The Year of the Dog by Grace Lin
But I’m not really Chinese either. It’s kind of confusing. My parents came from Taiwan. Some people thought Taiwan was part of China. So then calling me Chinese was kind of correct. Other people thought Taiwan was a country all by itself, so then I should be called Taiwanese. It didn’t help that my parents spoke both Chinese and Taiwanese.
“So when people ask me what I am, what am I supposed to tell them?” I once asked Mom.
“You tell them that you’re American,” Mom told me firmly.
But my friends didn’t call me Chinese, Taiwanese, or American. They called me Grace, my American name.
One of my friends at school was Becky Williams. Becky was tall, with hair as brown as tree bark. At recess, I told her that it was the Chinese Year of the Dog, so we drew dogs on the ground with chalk. I taught Becky how to draw a dog just like the ones I drew for our New Year’s decorations.
“What does it mean when it’s the Year of the Dog?” Becky asked. “Does that mean Scruffy gets to boss me around? Maybe he’ll eat at the dinner table and I’ll have to eat on the floor.”
I laughed, but I didn’t know how to explain it.
“Chinese people give every year an animal sign,” I tried to explain. “You know how horoscopes use animals for some months? Well, for Chinese people it’s for every year.”
“When is it the Year of the Unicorn?” Becky asked. “I love unicorns.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think that there is a Year of the Unicorn.”
Becky looked really disappointed, so I tried to think of something.
“But maybe during leap year or something they have a Unicorn Day.”
“Really? What do they do on Unicorn Day?”
“Um,” I scrambled, because now I was completely lying, “they draw pictures of unicorns and hang them up. Sometimes there’s a parade.”
“Cool!” Becky said, excited. “Will you tell me when that day is? We can celebrate it.”
“Okay,” I said, but I hoped that by the time a leap year came she would forget all about it.
Like an alarm clock, the bell rang and we lined up to go into the cafeteria. It was spaghetti day! Yum! I loved spaghetti, even though I always thought it was strange that they served it with an ice cream scoop. The spaghetti always looked like tennis balls on my plate.
But when I went to take my plate, the lunch lady stopped me.
“Hey,” she said, “I just saw you. You already took a lunch. Everyone only gets one!”
“No!” I said. “I didn’t. This is my first time.”
“Yes, you did,” the lunch lady said. “You took spaghetti and french fries.”
“No,” I said, “I didn’t get anything.”
“Are you sure?” the lunch lady said. “I know it was you.”
“It wasn’t!” Becky said. “Honest.”
The lunch lady gave me a lunch, but I could tell she didn’t believe us. She kept shaking her head and looking at me suspiciously.
When we went to sit down, Becky nudged me.
“Look over there,” she said, pointing. “That’s why the lunch lady thought you already got your lunch.”
I looked where she was pointing and I saw a girl that looked Chinese, just like me! I hadn’t noticed her before because she had been all bundled up in a fuzzy scarf and hat. She was brand new. I couldn’t wait to meet her.
Chapter 6
A New Year, A New Friend
BECKY AND I SAT NEXT TO THE NEW GIRL. SHE smiled at me.
“Hello!” she said. “Are you Pacy?”
“How did you know?” I asked.
“My mother told me about you. My mother met your mother last week. Didn’t you know?” she said. “She said there would be another Asian girl in school.”
“Her name’s not Pacy,” Becky said, pointing at me, “it’s Grace.”
“Grace is my name at school,” I rushed to explain. “My mom calls me Pacy.”
The new girl frowned and looked a little confused but said, “Well, anyway, my name’s Melody Ling.”
“Ling!” Becky said. “That’s like Grace’s last name — Lin.”
Melody nodded. “Except it’s with a ‘G.’ L-I-N-G.”
We found out that Melody and I had a lot of things that were almost the same. While I had an older sister and a younger sister, she had an older brother and a younger brother. We both had long black hair, but she had bangs and I didn’t. We both played the violin, but I was in Suzuki Book 3 and she was in Suzuki Book 2. We both couldn’t write in Chinese, but she could speak it and I couldn’t. My birthday was May 17 and Melody’s birthday was July 17.
“You’re almost twins!” Becky said. “Lucky!”
“My mom must have forgotten to tell me about you,” I said. “Probably because it’s Chinese New Year.”
“Yeah,” Becky said, “it’s the Year of the Dog! Grace is going to tell me when it’s the Day of the Unicorn so we can celebrate that.”
“Day of the Unicorn?” Melody said. “There’s no Day of the Unicorn.”
“Yes, there is,” Becky said. “It’s during a leap year, and there’s a parade and we hang pictures. Grace said so.”
Melody looked at me and I felt myself turning red.
“I must have made a mistake,” I mumbled.
“Oooh,” Melody said, “that Day of the Unicorn. I forgot. My family doesn’t celebrate it, so I didn’t remember. But, you’re right, it’s a big festival.”
Melody grinned at me and I smiled back. I knew we were going to be good friends.
Chapter 7
Almost Twins
WHEN I CAME HOME FROM SCHOOL, I COULDN’T wait to tell Mom about Melody. But, of course, she already knew all about it. Mom told me how she had gone grocery shopping and was surprised to see another Asian woman doing the same thing. The woman was so happy to see another Asian person that she went up to Mom and introduced herself. Melody’s parents were from Taiwan, too! So we were both Taiwanese-American. Mom said she would take me over to see Melody’s new house.
It was fun going to Melody’s house. She had the best room. One whole wall of her room was a picture of jungle animals. There was a lion staring in the grass and monkeys climbing the trees. There was even a pink flamingo.
“How did you get your wall like that?” I asked, impressed.
“It came that way, “Melody said. “If you look close you can see that it’s a kind of wallpaper, not painted.”
I looked really closely and I could see a tiny line down the side. It was like a huge ceiling-to-floor poster. We tried to draw all the animals in Melody’s notebook. I couldn’t copy the lion very well, but Melody thought my elephant drawing was exactly like the one on the wall. Melody’s brothers, Benji and Felix, came in and drew, too. We drew Melody riding the giraffe and Felix swinging from a vine. Benji and Felix weren’t too bad, for boys.
After Benji drew himself feeding bananas to the monkeys, he said, “I’m hungry, let’s go get some real bananas.”
That’s when we realized we were all hungry, so we went downstairs to eat.
In my house, Mom always had cookies or chocolate or cheese and crackers in the cupboards. If we didn’t have those, there was always fruit in a can that I could eat, too. But Melody didn’t have any of those things. Mom told me Melody’s mother was very “nutritious.” So in her cupboards there were only plain rice cakes that tasted like paper. There were nuts that were still in the shells and didn’t have any salt on them. But there weren’t any bananas.
“Don’t you have any candy?” I asked.
“No,” Melody said, “but we have vitamins. They’re kind of sweet.”
So we opened the big jar of vitamins. There was a big letter C on them. They were thin and flat and tasted like oranges. They were pretty good. Not as good as candy, but still yummy. We all sat on the floor, eating vitamins.
Melody’s mother came into the room and was surprised to see us around the vitamin jar. She seemed a little upset with us. I didn’t know why; I
“What are you doing?” she said. “You shouldn’t be eating vitamins like that!”
“We were hungry,” Melody said.
“Well, it’s almost dinnertime,” she said. “I’ll make you something better to eat. Pacy, why don’t you call your mother and see if you can stay over here for dinner.”
I called Mom, and we went back to Melody’s room.
“My mom called you Pacy,” Melody said. “Your mom and your sisters called you that, too. But everyone at school calls you Grace. How come?”
“Oh, I have two names,” I told her, “an American name and a Chinese name.”
“Why don’t they just call you one of them?” Melody asked. “Don’t you get mixed up?”
“Well, “ I said, “it was like this…”
HOW MY NAME CHANGED FROM PACY TO GRACE
On my first day of school, the teacher asked me, “What is your name?”
Right away, I said, “Pacy Lin!”
But she looked at her roster and shook her head. She said, “No, no, no. You’re a big girl now; you don’t go by that name anymore. It says here your name is Grace.”
I didn’t understand, but I just nodded my head. I knew I shouldn’t tell the teacher she was wrong, but I kept thinking she had made a mistake. Maybe the teacher had me mixed up with another girl and I was supposed to be somewhere else. Maybe she was me and I was her. How could I find her?
On the bus ride home, I asked Lissy about it.
“Oh, those are our American names,” Lissy told me. “They call me Beatrice. Mom and Dad gave us American and Chinese names. I think the people at the hospital told them to when we were born.”
“Well, I want to be called Pacy,” I grumbled.
“Don’t be stupid,” Lissy said. “Pacy is too weird for everyone. They won’t know how to say it. If I used Lissy they’d ask, ‘Is that LEE-SHE or LI-SEE?’ And then they’d ask, ‘Why do Chinese people always have to have these weird names?’ Just let them call you Grace.”
I still wasn’t convinced. “People won’t know which one is really me, though.”
“Look,” Lissy said, “‘it’s like egg foo young. At home we call it foo yung don, but at the restaurants they call it egg foo young. So it’s easier for Americans to say. But it’s still the same egg pancake—you know what you’re eating when Mom gives it to you, don’t you? And you know what to order at the restaurant. It’s not that hard.”
“So now,” I finished, “everyone at school calls me by my American name and everyone at home calls me by my Chinese name.”
“Well,” Melody said, “I guess it’s kind of cool. It’s like a nickname. But do you want me to call you Pacy or Grace?”
I thought a moment. “I call myself both names,” I said, “and we’re almost twins. So, you can call me both, too.”
Chapter 8
Dinner at Melody’s
FELIX CAME INTO THE ROOM AND TOLD US DINNER was ready. I was glad because my stomach was grumbling. “What’s for dinner?” I asked.
“Chinese food, of course,” Felix said. “The same as your house, probably.”
When we got downstairs, I wasn’t surprised to see Melody’s mother opening her rice cooker. We had rice every day at our house, too. But Melody’s mother was scooping out big spoonfuls of BROWN rice. We never had brown rice at my house, only white rice.
And then on the table, the vegetables weren’t stir-fried and the tofu didn’t have any shiny sauce on it. Everything was plain and colorless and dry.
“Are you sure this is Chinese food?” I asked Melody.
Melody’s mother heard me.
“This is Chinese food cooked a healthy way,” she told me. “It’s very good for you. Try it, you’ll like it.”
I tried it, but I didn’t like it. To me, the rice was too crunchy and chewy and the vegetables and tofu were tasteless. Yuck! I looked at Melody, Benji, and Felix. How could they eat this?
But they didn’t seem to think it was that bad. They put everything in their mouths and swallowed it. I just kept pushing the rice from one side of my plate to the other.
“Aren’t you hungry?” Melody asked me.
“I thought I was,” I said to her, “but I guess not.”
Melody’s mother looked at me, worried. “I hope eating all those vitamins didn’t make you sick.”
Could a person get sick from eating too many healthy things? Maybe I was already so full of nutritious things from the vitamins that my body couldn’t take any more. Maybe that was why the dinner tasted so bad to me.
We had dried apricots for dessert. They looked like shriveled orange mushrooms. I only had one. By that time, I was convinced it was because my body couldn’t fit in any more nutrition, but Melody’s mother worried that it was something else. She called Mom and talked to her for a long time in Taiwanese.
Mom came over and picked me up right away. She put her hand on my head and said that I felt okay, but she’d bring me home just in case.
In the car she said, “It’s too bad you got sick; it sounded like you were having a good time.”
“It was fun,” I said, “but can Melody come over to our house for dinner next time?”
Chapter 9
Red Eggs
MELODY AND I BECAME BEST FRIENDS. LIKE TWO chopsticks, we were always together. She came over to my house or I went over to hers. One day, she came over to help color eggs. They were for my cousin Albert’s Red Egg party. He was just born, so we were going to visit him in New Jersey.
When you go to a Red Egg party, you have to bring red eggs. Red eggs symbolize good luck for a new baby. I guess the more red eggs Albert got, the more luck he’d have. I’d get sick of eating all those eggs though.
Coloring eggs red was fun. Lissy, Ki-Ki, Melody, and I dipped lucky red envelopes in warm water and then rubbed the red coloring onto the eggs. Lissy got red dye on her nose and I laughed at her.
“Is there such a thing as a red egg colorer?” I asked. “That would be a fun job.”
“No,” Melody said, “there aren’t enough Red Egg parties for you to do that for real. Americans don’t have Red Egg parties.”
“But Chinese people do,” I said. “Every time a Chinese baby is born, there’s a Red Egg party. Maybe that would be enough.”
“Not all Chinese babies get Red Egg parties,” Lissy said. “You didn’t.”
“I didn’t? Why not?” I asked.
“Probably because you didn’t deserve it,” Lissy said. “You were the worst baby. You cried all the time and then you got SO sick. They took you to the hospital and Mom and Dad were so worried. They had to put a tube on your ankle and put you in a plastic box.”
Lissy went to go wash her hands and get some paper to wrap the eggs in.
“Gee, what did you have?” Melody asked.
“I know,” Ki-Ki piped up. “You got sick from ammonia. Mom told me.”
“Ammonia?” I said. “Isn’t that the stuff in window cleaner?”
Melody and I looked at each other.
“You must have been allergic to it,” Melody said.
“But, we have window cleaner now,” I said. “I saw it in the closet.”
We went to the closet and looked at the bottles. The bottles were on a shelf, lined up in a row. The window cleaner was in the middle and looked like a bottle of swimming pool water.
“There it is,” I said.
“You better not touch it!” Melody said. “You might get sick.”
“It must be a mistake that we have it,” I said. “Maybe my mother forgot I was allergic to it.”
“I’ll throw it away for you,” Melody said, reaching for it.
“What are you guys doing?” Lissy asked us.
“We’re getting rid of the ammonia so Pacy won’t get sick again,” Melody explained.
Lissy started to laugh. She snatched the window cleaner from Melody and looked at me menacingly. “Are you afraid of AMMONIA?” she c
“Stop!” Melody screamed. Ki-Ki screamed, too, and I started to run. Melody tried to grab the window cleaner away from Lissy, and I hid behind the sofa.
“What is going on here?” I heard Mom say. I crept out from behind the sofa.
“Lissy was going to spray me with the window cleaner,” I said. Melody nodded in support.
“Lissy, put the window cleaner away. And you,” Mom said to me, “why are you so scared of window cleaner all of a sudden?”
“Because it has AMMONIA,” I said and told her the whole story. Mom laughed and shook her head. Then she explained to us that when I was a baby I had had pneumonia, which was like a very bad cold. It was a very different thing from ammonia.
“But if you were allergic,” Mom said, “it was very nice of Melody to try to keep you from getting sick.”
“I guess you almost saved my life,” I told her.
Melody grinned, but whenever anyone mentioned window cleaner after that, we both turned red from embarrassment.
Chapter 10
Albert’s Party
MELODY WENT HOME AND WE PACKED UP THE eggs and all our suitcases into the car. Then, Mom made us get all dressed up in our fancy Chinese clothes. My dress was dark parsley green; it felt smooth and cool like a polished jade statue. Lissy’s dress was peacock blue, and Ki-Ki wore a pink dress with flowers embroidered on it. The dresses were all silky and shiny and had collars that buttoned close around our necks. The tight collars made it hard to breathe, but I didn’t say anything because then I would be acting like a baby, like Ki-Ki. Mom had to leave her collar open because she fussed so much.