted. “He lived in foreign world. He forgot Chinese ways.”
“Well, if our father can’t tell us, then you tell us,” I insisted.
“You won’t understand. It was a long time ago in China, when other foreigners were here.” Amah used a Chinese word for foreigners that meant they did not come from across the ocean.
“What foreigners?” Mei-mei scowled, picking up on Amah’s dislike of foreigners.
“Mongol people from the North.”
“When did they come?” I asked.
“It was a hundred, maybe a thousand years ago.”
“And you still remember it?” Mei-mei’s eyes grew big.
Amah glared at her and went on. “The Mongol people took over. Chinese people were unhappy then. No one wanted foreigners to rule us. Then Chinese leaders came up with a bright idea at the time of the Moon Festival.”
Mei-mei interrupted again. “Moon Festival?”
“See, you don’t know anything! This time every year when the moon gets big. Like tonight.”
“Tonight is Moon Festival?”
“No, there is no festival now. Japanese soldiers took it away. But the soldiers can’t take the Moon away. Tonight it will rise big and round.” Amah’s voice grew softer, and she began talking in Chinese, as if her memories were in Chinese. We understood her because she had always spoken to us in Chinese, and sometimes Da did too.
“When I was a little girl and the Moon hung in the sky like a big golden lantern, my mother would point to it and tell me the story of the beautiful Lady in the Moon.”
Amah lifted her hands into the air with her fingers, making a circle as if she were looking at the Moon.
“I could see Chang-o dancing on the surface of the Moon. You see, she couldn’t get away. Do you know why?”
“No, why?” we chimed in unison.
“Because she swallowed the Elixir of Immortality.”
“The what?” Mei-mei asked.
“That means she never dies,” Amah explained, enjoying our ignorance now.
She began talking faster. “You see, she was the wife of the magic archer, Yi. He could hit anything with his arrows. In fact, he could fly on the wind faster than his own arrows and catch them and bring them back.” Amah looked past Mei-mei and continued.
“Long ago the earth had ten suns and it was too hot. The emperor asked Yi to help. Yi used his magic arrows to shoot down nine suns. One sun was enough for light and warmth. As a reward, the emperor gave him the Elixir of Immortality.”
“Did he drink it?” Mei-mei gulped, as if waiting for the liquid to go down her throat.
“No, his wife found it and swallowed it in an instant.”
“That’s not the end of the story, is it?” I prodded, not wanting her to stop.
“No, no, no. His wife began to float. She floated up and up, rising in the sky, past the white clouds, and on up until she reached the moon. And there she still lives. If you look tonight at the full Moon, you can see her. Sometimes you can see her white rabbit too. But that’s another story.”
“Does Chang-o eat moon cakes?” Mei-mei asked.
“Oh, no, she doesn’t need to eat.”
“Well, what about the moon cakes?” Mei-mei looked puzzled.
“You didn’t tell us about the Mongols, did you?” I reminded her.
“Ah, yes,” said Amah. “You see, the Chinese leaders came up with a clever plan. They wanted to get rid of the Mongol people. When the full Moon came around, the leaders ordered cakes to be made in the shape of the Moon, round and puffy. They slipped a message inside the cakes. Only the Chinese people ate the cakes, so they read the message and knew the plan. On the night of the full Moon, all the Chinese attacked and overthrew the Mongols. So, we always celebrate with moon cakes.
“What about the white rabbit?’ Mei-mei asked.
“No more stories. Get your clothes off!”
CHAPTER 14
Moonlight streamed in the window that night, falling across Mei-mei’s sleepy round face. Was Mei-mei dreaming of Amah’s stories? Was she dreaming of the magic archer and the Lady in the Moon, or the Mongols and moon cakes?
My thoughts came rushing back as my stomach growled. Amah’s crumbling corn meal hardly tasted like a moon cake, and with only some thin soup, it didn’t feel like a festival at all.
If the Chinese long ago had had crumbling corn meal, I thought, they couldn’t have hidden messages inside. What if they couldn’t use the moon cakes to hide messages, then could they have defeated the Mongols?
It wasn’t the moon cakes that defeated the Mongols. It was their clever thinking! They used whatever they had. If they didn’t have moon cakes, they’d use something else, even corn meal or mud.
Mud? Yes, mud!
That gave me a clever idea.
“Wake up, Mei-mei! Wake up!” I shook Mei-mei until her eyes fluttered and she gazed sleepily at me.
“I have an idea! Listen,” I whispered in her ear, but her eyes shut again.
I was so excited about my plan that I couldn’t sleep. I got up and went to the window.
I could see over the low wall and into the field beyond it. The grasses were calm and still, and the moonlight made everything look like colorless day. Then something moved.
Is it a shadow? No. It’s a man. I couldn’t see his face clearly, because he wore a cap, but he looked like the man I saw watching Auntie Boxin’s house that day now long ago. Was he the robber who stole Auntie Boxin’s silver? Was he the same man I saw with Isabella in the dust storm?
I ducked, hoping he wouldn’t see me. When I peeked again, he was gone. I crawled back in bed. Who is this man? Is he spying on us?
Maybe I had imagined it. Maybe I was so full of Amah’s stories that I had imagined a man in the moonlight. I pulled the covers up to my chin and tried to sleep in the eerie light.
The next morning, Mei-mei and I started on my plan as soon as we went outside. Ma thought we were rebuilding our mud world, but we had a different idea. We took small amounts of mud and rubbed them round and round until we had a hard ball. We placed the balls in piles. We knew we had to be ready by the afternoon when the boys were likely to return.
We put as many balls as we could in our pockets. Mei-mei went first. She was just tall enough to pull herself up onto a low wall next to the house. With one foot on the wall and the other on the trellis,
she was able to climb up to Auntie Boxin’s balcony. From there she held on to the vines that grew on the side of house and shimmied onto the tile roof.
I went next. My full pockets got in the way and made it hard to climb. Before I reached Auntie Boxin’s balcony, I grabbed some vines. One of them broke, and I almost fell, dangling and reaching for the trellis.
“Mei-mei!” I cried, trying to keep my voice low enough so I wouldn’t wake Auntie Boxin from her nap or make Amah come out and see what we were doing.
Slowly I was able to get my footing on Auntie Boxin’s balcony and use the trellis to climb onto the edge of the roof. We scooted across the tile roof on our bottoms, to the side of the house that faced the courtyard.
We emptied our pockets and piled the balls on the ledge beside the roof gutter.
We had more balls to bring up, but I didn’t want to climb down again, so I told Mei-mei to go.
“I can’t carry all those balls!” she protested.
“Here,” I said. I took off my sweater and gave it to her. “You can fill it with balls. Just tie the sleeves together and bring it back.”
“I can’t climb up carrying that.”
“I’ll drop a vine over. You can tie the sweater to the vine, and I’ll pull it up.”
She scurried down again and while she was filling the sweater with the remaining mud balls, I broke off several pieces of vine from the side of the house and tied them together until I had a long rope.
When she got all the balls in the sweater, she yelled, “What do I do now?
“Tie the sleeves together and then wrap it with the vine,” I tried to whisper and holler at the same time.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she complained.
“Do I have to come down and do it myself?”
I dropped one end of the vine and held the other.
She wrapped her end of the vine around the sweater and tied it to the sleeves, then asked, “Now, what do I do?”
“Nothing. I’ll pull it up.”
I pushed against the tiles with my feet and pulled the vine one hand over the other. As the bundle got halfway up, it began to sway in the air, and then started spinning. Balls started falling out.
“Watch out! It’s falling apart!” I called to Mei-mei, but she had already started scrambling up the trellis again. I kept pulling slowly until she reached me just in time. Grabbing the vine with me, we pulled the unraveling bundle over the edge and fell back on the roof.
“Whoa, that was close,” I said as I untied the sweater. We stacked the balls along the edge. I was chilled from the wind and glad to put my sweater back on. Mei-mei tried to wipe it off with her muddy hands.
“Stop it! That only makes it worse,” I said. But the sweater didn’t matter. Our plan was ready. We both rubbed our hands together, then grinned at each other.
The boys were arguing but quit talking when they got to the gate. Tai went first and entered the courtyard. He was carrying a long stick. He quickly slid next to the gatehouse where coal used to be stored. He motioned with the stick for the twins to enter, directing them to stomp on what was left of the village.
Ying-wei entered the gate, then stopped. “What?”
Ying-jun was right behind him and peered over his shoulder. “It’s gone!”
Tai shoved the twins aside and moved in front of them.
“Go!” I whispered, and we pelted them with a shower of hard mud balls. Mei-mei and I threw as fast as we could, handfuls at a time.
“What the—?” Tai tried to bat them off with his stick.
“Watch where you’re slinging that stick!” Ying-wei shouted.
“Ouch! Stop hitting me.” Ying-wei yelled and he pushed Tai into the coal bin. “Let’s get out of here!” he shouted at his brother. He tried to open the gate, but the latch stuck.
Ying-jun scuttled over the wall. Ying-wei scrambled over him, falling to the ground outside the wall. Tai followed, stepping on Ying-wei. All three ran toward the field and disappeared in the tall grasses. From the roof, I could see the white fronds waving behind them in a long, jagged path through the field.
“They won’t bother us again,” I said, grinning at Mei-mei.
“There’s one more,” she said, pointing to a figure fiddling with the latch. As the gate opened, we let loose again with the few mud balls we had left.
Then we heard a stern, unmistakable voice.
CHAPTER 15
Da was furious, not because we pelted him with mud balls, but because we had climbed on the roof.
“If you fell and broke a leg, where could we go for help? You know we can’t take you to any hospital.”
Amah was mad about the dirty sweater. “We have no soap,” she said. “And besides, I have too much to do already.”
Ma was upset because instead of rebuilding the village, we had turned the mud into weapons.
“The war has gotten into you. You are acting just like them.” Ma glared at me. “Don’t you see? You have made enemies when you need friends.”
So what? I thought. They started it.
Deep down I knew Ma was right. Ying-wei and Ying-jun had been our only friends before Tai started acting like a bully and turned them against us. They pretended to go along with him, but I knew they wanted to play in the field with us like we had before. I knew they would never play with us now.
The weather turned cold and rainy, and even if we weren’t being punished, we all had to stay inside.
One day Da decided it was time for me to learn to write Chinese. I could speak Chinese, of course, and read some of it, but I had never studied calligraphy. Da got a brush and an ink stone from the desk and asked if I was ready to begin. I sat on the floor beside the low table and watched him. He took a stick of black ink and mixed it with a little water, rubbing it back and forth on the ink stone until he had a pool of black ink in the stone.
Sitting on his knees on the floor with the paper in front of him, Da dipped his brush into the ink, just so.
“You start from the top,” he said and stroked down in one swift movement.
He followed that stroke with another one, starting mid-way down and going to the right.
“Do you know what that means?” he asked.
“Of course, I do. It means man.”
“What about this?” He made two of the same markings, one beside the other.
“Two men,” I answered quickly.
“It means follow. One man following another. Now, Miss Know-It-All, you do it. Knowing what it means and doing it are two different things,” he said.
He slid the paper in front of me and handed me the brush. I dipped it into the ink and made a big blob on the paper.
“No, no, no. Too much ink! Just a light dip is all you need.”
I tried again. This time I barely dipped the brush in the ink and made a stroke.
After awhile Da got up and let me work alone. I was concentrating and didn’t notice that Weilin was watching me from the sofa next to Ma. Before Ma could stop him, he climbed down and squatted near me. Mei-mei, seeing the empty spot next to Ma, climbed up on the sofa.
“Ma, can you tell me a story about a girl like me?” Mei-mei asked.
“Like you? Well, there’s no one just like you, you know.”
“I know, but sorta like me.”
“Well, I know one about a little girl whose name is Gretel,” said Ma, getting settled with Mei-mei on her right side.
I already knew the story of Hansel and Gretel so I didn’t have to listen, but I wanted to hear the part about the witch.
“Hansel and Gretel lived with their father and step-mother in a small cottage on the edge of a big woods,” Ma began. “Times were hard, and they had little to eat. One night while Hansel and Gretel were in bed, very hungry, they overheard their parents talking.”
Weilin mov
ed closer to the ink stone. “No, don’t mess with the ink! This is mine.” I scolded him.
Ma went on. “When the children overheard their step-mother planning to take them deep into the woods and leave them there, Gretel began to cry.”
“Ma!” I burst out. “Weilin is bothering me!” I moved my paper and the ink stone from the floor to the rosewood table.
“Come here, Weilin. You can be Hansel,” Ma said, urging him up to the sofa. She pulled him into her side opposite from Mei-mei.
“Hansel went outdoors and picked up some pebbles and filled his coat pockets with them and went back to bed. The next morning, when the step-mother took the children into the woods—”
“Ma, get to the good part!” I interrupted impatiently.
“Be quiet, Nini,” Mei-mei said.
Just when Ma was about to get to the witch and the gingerbread house, Mei-mei pestered her with questions. “Was the roof made of gingerbread? What did it taste like? Was it like Sun’s cakes?”
Ma laughed and said, “Ah, yes, you remember Sun’s cakes, don’t you? You must be as hungry as Hansel and Gretel. What do you think they did?”
“They ate it!”
“You are right! Hansel broke off a piece of the roof and ate it. Gretel chipped out a piece of the windowpane and ate it.”
Mei-mei sat up. “Did they eat the whole house?”
“Not so fast. Before they could get that far, they heard a creaky old voice, ‘Who is nibbling at my house?’”
Just at that moment, Auntie Boxin opened the door from her apartment upstairs. “May Isabella and I come in?”
Auntie Boxin and Isabella stayed upstairs most of the time and seldom came down. Why did they have to barge in just when Ma was about to get to the good part?
Da replied, “Of course, please come in.”
“But, Da,” I protested.
He glared at me. Ma called to Amah to bring some tea, and I knew that meant Auntie Boxin would stay for a while. Ma welcomed her to sit in the chair next to the sofa.
Auntie Boxin was holding her black shawl with one hand and a handkerchief in the other. Isabella came alongside her and helped her. Auntie Boxin moved so slowly that I had made five bold characters by the time she was seated.
Dragonfly Dreams Page 8
