kneel here before the gods and the thought of what I am about to do stings my eyes like incense.
I can already hear the protest from Pearl’s ballet teachers – “you can’t do this, she is an extraordinary talent.” The gods give with one hand and take with the other, I
5 think, and then, ashamed, immediately touch my forehead to the ground before the triple Buddhas. The gods must forgive my lack of insight. But how could those teachers understand that we had originally allowed Pearl to dance only because we had no place else to put her? Her father and I spent our waking hours at the factory in Chinatown. Pearl was too young, or so I argued, to breathe in that clogged air, thick with fabric dust
10 that clung to our skin like a veil, turning even our sweat the colour of the garments we worked on. And somehow the consequences of that initial instinct to protect her have branched out through the years, sprouting and twisting, to arrive at this moment.
I suppose I spoiled her but she is my only girl. And she seemed so tiny when we first came to America, bundled into her red sweater and sent off to second grade alone. [...]
15 In the beginning, we tried to leave her alone at home after school. I had no one in this country, relative or neighbour, to look after her and we could not spare a moment from the work at the factory. It’s only for a few hours, I told myself, and she knows not to play with the stove and such, but I could not stand coming home to see her little face in the window of the dark apartment. “I count the headlights passing until you come home,”
20 she said. “Today there were twenty-eight. And when you don’t come fast, I beat on Fat Boy until you come.” Fat Boy was the stuffed dog her father had given her, one of the few toys we’d brought for her from China. [...] After that, I brought her to the factory with us.
Ah, Amitabha, Buddha of great compassion, I whisper, help her to understand that all 25 I have done, I have done because it was the only choice I had.
There were other children at the factory, of course, faces shining from the heat of the steam presses, heads already bowed by necessity and want. These were children who would grow up to wait tables in an uncle’s restaurant, perhaps, or to be a fishmonger, sanding scales off carp day after day. When I looked upon Pearl at the factory, idly
30 playing with a few spools the seamstresses had laid aside, it was as if I saw her entire
life pulled taut before her like thread – her thin fingers worn callused and red by years of sewing in the factory, then, if she was lucky, marriage to some office clerk, a pack of children, and finally, Pearl the woman submerged under the struggle to feed and clothe them all. I constantly entertained hopes of Pearl’s escape from the factory – if only we
35 could afford a tutor for her, I thought, or a babysitter.
Even when she slowly, awkwardly, began to make friends and her classmates would occasionally ask her to play at their houses, we couldn’t allow her to go. I understood nothing of these people who did not bow to our gods and ate with sharp knives at the table. Furthermore, we would have to invite them to visit in return; how could I serve
40 tea with coconut slivers and sugared lotus roots in our stained apartment? “Our home is beautiful, Mama,” Pearl would say, “look at the dances the sun does in the window” but she was too little to care about the floor strewn with the mattresses we slept on, the scraps we’d brought home from the factory to cover the worn table. [...]
So it seemed a blessing when a ballet school came to give a special lesson for her
45 third grade class and plucked Pearl out to be one of their scholarship students. Now she would have a place to go after school, at least for a few afternoons a week. [...] When we first came to the United States, Pearl had seemed so conspicuous in her foreignness: her shock of black hair and tawny skin in a classroom of pale freckled children. Even in China, she’d been an intense, quiet child, but here, she seemed to edge 50 ever further inward. Gone were the rare, glad moments of laughter, Pearl twinkling up the stairs with quick light steps, suddenly erupting into a handful of cartwheels across the floor. [...]
And I, I was able to give her so little of myself, with the factory all day and the sewing I brought home at night, the demands constantly upon me – for rice, for clean 55 trousers, for a pair of ears to listen. Why it should be that those who demand are the ones who receive, I do not know, but so it was with us. Even though Pearl would tug at my skirt beside every hot dog cart we passed in the street, never daring to ask but yearning with her eyes, I could count on the fingers of my left hand the number of times
I actually bought one for her. [...]
60 After Pearl began to take classes at the ballet school as one of their honoured scholarship students, she became suddenly popular. Mothers who had only glanced at me to look over my simple clothes were now eager to smile as they passed us. People began to tell me what a lovely child Pearl was and how beautiful a woman she would grow up to be. But how could I trust people such as this? Perhaps they place the tall hat 65 of flattery on your head while they’re actually laughing when you turn your face away. This is wisdom my mother passed on to me and this is what I said to Pearl when she, blushing, would translate their words.
Although I didn’t have to pay a dime for her dance classes, it was a great expense to pay so much for a pair of leather ballet shoes and the one set of leotard and tights, which
70 Pearl washed every night in the yellowed bathroom sink. When her father objected, I reminded him Pearl’s teacher in the regular school had told us that dancing would help her get into university later on. Now, I myself do not understand how that could be, but who am I to argue with the teacher?