Homesick Read Free Page B

handed him a segment of orange. He ate it slowly, his eyes on the rest of the orange. Segment by segment, I gave it all to him. Then he wiped his hands down the front of his jacket.
    â€œForeign devil,” he repeated.
    â€œAmerican friend,” I corrected. Then I asked him about the boat. Who was building it? Where were the builders?
    He pointed with his chin upriver. “Not here today. Back tomorrow.”
    I knew it would only be a question of time before the boy would run off to alert the people in the huts. “Foreign devil, foreign devil,” he would cry. So I put my hand on the prow of the boat, wished it luck, and climbing out, I started back toward the Bund. To my surprise the boy walked beside me. When we came to the edge of the Bund, I squatted down so we would be on the same eye level.
    â€œGood-bye,” I said. “May the River God protect you.”
    For a moment the boy stared. When he spoke, it was as if he were trying out a new sound. “American friend,” he said slowly.
    When I looked back, he was still there, looking soberly toward the foreign world to which I had gone.
    The time, according to the Customs House clock, was five after two, which meant that I couldn’t go home for two hours. School was dismissed at three-thirty and I was home by three-forty-five unless I had to stay in for talking in class. It took me about fifteen minutes to write “I will not talk in class” fifty times, and so I often came home at four o‘clock. (I wrote up and down like the Chinese: fifty “I’s,” fifty “wills,” and right through the sentence so I never had to think what I was writing. It wasn’t as if I were making a promise.) Today I planned to arrive home at four, my “staying-in” time, in the hope that I wouldn’t meet classmates on the way.
    Meanwhile I wandered up and down the streets, in and out of stores. I weighed myself on the big scale in the Hankow Dispensary and found that I was as skinny as ever. I went to the Terminus Hotel and tried out the chairs in the lounge. At first I didn’t mind wandering about like this. Half of my mind was still on the river with my junk, but as time went on, my junk began slipping away until I was alone with nothing but questions. Would my mother find out about today? How could I skip school tomorrow? And the next day and the next? Could I get sick? Was there a kind of long lie-abed sickness that didn’t hurt?
    I arrived home at four, just as I had planned, opened the door, and called out, “I’m home!” Cheery-like and normal. But I was scarcely in the house before Lin Nai-Nai ran to me from one side of the hall and my mother from the other.
    â€œAre you all right? Are you all right?” Lin Nai-Nai felt my arms as if she expected them to be broken. My mother’s face was white. “What happened?” she asked.
    Then I looked through the open door into the living room and saw Miss Williams sitting there. She had beaten me home and asked about my absence, which of course had scared everyone. But now my mother could see that I was in one piece and for some reason this seemed to make her mad. She took me by the hand and led me into the living room. “Miss Williams said you weren’t in school,” she said. “Why was that?”
    I hung my head, just the way cowards do in books.
    My mother dropped my hand. “Jean will be in school tomorrow,” she said firmly. She walked Miss Williams to the door. “Thank you for stopping by.”
    Miss Williams looked satisfied in her mean, pinched way. “Well,” she said, “ta-ta.” (She always said “ta-ta” instead of “good-bye.” Chicken language, it sounded like.)
    As soon as Miss Williams was gone and my mother was sitting down again, I burst into tears. Kneeling on the floor, I buried my head in her lap and poured out the whole miserable story. My mother could see