Chapter 2: Other Children

1994 was the year I went to preschool and learned about other children. I was always a sickly child and my parents had always kept a sum of money saved in case I had a medical emergency. However, to my dad’s surprise my emergency room trip was paid for by a local charity, and my parents began to understand one of the nice things about America at the time were resources that lower income families could afford. So they found a free preschool I could attend nearby, at the corner of a baseball field called Moor Field near Sixth and Valley.

The preschool was built in one of those temporary, portable classrooms common in public schools that would often get used far longer than intended. I remember enjoying the way the floor seemed to echo and bounce as I stomped around. The small building had an even smaller little fenced off play area where children could run around and enjoy recess. The school year must have already begun on my first day because I remember being led in and the other children already looked pretty settled in. Everyone was having breakfast, which seemed to be cereal, Eggo waffles, and those little paper Dixie cups that the teachers poured milk or fruit punch into. I understood this because that day I learned my first English word.

The teacher was a rather large bosomed, sweet faced Hispanic woman and she must have had experience with immigrant children because it seemed to take her all of a few minutes to see that I could not understand her. So she led me by the hand to the nearest table and sat me down, getting me some food onto a paper plate. Slowly she formed the word with her mouth and had me repeat it back to her. Wah full. Waffle. The first syllable sounded warm and friendly as it made me open my mouth wide and I giggled to myself as I pressed my lips together to make the second syllable, which felt like a funny sound to make from a mouth that was more accustomed to Chinese words.

In hindsight, breakfast probably lasted no longer than half an hour, but to my child self, it must have felt like an eternity because I was fascinated, completely engrossed in looking at shape of this new food that had the little boxes that held maple syrup and the little cinnamon sugar crystals that teacher had sprinkled on for me. I stared for quite a while, taking in this texture and the way the syrup moved around in the square from side to side as I tipped my plate left to right. Chinese breakfasts are not commonly sweet and even our sweets were nowhere near as sugary as maple syrup. At that point my parents did not often buy me candy or soda either as they worked too hard to be able to spend frivolously at that point. Cinnamon, too, was a foreign flavor to me. It tasted slightly bitter yet sweet and I wanted to go home and tell my mom all about this weird taste but I had no words for it.

For much of the day, the teacher gave us crayons to color with and sheets of paper with outlines of familiar cartoon characters on it. I tried my best to get good at coloring. The problem was, I did not really  understand that you were supposed to stay inside the lines when coloring, and also use the “correct” colors for everything. Also, at that point I had never seen a full set of crayons before. We had one or two crayons or markers at home, but never like what I saw on the table that day, boxes of pristine looking yellow Crayola brand sets with every single color of the rainbow. Even then, I thought some of the colorings made by other children who knew how to color looked really good. But I was too excited to see a full box of crayons. I grabbed a handful of five or six crayons, because I wanted to use all the colors at once. Predictably, it did not look good. After class I showed my mom the drawings and she said if I slowed down a little I could make it look nicer and pointed to one of the better drawings.

Preschool was also my first experience playing with other children. In that little fenced off playground there were balls, soft plastic play equipment, and best of all, tricycles. Little did I know that first day that the tricycle would become my favorite thing to play with over the coming months, though my first time riding one I was quickly pushed off of it by a kid named Frank. In retrospect, I don’t think he was a bully, but probably just a very demanding child. But at that age I’ve only ever met adults who tried their best to take care of me so this was a very jarring feeling. Frank was dark skinned, had a short crewcut, and I noticed he liked to walk with his chest out and his arms held stiffly to his sides. Even his name sounded tough and aggressive. It was short and had a hard consonant sound. I was hurt but also fascinated in wondering why someone would want to be mean or fight all the time. It would be a question I ask all my life.

Outside of school, my interactions with other children were more pleasant. By then we had been staying at our fourth street apartment for a few months. The complex was shaped like a square figure eight and our family stayed at number four on the left side of the square closer to the main gate. All the apartments faced toward the center where there was a big courtyard and a grassy area with two palm trees in the center. Across the courtyard was another family. The father was a short man with very large glasses and a kind smile. Their son was a year older than me and showed me all the best hiding places and caught bugs for me to look at. We became good friends even though I told him I thought his name sounded funny. Liwei meant strong and great. But with his last name Hu, his full name sounded like "a fox tail". He spoke Chinese with a kind of a hillbilly accent and told me his family was from Yangzhou and they’ve seen the countryside where the sun was hot and the fields were big. Liwei  would often share his toys with me and our parents eventually traded VHS tapes of Journey To The West for us to watch, though I must have seen the earlier episodes fifty times where Sun Wukong gets stuck under the mountain and tried to ask if I could borrow the later episodes where he was a hero instead.

Every afternoon we played together in the yard at the center of the complex, riding our bikes often over the little dirt hill between the twin palm trees in the center. One time when our parents weren’t looking, Liwei sat me in one of those tiny plastic fisher price cars where there was no floor and open at the bottom and you could "drive" by paddling your feet on the ground. Instead, Liwei put my feet up on the dashboard of the car and pushed from behind as fast as he could. It felt like flying and I laughed and laughed until our car hit a bush and my feet got stuck for a bit. Another time we got a couple of sticks and dug a hole in the dirt, digging further and further until we disturbed an anthill. I stuck my foot in and got bit painfully, crying and running home telling my grandfather who boiled a pot of water and poured it down the hole, exterminating the colony. 

One day Donna and Edward showed up and my grandmother told me they were to be my new friends. I learned when I was older that, always looking for more sources of income, my mom put an ad in the newspaper that she can be a nanny, and a busy Taiwanese couple who had just started a business responded. But I didn't know that then, I just thought friends simply appeared and life was beautiful because you will always have friends. Edward was just a baby and my grandmother spent the day cradling him in her arms and feeding him milk in a bottle and Donna was my age. She loved a treat called donut and that's why she liked her name because it sounded like donut, she told me. I loved to play with Donna because she got to watch all the coolest cartoons and told me about them, often bringing over her Disney VHS tapes so we could see them together. We watched Land Before Time and went outside to see if a leaf would be as tasty as it looked when a baby dinosaur chewed on one, though my grandmother stopped us when she saw what we were trying to do. Donna was my first female friend, which I didn’t think much of until Liwei told me he thought it was funny I was playing with a girl because I had taken off the “warrior” arm bracers he made me out of his father’s office papers when Donna came over. I guess that might have been why I played with both of them separately but never together.

That year my dad worked at a local Panda Express as a manager, often coming home with fortune cookies for me in his pockets. To this day I have a soft spot for Panda Express even though relatives from the mainland told me it wasn't "real" Chinese. I've always resented hearing that. Because to me, Chinese culture isn’t a fixed place. It’s what happens wherever Chinese people are, working, eating, raising children.”

My mom would often take me to a local park to wait for him to finish work and at night we would walk the three of us hand in hand through the Alhambra golf course, the lights in the driving range shimmering and the crickets chirping gently. I would often try to do a pull-up while holding onto both their arms, though they didn’t quite like it. Oftentimes I would fall asleep and my mom would carry me as we walked home. As a child I wished everything would always stay the same, but I would learn very soon that life is change and change is not always good.