I can’t look at him. But he is not paying attention to me. “Not good manners,” he scolds Marty, who has climbed on top of an ottoman and is pulling up the leg of her shorts to show Ma a scab.

My mother makes a big fuss over Nai-nai, making her sit down, bringing her a new cup of tea, although the one she has is still hot. Our grandmother gets her present first, a small package all wrapped up in white tissue paper. It contains what looks like several enormous pieces of gingerroot.

“Life-giving force,” Daddy says grandly.

Nai-nai nods in a dignified way.

“You make tea with this, you feel strong,” my mother explains to us.

My sister and I each receive a fine gold chain with a pendant made of a stone covered in gold filigree to resemble an animal: Marty’s is an amber butterfly, mine a jade turtle. In addition, Marty is given a long slender box with Chinese characters on it which turns out to contain a wooden flute. She immediately starts puffing, but only a tortured rasp emerges. Ma demonstrates how to hold it, spreading my sister’s small fingers over the holes, showing her how to make her lips into a kiss and direct a tight stream of air across the mouthpiece. She still can’t get the hang of it.

The flute should have gone to me. I know I could play it.

My other present is a carved wooden horse just about the size of my hand, dark and smooth and long-legged with bulging eyes and bared teeth. Holding it up to the light, I see how the artist has let the grain of the wood suggest the curved muscles of the horse’s shoulders and flanks.

“Your daddy pick this out,” my mother says. “Extra special, for your birthday.”

“Antique,” my father adds, the first word he’s spoken directly to me.

I don’t dare look up, even though what I want to do is give it back, tell them that I hate it. But that would make me seem spoiled, and Nai-nai is sitting across the room beaming.

I don’t thank Daddy though. And in the commotion of Marty trying to learn to play the flute, no one seems to notice.

Later, in bed, when everyone else is asleep, after I have tucked Piggy in beside me, I reach under my pillow and take out the hairpin Nai-nai gave me. Even as a child, I know it’s a much finer jade than my turtle. The weight of it sits cold in the palm of my hand, and lying there in the dark, I think that it’s as cold as the ocean in Monterey where I swam with the seals. I can see their gray-blue bodies gleaming in the water above, through the fractured sunlight on the waves. Once in a while they brush up against me, sleek dark flesh, a caress as gentle and unthinking as a breath. I am not afraid. Under here, I can hold my breath forever, and the cold does not bother me.

11

It’s fall. I’ve just started third grade. After school it’s still light enough to play outside until dinner. When Daddy asks us if we’ve done our homework we lie and say we don’t have any yet.

There’s always someone to play with. Coram Drive is in a Catholic parish, St. Cecilia’s, and almost every house on the block has children. The Cuddys, two houses down from us, already have five, one right after the other, and their mother is always pregnant. In the summer the older ones sleep on the screened porch. All the names on the mailboxes are Irish and Italian till you get to the dead end, and there are the Wangs and the Katzes. Mr. Katz owns a bakery in Cheshire, a couple of towns over, and every dawn we hear his truck chugging out of the driveway. My father says that Jews are almost as smart as Chinese.

The Katz kids are our best friends in the neighborhood, although for a while my parents wouldn’t let us play with them because of what happened last year.

David Katz is two years older than me, the bully of the block. He’s big for his age, chunky, walks with a swagger. One Fourth of July he blew off the tip of his thumb with an M-80 and had to be rushed to the emergency room in his father’s truck. The thumb grew back like a golf club, which just made him scarier, and the way he wears his hair, in a marine-style crewcut, doesn’t help. My mother is the only parent on Coram Drive who is not afraid of him.

“David, how you ever going to find a wife, you have such bad manners? I know you have a heart of gold, but nobody else knows. Have another plum candy, it’s good for blood circulating.”

“Yes, Mrs. Wang,” David mumbles to my mother. I think in a weird way he likes her.

Darcy Katz is my age, lank-haired and freckled and as skinny as a rail. She does everything Marty and I tell her to, including peeing into a hole we dig under the swing set in our backyard. But no matter what she does, the skirts of her smocked flowered dresses stay perfect starched bells over her knobby knees. Although Darcy and I are in the same grade, I am in the A class and she is in C. Despite what my father says, Darcy is not very smart. She likes me because I draw pictures for her—horses, kittens, pretty white-girl faces with long lashes and pouty lips—and doesn’t even mind when I make a caricature of her father with a big white chef’s hat on. She has a giggle that starts shyly and then turns into an uncontrollable stream, like her peeing.

Our backyard has the swings, but the Katzes have a stagnant little pond that Darcy claims holds goldfish, although we’ve never seen any. Sometimes when the four of us are hanging out back there, the bad boys come up to the wire fence that separates the Katzes’ yard from the back lots, where they live. They holler at us, make machine-gun noises.

David screams: “Your mother eats shit!”

What I’m thinking is that it’s no sweat to be Jewish. Although they attend Hebrew school, unable to wheedle their parents out of it like Marty and I did with Chinese school, David and Darcy with their fair skin and freckles blend in with the other kids. Plus their parents speak perfect English.

We climb over the fence and swipe things from the bad boys’ backyards: a garden hose, crabapples, a new baseball glove left lying in the grass. Once we fill an old rice sack with rocks and throw them against someone’s double basement doors until a window flies open.

The bad boys get back at us by ripping a hole in the Katzes’ fence and pouring detergent into the goldfish pond. They run through our backyard, deliberately trampling the violet bed and Ma’s tomato plants. Daddy leans out the back door screeching: “I call your parents! I know who you are!”

“You old chink!” they yell, and run away, laughing their heads off. They know he’s chicken, that he’ll never carry out his threat.

On the refrigerator my father tapes up a page from a magazine that shows a sad-looking black boy leaning up against a brick wall. Underneath it says: “He hasn’t got a Chinaman’s chance.”

Daddy tells Marty and me: “That’s what Americans think of us. “

“We’re American,” I say.

“You are American citizen. In your heart you are a Chinese.”

I’m not listening. I’ve learned not to listen to my father. What I secretly know is that I am the most American kid I have ever met. In second grade when Mrs. Augustine has the whole class write down the Pledge of Allegiance from memory I’m the only one who gets every word correct. I pretend I am Natalie Wood in West Side Story. She is really American, my mother says, only playing the part of a foreigner.

But this doesn’t solve the problem of eyes. The bad boys, sometimes kids we don’t know at school, jump out at us, pulling the corners of their own eyes back toward their temples. “Ching chong Chinaman.”

Everyone loves Chinese hair. Mrs. Augustine tells my mother that she looks out over the second grade and sees the sun shining off my sister’s pixie. “Just like an angel, that one.”

Eyes are a different story. Of course the best type to have are round and as large as possible. Even Ma thinks so. By her bed she keeps stacks of Chinese magazines with movie stars, and they all have great big almond eyes, outlined in black, with fluttery lashes. Some Chinese people, like our Nai-nai, have naturally Western-looking eyes, with double eyelids, but most have a single lid, which makes the eye look flat and slanty. Daddy has a single lid, though his eyes are big. Even Ma, who was a beauty in Shanghai, has single lids. She tells us that in Japan they have an operation where they take skin off your thigh to give you double eyelids.