The Year of the Three Sisters Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Frontispiece

  Pronunciation Guide

  A Plan

  An Invitation

  A Reply

  Arrival!

  First Day in America

  School

  The Weekend

  News from China

  CAT

  The Swallow

  Thanksgiving

  The Spring Bud School

  Holiday Break

  Sad News

  A Decision

  Choosing Gifts

  A Surprise Party

  Epilogue

  Read More from the Anna Wang Series

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  Copyright © 2015 by Andrea Cheng

  Illustrations copyright © 2015 by Patrice Barton

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Cheng, Andrea.

  The year of the three sisters / by Andrea Cheng ; illustrated by Patrice Barton.

  p. cm.

  Sequel to: Year of the fortune cookie.

  Summary: Twelve-year-old Anna’s friend Andee spearheads a campaign to bring Fan from China to Cincinnati on a year-long cultural exchange, but before Fan even arrives Anna is concerned that Andee and Fan are too different to get along.

  ISBN 978-0-544-34427-3

  1. Chinese Americans—Juvenile fiction. [1. Chinese Americans—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Foreign study—Fiction.] I. Barton, Patrice, 1955– illustrator. II. Title.

  PZ7.C41943Yk 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014013599

  eISBN 978-0-544-55687-4

  v1.0415

  To the Wu family

  —A.C.

  To Lily

  —P. B.

  Pronunciation Guide

  Sun – Tai yang (Tie yang)

  Hot – Re (re)

  Yellow – Huang se (hwang se)

  Melon – Gua (gwa)

  Playground – You le chang (yo le chang)

  Ice Cream – Bing qi ling (bing ji ling)

  Welcome – Huan ying (hwan ying)

  How was your flight? – Lu shang zen me yang (loo shang ze me yang)

  Good – Hao (how)

  Thank you – Xie xie (shay shay)

  Very tired – Tai Lei Le (tie lay le)

  Grandfather (mother’s side) – Wai gong (why gong) or Gong Gong (gong gong)

  Grandmother (mother’s side) – Wai po (why po) or Po Po

  Badminton – Yu mao qiu (oo mao chio)

  Sorry – Dui bu qi (duay bu chi)

  Residence permit – Hu kou (Hu ko)

  Goodbye – Zai jian (zsai jian)

  Sister (older) – Jie jie (je je)

  Dad – Ba ba (ba ba)

  Chapter One

  A Plan

  My mom doesn’t believe in air conditioning. It’s not healthy, she says, to go from hot to cold. So I stand in front of the window fan, waving my shirt to dry the sweat.

  I sit down at my desk and reread the letter that came yesterday from Fan, my waitress friend in China.

  Dear Anna,

  I am sorry it takes me so long to answer. Thank you for telling me about the presentation to your school. I am embarrassed that you present me but I am proud too. In your last letter you ask about my summer. Summer season the hotel is very busy so there are many tables to clean and now I am a cooker in the kitchen too. You ask how is my brother. He is fine. He plays all day but I give him homework so he can be a good student, better than me. My mother is fine but my father hurt from his job (his back). He is builder and the materials are very heavy. Sorry I cannot explain in English. I hope you understand.

  I will give you a small Chinese lesson with summer season words:

  Sun—tai yang

  Hot—re

  Yellow color—huang ze

  Melon—gua

  Playground—you le chang

  Ice cream—bing ji ling

  Please send me English lesson. I still dream to learn English more. Then I can work better in the hotel like at the desk in the lobby. That is the word in my dictionary. Is it correct?

  Now I am tired. Thank you, my friend.

  Yours truly,

  Fan

  PS: Here is my try poem in English:

  You are my friend

  Far away

  But sun rises in East

  Goes away in West

  We are one world,

  Sisters.

  I love the way Fan calls her verse a try poem. I open the small photo album I put together after my trip to China this past December. The last page has a picture of Fan the day I left, wearing her waitress uniform and smiling shyly at the camera. I look more closely at her face, but it’s impossible to tell what she is thinking. Fan asked me lots of questions about America, and she loved looking at photos of my family. She said she would like to visit, but then when I asked her if she could really come someday, she said, For you it is easy to get on an airplane. But for me it is not possible.

  I take a sheet of paper out of my desk drawer:

  Dear Fan,

  Thank you for your letter. I really like your poem. I wish I could write that well in Chinese.

  In the morning I am helping my teacher take care of the baby she adopted in China.

  The phone rings and I go into the hallway to answer it. “Hey, Anna.” Andee’s deep voice is so different from everyone else’s I know.

  “I thought you were still in Vermont!”

  “I came back a week early. Can I come over?”

  Andee is suntanned and her curly hair is lighter than before. She has on long boy shorts and a green T-shirt, and she looks taller. She hugs me, and we head up to my room. When I ask Andee about Vermont, she says, “My grandparents enrolled me in this outdoor adventure thing, which was fine, but the kids . . . I don’t know, I just felt like I didn’t have anything in common with anyone.”

  “So you left early?”

  Andee nods, then reaches for her backpack. “I brought you something.” She hands me a tiny bottle of Genuine Vermont Maple Syrup.

  I hold the bottle up so it catches the sunlight. “How did you know I love miniature things?”

  Andee smiles. “Just a guess. What were you doing when I called?”

  “Writing back to my friend in China.” I show Andee the letter from Fan, and her eyes move quickly over the words.

  “So while I was climbing mountains with a bunch of rich teenagers, your friend was cleaning tables in a hotel.” Andee sees the photo of Fan. “We’re almost the same age, aren’t we?”

  “She’s a year older, I think.”

  “A sophomore?”

  “She had to drop out after eighth grade.” As soon as I say the word “drop out,” I think of kids who fail their classes. “Fan had to leave school to earn money for her family,” I explain.

  “I wish we could give them the money my grandparents wasted on that adventure camp.” Andee turns to me. “Hey, maybe Fan could go to high school here for a year. Then she’d really learn English.”

  It’s hard for me to imagine Fan in the front hallway at Fenwick High School, surrounded by American students. The only places she has ever been, she told me, are Beijing and the small village where she was born. “Fan could never afford the plane ticket,” I say, remembering what she said about trav
eling. “Her family is . . .” I don’t want to say “poor” because I don’t really know what poor means in China. “They don’t earn a lot of money.”

  Andee takes a deep breath. “I bet my parents and my grandparents would donate. Plus the Community Action Team is always looking for projects. And living here would be practically free. She could stay in one of our guest rooms.” Once Andee gets an idea, she cannot stop talking. “I forgot to tell you: my mom joined the Local School Decision-Making Committee, and she convinced them to offer Mandarin Chinese at Fenwick High starting in September. We were planning to host an exchange student from China anyway, so this would be perfect!”

  Andee is always so sure that she can make things work out. “Fan’s family needs the money she earns at the hotel,” I say. “Her parents don’t earn very much, and they have to send money to her grandparents in the countryside every week.”

  Andee pulls her eyebrows together. “We could set up one of those donor pages online. It’s a really good cause.”

  “Fan isn’t exactly a ‘cause.’” My voice comes out louder than I expected.

  Andee looks at me. “You know what I mean.”

  I wipe my face with my T-shirt. I think the heat is getting to me. I feel bad for snapping at Andee when she is just trying to help my friend. Fan did tell me that if she knew English better, she could probably get promoted at the hotel and help her family more. Maybe, if we can pay for everything, Andee’s plan really could work out.

  “I can’t wait to tell my mom,” Andee says as we head downstairs to get a snack. “She’s really good at arranging things.”

  While we eat our ice cream, we talk about all the things we could do with Fan if she comes: take her to the zoo, to King’s Island, or the swimming pool if it’s still as hot as it is now.

  It’s after eleven, but I can’t sleep. China is thirteen hours ahead, so it’s just after noon there. Fan is probably at the hotel, setting the tables for lunch. Or maybe she is taking a break and studying the English vocabulary that I wrote down in her notebook. Fan told me that even though she left school in eighth grade, she would never stop trying to learn. I know that the best way to learn a language is to be surrounded by it. I learned more Chinese in two weeks in China than I did in two years at Chinese school. So why does my stomach flip when I imagine Fan in Cincinnati?

  I move to a cool spot on the bed. How would Fan feel in Andee’s house, where each room is bigger than her whole apartment? In China, she lives in an alley with lots of other migrant families. They all share a public bathroom, and they cook on electric hot plates or small charcoal grills that line the street. Andee’s house has a bathroom for each person, and a stove with six burners.

  I sit up and look out the window. Last year Andee and I had so much fun planning our CAT projects together. But today I notice her insistence more, as if everything has to happen exactly the way she thinks it should. Andee is older than me by two years, but she has never been to China and she doesn’t know anything about Fan’s life. Of course, after two weeks, I don’t know that much either. Still, I talked to Fan almost every day I was there, and we ate dumplings in the small room that she shares with her parents and her brother.

  I lie back down with my arms crossed behind my head. I miss Camille. She spends every summer in Oklahoma with her grandparents, but this time it seems as if she’s been gone forever.

  Chapter Two

  An Invitation

  After Andee’s orthodontist appointment, her mom drops her off at my house. She starts talking even before she’s inside the front door. “It turns out that in order to be an exchange student, you have to be enrolled in high school, and you said Fan isn’t. Then my mom contacted someone she knows in D.C., and there’s a way Fan can come as part of a cultural exchange program, so the lady sent us the application and my mom’s working on it right now.”

  The idea of sending in an application without telling Fan worries me. “Don’t you think we should talk to Fan first?”

  “These applications can take a while to process, so my mom thought we should get started right away.” Andee covers her mouth with her hand. “My teeth are killing me.”

  I put a few ice cubes into a washcloth and Andee holds them to her gums. “Let’s send an email to Fan,” she says.

  “She doesn’t have a computer.” I pause. “But I think she does go to Internet cafés sometimes.”

  Andee looks over my shoulder as I type:

  Dear Fan,

  I hope you and your family are doing well. I think about the time I spent in China all the time. Thank you for helping me so much while I was there.

  My friend Andee and I were talking, and we have an idea. We want to invite you to come to visit us in Cincinnati. We know the airplane ticket is very expensive, but Andee’s parents were planning to invite a student from China anyway, and I know you are the perfect person! You could help Andee learn Chinese and we could help you improve in English. Andee’s parents would be happy to pay for the airplane ticket and you can stay at her house for free.

  “Is the exchange for a year?” I ask.

  “It can be for six months or nine months. But nine months would be better.”

  You can stay here for nine months and you can go to Fenwick High School with Andee (she is two years older than me).

  Andee sucks on her ice cube. “Maybe we should tell her that the passport and visa might take a while, so she’d better start right away.”

  Please tell us what you think asap (as soon as possible) because you will need a passport and a visa to come, and the application might take a long time.

  Then I add,

  We hope everything works out. Just thinking about you in Cincinnati makes me excited! I miss you!

  Yours,

  Anna and Andee

  As soon as I click “Send” I realize that I haven’t asked my parents.

  “They don’t really have to do anything,” Andee says. “If Fan lives with us and my mom applies for the cultural exchange, there isn’t anything your parents have to arrange.”

  Andee is right. My parents don’t know anything about exchange programs, and they don’t have money to buy tickets and pay for applications. But I still feel as if my family should be included. I get an ice cube out of the freezer and hold it to my forehead.

  “We should start figuring out how to raise money,” Andee says. “We could do a 5K walk. I bet people would pledge.”

  I think of the walks I’ve done for cancer and AIDS. A walk for Fan makes it seem like somebody is sick, but I can’t think of anything better. Andee writes 5K Walk on top of a list she calls Fan’s Fund.

  By the time Andee’s mom comes to get her, she has added a car wash, a plant sale, and a babysitting service.

  Kaylee is running a fever, so Mom had to leave work to pick her up at daycare. When they come in, Kaylee’s cheeks are red and her eyes are watery.

  “Kaylee Bao Bao,” I say, reaching for my sister, but she turns away. Mom gives her a drink of water and then lays her down in her crib. She hugs her sock mouse and we tiptoe out of her room.

  I follow Mom into the basement, where we sort the laundry. “Light or dark?” I ask, holding up one of Ken’s shirts that is white and blue striped.

  “Your choice,” Mom says.

  I toss it into the darks. Mom puts the clothes into the washer, adds the detergent, and turns on the machine.

  “I wonder if Fan’s family uses a washing machine,” I say.

  “In China, many people wash clothes by hand,” Mom says. “Especially a migrant family probably does not have money for a laundromat.”

  Mom is about to go back upstairs when I say, “Andee’s family invited Fan to come to Cincinnati for the school year.”

  Mom looks surprised. “That is very nice of them. Will they pay for the ticket?”

  I nod. “Andee’s mom is filling out the application for a cultural exchange.”

  Mom sits down on the old sofa next to the dryer and motions for me to
sit next to her. “That will be a very special experience for Fan,” she says. “Most young people in China don’t have such an opportunity. Especially migrant children.”

  Then for no reason at all, I feel choked up. I tell Mom how Andee is arranging everything before we even know if Fan wants to come. “I’m not sure Fan will like it here,” I say, remembering the parks full of people in Beijing and the buses that go everywhere.

  Mom pulls me close and I feel her dry hands smoothing my hair. “There are things she would like and things she would not like,” Mom says. “Just like in China. There were things that you liked and things that you didn’t like, right?”

  “I didn’t like the toilets because they were only holes in the ground,” I say. “But I liked riding the bus everywhere.”

  “When I first came to the U.S., I thought the food tasted funny,” Mom says.

  “What did you like?”

  “The way everyone stops at red lights. The drivers in China don’t pay attention to the rules.” I can feel mom’s shoulder against mine.