Indian Education
by Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie, the son of a Coeur d’Alene Indian father and a
Spokane Indian Mother, was born in 1966 and grew up on the
Spokane Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington, home to some 1,100
Spokane tribal members. A precocious child who endured much
teasing from his fellow classmates on the reservation and who
realized as a teenager that his educational opportunities there were
extremely limited, Alexie made the unusual decision to attend high
school off the reservation in nearby Reardon. While in college, he
began publishing poetry; within a year of graduation, his first
collection, The Business of Fancy dancing (1992), appeared. This
was followed by The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
(1993), a short story collection, and the novels Reservation Blues
(1995) and Indian Killer (1996), all of which have garnered
numerous awards and honors. Alexie also wrote the screenplay for
the highly acclaimed film Smoke Signals.
First Grade
My hair was too short and my U.S. Government glasses
were horn-rimmed, ugly, and all that first winter in school, the
other Indian boys chased me from one corner of the playground to
the other. They pushed me down, buried me in the snow until I
couldn’t breathe, thought I’d never breathe again.
They stole my glasses and threw them over my head, around my
outstretched hands, just beyond my reach, until someone tripped
me and sent me falling again, facedown in the snow.
I was always falling down; my Indian name was Junior Falls
Down. Sometimes it was Bloody Nose or Steal-His-Lunch. Once it
was Cries-Like-a-White-Boy, even though none of us had seen a
white boy cry.
Then it was Friday morning recess and Frenchy SiJohn
threw snowballs at me while the rest of the Indian boys tortured
some other top-yogh-yaught kid, another weakling. But Frenchy
was confident enough to torment me all by himself, and most days
I would have let him.
But the little warrior in me roared to life that day and
knocked Frenchy to the ground, held his head against the snow,
and punched him so hard that my knuckles and the snow made
symmetrical bruises on his face. He almost looked like he was
wearing war paint.
But he wasn’t the warrior. I was. And I chanted It’s a good
day to die, it’s a good day to die, all the way down to the principle’s
office.
Second Grade
Betty Towle, missionary teacher, redheaded and so ugly
that no one ever had a puppy crush on her, made me stay in for
recess fourteen days straight.
“Tell me you’re sorry,” she said.
“Sorry for what?” I asked.
“Everything,” she said and made me stand straight for
fifteen minutes, eagle-armed with books in each hand. One was a
math book; the other was English. But all I learned was that
gravity can be painful.
For Halloween I drew a picture of her riding a broom with a
scrawny cat on the back. She said that her God would never forgive
me for that.
Once, she gave the class a spelling test but set me aside and
gave me a test designed for junior high students. When I spelled all
the words right, she crumpled up the paper and made me eat it.
“You’ll learn respect,” she said.
She sent a letter home with me that told my parents to
either cut my braids or keep me home from class. My parents came
in the next day and dragged their braids across Betty Towle’s desk.
“Indians, indians, indians.” She said it without capitalization. She
called me “indian, indian, indian. “
And I said, Yes I am, I am Indian. Indian, I am.
 2
Third Grade
My traditional Native American art career began and ended
with my very first portrait: Stick Indian Taking a Piss in My
Backyard.
As I circulated the original print around the classroom, Mrs.
Schluter intercepted and confiscated my art.
Censorship, I might cry now. Freedom of expression, I would
write in editorials to the tribal newspaper.
In the third grade, though, I stood alone in the corner, faced
the wall, and waited for the punishment to end.
I’m still waiting.
Fourth Grade
“You should be a doctor when you grow up,” Mr. Schluter
told me, even though his wife, the third grade teacher, thought I
was crazy beyond my years. My eyes always looked like I had just
hit-and-run someone.
“Guilty,” she said. “You always look guilty.”
“Why should I be a doctor?” I asked Mr. Schluter.
“So you can come back and help the tribe. So you can heal
people.”
That was the year my father drank a gallon of vodka a day
and the same year that my mother started two hundred quilts but
never finished any. They sat in separate, dark places in our HUD
house and wept savagely.
I ran home after school, heard their Indian tears, and
looked in the mirror. Doctor Victor, I called myself, invented an
education, talked to my reflection. Doctor Victor to the emergency
room.
Fifth Grade
I picked up a basketball for the first time and made my first
shot. No. I missed my first shot, missed the basket completely, and
the ball landed in the dirt and sawdust, sat there just like I had sat
there only minutes before.
But it felt good, that ball in my hands, all those possibilities
and angles. It was mathematics, geometry. It was beautiful.
At that same moment, my cousin Steven Ford sniffed
rubber cement from a paper bag and leaned back on the merry-go-
round. His ears rang, his mouth was dry, and everyone seemed so
far away.
But it felt good, that buzz in his head, all those colors and
noises. It was chemistry, biology. It was beautiful.
Oh, do you remember those sweet, almost innocent choices
that the Indian boys were forced to make?
Sixth Grade
Randy, the new Indian kid from the white town of
Springdale, got into a fight an hour after he first walked into the
reservation school.
Stevie Flett called him out, called him a squaw man, called
him a pussy, and called him a punk.
Randy and Stevie, and the rest of the Indian boys, walked
out into the playground.
“Throw the first punch,” Stevie said as they squared off.
“No,” Randy said.
“Throw the first punch,” Stevie said again.
“No,” Randy said again.
“Throw the first punch!” Stevie said for the third time, and
Randy reared back and pitched a knuckle fastball that broke
Stevie’s nose.
We all stood there in silence, in awe.
That was Randy, my soon-to-be first and best friend, who
taught me the most valuable lesson about living in the white
world: Always throw the first punch.
 3
Seventh Grade
I leaned through the basement window of the HUD house
and kissed the white girl who would later be raped by her foster-
parent father, who was also white. They both lived on the
reservation, though, and when the headlines and stories filled the
papers later, not one word was made of their color.
Just Indians being Indians, someone must have said
somewhere and they were wrong.
But on the day I leaned out through the basement window
of the HUD house and kissed the white girl, I felt the good-byes I
was saying to my entire tribe. I held my lips tight against her lips, a
dry, clumsy, and ultimately stupid kiss.
But I was saying good-bye to my tribe, to all the Indian girls
and women I might have loved, to all the Indian men who might
have called me cousin, even brother, I kissed that white girl and
when I opened my eyes, I was gone from the reservation, living in
a farm town where a beautiful white girl asked my name.
“Junior Polatkin,” I said, and she laughed.
After that, no one spoke to me for another five hundred
years.
Eighth Grade
At the farm town junior high, in the boys’ bathroom, I could
hear voices from the girls’ bathroom, nervous whispers of
anorexia and bulimia. I could hear the white girls’ forced vomiting,
a sound so familiar and natural to me after years of listening to my
father’s hangovers.
“Give me your lunch if you’re just going to throw it up,” I
said to one of those girls once.
I sat back and watched them grow skinny from self pity.
Back on the reservation, my mother stood in line to get us
commodities. We carried them home, happy to have food, and
opened the canned beef that even the dogs wouldn’t eat.
But we ate it day after day and grew skinny from self pity.
There is more than one way to starve.
Ninth Grade
At the farm town high school dance, after a basketball game
in an overheated gym where I had scored twenty-seven points and
pulled down thirteen rebounds, I passed out during a slow song.
As my white friends revived me and prepared to take me to
the emergency room where doctors would later diagnose my
diabetes, the Chicano teacher ran up to us.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s that boy been drinking? I know all
about these Indian kids. They start drinking real young.”
Sharing dark skin doesn’t necessarily make two men brothers.
Tenth Grade
I passed the written test easily and nearly flunked the
driving, but still received my Washington State driver’s license on
the same day that Wally Jim killed himself by driving his car into a
pine tree.
No traces of alcohol in his blood, good job, wife and two
kids.
“Why’d he do it?” asked a white Washington State trooper.
All the Indians shrugged their shoulders, looked down at
the ground.
“Don’t know,” we all said, but when we look in the mirror,
see the history of our tribe in our eyes, taste failure in the tap
water, and shake with old tears, we understand completely.
Believe me, everything looks like a noose if you stare at it
long enough.
 4

Eleventh Grade
Last night I missed two free throws which would have won
the game against the best team in the state. The farm town high
school I played for is nicknamed the “Indians,” and I’m probably
the only actual Indian ever to play for a team with such a mascot.
This morning I pick up the sports page and read the
headline: INDIANS LOSE AGAIN.
Go ahead and tell me none of this is supposed to hurt me
very much.

Twelfth Grade
I walk down the aisle, valedictorian of this farm town high
school, and my cap doesn’t fit because I’ve grown my hair longer
than it’s ever been. Later, I stand as the school-board chairman
recites my awards and accomplishments, and scholarships.
I try to remain stoic for the photographers as I look toward
the future.

Back home on the reservation, my former classmates

graduate: a few can’t read, one or two are just given attendance
diplomas, most look forward to the parties, The bright students
are shaken, frightened, because they don’t know what comes next.
They smile for the photographer as they look back toward
tradition.

The tribal newspaper runs my photograph and the

photograph of my former classmates side by side.

Postscript: Class Reunion

Victor said, “Why should we organize a reservation high
school reunion? My graduating class has a reunion every weekend
at the Powwow Tavern.”

THE END
 5
I’m Working on My Charm
by Dorothy Allison
I’m working on my charm.
It was one of those parties where everyone pretends to
know everyone else. My borrowed silk blouse kept pulling out of
my skirt, so I tried to stay with my back to the buffet and ignore
the bartender, who had a clear view of my problem. The woman
who brushed my arm was a friend of the director of the
organization where I worked; a woman who was known for her
wardrobe and sudden acts of well-publicized generosity. She
tossed her hair back when she saw me and laughed like an old
familiar friend. “Southerners are so charming, I always say, giving
their children such clever names.”
She had a wineglass in one hand and a cherry tomato in the
other, and she gestured with that tomato—a wide, witty,
“charmed” gesture I do not ever remember seeing in the South. “I
just love yours. There was a girl at school had a name like yours,
two names said as one actually. Barbara-Jean, I think, or Ruth-
Anne. I can’t remember anymore, but she was the sweetest, most
soft-spoken girl. I just loved her.”
She smiled again, her eyes looking over my head at
someone else. She leaned in close to me. “It’s so wonderful that
you can be with us, you know. Some of the people who have
worked here, well . . . you know, well, we have so much to learn
from you—gentility, you know, courtesy, manners, charm, all of
that.”
For a moment I was dizzy, overcome with the curious
sensation of floating out of the top of my head. It was as if I looked
down on all the other people in that crowded room, all of them
sipping their wine and half of them eating cherry tomatoes. I
watched the woman beside me click her teeth against the beveled
edge of her wineglass and heard the sound of my mother’s voice
hissing in my left ear, Yankeeeeeees! It was all I could do not to
nod.
When I was sixteen I worked counter with my mama back
of a Moses Drugstore planted in the middle of a Highway 50
shopping mall. I was trying to save money to go to college, and
ritually, every night, I’d pour my tips into a can on the back of my
dresser. Sometimes my mama would throw in a share of hers to
encourage me, but mostly hers was spent even before we got
home—at the Winn Dixie at the far end of the mall or the Maryland
Fried Chicken right next to it.
Mama taught me the real skills of being a waitress—how to
get an order right, get the drinks there first and the food as fast as
possible so it would still be hot, and to do it all with an expression
of relaxed good humor. “You don’t have to smile,” she explained,
“but it does help. Of course,” she had to add, “don’t go ’round like a
grinning fool. Just smile like you know what you’re doing, and
never look like you’re in a hurry.” I found it difficult to keep from
looking like I was in a hurry, especially when I got out of breath
running from steam table to counter. Worse, moving at the speed I
did, I tended to sway a little and occasionally lost control of a plate.
“Never,” my mama told me, “serve food someone has seen
fall to the floor. It’s not only bad manners, it’ll get us all in trouble.
Take it in the back, clean it off, and return it to the steam table.”
After a while I decided I could just run to the back, count to ten,
and take it back out to the customer with an apology. Since I
usually just dropped biscuits, cornbread, and baked potatoes—the
kind of stuff that would roll on a plate—I figured brushing it off
was sufficient. But once, in a real rush to an impatient customer, I
watched a ten-ounce T-bone slip right off the plate, flip in the air,
and smack the rubber floor mat. The customer’s mouth flew open,
and I saw my mama’s eyes shoot fire. Hurriedly I picked it up by
the bone and ran to the back with it. I was running water on it
when Mama came in the back room.
“All right,” she snapped, “you are not to run, you are not
even to walk fast. And,” she added, taking the meat out of my
fingers and dropping it into the open waste can, “you are not, not
 6
ever to drop anything as expensive as that again.” I watched
smoky frost from the leaky cooler float up toward her blond curls,
and I promised her tearfully that I wouldn’t.
The greater skills Mama taught me were less tangible than
rules about speed and smiling. What I needed most from her had a
lot to do with being as young as I was, as naive, and quick to
believe the stories put across the counter by all those travelers
heading north. Mama always said I was the smartest of her
daughters and the most foolish. I believed everything I read in
books, and most of the stuff I heard on the TV, and all of Mama’s
carefully framed warnings never seemed to quite slow down my
capacity to take people as who they wanted me to think they were.
I tried hard to be like my mama, but, as she kept complaining, I
was just too quick to trust—badly in need of a little practical
experience.
My practical education began the day I started work. The
first comment by the manager was cryptic but to the point. “Well,
sixteen.” Harriet smiled, looking me up and down. “At least you’ll
up the ante.” Mama’s friend Mabel came over and squeezed my
arm. “Don’t get nervous, young one. We’ll keep moving you
around. You’ll never be left alone.”
Mabel’s voice was reassuring even if her words weren’t,
and I worked her station first. A family of four children, parents,
and a grandmother took her biggest table. She took their order
with a wide smile, but as she passed me going down to the ice
drawer, her teeth were point on point. “Fifty cents,” she snapped,
and went on. Helping her clean the table thirty-five minutes later I
watched her pick up two lone quarters and repeat, “Fifty cents,”
this time in a mournfully conclusive tone.
It was a game all the waitresses played. There was a butter
bowl on the back counter where the difference was kept, the
difference between what you guessed and what you got. No one
had to play, but most of the women did. The rules were simple.
You had to make your guess at the tip before the order was taken.
Some of the women would cheat a little, bringing the menus with
the water glasses and saying, “I want ya’ll to just look this over
carefully. We’re serving one fine lunch today.” Two lines of
conversation and most of them could walk away with a guess
within five cents.
However much the guess was off went into the bowl. If you
said fifty cents and got seventy-five cents, then twenty-five cents
to the bowl. Even if you said seventy-five cents and got fifty cents
you had to throw in that quarter—guessing high was as bad as
guessing short. “We used to just count the short guesses,” Mabel
explained, “but this makes it more interesting.”
Once Mabel was sure she’d get a dollar and got stiffed
instead. She was so mad she counted out that dollar in nickels and
pennies, and poured it into the bowl from a foot in the air. It made
a very satisfying angry noise, and when those people came back a
few weeks later no one wanted to serve them. Mama stood back by
the pharmacy sign smoking her Pall Mall cigarette and whispered
in my direction, “Yankees.” I was sure I knew just what she meant.
At the end of each week, the women playing split the butter bowl
evenly.
Mama said I wasn’t that good a waitress, but I made up for
it in eagerness. Mabel said I made up for it in “tail.” “Those
salesmen sure do like how you run back to that steam table,” she
said with a laugh, but she didn’t say it where Mama could hear.
Mama said it was how I smiled.
“You got a heartbreaker’s smile,” she told me. “You make
them think of when they were young.” Behind her back, Mabel
gave me her own smile, and a long slow shake of her head.
Whatever it was, by the end of the first week I’d earned
four dollars more in tips than my mama. It was almost
embarrassing. But then they turned over the butter bowl and
divided it evenly between everyone but me. I stared and Mama
explained. “Another week and you can start adding to the pot.
 7
Then you’ll get a share. For now just write down two dollars on
Mr. Aubrey’s form.”
“But I made a lot more than that,” I told her.
“Honey, the tax people don’t need to know that.” Her voice
was patient. “Then when you’re in the pot, just report your share.
That way we all report the same amount. They expect that.”
“Yeah, they don’t know nothing about initiative,” Mabel
added, rolling her hips in illustration of her point. It made her
heavy bosom move dramatically, and I remembered times I’d seen
her do that at the counter. It made me feel even more embarrassed
and angry.
When we were alone I asked Mama if she didn’t think Mr.
Aubrey knew that everyone’s reports on their tips were faked.
“He doesn’t say what he knows,” she replied, “and I don’t
imagine he’s got a reason to care.”
I dropped the subject and started the next week guessing
on my tips.
Salesmen and truckers were always a high guess. Women
who came with a group were low, while women alone were
usually a fair twenty-five cents on a light lunch—if you were polite
and brought them their coffee first. It was 1966, after all, and a
hamburger was sixty-five cents. Tourists were more difficult. I
learned that noisy kids meant a small tip, which seemed the
highest injustice. Maybe it was a kind of defensive arrogance that
made the parents of those kids leave so little, as if they were
saying, “Just because little Kevin gave you a headache and poured
ketchup on the floor doesn’t mean I owe you anything.”
Early-morning tourists who asked first for tomato juice,
lemon, and coffee were a bonus. They were almost surely leaving
the Jamaica Inn just up the road, which had a terrible restaurant
but served the strongest drinks in the county. If you talked softly
you never got less than a dollar, and sometimes for nothing more
than juice, coffee, and aspirin.
I picked it up. In three weeks I started to really catch on and
started making sucker bets like the old man who ordered egg
salad. Before I even carried the water glass over, I snapped out my
counter rag, turned all the way around, and said, “Five.” Then as I
turned to the stove and the rack of menus, I mouthed, “Dollars.”
Mama frowned while Mabel rolled her shoulders and said,
“An’t we growing up fast!”
I just smiled my heartbreaker’s smile and got the man his
sandwich. When he left I snapped that five-dollar bill loudly five
times before I put it in my apron pocket. “My mama didn’t raise no
fool,” I told the other women, who laughed and slapped my behind
like they were glad to see me cutting up.
But Mama took me with her on her break. We walked up
toward the Winn Dixie where she could get her cigarettes cheaper
than in the drugstore.
“How’d you know?” she asked.
“ ’Cause that’s what he always leaves,” I told her.
“What do you mean, always?”
“Every Thursday evening when I close up.” I said it knowing
she was going to be angry.
“He leaves you a five-dollar bill every Thursday night?” Her
voice sounded strange, not angry exactly but not at all pleased
either.
“Always,” I said, and I added, “And he pretty much always
has egg salad.”
Mama stopped to light her last cigarette. Then she just
stood there for a moment, breathing deeply around the Pall Mall,
and watching me while my face got redder and redder.
“You think you can get along without it?” she asked finally.
“Why?” I asked her. “I don’t think he’s going to stop.”
“Because,” she said, dropping the cigarette and walking on,
“you’re not working any more Thursday nights.”
On Sundays the counter didn’t open until after church at
one o’clock. But at one sharp, we started serving those big gravy
lunches and went right on till four. People would come in prepared
to sit and eat big—coffee, salad, country-fried steak with potatoes
 8
and gravy, or ham with red-eye gravy and carrots and peas. You’d
also get a side of hogshead biscuits and a choice of three pies for
dessert.
Tips were as choice as the pies, but Sunday had its trials.
Too often, some tight-browed couple would come in at two o’clock
and order breakfast—fried eggs and hash browns. When you told
them we didn’t serve breakfast on Sundays, they’d get angry.
“Look, girl,” they might say, “just bring me some of that ham
you’re serving those people, only bring me eggs with it. You can do
that,” and the contempt in their voices clearly added, “Even you.”
It would make me mad as sin. “Sir, we don’t cook on the
grill on Sundays. We only have what’s on the Sunday menu. When
you make up your mind, let me know.”
“Tourists,” I’d mutter to Mama.
“No, Yankees,” she’d say, and Mabel would nod.
Then she might go over with an offer of boiled eggs, that
ham, and a biscuit. She’d talk nice, drawling like she never did with
friends or me, while she moved slower than you’d think a wide-
awake person could. “Uh huh,” she’d say, and “Shore-nuf,” and
offer them honey for their biscuits or tell them how red-eye gravy
is made, or talk about how sorry it is that we don’t serve grits on
Sunday. That couple would grin wide and start slowing their
words down, while the regulars would choke on their coffee.
Mama never bet on the tip, just put it all into the pot, and it was
usually enough to provoke a round of applause after the couple
was safely out the door.
Mama said nothing about it except the first time when she
told me, “Yankees eat boiled eggs for breakfast,” which may not
sound like much, but had the force of a powerful insult. It was a
fact that the only people we knew who ate boiled eggs in the
morning were those stray tourists and people on the TV set who
we therefore assumed had to be Yankees.
Yankees ate boiled eggs, laughed at grits but ate them in big
helpings, and had plenty of money to leave outrageous tips but
might leave nothing for no reason that I could figure out. It wasn’t
the accent that marked Yankees. They talked different, but all
kinds of different. There seemed to be a great many varieties of
them, not just northerners, but westerners, Canadians, black
people who talked oddly enough to show they were foreign, and
occasionally strangers who didn’t even speak English. Some were
friendly, some deliberately nasty. All of them were Yankees,
strangers, unpredictable people with an enraging attitude of
superiority who would say the rudest things as if they didn’t know
what an insult was.
“They’re the ones the world was made for,” Harriet told me
late one night. “You and me, your mama, all of us, we just hold a
place in the landscape for them. Far as they’re concerned, once
we’re out of sight we just disappear.”
Mabel plain hated them. Yankees didn’t even look when she
rolled her soft wide hips. “Son of a bitch,” she’d say when some
fish-eyed, clipped-tongue stranger would look right through her
and leave her less than fifteen cents. “He must think we get fat on
the honey of his smile.” Which was even funnier when you’d seen
that the man hadn’t smiled at all.
“But give me an inch of edge and I can handle them,” she’d
tell me. “Sweets, you just stretch that drawl. Talk like you’re from
Mississippi, and they’ll eat it up. For some reason, Yankees got
strange sentimental notions about Mississippi.”
“They’re strange about other things, too,” Mama would
throw in. “They think they can ask you personal questions just
’cause you served them a cup of coffee.” Some salesman once
asked her where she got her hose with the black thread sewed up
the back and Mama hadn’t forgiven him yet.
But the thing everyone told me and told me again was that
you just couldn’t trust yourself with them. Nobody bet on Yankee
tips, they might leave anything. Once someone even left a New
York City subway token. Mama thought it a curiosity but not the
equivalent of real money. Another one ordered one cup of coffee to
go and twenty packs of sugar.
 9

“They made road liquor out of it,” Mabel said. “Just add an the men I work with every day comes over with a full plate and a
ounce of vodka and set it down by the engine exhaust for a month wide grin.
or so. It’ll cook up into a bitter poison that’ll knock you cross- “Boy,” he drawls around a bite of the cornbread I
eyed.” contributed to the buffet. “I bet you sure can cook.”
It sounded dangerous to me, but Mabel didn’t think so. “Not “Bet on it,” I say with my Mississippi accent. I swallow the
that I would drink it,” she’d say, “but I wouldn’t fault a man who rest of a cherry tomato and give him my heartbreaker’s smile.
did.”
They stole napkins, not one or two but a boxful at a time. THE END
Before we switched to sugar packets, they’d come in, unfold two or
three napkins, open them like diapers, and fill them up with sugar
before they left. Then they might take the knife and spoon to go
with it. Once I watched a man take out a stack of napkins I was
sure he was going to walk off with. But instead he sat there for
thirty minutes making notes on them, then balled them all up and
threw them away when he left.
My mama was scandalized by that. “And right over there on
the shelf is a notebook selling for ten cents. What’s wrong with
these people?”
“They’re living in the movies,” Mabel whispered, looking
back toward the counter.
“Yeah, Bette Davis movies,” I added.
“I don’t know about the movies.” Harriet put her hand on
Mama’s shoulder. “But they don’t live in the real world with the
rest of us.”
“No,” Mama said, “they don’t.”
I take a bite of cherry tomato and hear Mama’s voice again.
No, she says.
“No,” I say. I tuck my blouse into my skirt and shift in my
shoes. If I close my eyes, I can see Mabel’s brightly rouged
cheekbones, Harriet’s pitted skin, and my mama’s shadowed
brown eyes. When I go home tonight I’ll write her about this party
and imagine how she’ll laugh about it all. The woman who was
talking to me has gone off across the room to the other bar. People
are giving up nibbling and going on to more serious eating. One of
 10
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
by Karen Russell
Stage 1: The initial period is one in which everything is new,
exciting, and interesting for your students. It is fun for your
students to explore their new environment.
- from The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock
***
At first, our pack was all hair and snarl and floor-thumping
joy. We forgot the barked cautions of our mothers and fathers, all
the promises we'd made to be civilized and ladylike, couth and
kempt. We tore through the austere rooms, overturning dresser
drawers, pawing through the neat piles of the Stage 3 girls'
starched underwear, smashing light bulbs with our bare fists.
Things felt less foreign in the dark. The dim bedroom was
windowless and odourless. We remedied this by spraying
exuberant yellow streams all over the bunks. We jumped from
bunk to bunk, spraying. We nosed each other midair, our bodies
buckling in kinetic laughter. The nuns watched us from the corner
of the bedroom, their tiny faces pinched with displeasure.
"Ay Caramba," Sister Maria de la Guardia sighed. "Que
barbaridad!" She made the Sign of the Cross. Sister Maria came to
St. Lucy's from a Half-Way House in Copacabana. In Copacabana,
the girls are fat and languid and eat pink slivers of guava right out
of your hand. Even at Stage 1, their pelts are silky, sun-bleached to
near invisibility. Our pack was hirsute and sinewy and mostly
brunette. We had terrible posture. We went knuckling along the
wooden floor on the calloused pads of our fists, baring row after
row of tiny, wood-rotted teeth. Sister Josephine sucked in her
breath. She removed a yellow wheel of floss from under her robes,
looping it like a miniature lasso.
"The girls at our facility are backwoods," Sister Josephine
whispered to Sister Maria de la Guardia with a beatific smile. "You
must be patient with them." I clamped down on her ankle,
straining to close my jaws around the woolly XXL sock. Sister
Josephine tasted like sweat and freckles. She smelled easy to kill.
We'd arrived at St. Lucy's that morning, part of a pack
fifteen-strong. We were accompanied by a mousy, nervous-
smelling social worker; the baby-faced deacon; Bartholomew the
blue wolfhound; and four burly woodsmen. The deacon handed
out some stale cupcakes and said a quick prayer. Then he led us
through the woods. We ran past the wild apiary, past the felled
oaks, until we could see the white steeple of St. Lucy's rising out of
the forest. We stopped short at the edge of a muddy lake. Then the
deacon took our brothers. Bartholomew helped him to herd the
boys up the ramp of a small ferry. We girls ran along the shore,
tearing at our new jumpers in a plaid agitation. Our brothers stood
on the deck, looking small and confused.
Our mothers and fathers were werewolves. They lived an
outsider's existence in caves at the edge of the forest, threatened
by frost and pitchforks. They had been ostracized by the local
farmers for eating their silled fruit pies and terrorizing the heifers.
They had ostracized the local wolves by having sometimes-
thumbs, and regrets, and human children. (Their condition skips a
generation.) Our pack grew up in a green purgatory. We couldn't
keep up with the purebred wolves, but we never stopped crawling.
We spoke a slab-tongued pidgin in the cave, inflected with
frequent howls. Our parents wanted something better for us; they
wanted us to get braces, use towels, be fully bilingual. When the
nuns showed up, our parents couldn't refuse their offer. The nuns,
they said, would make us naturalized citizens of human society.
We would go to St. Lucy's to study a better culture. We didn't
know at the time that our parents were sending us away for good.
Neither did they.
That first afternoon, the nuns gave us free rein of the
grounds. Everything was new, exciting and interesting. A low
granite wall surrounded St. Lucy's, the blue woods humming for
miles behind it. There was a stone fountain full of delectable birds.
There was a statue of St. Lucy. Her marble skin was colder than
 11
our mother's nose, her pupilless eyes rolled heavenward. Doomed
squirrels gambolled around her stony toes. Our diminished pack
threw back our heads in a celebratory howl-an exultant and
terrible noise, even without a chorus of wolf-brothers in the
background. There were holes everywhere!
We supplemented these holes by digging some of their
own. We interred sticks, and our itchy new jumpers, and the bones
of the friendly, unfortunate squirrels. Our noses ached beneath an
invisible assault. Everything was smudged with a human odour:
baking bread, petrol, the nun's faint woman-smell sweating out
beneath a dark perfume of tallow and incense. We smelled one
another, too, with the same astounded fascination. Our own scent
had become foreign in this strange place.
We had just sprawled out in the sun for an afternoon nap,
yawning into the warm dirt, when the nuns reappeared. They
conferred in the shadow of the juniper tree, whispering and
pointing. Then they started towards us. The oldest sister had spent
the past hour twitching in her sleep, dreaming of fatty and infirm
elk. (The pack used to dream the same dreams back then, as
naturally as we drank the same water and slept on the same red
scree.) When our oldest sister saw the nuns approaching, she
instinctively bristled. It was an improvised bristle, given her new,
human limitations. She took clumps of her scraggly, nut-brown
hair and held it straight out from her head.
Sister Maria gave her a brave smile.
"And what is your name?" she asked.
The oldest sister howled something awful and inarticulable, a
distillate of hurt and panic, half-forgotten hunts and eclipsed
moons. Sister Maria nodded and scribbled on a yellow legal pad.
She slapped on a nametag: HELLO, MY NAME IS_______! "Jeanette it
is."
The rest of the pack ran in a loose, uncertain circle, torn
between our instinct to help her and our new fear. We sensed
some subtler danger afoot, written in a language we didn't
understand.
Our littlest sister had the quickest reflexes. She used her
hands to flatten her ears to the side of her head. She backed
towards the far corner of the garden, snarling in the most
menacing register that an eight-year-old wolf-girl can muster.
Then she ran. It took them two hours to pin her down and tag her:
HELLO MY NAME IS MIRABELLA!
"Stage 1," Sister Maria sighed, taking careful aim with her
tranquillizer dart. "It can be a little over-stimulating."
***
Stage 2: After a time, your students realize that they must work
to adjust to the new culture. This work may be stressful and
students may experience a strong sense of dislocation. They may
miss certain foods. They may spend a lot of time daydreaming
during this period. Many students feel isolated, irritated,
bewildered, depressed, or generally uncomfortable.
Those were the days when we dreamed of rivers and meat.
The full-moon nights were the worst! Worse than cold toilet seats
and boiled tomatoes, worse than trying to will our tongues to curl
around our false new names. We would snarl at one another for no
reason. I remember how disorienting it was to look down and see
two square-toed shoes instead of my own four feet. Keep your
mouth shut, I repeated during our walking drills, staring straight
ahead. Keep your shoes on your feet. Mouth shut, shoes on feet. Do
not chew on your new penny loafers. Do not. I stumbled around in
a daze, my mouth black with shoe polish. The whole pack was
irritated, bewildered, depressed. We were all uncomfortable, and
between languages. We had never wanted to run away so badly in
our lives; but who did we have to run back to? Only the curled
black grimace of the mother. Only the father, holding his tawny
head between his paws. Could we betray our parents by going
back to them? After they'd given us the choicest part of the
woodchuck, loved us at our hairless worst, nosed us across the ice
 12
floes, and abandoned us at the Halfway House for our own
betterment?
Physically, we were all easily capable of clearing the low
stone walls. Sister Josephine left the wooden gates wide open.
They unslatted the windows at night, so that long fingers of
moonlight beckoned us from the woods. But we knew we couldn't
return to the woods; not till we were civilized, not if we didn't
want to break the mother's heart. It all felt like a sly, human taunt.
It was impossible to make the blank, chilly bedroom feel
like home. In the beginning, we drank gallons of bathwater as part
of a collaborative effort to mark our territory. We puddled up the
yellow carpet of old newspapers. But later, when we returned to
the bedroom, we were dismayed to find all trace of the pack musk
had vanished. Someone was coming in and erasing us. We sprayed
and sprayed every morning; and every night, we returned to the
same ammonium eradication. We couldn't make our scent stick
here; it made us feel invisible. Eventually we gave up. Still, the
pack seemed to be adjusting on the same timetable. The advanced
girls could already alternate between two speeds, "slouch" and
"amble." Almost everybody was fully bipedal.
Almost.
The pack was worried about Mirabella.
Mirabella would rip foamy chunks out of the church pews
and replace them with ham bones and girl dander. She loved to
roam the grounds wagging her invisible tail. (We all had a hard
time giving that up. When we got excited, we would fall to the
ground and start pumping our backsides. Back in those days we
could pump at rabbity velocities. Que horror! Sister Maria
frowned, looking more than a little jealous.) We'd give her scolding
pinches. "Mirabella," we hissed, imitating the nuns. "No." Mirabella
cocked her ears at us, hurt and confused.
Still, some things remained the same. The main
commandment of wolf life is Know Your Place, and that translated
perfectly. Being around other humans had awakened a slavish-dog
affection in us. An abasing, belly-to-the-ground desire to please. As
soon as we realized that others higher up in the food chain were
watching us, we wanted only to be pleasing in their sight. Mouth
shut, I repeated, shoes on feet. But if Mirabella had this latent
instinct, the nuns couldn't figure out how to activate it. She'd go
bounding around, gleefully spraying on their gilded statue of St.
Lucy, mad-scratching at the virulent fleas that survived all of their
powders and baths. At Sister Maria's tearful insistence, she'd stand
upright for roll call, her knobby, oddly-muscled legs quivering
from the effort. Then she'd collapse right back to the ground with
an ecstatic oomph! She was still loping around on all fours (which
the nuns had taught us to see looked unnatural and ridiculous--we
could barely believe it now, the shame of it, that we used to
locomote like that!), her fists blue-white from the strain. As if she
were holding a secret tight to the ground. Sister Maria de la
Guardia would sigh every time she saw her. "Caramba!" She'd sit
down with Mirabella and pry her fingers apart. "You see?" she'd
say softly, again and again. "What are you holding onto? Nothing,
little one. Nothing."
Then she would sing out the standard chorus, "Why can't
you be more like your sister Jeanette?"
The pack hated Jeanette. She was the most successful of us,
the one furthest removed from her origins. Her real name was
GWARR! but she wouldn't respond to this anymore. Jeanette
spiffed her penny loafers until her very shoes seemed to gloat.
(Linguists have since traced the colloquial origins of "goody two-
shoes" back to our facilities.) She could even growl out a demonic-
sounding precursor to "Pleased to meet you." She'd delicately
extend her former paws to visitors, wearing white kid gloves.
"Our little wolf, disguised in sheep's clothing!" Sister
Ignatius liked to joke with the visiting deacons, and Jeanette would
surprise everyone by laughing along with them, a harsh, inhuman,
barking sound. Her hearing was still twig-snap sharp. Jeanette was
the first among us to apologize; to drink apple juice out of a sippy
cup; to quit eyeballing the cleric's jugular in a disconcerting
fashion. She curled her lips back into a cousin of a smile as the
 13
traveling barber cut her pelt into bangs. Then she swept her
coarse black curls under the rug. When we entered a room, our
nostrils flared beneath the new odors: onion and bleach, candle
wax, the turnipy smell of unwashed bodies. Not Jeanette. Jeanette
smiled and pretended she couldn't smell a thing.
I was one of the good girls. Not great and not terrible,
solidly middle-of-the-pack. But I had an ear for languages, and I
could read before I could adequately wash myself. I probably could
have vied with Jeanette for the number one spot; but I'd seen what
happened if you gave in to your natural aptitudes. This wasn't like
the woods, where you had to be your fastest and your strongest
and your bravest self. Different sorts of calculations were required
to survive at the Home.
The pack hated Jeanette, but we hated Mirabella more. We
began to avoid her, but sometimes she'd surprise us, curled up
beneath the beds or gnawing on a scapula in the garden. It was
scary to be ambushed by your sister. I'd bristle and growl, the way
that I'd begun to snarl at my own reflection as if it were a stranger.
"Whatever will become of Mirabella?" we asked, gulping
back our own fear. We'd heard rumors about former wolf-girls
who never adapted to their new culture. It was assumed that they
were returned to our native country, the vanishing woods. We
liked to speculate about this before bedtime, scaring ourselves
with stories of catastrophic bliss. It was the disgrace, the failure
that we all guiltily hoped for in our hard beds. Twitching with the
shadow question: Whatever will become of me?
We spent a lot of time daydreaming during this period.
Even Jeanette. Sometimes I'd see her looking out at the woods in a
vacant way. If you interrupted her in the midst of one of these
reveries, she would lunge at you with an elder-sister ferocity,
momentarily forgetting her human catechism. We liked her better
then, startled back into being foamy old Jeanette.
In school, they showed us the St. Francis of Assisi slide
show, again and again. Then the nuns would give us bags of bread.
They never announced these things as a test; it was only much
later that I realized that we were under constant examination. "Go
feed the ducks," they urged us. "Go practice compassion for all
God's creatures." Don't pair me with Mirabella, I prayed, anybody
but Mirabella. "Claudette," Sister Josephine beamed, "why don't
you and Mirabella take some pumpernickel down to the ducks?"
"Ohhkaaythankyou," I said. (It took me a long time to say
anything; first I had to translate it in my head from the Wolf.) It
wasn't fair. They knew Mirabella couldn't make bread balls yet.
She couldn't even undo the twist tie of the bag. She was sure to eat
the birds; Mirabella didn't even try to curb her desire to kill
things--and then who would get blamed for the dark spots of duck
blood on our Peter Pan collars? Who would get penalized with
negative Skill Points? Exactly.
As soon as we were beyond the wooden gates, I snatched
the bread away from Mirabella and ran off to the duck pond on my
own. Mirabella gave chase, nipping at my heels. She thought it was
a game. "Stop it," I growled. I ran faster, but it was Stage 2 and I
was still unsteady on my two feet. I fell sideways into a leaf pile,
and then all I could see was my sister's blurry form, bounding
toward me. In a moment, she was on top of me, barking the old
word for tug-of-war. When she tried to steal the bread out of my
hands, I whirled around and snarled at her, pushing my ears back
from my head. I bit her shoulder, once, twice, the only language
she would respond to, I used my new motor skills. I threw dirt, I
threw stones. "Get away!" I screamed, long after she had made a
clinging retreat into the shadows of the purple saplings. "Get away,
get away!"
Much later, they found Mirabella wading in the shallows of
a distant river, trying to strangle a mallard with her rosary beads. I
was at the lake; I'd been sitting there for hours. Hunched in the
long cattails, my yellow eyes flashing, shoving ragged hunks of
bread into my mouth.
I don't know what they did to Mirabella. Me they separated
from my sisters. They made me watch another slide show. This
one showed images of former wolf-girls, the ones who had failed
 14
to be rehabilitated. Longhaired, sad-eyed women, limping after
their former wolf packs in white tennis shoes and pleated culottes.
A wolf-girl bank teller, her makeup smeared in oily rainbows,
eating a raw steak on the deposit slips while her colleagues looked
on in disgust. Our parents. The final slide was a bolded sentence in
St. Lucy's prim script:
DO YOU WANT TO END UP SHUNNED BY BOTH SPECIES?
After that, I spent less time with Mirabella. One night she
came to me, holding her hand out. She was covered with splinters,
keening a high, whining noise through her nostrils. Of course I
understood what she wanted; I wasn't that far removed from our
language (even though I was reading at a fifth-grade level, halfway
into Jack London's The Son of the Wolf).
"Lick your own wounds," I said, not unkindly. It was what
the nuns had instructed us to say; wound licking was not
something you did in polite company. Etiquette was so
confounding in this country. Still, looking at Mirabella--her fists
balled together like small white porcupines, her brows knitted in
animal confusion--I felt a throb of compassion. How can people
live like they do? I wondered. Then I congratulated myself. This
was a Stage 3 thought.
***
Stage 3: It is common that students who start living in a new and
different culture come to a point where they reject the host
culture and withdraw into themselves. During this period, they
make generalizations about the host culture and wonder how the
people can live like they do. Your students may feel that their
own culture's lifestyle and customs are far superior to those of
the host country.
The nuns were worried about Mirabella too. To correct a
failing, you must first be aware of it as a failing. And there was
Mirabella, shucking her plaid jumper in full view of the visiting
cardinal. Mirabella, battling a raccoon under the dinner table while
the rest of us took dainty bites of peas and borscht. Mirabella,
doing belly flops into compost.
"You have to pull your weight around here," we overheard
Sister Josephine saying one night. We paused below the vestry
window and peered inside.
"Does Mirabella try to earn Skill Points by shelling walnuts
and polishing Saint-in-the-Box? No. Does Mirabella even know
how to say the word walnut? Has she learned how to say anything
besides a sinful 'HraaaHA!' as she commits frottage against the
organ pipes? No."
There was a long silence.
"Something must be done," Sister Ignatius said firmly. The
other nuns nodded, a sea of thin, colorless lips and kettle-black
brows. "Something must be done," they intoned. That ominously
passive construction; a something so awful that nobody wanted to
assume responsibility for it.
I could have warned her. If we were back home, and
Mirabella had come under attack by territorial beavers or snow-
blind bears, I would have warned her. But the truth is that by Stage
3 I wanted her gone. Mirabella's inability to adapt was taking a
visible toll. Her teeth were ground down to nubbins; her hair was
falling out. She hated the spongy, long-dead foods we were served,
and it showed--her ribs were poking through her uniform. Her
bright eyes had dulled to a sour whiskey color. But you couldn't
show Mirabella the slightest kindness anymore--she'd never leave
you alone! You'd have to sit across from her at meals, shoving her
away as she begged for your scraps. I slept fitfully during that
period, unable to forget that Mirabella was living under my bed,
gnawing on my loafers.
It was during Stage 3 that we met our first purebred girls.
These were girls raised in captivity, volunteers from St. Lucy's
School for Girls. The apple-cheeked fourth-grade class came to
tutor us in playing. They had long golden braids or short, severe
bobs. They had frilly-duvet names like Felicity and Beulah; and
pert, bunny noses; and terrified smiles. We grinned back at them
 15
with genuine ferocity. It made us nervous to meet new humans.
There were so many things that we could do wrong! And the rules
here were different depending on which humans we were with;
dancing or no dancing, checkers playing or no checkers playing,
pumping or no pumping.
The purebred girls played checkers with us.
"These girl-girls sure is dumb," my sister Lavash panted to
me between games. "I win it again! Five to none."
She was right. The purebred girls were making mistakes on
purpose, in order to give us an advantage. "King me," I growled,
out of turn. "I SAY KING ME!" and Felicity meekly complied. Beulah
pretended not to mind when we got frustrated with the oblique,
fussy movement from square to square and shredded the board to
ribbons. I felt sorry for them. I wondered what it would be like to
be bred in captivity and always homesick for a dimly sensed forest,
the trees you've never seen.
Jeanette was learning how to dance. On Holy Thursday, she
mastered a rudimentary form of the Charleston. "Brava!" the nuns
clapped. "Brava!"
Every Friday, the girls who had learned how to ride a
bicycle celebrated by going on chaperoned trips into town. The
purebred girls sold seven hundred rolls of gift-wrap paper and
used the proceeds to buy us a yellow fleet of bicycles built for two.
We'd ride the bicycles uphill, a sanctioned pumping, a grim-faced
nun pedaling behind each one of us. "Congratulations!" the nuns
would huff. "Being human is like riding this bicycle. Once you've
learned how, you'll never forget." Mirabella would run after the
bicycles, growling out our old names. "Hwraa! Gwarr! Trrrrrrr!"
We pedaled faster.
At this point, we'd had six weeks of lessons, and still
nobody could do the Sausalito but Jeanette. The nuns decided we
needed an inducement to dance. They announced that we would
celebrate our successful rehabilitations with a Debutante Ball.
There would be brothers, ferried over from the Home for Man-
Boys Raised by Wolves. There would be a photographer from the
Gazette Sophisticate. There would be a three-piece jazz band from
West Toowoomba, and root beer in tiny plastic cups. The brothers!
We'd almost forgotten about them. Our invisible tails went limp. I
should have been excited; instead I felt a low mad anger at the
nuns. They knew we weren't ready to dance with the brothers; we
weren't even ready to talk to them. Things had been so much
simpler in the woods. That night I waited until my sisters were
asleep. Then I slunk into the closet and practiced the Sausalito
two-step in secret, a private mass of twitch and foam. Mouth shut--
shoes on feet! Mouth shut--shoes on feet! Mouthshutmouthshut...
One night I came back early from the closet and stumbled
on Jeanette. She was sitting in a patch of moonlight on the
windowsill, reading from one of her library books. (She was the
first of us to sign for her library card too.) Her cheeks looked
dewy.
"Why you cry?" I asked her, instinctively reaching over to
lick Jeanette's cheek and catching myself in the nick of time.
Jeanette blew her nose into a nearby curtain. (Even her
mistakes annoyed us--they were always so well intentioned.) She
sniffled and pointed to a line in her book: "The lake water was
reinventing the forest and the white moon above it, and wolves
lapped up the cold reflection of the sky." But none of the pack
besides me could read yet; and I wasn't ready to claim a common
language with Jeanette.
The following day, Jeanette golfed. The nuns set up a miniature
put-put course in the garden. Sister Maria dug four sand traps and
got Clyde the groundskeeper to make a windmill out of a
lawnmower engine. The eighteenth hole was what they called a
"doozy," a minuscule crack in St. Lucy's marble dress. Jeanette got
a hole in one.
On Sundays, the pretending felt almost as natural as nature.
The chapel was our favorite place. Long before we could
understand what the priest was saying, the music instructed us in
how to feel. The choir director--aggressively perfumed Mrs.
Valuchi, gold necklaces like pineapple rings around her neck--
 16
taught us more than the nuns ever did. She showed us how to
pattern the old hunger into arias. Clouds moved behind the frosted
oculus of the nave, glass shadows that reminded me of my mother.
The mother, I'd think, struggling to conjure up a picture. A black
shadow, running behind the watery screen of pines.
We sang at the chapel annexed to the Halfway House every
morning. We understood that this was the human's moon, the
place for howling beyond purpose. Not for mating, not for hunting,
not for fighting, not for anything but the sound itself. And we'd
howl along with the choir, hurling every pitted thing within us at
the stained glass. "Sotto voce." The nuns would frown. But you
could tell that they were pleased.
***
Stage 4: As a more thorough understanding of the host culture is
acquired, your students will begin to feel more comfortable in
their new environment. Your students feel more at home and
their self-confidence grows. Everything begins to make sense.
"Hey, Claudette," Jeanette growled to me on the day before
the ball. "Have you noticed that everything's beginning to make
sense?"
Before I could answer, Mirabella sprang out of the hall
closet and snapped through Jeanette's homework binder. Pages
and pages of words swirled around the stone corridor, like dead
leaves off trees.
"What about you, Mirabella?" Jeanette asked politely,
stooping to pick up her erasers. She was the only one of us who
would still talk to Mirabella; she was high enough in the rankings
that she could afford to talk to the scruggliest wolf girl. "Has
everything begun to make more sense, Mirabella?"
Mirabella let out a whimper. She scratched at us and
scratched at us, raking her nails along our shins, so hard that she
drew blood. Then she rolled belly-up on the cold stone floor,
squirming on a bed of spelling-bee worksheets. Above us, small
pearls of light dotted the high tinted window.
Jeanette frowned. "You are a late bloomer, Mirabella!
Usually, everything's begun to make more sense by Month Twelve
at the latest." I noticed that she stumbled on the word bloomer.
HraaaHA! Jeanette could never fully shake our accent. She'd talk
like that her whole life, I thought with a gloomy satisfaction, each
word winced out like an apology for itself.
"Claudette, help me," she yelped. Mirabella had closed her
jaws around Jeanette's bald ankle and was dragging her toward
the closet. "Please. Help me to mop up Mirabella's mess."
I ignored her and continued down the hall. I only had four
more hours to perfect the Sausalito. I was worried only about
myself. By that stage, I was no longer certain how the pack felt
about anything.
At seven o'clock on the dot, Sister Ignatius blew her whistle
and frog-marched us into the ball. The nuns had transformed the
rectory into a very scary place. Purple and silver balloons started
popping all around us. Black streamers swooped down from the
eaves and got stuck in our hair like bats. A full yellow moon
smirked outside the window. We were greeted by blasts of a
saxophone, and fizzy pink drinks, and the brothers.
The brothers didn't smell like our brothers anymore. They
smelled like pomade and cold, sterile sweat. They looked like little
boys. Someone had washed behind their ears and made them wear
suspendered dungarees. Kyle used to be the blustery alpha male
BTWWWR!, chewing through rattle-snakes, spooking badgers,
snatching a live trout out of a grizzly's mouth. He stood by the
punch bowl, looking pained and out of place.
"My stars!" I growled. "What lovely weather we've been
having!"
"Yees," Kyle growled back, "It is beginning to look a lot like
Christmas." All around the room, boys and girls raised by wolves
were having the same conversation. Actually, it had been an
unseasonably warm and brown winter, and just that morning a
 17
freak hailstorm had sent Sister Josephine to an early grave. But we
had only gotten up to Unit 7: Party Dialogue; we hadn't yet learned
the vocabulary for Unit 12: How to Tactfully Acknowledge the
Disaster. Instead, we wore pink party hats and sucked olives on
little sticks, inured to our own strangeness.
The sisters swept our hair back into high, bouffant
hairstyles. This made us look more girlish and less inclined to eat
people, the way that squirrels are saved from looking like rodents
by their poofy tails. I was wearing a white organdy dress with
orange polka dots. Jeanette was wearing a mauve organdy dress
with blue polka dots. Linette was wearing a red organdy dress
with white polka dots. Mirabella was in a dark corner, wearing a
muzzle. Her party culottes were duct-taped to her knees. The nuns
had tied little bows on the muzzle to make it more festive. Even so,
the jazz band from West Toowoomba kept glancing nervously her
way.
"You smell astoooounding!" Kyle was saying, accidentally
stretching the diphthong into a howl and then blushing. "I mean..."
"Yes, I know what it is that you mean," I snapped. (That's
probably a little narrative embellishment on my part; it must have
been months before I could really "snap" out words.) I didn't smell
astounding. I had rubbed a pumpkin muffin all over my body
earlier that morning to mask my natural, feral scent. Now I
smelled like a purebred girl, easy to kill. I narrowed my eyes at
Kyle and flattened my ears, something I hadn't done for months.
Kyle looked panicked, trying to remember the words that would
make me act like a girl again. I felt hot, oily tears squeezing out of
the red corners of my eyes. Shoesonfeet! I barked at myself. I tried
again. "My! What lovely weather..."
The jazz band struck up a tune.
"The time has come to do the Sausalito," Sister Maria
announced, beaming into the microphone. "Every sister grab a
brother!" She switched on Clyde's industrial flashlight, struggling
beneath its weight, and aimed the beam in the center of the room.
Uh-oh. I tried to skulk off into Mirabella's corner, but Kyle
pushed me into the spotlight. "No," I moaned through my teeth,
"noooooo." All of a sudden the only thing my body could
remember how to do was pump and pump. In a flash of white-hot
light, my months at St. Lucy's had vanished, and I was just a
terrified animal again. As if of their own accord, my feet started to
wiggle out of my shoes. Mouth shut, I gasped, staring down at my
naked toes, mouthshutmouthshut.
"Ahem. The time has come," Sister Maria coughed, "to do
the Sausalito." She paused. "The Sausalito," she added helpfully,
"does not in any way resemble the thing that you are doing."
Beads of sweat stood out on my forehead. I could feel my
jaws gaping open, my tongue lolling out of the left side of my
mouth. What were the steps? I looked frantically for Jeanette; she
would help me, she would tell me what to do.
Jeanette was sitting in the corner, sipping punch through a
long straw and watching me with uninterest. I locked eyes with
her, pleading with the mute intensity that I had used to beg her for
weasel bones in the forest. "What are the steps?" I mouthed. "The
steps!"
"The steps?" Then Jeanette gave me a wide, true wolf smile.
For an instant, she looked just like our mother. "Not for you," she
mouthed back.
I threw my head back, a howl clawing its way up my throat.
I was about to lose all my Skill Points, I was about to fail my
Adaptive Dancing test. But before the air could burst from my
lungs, the wind got knocked out of me. Oomph! I fell to the ground,
my skirt falling softly over my head. Mirabella had intercepted my
eye-cry for help. She'd chewed through her restraints and tackled
me from behind, barking at unseen cougars, trying to shield me
with her tiny body. "Caramba!" Sister Maria squealed, dropping
the flashlight. The music ground to a halt. And I have never loved
someone so much, before or since, as I loved my littlest sister at
that moment. I wanted to roll over and lick her ears; I wanted to
kill a dozen spotted fawns and let her eat first.
 18

But everybody was watching; everybody was waiting to see We graduated from St. Lucy's shortly thereafter. As far as I
what I would do. "I wasn't talking to you," I grunted from can recollect, that was our last communal howl.
underneath her. "I didn't want your help. Now you have ruined the
Sausalito! You have ruined the ball!" I said more loudly, hoping the ***
nuns would hear how much my enunciation had improved.
"You have ruined it!" my sisters panted, circling around us, Stage 5: At this point your students are able to interact
effectively in the new cultural environment. They find it easy to
eager to close ranks. "Mirabella has ruined it!" Every girl was wild-
move between the two cultures.
eyed and itching under her polka dots, punch froth dribbling down
her chin. The pack had been waiting for this moment for some
One Sunday, near the end of my time at St. Lucy's, the
time. "Mirabella cannot adapt! Back to the woods, back to the
sisters gave me a special pass to go visit the parents. The
woods!"
woodsman had to accompany me; I couldn't remember how to
The band from West Toowoomba had quietly packed their
find the way back on my own. I wore my best dress and brought
instruments into black suitcases and were sneaking out the back.
along some prosciutto and dill pickles in a picnic basket. We
The boys had fled back toward the lake, bow ties spinning,
crunched through the fall leaves in silence, and every step made
suspenders snapping in their haste. Mirabella was still snarling in
me sadder. "I'll wait out here," the woodsman said, leaning on a
the center of it all, trying to figure out where the danger was so
blue elm and lighting a cigarette.
that she could defend me against it. The nuns exchanged glances.
The cave looked so much smaller than I remembered it. I
In the morning, Mirabella was gone. We checked under all
had to duck my head to enter. Everybody was eating when I
the beds. I pretended to be surprised. I'd known she would have to
walked in. They all looked up from the bull moose at the same
be expelled the minute I felt her weight on my back. Clyde had
time, my aunts and uncles, my sloe-eyed, lolling cousins, the
come and told me this in secret after the ball, "So you can say yer
parents. My uncle dropped a thighbone from his mouth. My littlest
goodbyes." I didn't want to face Mirabella. Instead, I packed a tin
brother, a cross-eyed wolf-boy who has since been successfully
lunch pail for her: two jelly sandwiches on saltine crackers, a
rehabilitated and is now a dour, balding children's book author,
chloroformed squirrel, a gilt-edged placard of St. Bolio. I left it for
started whining in terror. My mother recoiled from me, as if I were
her with Sister Ignatius, with a little note: Best wishes! I told
a stranger. TRRR? She sniffed me for a long moment. Then she
myself I'd done everything I could.
sank her teeth into my ankle, looking proud and sad. After all the
"Hooray!" the pack crowed. "Something has been done!"
tail wagging and perfunctory barking had died down, the parents
We raced outside into the bright sunlight, knowing full well
sat back on their hind legs. They stared up at me expectantly,
that our sister had been turned loose, that we'd never find her. A
panting in the cool gray envelope of the cave, waiting for a display
low roar rippled through us and surged up and up, disappearing
of what I had learned.
into the trees. I listened for an answering howl from Mirabella,
"So," I said, telling my first human lie. "I'm home."
heart thumping--what if she heard us and came back? But there
was nothing.
THE END
 19
The Story Of The Good Little Boy
by Mark Twain
(ca. 1865)
Once there was a good little boy by the name of Jacob
Blivens. He always obeyed his parents, no matter how absurd and
unreasonable their demands were; and he always learned his
book, and never was late at Sabbath- school. He would not play
hookey, even when his sober judgment told him it was the most
profitable thing he could do. None of the other boys could ever
make that boy out, he acted so strangely. He wouldn't lie, no
matter how convenient it was. He just said it was wrong to lie, and
that was sufficient for him. And he was so honest that he was
simply ridiculous. The curious ways that that Jacob had, surpassed
everything. He wouldn't play marbles on Sunday, he wouldn't rob
birds' nests, he wouldn't give hot pennies to organ-grinders'
monkeys; he didn't seem to take any interest in any kind of
rational amusement. So the other boys used to try to reason it out
and come to an understanding of him, but they couldn't arrive at
any satisfactory conclusion. As I said before, they could only figure
out a sort of vague idea that he was "afflicted," and so they took
him under their protection, and never allowed any harm to come
to him.
This good little boy read all the Sunday-school books; they
were his greatest delight. This was the whole secret of it. He
believed in the gold little boys they put in the Sunday-school book;
he had every confidence in them. He longed to come across one of
them alive once; but he never did. They all died before his time,
maybe. Whenever he read about a particularly good one he turned
over quickly to the end to see what became of him, because he
wanted to travel thousands of miles and gaze on him; but it wasn't
any use; that good little boy always died in the last chapter, and
there was a picture of the funeral, with all his relations and the
Sunday-school children standing around the grave in pantaloons
that were too short, and bonnets that were too large, and
everybody crying into handkerchiefs that had as much as a yard
and a half of stuff in them. He was always headed off in this way.
He never could see one of those good little boys on account of his
always dying in the last chapter.
Jacob had a noble ambition to be put in a Sunday school
book. He wanted to be put in, with pictures representing him
gloriously declining to lie to his mother, and her weeping for joy
about it; and pictures representing him standing on the doorstep
giving a penny to a poor beggar-woman with six children, and
telling her to spend it freely, but not to be extravagant, because
extravagance is a sin; and pictures of him magnanimously refusing
to tell on the bad boy who always lay in wait for him around the
corner as he came from school, and welted him so over the head
with a lath, and then chased him home, saying, "Hi! hi!" as he
proceeded. That was the ambition of young Jacob Blivens. He
wished to be put in a Sunday-school book. It made him feel a lithe
uncomfortable sometimes when he reflected that the good little
boys always died. He loved to live, you know, and this was the
most unpleasant feature about being a Sunday-school-boo boy. He
knew it was not healthy to be good. He knew it was more fatal than
consumption to be so supernaturally good as the boys in the books
were he knew that none of them had ever been able to stand it
long, and it pained him to think that if they put him in a book he
wouldn't ever see it, or even if they did get the book out before he
died it wouldn't be popular without any picture of his funeral in
the back part of it. It couldn't be much of a Sunday-school book
that couldn't tell about the advice he gave to the community when
he was dying. So at last, of course, he had to make up his mind to
do the best he could under the circumstances--to live right, and
hang on as long as he could and have his dying speech all ready
when his time came.
But somehow nothing ever went right with the good little
boy; nothing ever turned out with him the way it turned out with
the good little boys in the books. They always had a good time, and
 20
the bad boys had the broken legs; but in his case there was a screw
loose somewhere, and it all happened just the other way. When he
found Jim Blake stealing apples, and went under the tree to read to
him about the bad little boy who fell out of a neighbor's apple tree
and broke his arm, Jim fell out of the tree, too, but he fell on him
and broke his arm, and Jim wasn't hurt at all. Jacob couldn't
understand that. There wasn't anything in the books like it.
And once, when some bad boys pushed a blind man over in
the mud, and Jacob ran to help him up and receive his blessing, the
blind man did not give him any blessing at all, but whacked him
over the head with his stick and said he would like to catch him
shoving him again, and then pretending to help him up. This was
not in accordance with any of the books. Jacob looked them all
over to see.
One thing that Jacob wanted to do was to find a lame dog
that hadn't any place to stay, and was hungry and persecuted, and
bring him home and pet him and have that dog's imperishable
gratitude. And at last he found one and was happy; and he brought
him home and fed him, but when he was going to pet him the dog
flew at him and tore all the clothes off him except those that were
in front, and made a spectacle of him that was astonishing. He
examined authorities, but he could not understand the matter. It
was of the same breed of dogs that was in the books, but it acted
very differently. Whatever this boy did he got into trouble. The
very things the boys in the books got rewarded for turned out to
be about the most unprofitable things he could invest in.
Once, when he was on his way to Sunday-school, he saw
some bad boys starting off pleasuring in a sailboat. He was filled
with consternation, because he knew from his reading that boys
who went sailing on Sunday invariably got drowned. So he ran out
on a raft to warn them, but a log turned with him and slid him into
the river. A man got him out pretty soon, and the doctor pumped
the water out of him, and gave him a fresh start with his bellows,
but he caught cold and lay sick abed nine weeks. But the most
unaccountable thing about it was that the bad boys in the boat had
a good time all day, and then reached home alive and well in the
most surprising manner. Jacob Blivens said there was nothing like
these things in the books. He was perfectly dumfounded.
When he got well he was a little discouraged, but he
resolved to keep on trying anyhow. He knew that so far his
experiences wouldn't do to go in a book, but he hadn't yet reached
the allotted term of life for good little boys, and he hoped to be
able to make a record yet if he could hold on till his time was fully
up. If everything else failed he had his dying speech to fall back on.
He examined his authorities, and found that it was now
time for him to go to sea as a cabin-boy. He called on a ship-captain
and made his application, and when the captain asked for his
recommendations he proudly drew out a tract and pointed to the
word, "To Jacob Blivens, from his affectionate teacher." But the
captain was a coarse, vulgar man, and he said, "Oh, that be blowed!
that wasn't any proof that he knew how to wash dishes or handle a
slush-bucket, and he guessed he didn't want him." This was
altogether the most extraordinary thing that ever happened to
Jacob in all his life. A compliment from a teacher, on a tract, had
never failed to move the tenderest emotions of ship-captains, and
open the way to all offices of honor and profit in their gift it never
had in any book that ever he had read. He could hardly believe his
senses.
This boy always had a hard time of it. Nothing ever came
out according to the authorities with him. At last, one day, when he
was around hunting up bad little boys to admonish, he found a lot
of them in the old iron-foundry fixing up a little joke on fourteen or
fifteen dogs, which they had tied together in long procession, and
were going to ornament with empty nitroglycerin cans made fast
to their tails. Jacob's heart was touched. He sat down on one of
those cans (for he never minded grease when duty was before
him), and he took hold of the foremost dog by the collar, and
turned his reproving eye upon wicked Tom Jones. But just at that
moment Alderman McWelter, full of wrath, stepped in. All the bad
boys ran away, but Jacob Blivens rose in conscious innocence and
 21

began one of those stately little Sunday-school-book speeches

which always commence with "Oh, sir!" in dead opposition to the
fact that no boy, good or bad, ever starts a remark with "Oh, sir."
But the alderman never waited to hear the rest. He took Jacob
Blivens by the ear and turned him around, and hit him a whack in
the rear with the flat of his hand; and in an instant that good little
boy shot out through the roof and soared away toward the sun
with the fragments of those fifteen dogs stringing after him like the
tail of a kite. And there wasn't a sign of that alderman or that old
iron-foundry left on the face of the earth; and, as for young Jacob
Blivens, he never got a chance to make his last dying speech after
all his trouble fixing it up, unless he made it to the birds; because,
although the bulk of him came down all right in a tree-top in an
adjoining county, the rest of him was apportioned around among
four townships, and so they had to hold five inquests on him to
find out whether he was dead or not, and how it occurred. You
never saw a boy scattered so.--[This glycerin catastrophe is
borrowed from a floating newspaper item, whose author's name I
would give if I knew it.--M. T.]
Thus perished the good little boy who did the best he could,
but didn't come out according to the books. Every boy who ever
did as he did prospered except him. His case is truly remarkable. It
will probably never be accounted for.

THE END
 22
Hijabi in Plain Sight: On Being Way Too Hot
by R. Aicha
Once the temperature wavers half a degree or so above the
freezing point, I know that It is coming. Cue the dreaded question
that tops my Hijabi FAQ list:
Aren’t you hot in that?
So when Blonde Sophia corners me after 6th period during a
particularly hot spell last week, her query isn’t entirely
unexpected. It’s practically the soundtrack of my summer life, after
all.
But what gets me every time — with Blonde Sophia, the stranger
in the public restroom, and the countless others who’ll come
forward between now and September — is the question’s
incredible nuance. On the surface, it has nothing to do with
religion, politics, or terrorism. The premise appears (almost)
believable: people are genuinely invested in my physical comfort.
Other bonuses: the question is clear and succinct. It is easily
workable into any conversation. It can be phrased in a variety of
distinct, creatively stimulating ways:
• “Oh my God, isn’t your clothing [READ: religion] suffocating
you?”
• “Are you really wearing like five layers [READ: of
patriarchal oppression] right now?”
• “You should take it off for a little while until it gets cooler —
it’s totally okay!” [READ: I know what’s best for you, both
wardrobe-wise and life-wise, just like in Mean Girls.
However, I am not familiar with the concept of irony.]
Even the more classic version can be dressed up with a limitless
array of offensive tonalities:
• “Aren’t you HOT in that?!”
• “Are you not hot in that…?”
• “How are you not hot in that?”
The way I see it is this: It’s 93 degrees out. You and I both know
that I am hot in that. What’s the real question here, Blonde Sophia?
Look… I’ve got nothing against your bare and generally flawless
legs. Sometimes, I also want to come to school wearing a tiny floral
sundress or a cute ’90s-style crop top. To feel the wind fully,
rushing at the backs of my calves and behind my ears.
To be you: one of the long-haired, bare-legged beauties that the
boys in our class live for, give their varsity jackets to, and kiss in
the stairwells.
So forgive me for being defensive, Sophia.
It’s easy to say that wearing the headscarf is hard because of all of
the doors I must witness closing in front of me. The doors that I
cannot even name or imagine and doors that I can, like the
American presidency. It’s easy to say that wearing the headscarf is
hard because of your questions and your ignorance, because of
Islamophobia and Society at large, not to mention The System Is
Broken. (I’ve been listening to a lot of slam poetry lately.)
But it is nearly impossible for me to admit to you that being a
Muslim is hard physically. That this is a disadvantage I have
brought upon myself, and continue to bring upon myself.
 23

So yes: I am hot in this.
Likewise, it is strenuous to fast during Ramadan. We may frequent
wildly different social stratas, Sophia, but we are still both human.
(So before you ask me if I’m hungry in a couple of months, please
remember that I cleared it right up for you in late-March.)
And yes, as you might guess, Ramadan and summer occasionally
collide for a truly memorable experience.
Please remember that I am choosing to make these sacrifices.
Sacrifices that look to you like sweat stains and forehead blotting
and (another?) opportunity to question my fashion choices, or
perhaps my general ability to respond to social cues.
on your right, both from different countries. With your feet
splayed and bare and unguarded. Your heart suspended.
You won’t smile the secret smile of hijabis passing each other on
the street.
You won’t stand in front of your mirror, wearing an ankle-length,
ink-black jilbab with delicate black detailing, and feel ethereal. (If
you did, you would probably look awesome, but it would also be
cultural appropriation — a discussion for another day.)
How am I supposed to convey all this and more, when you ask me
if I’m hot in that, and when you’re really asking me why I wear the
headscarf, and who I am really, and where I come from?

No: you won’t see me in a bikini. I won’t see me in a bikini either, if Maybe one day we can have a conversation about all of this, but
it makes you feel any better. (Admittedly, that’s got more to do until then, I’ll continue to answer you:
with my body image issues than anything else; you can bet all your
booty shorts that other hijabis strut around in their underwear at No.
home if they want to.)
THE END
But please remember that you won’t see the other things, either.
My family and I, walking home together under the full moon after
Ramadan night prayers. (The streets blue-black and empty, the
night swollen with our faith; you are sleeping.) You won’t eat from
our traditional iftar dinner feasts, or sit with our entire extended
family as we stay up laughing and talking and hoping to sleep late
into the hot tomorrow.

You will probably use the phrase, “the Mecca of…” throughout
your entire life, Sophia, without ever truly understanding it.
You will never pray in one of the rings surrounding the ka’bah,
with melodic Quranic verses washing over you. With your sides
wedged tight in between the Muslim on your left and the Muslim
 166 CH. 4 / SETTING
acterized by the unscrupulous cunning described by the Italian Renaissance
,politician and writer Niccolb MachiaveIli (1469-1527). Ernest Hemingway's
"Hills Like White ElephantsJJpresents a realistic setting in modern Spain,
and a situation that at first seems commonplace. Yet something feels very
alien about the episode, not only because readers may never have been to
Spain. Because they are so sparse, details of the landscape and the bar at the
station are magnified in their significance, as if setting alone tells most of
the story.
The stories that follow rely on setting in differing ways and to different
degrees, but you will see in each of them a revealing portrait of a time and
place. Just as our own memories of important experiences include complex
impressions of when and where they occurred-the weather, the shape of the
room, the music that was playing, even the fashions or the events in the news
back then-so stories rely on setting to give substance to the other elements
of fiction.
A M Y TAN
A Pair of Tickets
The minute our train leaves the Hong Kong border and enters Shenzhen,
China, I feel different. I can feel the skin on my forehead tingling, my blood
rushing through a new course, my bones aching with a familiar old pain.
And I think, My mother was right. I am becoming Chinese.
i "Cannot be helped," my mother said when I was fifteen and had vigor-
I
I
ously denied that I had any Chinese whatsoever below my skin. I was a
sophomore at Galileo High i n San Francisco, and all my Caucasian friends
agreed: I was about as Chinese as they were. But my mother had studied
at a famous nursing school in Shanghai, and she said she knew all about
genetics. So there was no doubt in her mind, whether I agreed or not: Once
you are born Chinese, you cannot help but feel and think Chinese.
"Someday you will see," said my mother. "It's in your blood, waiting to
be let go."
And when she said this, I saw myself transforming like a werewolf, a
mutant tag of DNA suddenly triggered, replicating itself insidiously into a
syndrome, a cluster of telltale Chinese behaviors, all those things my mother
did to embarrass me-haggling with store owners, pecking her mouth with
a toothpick in public, being color-blind to the fact that lemon yellow and
pale pink are not good combinations for winter clothes.
5 But today I realize I've never really known what it means to be Chinese.
I am thirty-six years old. My mother is dead and I am on a train, carrying
wich me her dreams of coming home. I am going to China.
We are going to Guangzhou, my seventy-two-year-oldfather, Canning
. Woo, and I, where we will visit his aunt, whom he has not seen since he
was ten years old. And I don't know whether it's the prospect of seeing his
aunt or if it's because he's back in China, but now he looks like he's a
AMY TAN A Pair of Tickets 167 ,
1
young boy, so innocent and happy I want to button his sweater and pat , I:
his head. We are sitting across from each other, separated by a little table ,
with two cold cups of tea For the first time I can ever remember, my father , 1 1
has rears in his eyes, and all he is seeing out the train window is a sectioned i 1 a
field of yellow, green, and brown, a narrow canal flanking the tracks, low
rising hills, and three people in blue jackets riding an ox-driven cart on
this early October morning. And I can't help myself. I also have misty eyes,
as if I had seen this a long, long time ago, and had almost forgotten.
In less than three hours, we will be in Guangzhou, which my guidebook
, ,
tells me is how one properly refers to Canton these days. It seems all the 1
cities I have heard of, except Shanghai, have changed their spellings. I think1
they are saying China has changed in other ways as well. Chungking is
Chongqing. And Kweilin is Guilin. I have looked these names up, because,
after we see my father's aunt in Guangzhou, we will catch a plane to S
hai, where I will meet my two half-sisters for the first time.
They are my mother's twin daughters from her first marriage, lit
babies she was forced to abandon on a road as she was fleeing Kweilin
Chungking in 1944. That was all my mother had told me about th
daughters, so they had remained babies in my mind, all these years, sitt
on the side of a road, listening to bombs whistling in the distance
sucking their patient red thumbs.
And it was only this year that someone found them and wrote wi
joyful news. A letter came from Shanghai, addressed to my mother.
I first heard about this, that they were alive, I imagined my identical
transforming from little babies into six-year-old girls. In my mind, they 'I;
were seated next to each other at a table, taking turns with the fountain I 1
pen. One would write a neat row of characters: Dearest Mama. We are dlive.4I ' "
She would brush back her wispy bangs and hand the other sister the pen, J '!I
and she would write: Come get us. Please hurry. I
Of course they could not know that my mother had died three months 10 i
before, suddenly, when a blood vessel in her brain burst. One minute she
was talking to my father, complaining about the tenants upstairs, scheming b
how to evict them under the pretense that relatives from China wereaov- !
ing in. The next minute she was holding her head, her eyes squeezed shut,
'
groping for the sofa, and then crumpling softly to the floor with fluttering
hands.
So my father had been the first one to open the letter, a long letter it
turned out. And they did call her Mama They said they always revered her
as their true mother. They kept a framed picture of her. They told her I
about their life, from the time my mother last saw them on the road leaving
Kweilin to when they were finally found.
I
1
And the letter had broken my father's heart so much-these daughters ,I
calling my mother from another life he never knew-that he gave the letter ! ''
to my mother's old friend Auntie Lindo and asked her to write back and ,
tell my sisters, in the gentlest way possible, that my mother was dead.
But instead Auntie Lindo took the letter to the Joy Luck Club and dis- ,
cussed with Auntie Ying and Auntie An-mei what should be done, because ,

they had knob for many years about my motheis search for her)twin
daughters, her)endless hope. Auntie Lindo and the others cried oveb this
double tragedy, of losing my mother three months before, and now again.
And so they cduldn't help but think of some miracle, some possiblk way
of reviving herifrom the dead, so my mother could fulfill her dream.;
So this is what they wrote to my sisters in Shanghai: "Dearest Daughters,
I too have nev4r forgotten you in my memory or in my heart. I never)gave
up hope that we would see each other again in a joyous reunion. I am]only
sorry it has betip too long. I want to tell you everything about my life (since
I last saw you. I want to tell you this when our family comes to see ybu in
15
China. . . ." Theb signed it with my mother's name. I
It wasn't until all this had been done that they first told me a b o h my
sisters, the let+ they received, the one they wrote back.
"They'll think she's coming, then," I murmured. And I had imagined my
sisters now beibg ten or eleven, jumping up and down, holdmg hands,
their pigtds bouncing, excited that their mother-their mother-was crom-
ing, whereas rnp mother was dead. I
"How can you say she is not coming in a letter?,' said Auntie
"She is their mqther. She is your mother. You must be the one to tell +em.
fdl these years, I they have been dreaming of her." And I thought she was
right.
L,
I I
But then I s&ted dreaming, too, of my mother and my sisters and how
it would be if I arrived in Shanghai. All these years, while they waitdd to
be found, I had lived with my mother and then had lost her. I imagined
seeing my sistees at the airport. They would be standing on their tiptoes,
looking anxiou$ly, scanning from one dark head to another as we goi off
the plane. And I would recognize them instantly, their faces with the iden-
tical worried lobk.
"]ye~e,fiefie) Sister, Sister. We are here," I saw myself saying in my poor
version of ~hinbse.
20 'Where is Mama?" they would say, and look around, still smiling, two
flushed and eagkr faces. "Is she hiding?" And this would have been lik4 my
mother, to stand behind just a bit, to tease a little and make people's
patience pull a little on their hearts. I would shake my head and tell)my
sisters she was not hiding.
"Oh, that mubt be Mama, no?" one of my sisters would whisper excit4dly,
pointing to another small woman completely engulfed in a tower of pres-
ents. And that, $00, would have been like my mother, to bring mount&ns
of gifts, food, and toys for children-all bought on sale-shunning thanks,
saying the gifts $ere nothing, and later turning the labels over to show my
sisters. "Calvin Klein. 100%wool."
I imagined qyself starting to say, "Sisters, I am sorry, I have co/me
.
alone . ." and before I could tell them-they could see it in my face-they
were wailing, pulling their hair, their lips twisted in pain, as they ran a@ay
from me. And then I saw myself getting back on the plane' and coming
home. I I
After I had drhamed this scene many times-watching their despair tLrn
I I
I
I AMY TAN A Pair of Tickets 169
I
from horror into anger-I begged duntie Lindo to write another letter. And
at first she refused. I
It '
"How can I say she is dead? I c d n o t write this," said Auntie Lindo with
a stubborn look. I I
"But it's cruel to have them beieve she's coming on the plane," I said. 25 !
"When they see it's just me, they'll hate me."
"Hate you? Cannot be." She WAS scowling. "You are their own sister,
their only family." I I
'You don't understand," I protebted.
"What I don't understand?" she said.
And I whispered, "They'll think ym responsible, that she died because I
didn't appreciate her." I
,
And Auntie Lindo looked satisfied and sad at the same time, as if this
were true and I had finally realized it. She sat down for an hour, and when
30
/ 1/
she stood up she handed me a two:page letter. She had tears in her eyes. I
realized that the very thing I had feared, she had done. So even if she had 1
written the news of my mother's dekth in English, I wouldn't have had the ,,
ind do. heart to read it. I ! I
"Thank you," I whispered. ) I I
I
I
The landscape has become gray, filled with low flat cement buildings, old
factories, and then tracks and moreltracks filled with trains like ours pass-
ing by in the opposite direction. I sde platforms crowded with people wear-
ing drab Western clothes, with spotd of bright colors: little children wearing
pink and yellow, red and peach. Arid there are soldiers in olive green and
red, and old ladies in gray tops mcl pants that stop mid-calf. We are in
Guangzhou. I
I
I
Before the train even comes to a/ stop, people are bringing down their
belongings from above their seats. For a moment there is a dangerous
I
I
shower of heavy suitcases laden with gifts to relatives, half-broken boxes
wrapped in miles of string to keep the contents from spilling out, plastic
bags filled with yirn and vegetable!^ and packages of dried mushrooms,
and camera cases. And then we are caught in a stream of people rush-
ing, shoving, pushing us along, un$l we 'find ourselves in one of a dozefi
I lines waiting to go through customs. I feel as if I were getting on a num-
ber 30 Stockton bus in San Franc+s;b. I am in China, I remind myself.
And somehow the crowds don't bother me. It feels right. I start pushing
too. I
I take out the declaration forms And my passport. Woo," it says at the
top, and below that, 7une May," who was born in "California, U.S.A.," in
I 1951. I wonder if the customs will question whether I'm the same
person as in the passport photo. Ih this picture, my chin-length hair is
swept back and artfully styled. I 4wearing false eyelashes, eye shadow,
and lip liner. My cheeks are hollowed out by bronze blusher. But I had not
expected the heat in October. And ndw my hair hangs limp with the humid-
ity. I wear no makeup; in Hong Kohg my mascara had melted into dark
circles and everything else had felt tikt layers of grease. So today my face
I
 L
170 CH. 4 / SETTING
is plain, unadorned except for a thin mist of shiny sweat on my forehead
and nose.
35 Even without makeup, I could never pass for true Chinese. I stand five-
foot-six, and my head pokes above the crowd so that I am eye level only
with other tourists. My mother once told me my height came from my
grandfather, who was a northerner, and may have even had some Mongol
blood. "This is what your grandmother once told me," explained my
mother. "But now it is too late to ask her. They are all dead, your grand-
parents, your uncles, and their wives and children, all killed in the war,
when a bomb fell on our house. So many generations in one instant."
She had said this so matter-of-factly that I thought she had long since
gotten over any grief she had. And then I wondered how she knew they
were all dead.
"Maybe they left the house before the bomb fell," I suggested.
"No," said my mother. "Our whole family is gone. It is just you and I."
"But how do you know? Some of them could have escaped."
40 "Cannot be," said my mother, this time almost angrily. And then her
frown was washed over by a puzzled blank look, and she began to talk as
if she were trying to remember where she had misplaced something. "I
went back to that house. I kept looking up to where the house used to be.
And it wasn't a house, just the sky. And below, underneath my feet, were
four stories of burnt bricks and wood, all the life of our house. Then off
to the side I saw things blown into the yard, nothing valuable. There was
a bed someone used to sleep in, really just a metal frame twisted up at one
corner. And a book, I don't know what kind, because every page had turned
black. And I saw a teacup which was unbroken but fdled with ashes. And
then I found my doll, with her hands and legs broken, her hair burned off.
. . . When I was a little girl, I had cried for that doll, seeing it all alone in
the store window, and my mother had bought it for me. It was an American
doll with yellow hair. It could turn its legs and arms. The eyes moved up
and down. And when I married and left my family home, I gave the doll
to my youngest niece, because she was like me. She cried if that doll was
not with her always. Do you see? If she was in the house with that doll,
her parents were there, and so everybody was there, waiting together,
because that's how our family was."
The woman in the customs booth stares at my documents, then glances at
me briefly, and with two quick movements stamps everything and sternly
nods me along. And soon my father and I find ourselves in a large area
filled with thousands of people and suitcases. I feel lost and my father
looks helpless.
"Excuse me," I say to a man who looks like an American. "Can you tell
me where I can get a taxi!" He mumbles something that sounds Swedish
or Dutch.
"Syau Yen! Syau Yen!" I hear a piercing voice shout from behind me.
An old woman in a yellow knit beret is holding up a pink plastic bag filled
with wrapped trinkets. I guess she is trying to sell us something. But my
AMY TAN A Pair of Tickets 171
father is staring down at this tiny sparrow of a woman, squinting into her
eyes. And then his eyes widen, his face opens up and he smiles like a pleased
little boy.
"Aiyi! Aiyi!"-Auntie Auntie!-he says softly.
"Syau Yen!" coos my great-aunt. I think it's funny she has just called 45
my father "Little Wild Goose." It must be his baby milk name, the name
used to discourage ghosts from stealing children.
They clasp each other's hands-they do not hug-and hold on like this,
taking turns saying, "Look at you! You are so old. Look how old you've
become!" They are both crying openly, laughing at the same time, and I
bite my lip, trying not to cry. I'm afraid to feel their joy. Because I am I
thinking how different our arrival in Shanghai will be tomorrow, how awk-
ward it will feel.
~
,
I
Now Aiyi beams and points to a Polaroid picture of my father. My father
had wisely sent pictures when he wrote and said we were coming. See how
smart she was, she seems to intone as she compares the picture to my
father. In the letter, my father had said we would call her from the hotel
once we arrived, so this is a surprise, that they've come to meet us. I wonder
if my sisters will be at the airport.
It is only then that I remember the camera I had meant to take a picture
of my father and his aunt the moment they met. It's not too late. -
"Here, stand together over here," I say, holding up the Polaroid. The
camera flashes and I hand them the snapshot. Aiyi and my father still stand
close together, each of them holding a-corner of the pi'ture, watching as
their images begin to form. They are almost reverentially quiet. Aiyi is only
five years older than my father, which makes her around seventy-seven.But
she looks ancient, shrunken, a mummified relic. Her thin hair is pure white,
her teeth are brown with decay. So much for stories of ~ h i n e s ewomen
looking young forever, I think to myself.
Now Aiyi is crooning to me: 'Tandale." So big already. She looks up at 50
me, at my full height, and then peers into her pink plastic bag-her gifts
to us, I have figured out-as if she is wondering what she will give to me,
now that I am so old and big. And then she grabs my elbow with her sharp
pincerlike grasp and turns me around. A man and a woman in their fifties
are shalung hands with my father, everybody smiling and saying, "Ah! Ah!"
They are Ayi's oldest son-and his wife,. andstanding next to them are four
other people, around my age, and a little girl who's around ten. The intro-
ductions go by so fast, all I know is that one of them is Aiyi's grandson,
with his Gfe, -and the other is her granddaughter, with her h u s b d . And
the little girl is Lili, Aiyi's great-granddaughter.
'
Aiyi and my father speak the Mandarin dialect from their childhood,
but the rest of the family speaks only the Cantonese of their village. I
'
understand only anda ark but-can't speak it that well. So Aiyi a n d my
father gossip unrestrained in ~ a n d a r i n ,exchanging news about people
from their old village. And they stop only occasionally to talk to the rest
of us, sometimes in Cantonese, sometimes in English.
"Oh, it is as I suspected; says my father, turning to me. "He died last
 174 CH. 4 / SETTING
i
So it's decided: We are going to dine tonight in our rooms, with our
family, sharing hamburgers, french fries, and apple pie la mode.
70 Aiyi and her family are browsing the shops while we clean up. After a hot
ride on the train, I'm eager for a shower and cooler clothes.
The hotel has provided little packets of shampoo which, upon opening,
I discover is the consistency and color of hoisin sauce.2This is more like
it, I think. This is China. And I rub some in my damp hair.
Standing in the shower, I realize this is the first time I've been by myself
in what seems like days. But instead of feeling relieved, I feel forlorn. I
think about what my mother said, about activating my genes and becoming
Chinese. And I wonder what she meant.
Right after my mother &ed, I asked myself a lot of things, things that
couldn't be answered, to force myself to grieve more. It seemed as if I
wanted to sustain my grief, to assure myself that I had cared deeply enough.
But now I ask the questions mostly because I want to know the answers.
What was that pork stuff she used to make that had the texture of sawdust?
What were the names of the uncles who died in Shanghai? What had she
dreamt all these years about her other daughters? All the times when she
got mad at me, was she really thinking about them? Did she wish I were
they? Did she regret that I wasn't?
75 At one o'clock in the morning, I awake to tapping sounds on the window.
I must have dozed off and now I feel my body uncramping itself. I'm sitting
on the floor, leaning against one of the twin beds. Lili is lying next to me.
The others are asleep, too, sprawled out on the beds and floor. Aiyi is seated
at a little table, looking very sleepy. And my father is staring out the win-
dow, tapping his fingers on the glass. The last time I listened my father
was telling Aiyi about his life since he last saw her. How he had gone to
Yenching University, later got a post with a newspaper in Chungking, met
my mother there, a young widow. How they later fled together to Shanghai
to try to find my mother's family house, but there was nothing there. And
then they traveled eventually to Canton and then to Hong Kong, then
Haiphong and finally to San Francisco.. . .
"Suyuan didn't tell me she was trying all these years to find her daugh-
ters," he is now saying in a quiet voice. "Naturally, I did not discuss her
daughters with her. I thought she was ashamed she had left them behind."
"Where did she leave them?" asks Aiyi. "How were they found?"
I am wide awake now. Although I have heard parts of this story from
my mother's friends.
"It happened when the Japanese took over Kweilin," says my father.
80 "Japanese in Kweilin?" says Aiyi. "That was never the case. Couldn't be.
The Japanese never came to Kweilin."
2. Sweet brownish-red sauce made from soybeans, sugar, water, spices, garlic, and chili.
AMY TAN A Pdir of Tickets 175
, I
'Yes, that is what the newspapers reported. I know this because I was
working for the news bureau at the time..The Kuomintang3 often told us
what we could say and could not say. But we knew the Japanese had come
into Kwangsi Province. We had sources who told us how they had captured
the Wuchang-Canton railway. How they were coming overland, making
very fast progress, marching toward the provincial capital."
Aiyi looks astonished. "If people did not know this, how could Suyuan
know the Japanese were coming?"
"An officer of the Kuomintang secretly warned her," explains my father.
"Suyuan's husband also was an officer and everybody knew that officers
and their families would be the first to be killed. So she gathered a few
possessions and, in the middle of the night, she picked up her daughters
and fled on foot. The babies were not even one year old."
"How could she give up those babies!" sighs Aiyi. "Twin girls. We have
never had such luck in our family." And then she yawns again.
'What were they named?" she asks. I listen carefully. I had been planning
on using just the familiar "Sister" to address them both. But now I want
to know how to pronounce their names.
"They have their father's surname, Wang," says my father. "And their
given names are Chwun Yu and Chwun Hwa."
'What do the names mean?" I ask.
"Ah." My father draws imaginary characters on the window. "One means
'Spring Rain,' the other 'Spring Flower,' " he explains in English, "because
they born in the spring, and of course rain come before flower, same order
these girls are born. Your mother like a poet, don't you think?"
I nod my head. I see Aiyi nod her head forward, too. But it falls forward
and stays there. She is breathing deeply, noisily. She is asleep.
"And what does Ma's name mean?" I whisper.
" 'Suyuan,' " he says, writing more invisible characters on the glass. "The
way she write it in Chinese, it mean 'Long-Cherished Wish.' Quite a fancy
name, not so ordinary like flower name. See this first character, it mean
something like 'Forever Never Forgotten.' But there is another way to write
'Suyuan.' Sound exactly the same, but the meaning is opposite." His finger
creates the brushstrokes of another character. "The first part look the same:
'Never Forgotten.' But the last part add to first part make the whole word
mean 'Long-Held Grudge.' Your mother get angry with me, I tell her her
name should be Grudge."
My father is looking at me, moist-eyed. "See, I pretty clever, too, hah?"
I nod, wishing I could find some way to comfort him. "And what about
my name," I ask, "what does 'Jing-me2 mean?"
'Your name also special," he says. I wonder if any name in Chinese is
not something special. " 'Jing' like excellent jing. Not just good, it's some-
thing pure, essential, the best quality. Jing is good leftover stuff when you
3. National People's Party, led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975), which fought suc-
cessfully against the Japanese occupation before being defeated militarily in 1949 by the Chinese
Communis~Party,led by Mao Zedong (1893-1976).
 176 CH. 4 / SETTING
take impurities out of something like gold, or rice, or salt. So what is left-
1 AMY TAN
just pure essence. And 'Mei,' this is common mei, as in meimei, 'younger
sister.' "
95 I think about this. My mother's long-cherished wish. Me, the younger
sister who was supposed to be the essence of the others. I feed myself with
the old grief, wondering how disappointed my mother must have been.
Tiny Aiyi stirs suddenly, her head rolls and then falls back, her mouth opens
as if to answer my question. She grunts in her sleep, tucking her body more
closely into the chair.
"So why did she abandon those babies on the road?" I need to know,
because now I feel abandoned too. . on their wedding day. And she wrote on the back of each the names of the
"Long time I wondered this myself," says my father. "But then I read
that letter from her daughters in Shanghai now, and I talk to Auntie Lindo,
all the others. And then I knew. No shame in what she done. None."
"What happened?"
'Your mother running away-" begins my father.
loo "No, tell me in Chinese," I interrupt. "Really, I can understand."
He begins to talk, still standing at the window, looking into the night.
After fleeing Kweilin, your mother walked for several days trying to find
a main road. Her thought was to catch a ride on a truck or wagon, to catch
enough rides until she reached Chungking, where her husband was
stationed.
She had sewn money and jewelry into the lining of her dress, enough,
she thought, to barter rides all the way. If I am lucky, she thought, I will
not have to trade the heavy gold bracelet and jade ring. These were things
from her mother, your grandmother.
By the third day, she had traded nothing. The roads were filled with
people, everybody running and begging for rides from passing trucks. The
trucks rushed by, afraid to stop. So your mother found no rides, only the
start of dysentery pains in her stomach.
105 Her shoulders ached from the two babies swinging from scarf slings.
Blisters grew on the palms from holding two leather suitcases. And then
the blisters burst and began to bleed. After a while, she left the suitcases
behind, keeping only the food and a few clothes. And later she also dropped
the bags of wheat flour and rice and kept walking like this for many miles,
singing songs to her little girls, until she was delirious with pain and fever.
Finally, there was not one more step left in her body. She didn't have
the strength to carry those babies any farther. She slumped to the ground.
She knew she would &e of her sickness, or perhaps from thirst, from star-
vation, or from the Japanese, who she was sure were marching right behind
her.
She took the babies out of the slings and sat them on the side of the
I road, then lay down next to, them. You babies are so good, she said, so
I
quiet. They smiled back, reaching their chubby hands for her, wanting to
be picked up again. And then she knew she could not bear to watch her
I babies die with her.
A Pair of Tickets 177
She saw a family with three young children in a cart going by. '"Take my
babies, I beg you," she cried to them. But they stared back with empty eyes
and never stopped.
She saw another person pass and called out again. This time a man
turned around, and he had such a terrible expression-your mother said it
looked like death itself-she shivered and looked away.
When the road grew quiet, she tore open the lining of her dress, and 110
stuffed jewelry under the shirt of one baby and money under the other.
She reached into her pocket and drew out the photos of her family, the
picture of her father and mother, the picture of herself and her husband
babies and this same message: "Please care for these babies with the money
and valuables provided. When it is safe to come, if you bring them to 1
Shanghai, 9 Weichang Lu, the Li family will be glad to give you a generous
reward. Li Suyuan and Wang Fuchi."
And then she touched each baby's cheek and told her not to cry. She
would go down the road to find them some food and would be back. And
without looking back, she walked down the road, stumbling and crying,
thinking only of this one last hope, that her daughters would be found by
a kindhearted person who would care for them. She would not allow herself
to imagine anything else.
She d ~ not
d remember how far she walked, which direction she went,
when she fainted, or how she was found. W e n she awoke, she was in the
back of a bouncing truck with several other sick people, all moaning. And
she began to scream, thinking she was now on a journey to Buddhist hell. 1
But the face of an American missionary lady bent over her and smiled,
I
talking to her in a soothing language she did not understand. And yet she I
could somehow understand. She had been saved for no good reason, and
it was now too late to go back and save her babies.
When she arrived in Chungking, she learned her husband had died two
weeks before. She told me later she laughed when the officers told her this
news, she was so delirious with madness and disease. To come so far, to
lose so much and to find nothing.
I met her in a hospital. She was lying on a cot, hardly able to move, her
dysentery had drained her so thin. I had come in for my foot, my missing
toe, which was cut off by a piece of f&ng rubble. She was talking to herself,
mumbling.
"Look at these clothes," she said, and I saw she had on a rather unusual 115
dress for wartime. It was silk satin, quite dirty, but there was no doubt it
was a beautihl dress.
r'Look at this face," she said, and I saw her dusty face and hollow cheeks,
her eyes shining black. "Do you see my foolish hope?"
"I thought I had lost everything, except these two things," she mur-
mured. "And I wondered which I would lose next. Clothes or hope? Hope
or clothes?"
"But now, see here, look what is happening," she said, laughing, as if all
her prayers had been answered. And she was pulling hair out of her head
as easilv as one lifts new wheat from wet soil.
 178 CH. 4 / SETTING
It was an old peasant woman who found them. "How could I resist?"
the peasant woman later told your sisters when they were older. They were
still sitting obediently near where your mother had left them, looking like
little fairy queens waiting for their sedan to arrive.
120 The woman, Mei Ching, and her husband, Mei Han, lived in a stone
cave. There were thousands of hidden caves like that in and around Kweilin
so secret that the people remained hidden even after the war ended. The
Meis would come out of their cave every few days and forage for food
supplies left on the road, and sometimes they would see something that
they both agreed was a tragedy to leave behind. So one day they took back
to their cave a delicately painted set of rice bowls, another day a little
footstool with a velvet cushion and two new wedding blankets. And once,
it was your sisters.
They were pious people, Muslims, who believed the twin babies were a
sign of double luck, and they were sure of this when, later in the evening,
they discovered how valuable the babies were. She and her husband had
never seen rings and bracelets like those. And while they admired the pic-
tures, knowing the babies came from a good family, neither of them could
read or write. It was not until many months later that Mei Ching found
someone who could read the writing on the back. By then, she loved these
baby girls like her own.
In 1952 Mei Han, the husband, died. The twins were already eight years
old, and Mei Ching now decided it was time to find your sisters' true family.
She showed the girls the picture of their mother and told them they
had been born into a great family and she would take them back to see
their true mother and grandparents. Mei Ching told them about the
reward, but she swore she would refuse it. She loved these girls so much,
she only wanted them to have what they were entitled to-a better life, a
fine house, educated ways. Maybe the f d l y would let her stay on as the
girls' amah. Yes, she was certain they would insist.
Of course, when she found the place at 9 Weichang Lu, in the old French
Concession, it was something completely different. It was the site of a
factory building, recently constructed, and none of the workers knew what
had become of the family whose house had burned down on that spot.
125 Mei Ching could not have known, of course, that your mother and I,
her new husband, had already returned to that same place in 1945in hopes
of finding both her family and her daughters.
Your mother and I stayed in China until 1947. We went to many differ-
ent cities-back to Kweilin, to Changsha, as far south as Kunming. She was
always looking out of one corner of her eye for twin babies, then little girls.
Later we went to Hong Kong, and when we finally left in 1949 for the
United States, I think she was even looking for them on the boat. But when
we arrived, she no longer talked about them. I thought, At last, they have
died in her heart.
When letters could be openly exchanged between China and the United
States, she wrote immediately to old friends in Shanghai and Kweilin. I did
not know she did this. Auntie Lindo told me. But of course, by then, all
' AMY TAN A Pair of Ticlzets 179
the street names had changed. Some people had died, others had moved
I
away. So it took many years to find a contact. And when she did find an
old schoolmate's address and wrote asking her to look for her daughters,
her friend wrote back and said this was impossible, like looking for a needle
on the bottom of the ocean. How did she know her daughters were in
Shanghai and not somewhere else in China? The friend, of course, &d not
ask, How do you know your daughters are still alive?
So her schoolmate did not look. Finding babies lost during the war was
a matter of foolish imagination, and she had no time for that.
But every year, your mother wrote to different people. And this last year,
I think she got a big idea in her head, to go to China and find them herself.
I remember she told me, 'Canning, we should go, before it is too late, before ,
we are too old." And I told her we were already too old, it was already too , 1
late. ,
I just thought she wanted to be a tourist! I didn't know she wanted to 130 i
go and look for her daughters. So when 1 said it was too late, that must
have put a terrible thought in her head that her daughters might be dead.
1
I
And I think this possibility . grew
- bigger and bigger in her head, until it
killed her.
Maybe it was your mother's dead spirit who guided her Shanghai school-
mate to find her daughters. Because after your mother died, the schoolmate
saw your sisters, by chance, while shopping for shoes at the Number One
Department Store on Nanjing Dong Road. She said it was like a dream,
seeing these two women who looked so much alike, moving down the stairs
together. There was something about their facial expressions that reminded
the schoolmate of your mother.
She quickly walked over to them and called their names, which of course,
they did not recognize at first, because Mei Ching had changed their names.
But your mother's friend was so sure, she persisted. "Are you not Wang
Chwun Yu and Wang Chwun Hwa?" she asked them. And then these
double-image women became very excited, because they remembered the
names written on the back of an old photo, a photo of a young man and
woman they still honored, as their much-loved first parents, who had died
and become spirit ghosts still roaming the earth looking for them. .,
At the airport, I am exhausted. 1 could not sleep last night. Aiyi had fol-
lowed me into my room at three in the morning, and she instantly fell
asleep on one of the twin beds, snoring with the might of a lumberjack. I
lay awake thinlung about my mother's story, realizing how much I have
never known about her, grieving that my sisters and I had both lost her.
And now at the airport, after shaking hands with everybody, waving
good-bye, I think about all the different ways we leave people in this world.
Cheerily waving good-bye to some at airports, knowing we'll never see each
other again. Leaving others on the side of the road, hoping that we will.
Finding my mother in my father's story and saying good-bye before I have
a chance to know her better.

I
180 CH. 4 / SETTING
135 Aiyi smiles at me as we wait for our gate to be called. She is so old. I
put one arm around her and one arm around Lili. They are the same size,
it seems. And then it's time. As we wave good-bye one more time and enter
the waiting area, I get the sense I am going from one funeral to another.
In my hand I'm clutching a pair of tickets to Shanghai. In two hours we'll
be there.
The plane takes off. I close my eyes. How can I describe to them in my
broken Chinese about our mother's life? Where should I begin?
"Wake up, we're here," says my father. And I awake with my heart pounding
in my throat. I look out the window and we're already on the runway. It's
gray outside.
And now I'm walking down the steps of the plane, onto the tarmac and
toward the building. If only, I think, if only my mother had lived long
enough to be the one walking toward them. I am so nervous I cannot even
feel my feet. I am just moving somehow.
Somebody shouts, "She's arrived!" And then I see her. Her short hair.
Her small body. And that same look on her face. She has the back of her
hand pressed hard against her mouth. She is crying as though she had
gone through a terrible ordeal and were happy it is over.
140 And I know it's not my mother, yet it is the same look she had when I
was five and had disappeared all afternoon, for such a long time, that she
was convinced I was dead. And when I miraculously appeared, sleepy-eyed,
crawling from underneath my bed, she wept and laughed, biting the back
of her hand to make sure it was true.
And now I see her again, two of her, waving, and in one hand there is a
photo, the Polaroid I sent them. As soon as I get beyond the gate, we run
toward each other, all three of us embracing, all hesitations and expecta-
tions forgotten.
"Mama, Mama," we all murmur, as if she is among us.
My sisters look at me, proudly. "Meimeijandale, '"says one sister proudly
to the other. "Little Sister has grown up." I look at their faces again and 1
see no trace of my mother in them, Yet they still look familiar. And now I
also see what part of me is Chinese: It is so obvious. It is my family. It is
in our blood. After all these years, it can finally be let go.
My sisters and I stand, arms around each other, laughing and wiping the
tears from each other's eyes. The flash of the Polaroid goes off and my
father hands me the snapshot. My sisters and I watch quietly together,
eager to see what develops.
145 The gray-green surface changes to the bright colors of our three images,
sharpening and deepening all at once. And although we don't speak, I know
we all see it: Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same
mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish.
1989
1
ANTON CHEKHOV TheLadywiththeDog 181
QUESTIONS
1
1. Why is the opening scene of "A Pair of Tickets''-the train journey from Hong
Kong to Guangzhou-an appropriate setting for June May's remark that she
is "becoming Chinese"?
2. When June May arrives in Guangzhou, what are some details that seem famil-
" iar to her, and what are some that seem exotic? Why is she so preoccupied
with comparing China to America?
3. June May says that "she could never pass for true Chinese," yet by the end of
the story she has discovered "the part of me that is Chinese." How does the
meaning of "Chinese"evolve throughout the story? 1,
ANTON CHEKHOV
The Lady with the Dog1
I
It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a
little dog. Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov, who had by then been a fortnight at
Yalta? and so was fairly at home there, had begun to take an interest in
new arrivals. Sitting in Verney's pavilion, he saw, walking on the sea-front,
a fair-haired young lady of me&um height, wearing a bhet; a white Pom- I
eranian dog was running behind her.
And afterwards he met her in the public gardens and in the square '
several times a day. She was walking alone, always wearing the same biret,
and always with the same white dog; no one knew who she was, and every ,
one called her simply "the lady with the dog."
"If she is here alone without a husband or friends, it wouldn't be amiss
to make her acquaintance," Gurov reflected.
He was under forty, but he had a daughter already twelve years old, and
two sons at school. He had been married young, when he was a student in
his second year, and by now his wife seemed half as old again as he. She
was a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, staid and dignified, and, as
she said of herself, intellectual. She read a great deal, used phonetic spelling,
called her husband, not Dmitri, but Dimitri, and he secretly considered her
unintelbgent, narrow, inelegant, was afraid of her, and did not like to be
at home. He had begun being unfaithful to her long ago-had been unfaith-'
ful to her often, and, probably on that account, almost always spoke ill of
women. and when they were talked about in his presence, used to call them
"the lower race."
It seemed to him that he had been so schooled by bitter experience that 5
he m i"~ hcall
t them what he liked, and yet he could not get on for two days
together without "the lower race." In the society of men he was bored and
not himself, with them he was cold and uncommunicative; but when he
1. Translated by Constance Garnett. 2. Russian city on the Black Sea; a resort.