Winter meant skating, tobogganing, the holidays, and Mom’s campaign to make sure Megan and I had no free time on our hands. In the past, she had always signed us up for crafts, sewing, swimming, skating, even French and Spanish lessons. Sure enough, one day I came home from school to find a pamphlet on the kitchen table, “Winter Made Fun.” Dad sat there drinking tea from a mug, reading the paper.
“What’s that?” I asked, my bag still on my shoulders.
“Oh,” Dad said casually, looking at the glossy picture on the pamphlet, “your mom asked me to pick it up for you and Megan.”
I poured myself a glass of milk and headed for the living room.
“At least have a look at it,” Mom said later.
I whined; Megan complained. We weren’t interested. We were too busy. Everything they offered looked stupid and boring. Why couldn’t our parents leave us alone?
Before I went to bed, she brought up the issue again. “There is one thing you could give a try, something entirely new.”
Megan was in the hall, and this brought her to the door. “What?” she said.
“Well, I was thinking of Dong-mei.”
“What is it?” I asked warily.
“I was talking to Frank last night on the phone,” Mom began.
Frank Wu and my parents had become closer than ever since Tiananmen happened. He had come up to Milford on the bus a few times. When my parents were in the city, they’d have dinner with him.
“He’s teaching Mandarin again this winter,” Mom said. “In the north end of the city, half an hour’s drive from here.” She let the sentence hang. “Your dad would be willing to take you there two afternoons a week after school.”
“I thought Frank spoke Chinese,” Megan said.
I wished she would shut up and let Mom talk herself out. But no, she always had something to say.
“Mandarin is the official dialect in China,” Mom explained.
“Is it easy to learn?” Megan asked.
Mom smiled. Here we go, I said to myself. “There’s only one way to find out,” Mom said.
“I think being able to speak Chinese would be neat,” Megan bubbled. I wished I could stuff a sock in her mouth. I knew she’d quickly lose interest, like she always did.
“Forget it,” I told my mother, silently cursing both of them, Megan in particular. Would Mother ever lay off trying to keep me in touch with my roots? “No way. I’m having enough trouble with French at school, even after those crummy lessons you made me take last winter. So leave me out of your neat plan,” I said, glaring at my sister.
“You don’t even want to give it a try, Dong-mei? If you don’t like the lessons, you can always drop them. You’ve dropped out of things before,” she added sweetly. “At least then you can say you tried.”
I’d heard that last sentence so many times it was engraved in my memory, and I said it along with her in my head.
“And Frank is such a nice guy,” Mom quickly added.
“Yeah,” Megan said. “At least we’ll know our teacher. Come on, Grace, you’d be able to write your own name in Chinese.”
“So? Who cares?”
“In the spring you’re going to study about China in school,” Mom said, never giving up. “Wouldn’t it be fun to know a little about the language? And you like Frank, don’t you?”
“I want to try it,” Megan said. “And don’t forget, Grace, that in two weeks I take the test for my permanent driver’s licence. If I pass, you and I can go to the city by ourselves.”
Suddenly Megan’s enthusiasm made sense.
“We’ll have to see about that,” Mom said doubtfully. “Anyway, Dong-mei, think about it, will you? If you take Chinese, your dad and I won’t ask you to sign up for anything else, like piano lessons.”
“Okay,” I said. “If Megan can take me when she gets her licence.” I could drive a bargain, too.
“It’s a deal,” Mom said, trying to hide a smile.
I took my lessons at the Hua Sheng—Voice of China—language school, above a store that smelled of rotten fruit and dead fish. I stuck with it for the first year, after wavering a bit in March, when Mom hinted that it was either Chinese or piano lessons. I hoped that, after the break for summer holidays, I could drop out.
It was Dad who changed my mind, using the simplest and most effective method—bribery. He paid me to keep going. If Mom had found out she’d have thrown a fit. Dad warned me never to let on that he was beefing up my bank account, and occasionally treating me to a cheeseburger and a strawberry milkshake on the way home, as I struggled with my brush pen and vocabulary exercises.
By then, Megan’s commitment to me and the Chinese lessons had faded. She auditioned for the Drama Club musical and landed the part of the dumb girlfriend of a brainless guy with a leather jacket and greasy hair. She was thrilled, but I was pretty sure she got the part because of her long blond hair and pretty face. Her commitment to the musical meant that more and more often Dad and I made the trip to Toronto on our own.
By the time I had logged two years with Frank Wu, with his weak chin and caved-in chest and goofy laugh, I could carry on a conversation in Mandarin and read and write a couple of hundred characters. And, to my surprise as much as my parents’, I began my third year with no whining and excuses.
I liked being able to talk in another language—really talk, about everyday things, not chant brainless phrases that weren’t connected to anything, like we did in French class at school. I had to give “Flank” credit. He drilled us and forced us to talk to him and each other in Chinese.
Being able to mumble remarks that no one understood, and sometimes swear at people without their knowing, was an added benefit. Many times, I basked in the sense of superiority it gave me. I was probably the only person in Milford who could speak Mandarin.
There was one thing I didn’t like, and never really got comfortable with. It came up in the second lesson. We sat in hard-backed chairs, with winter rain beating on the window, listening to Frank drone on about the writing system. My mind wandered and I looked around at the other students.
“Many Chinese characters,” Frank lectured in his fluty voice as he stood at the blackboard with a piece of chalk in his hand, “have two parts, either top-and-bottom or left-and-right. In most cases these parts are words themselves. Example.” He spun around and wrote three characters on the board. “Man, or male. This character means field, a piece of land. This one is strength or power. When you put field on top of strength, it forms a new word, man.”
“Sounds like a guy made up this writing system,” joked Elaine, a twenty-something African-Canadian.
Frank smiled when Tony, a Canadian-born Chinese, said, “It’s all neat and logical. It makes sense, and it’s easy to remember.”
“How about the word for female?” Peggy asked. She was a recent arrival from Hong Kong. “Is it logical, too?”
Frank scratched his head. “Well, it looks like this.” And he wrote a simple character on the board.
“Just like that?” I asked. “Three lines?”
“Strokes, Grace. The lines are called strokes.”
Peggy giggled. “The strokes look like the gentle curves of our bodies.”
“Or not,” Susan hissed under her breath. She was middle-aged and a bit chubby.
I said, “Is that what the word is based on, our bodies?”
Frank flushed, probably regretting the whole idea of the lesson. “Perhaps you won’t like the answer. This character came from an old ideograph of a person kneeling in subservience.”
Elaine groaned. “I might have known.”
“But,” Frank said, “to make you feel better, let’s do this.”
He added a few strokes to the top of the word female, like a hat. “Now you get a new word, an, which means peace. Now, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?”
“Is that the same an as in Tiananmen Square?” Susan asked.
“Yes. Tiananmen—the Heaven Peace Gate or Gate of Heavenly Peace.”
“Not much peace there in 1989,” I said. “Nobody knows how many people were killed.”
“And no apology from the government,” Susan added.
“Come on, no politics,” Tony complained. “You can discuss it after class.”
“All I was trying to do,” our teacher said, “was help you find a way of remembering the characters. There are thousands of them. Every little trick helps. Now look at this. If we put the word son beside the word for female, we get hao, which means good.”
“Why is that?” I said. “Woman plus son means good? The Chinese don’t like daughters? Is that why the orphanages are full of girls?”