The Year of the Book Read online

  The elevator doors open and there is Mr. Shepherd. “Knew I’d beat you,” he says. “The other elevator’s faster.” He reaches into his pocket. “There’s something I thought you ought to have, Anna.” He hands me a small metal box. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to open it right there in the elevator.

  “Go ahead,” he says, holding the elevator door open with his wheelchair.

  Inside is a set of miniature watercolors and a tiny brush.

  “She used to carry it wherever we went.” Mr. Shepherd is holding tight to the armrests. “In case there was something that caught her eye.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want—”

  He opens his mouth, but his voice won’t come out.

  “Thank you,” I whisper.

  On the bus, Mom takes out her anatomy book to study for her test tomorrow. I open the watercolors and touch the small circles of red, blue, and yellow. Mrs. Shepherd used to give us seeds to plant. She made us her famous peach pies. But I never knew she was a painter.

  “I’ll come back with you next Saturday,” I tell Mom. I’m not sure if she hears me or not. She is concentrating on a picture of the human body in her anatomy book and moving her lips to pronounce the words.

  Three

  Chinese School

  Mom is learning how to drive so she is in the driver’s seat and Dad sits next to her. “Speed up,” he says. “You don’t want all the other cars to pass you.”

  “It’s okay. They can pass,” Mom says, trying to move the car over. It feels like we’re about to hit the curb.

  “Be careful,” Dad says, as Mom swerves around a pothole.

  Mom already failed the driver’s test once. She said the tester was unfriendly. He even kicked the door closed with his foot. Dad said she should have complained, but Mom said that if the supervisor got mad, she’d never be able to pass the test. “I’ll keep practicing,” she said. “Then there will be no way I can fail.”

  Mom hits the brake too hard at the red light and the car jerks.

  “You should look farther ahead,” Dad says.

  I am starting to feel carsick. Finally we turn in to the driveway of the church that lets us use the basement for Chinese school. Me and Ken and Mom get out, and Dad slides over into the driver’s seat.

  A group of kids is playing tag. Auntie Linda sees us. "Ni hao,” she says, coming over and patting me and Ken on our heads. She’s not really our aunt. We call all my mom’s friends aunties. Auntie Linda says something about how beautiful Mom’s dress is. It’s the one from Mr. Shepherd, Mom explains. I know because I hear her say his name in English. Auntie Susan joins the conversation. After that I can’t understand what they are talking about. I wish I could because they are nodding and listening so hard to Mom’s story. She lifts her leg and her arms. Auntie Linda and Auntie Susan look at me and smile. Mom must be telling them how Mr. Shepherd fell down and we hoisted him back into his wheelchair.

  “Hey, Ken,” a boy named Ryan says, tapping Ken on the shoulder. They go over and join two other boys. A group of girls is talking by the door. Auntie Linda says, “Anna, see the girl in the green skirt? That is my daughter, Camille.”

  I nod.

  “Camille,” Auntie Linda shouts. Then she says something to her daughter in Chinese. Camille looks at me and waves. Her face looks friendly, but I don’t know her so I’m afraid to go over to the group. Instead I open my book and read standing up.

  A bell rings and we all go into one big room.

  Teacher Zhen puts a Chinese ' character on the board.

  She starts talking about it in Chinese, and I have no idea what she’s saying. The other kids are taking out their notebooks and copying down the character. They already speak Chinese, so now they are learning to read and write. But I can only say a few things like ni hao for hello and xie xie for thank you. Dad always tells Mom to speak to us in Chinese, but she doesn’t because we don’t know what she’s talking about.

  I take out my notebook and write Anna Wang on the top. Then I copy the character off the board. Two lines across and two down, one long and one short. Tian. The teacher points to the character and counts to four: yi, er, san, si. She is counting the lines. But what good is it to learn how to make a character if you have no idea what it means? “What’s it mean?” I whisper to the girl next to me.

  “Shhh,” she says.

  I’m almost done with My Side of the Mountain but I don’t like this last part. Sam’s family is going to find him and he’ll have to go back and lead a normal boring life. I try to think of another way that the story could go. He could never be found and just keep on living in the woods by himself, but that’s unrealistic. His family would keep looking for him until they found him.

  Or he could be attacked by a bear or he could freeze to death, but those are endings that don’t usually happen in kid’s books. Adult books are probably different because they don’t worry about terrible endings.

  “Gei wo" The teacher is standing over me. Her voice is loud and I have no idea what she is saying. She has her hand out but I don’t know what she wants. The girl next to me points to my book. “Give it to her,” she whispers.

  “My book?”

  She nods.

  But it’s a library book, and if I don’t return it on time, we’ll have to pay a fine and Mom will be mad. Plus, even though I can predict the ending, I still want to read it.

  Teacher Zhen is waiting. I close the book and hand it to her.

  Next we listen to a rap song in Chinese. Some of the kids already know it and say the words with the rapper. I like the way it sounds but I don’t know what it’s about.

  I stare at the cracks on the wall. One looks like the map of a river with a thick part in the middle and smaller tributaries branching out. Another looks like the profile of a person’s face with a big nose sticking out. Laura and her brothers have upturned noses like that, but my nose is small and flat. Once a boy in my class called me a Chinese flat face and I called him a big-nosed moose.

  At eleven thirty a bell rings again and Chinese class is finally over. Camille stands next to me. “I didn’t understand that song—did you?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “I don’t speak Chinese.”

  “I speak some, but that song is too fast.”

  “I don’t speak any,” I say. “Neither does my dad.” “ABC?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “American-born Chinese?”

  I nod.

  Mom has been talking to her friends the whole time. Her face looks happy and young. She never looks that way when she comes to pick me up at regular school because she is worried that maybe she won’t understand every little thing. But at Chinese school she has so many friends.

  Ryan asks Ken if he can come over for the afternoon. Mom knows his mom. She says that would be fine. Nobody asks me if I can go anywhere.

  “Teacher Zhen took my book,” I say.

  Mom pulls her eyebrows together. “Why is that?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know what she’s talking about anyway.”

  “How can you learn Chinese if you don’t listen?”

  Mom goes into the classroom to talk to the teacher. They keep looking over at me. I bet Teacher Zhen is telling Mom that I am a naughty girl who doesn’t pay attention.

  When Mom comes back, she hands me my book. “Teacher Zhen is very kind to give you another chance.”

  “I don’t want another chance,” I say. “I don’t want to go to Chinese school anymore.”

  “Then what will you do when we go to China?” she asks.

  “Dad manages and he doesn’t know Chinese.”

  “And that is very difficult for him. A Chinese face but no Chinese words is not easy.”

  “He could learn if he wanted.”

  Mom shakes her head. “A language is hard to learn when you are old, but when you are young, it is easy.”

  “Then why didn’t you teach us?” I ask. “You could have been perseverant.”

  Mo
m looks around, hoping that none of her friends hears the way I am talking to my mother. She steps away from me like I am not her daughter.

  Dad pulls up to the curb and scoots over so Mom can sit in the driver’s seat. She waits until all the other cars are gone before she pulls out of the parking lot.

  “Speed up a little,” Dad says once we are on the road. “If you go under the speed limit, the other drivers get irritated.”

  Mom pushes on the gas pedal and the car lurches forward, making my stomach turn.

  Mom doesn’t say anything to me during lunch. She doesn’t ask me if I want more noodles or milk to drink. After we are done eating, Dad goes to work and Mom makes herself flashcards for every single bone in the human body with the word on one side and the definition on the other. She has to have them all memorized before the test. I know that when she was a girl, she had to memorize Chinese characters every day, so she is used to making flashcards.

  The phone rings. It’s Laura asking if I can come over. I bet she called Allison and Lucy first, and then when they couldn’t play, she asked me.

  “I can’t,” I say. “I’m busy now.”

  “What are you doing?”

  I have to think of something fast. “Studying my Chinese,” I say. “I have a lot of characters to memorize.”

  “Characters?”

  “They’re like words.”

  “So you can’t come?’

  “No.”

  “Call me when you’re done.”

  “Okay,” I say, even though I know I won’t.

  When I hang up, I take some file cards and start copying characters out of the Chinese book.

  “You were not friendly to Laura on the phone,” Mom says.

  “She’s not friendly to me either,” I say.

  “You shouldn’t lie,” Mom says.

  “I didn’t. I am practicing my characters.”

  “I thought you don’t want to learn Chinese.”

  “I changed my mind,” I mumble.

  “You have to do the strokes in the right order,” Mom says, showing me on one of her flashcards.

  “I think it looks okay,” I say.

  “You think you know everything.” Then Mom mumbles something in Chinese.

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  “Impossible to translate,” Mom says, turning back to her anatomy book.

  Suddenly I really want to know Chinese.

  I take the file cards and the Chinese book into my room. Mom is right. I wasn’t friendly to Laura. But-Mom doesn’t see her at school, following Allison around like a puppy.

  The phone rings and I hear Mom speaking Chinese so it must be Auntie Linda or Auntie Susan. She says my name and I know she is telling her friend what a terrible daughter I am. Tears come to my eyes.

  I sit at my desk and look out the window. The leaves of the gingko tree across the street have turned yellow. I could write Mom a note and tell her I’m sorry, but I don’t know what exactly I am sorry for. Instead I draw a picture of the gingko tree with the Jacksons’ house behind it. I get a cup of water from the bathroom and use the small paintbrush to fill in my pencil lines with paint.

  Next to the metal watercolor tin is the Chinese book. I wonder if the glossary has the word for “sorry.” I look through the alphabet until I get to the's’s. There it is: sorry, dui bu qi, followed by three characters.

  I don’t know what order to make the strokes in, but I copy the characters as well as I can onto the bottom of the paper. Then I go into Mom and Dad’s room and set the picture on their bed.

  Four

  Science

  On my way to school in the morning, there is a huge rainbow arching across the sky. I’ve seen little rainbows after it rains, but never one like this. And then I see that it is actually double. The second arch is faint but you can still see the colors. I hurry down the hill ahead of Ken.

  “I’ve seen plenty of rainbows in my life,” Ray says, “but I’d say this one is the most magnificent.”

  “It’s double,” I say.

  Ray takes off his glasses. “You’re right, Anna,” he says. “I wonder what makes that happen.” He smiles. “Could it be double raindrops?”

  I know that water breaks the light into colors, but I have no idea why. We watch until the rainbow fades. “How many more minutes, Ray?” I ask.

  He looks at his watch. “You got about eight minutes today.”

  I see Allison coming down the hill. She has on a short skirt with a jacket that’s made out of the same material. When she gets to the curb Ray asks her if she saw the rainbow.

  Allison shakes her head. “Nope,” she says. Then she sees Lucy. “I like your sweater.”

  “I like your jacket,” Lucy says.

  Ray looks at me. “Too bad you can’t keep a rainbow in your lunch bag,” he says, moving into the intersection so we can cross.

  Too bad I can’t stay with you instead of going to school, I want to say. Too bad we can’t go to the library and find out what causes rainbows—single, double, or triple.

  Ken joins his friends on the field. I walk over to the fourth grade girls. Laura is jumping rope and counting in Spanish. “I can count in French and German,” Ashley says.

  “I can say hello, like bonjour,” Lucy says. She curtsies and nods her head like a French schoolgirl. Then she giggles. “Do you know what Je t’aime means?”

  We shake our heads.

  “I don’t know if I should tell you.” She looks around. “It means ‘I love you.’”

  The way Lucy talks makes me blush. “Hey, Anna, can you speak Japanese?” Allison asks.

  “Chinese,” I say.

  “I mean Chinese?”

  “A little,” I say.

  “Say something.”

  I think fast. “Xie xie means ‘thank you,’” I say.

  Allison tries to say xie xie, but it comes out sounding like shee shee instead of shieh shieh. She turns to Lucy. “Shee shee for letting me borrow your yellow sweater.”

  “How do you say ‘you’re welcome’?” Lucy asks.

  I have no idea. “They don’t say ‘you’re welcome’ in Chinese,” I say.

  “Weird,” Lucy says.

  Soon lots of girls are saying shee shee for this and for that. What they don’t know is that in Chinese, shee shee means you have to pee.

  Laura drops the jump rope. “Did I tell you that I’m taking Irish dance classes?” Then she shows us the new dance she’s learning, where you put your hand on your hip and spin around with a partner, who is Allison.

  Finally the bell rings.

  We go to Mr. Schmitz’s room for science. There is a bathtub full of pillows in the back of the room where you can read when you’re done with your work, but first we have to gather data. The data is observations about different bird nests that are out on the shelf. We have to write our observations in the columns on the worksheet.

  “I bet this one is a blue jay’s nest,” Laura says. “And this one is a cardinal’s.”

  Allison nods.

  “This one is for a sparrow,” Tony says.

  How do they all know stuff like that? I have no idea what kind of bird makes what kind of nest. Anyway, those are not observations. Those are conclusions and Mr. Schmitz didn’t say to conclude anything. Observe means to look closely, Mr. Schmitz says.

  I see a pill bug on nest A, so I write that. And there is a small blue piece of paper stuck in the nest that might be from a candy wrapper. Nest B is falling apart on one side. As soon as I finish writing in the columns, I can turn in my paper and read in the bathtub.

  I bend over to smell the nests. They all smell the same, like mud and grass. I write that across all the columns because there’s no reason to write it over again five times.

  “What are you doing?” Allison asks when she sees my big printing.

  “They all smell the same,” I say.

  “Weird,” she says.

  I don’t know if she means the smell or the writing or me.
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  My worksheet is getting messy because I’m in a hurry. I want to throw my paper away and start over with a fresh one, but then I’ll never have time to read in the bathtub.

  Laura is drawing little pictures in each column. Everything is labeled very neatly. Allison’s columns are full, too. She sees me looking at her paper and covers it with her arm.

  I don’t want to copy and I’ve done enough observing. Mr. Schmitz has some picture books that I remember from when I was little, like about Alexander’s terrible day, so I get into the bathtub and read that one. Then I pick up a thick book with a picture on the cover of a girl who looks about twelve and a boy who looks about ten. I read the jacket. The kids are stuck in a museum overnight. It sounds good so I lie down in the bathtub and open the book. I like the way it starts. The older sister is annoyed at her brother but you can tell she really likes him.

  “Spacey Anna,” Lucy says.

  “Book girl,” somebody whispers.

  Everyone is looking at me. They are lined up by the door, ready to go. I climb out of the bathtub but my foot gets stuck on one of the pillows and I fall forward. Luckily I put my hands down so I don’t really hurt myself, but my feet are tangled and the books are all over the place. Somehow I get up and make myway to Ms. Simmons’s classroom. Then I realize I still have Mr. Schmitz’s book and I forgot to ask him if I could borrow it. I’ll go back later to ask, but for now I have the book to read. These two kids find all this money in a fountain in the museum, and they start filling their pockets with it. That’s not really stealing because the people left it there, but it sort of is because they didn’t mean for it to go to these two kids.

  “Are you all right?” someone asks.

  I look up. Laura has her head next to mine. I don’t know what she’s talking about because I am in my book world. “What?”