“This is Greek test-oil and water, the water has floated to the top,” Ma says in her storytelling voice. “Mei Shie says that someone has put a curse on you.”

Then they are jabbering away in Chinese again, and Mei Shie gives my mother several little plastic bags. On the train ride home Ma closes her eyes and starts to snore. I take one of the plastic bags out of her carryall and examine the rust-colored powder. I know what it is even before I ask, later, at home—it’s dried blood. I don’t know how I know this. Ma will boil it in water for me to sip from a mug. It will turn my breath and sweat bitter so that the kids at school will say pee-yeww! and no one will want to stand next to me in line.

The first night I take the potion I can still taste it in my mouth after I brush my teeth. In bed I fall asleep instantly, before my sister even, because the last thing I remember is her voice in the dark.

It works. Monkey King never comes to my bed again.

12

Downstairs my parents are fighting in Chinese but the different way they talk makes it sound as if they’re speaking different languages. Ma is fast, slippery, slurry. Daddy is choppy and whiny like a baby. Marty and I listen from our bedroom. She is six and I am seven. My sister claims she understands.

“No way,” I say.

“He’s saying he never had a father, so he doesn’t know how to behave.”

This is what he says to Ma after he spanks us, which he has been doing a lot lately. We are evil girls. Marty talks back and gets into fights. My trouble is what I don’t do, like going up to my room before helping Ma with the dinner dishes. Plus my sister and I are both stupid in school, Bs instead of As, Marty worse than me because she never does her homework.

Ma scolds Daddy. “Bad for character,” she says in English. “My father hit me and it didn’t make me study more.”

No matter how hard our father hits us, though, he can’t make us cry. I can tell by his face just how much he hates that I can get to my feet, pull my skirt down, and walk upstairs like nothing happened. Marty used to cry, but I have taught her not to. Now my sister and I show each other our bruises and agree that he is a weakling.

I know what they are fighting about now. My hair. Ma wants to cut it, Daddy says no.

My father’s voice gets higher, louder, filling my head no matter how hard I press my palms against my ears. He is cursing in Chinese, peasant curses. Marty and I call it his murder voice.

Ma’s voice stays low and cool, like he could shout all night and she wouldn’t care. Still, Daddy will win the argument, like he always does. I will have two long braids until I die.

Our parents teach Chinese to Yale students but not to us, so although we understand a little we can’t speak it. For a couple of months we have to take lessons on Saturday mornings in the living room behind the Sung Trading Company. Aunty Lilah—she and Uncle Frank own the store—is our teacher. She holds up cards with magazine pictures pasted on them: chair, table, cat. Yizhi, zhuozi, mau.

After our lesson we go out to the store to wait for Ma. We are supposed to be nice to Mimi Sung, who is our age, but I can never think of a thing to say to that round, beaming face behind the cash register.

“Ah, how’s it going?”

“Just fine, thank you,” she replies in her prissy way. She’s a whiz at making change, can practically figure out what Ma is going to give her before she opens her purse. I watch her plump little hands riffle confidently through the stacks of bills, scoop the coins out of the cash drawer without her having to look down.

“Such a pleasant girl,” Ma says in the car. “So helpful to her parents.”

But the Oriental kid we really hate is Xiao Lu, who is the reason we get into trouble and can’t play with the Katzes for an entire year.

Xiao Lu’s father is a math professor, his mother stays at home and does nothing. “Very old world,” Ma says. When he was little that strange mother let his hair grow long and put him in dresses to fool the gods into thinking he was a girl so they wouldn’t steal him. He’s skinny and yellow-colored because he’s rarely allowed to play outdoors.

Marty and I call him Pointy Head and Flat Face.

“He looks like he was run over by a truck.”

“How can he even see out of those eyes?”

When he really gets on our nerves we call him Girl.

“Get the ball, Girl.”

“Bring us some lemonade, Girl.”

At the dinner table Aunty Winnie says something to him in Chinese, like “Go do your homework,” and he obeys instantly, ducking his head and clambering down from his chair.

Our parents can’t tame us. Once a month we drive into New York City to have dinner in Chinatown, where the narrow, winding streets are jammed with short people and funny smells and whose stores I try not to look into when we pass, for fear of seeing pressed duck like hanged men in the window. “Shanghai much worse,” Ma assures us. In the restaurant Daddy speaks in Mandarin, stroking characters on his napkin with his Parker fountain pen when the waiter doesn’t understand. But the language on the street is Cantonese, where people sound like they’re fighting, even when they’re not. In the car on the way home my sister and I imitate it, breaking ourselves up. “LO LEE LO GOO,” I shout, exaggerating the up and down tones. “GUM GO JEE WOK NA NA NA,” Marty gasps back.

“They don’t study in Chinese class, so what is this?” Ma asks Daddy.

But we never get scolded: my parents are in too good a mood after going to Chinatown. Daddy has a pile of Chinese newspapers to read in his armchair after dinner, and Ma has stocked up on her movie-star magazines.

It’s Chinese New Year and we are going to be on TV. The kids—Mimi, Xiao Lu, Marty, and I—plus the crew, are crammed into the tiny living room behind the Sung Trading Company where we have Chinese lessons. Our parents are outside in the shop—I can hear them gabbing to each other in Chinese.

We are going to perform the Dragon Dance. The dragon looks like the one we saw in the Chinese New Year parade in Chinatown—an enormous wooden head painted mostly green and red and bulging golden eyes without pupils. It has a mane I like a lion’s, although it doesn’t look like a lion because the head is square. The body is made of cloth, long, with multicolored scales. One kid will get to put on the head and wag it I around ferociously; two more will prance behind, draped in the body. One will be the teaser, who stands in front of the dragon and beckons it to chase them.

“I want to be the teaser,” Marty announces. Because we are going to be on TV my sister is wearing her red pullover sweater and red-and-blue-plaid pedal pushers.

The man in charge frowns at her.

The other TV person, a woman, says to the man, “She really is a beautiful child.”

“Too short,” he says. “We need her for the tail.”

Mimi’s just smiling in her silly way, like the big-headed wooden dolls they have in the window of the store, and of course Xiao Lu doesn’t say a word. I know his mother is standing right outside; from time to time I hear the curtain of wooden beads clicking as Aunty Winnie peeks in.

The way it ends up is this: I am the teaser, Xiao Lu the head, Mimi the front of the body, my sister the back.

The TV man yells, “Ready!” and Uncle Frank, Mimi’s father, comes in with his giant tape recorder. He switches it on: bong! bong! bong! Chinese cymbals and some other kind of high-pitched boingy instruments. It sounds as bad as the Cantonese ladies arguing in Chinatown.

“Okay, tease the dragon, honey,” the woman tells me, and I hear the camera start to whir.

I begin to walk backward, staring into the glaring golden eyes, reminding myself that it’s only old Flat Face behind them. I insert my thumbs into my ears and wiggle my fingers.