Unidentified Funny Objects 2 Read Free

what to say to him. I only ever hear from him when he’s arguing with you or when you tell him about my grades and he yells at me.”
    Helen felt a pang of guilt. “ Aiya . That’s not how we wanted it. Your father works so hard because he loves you. You should give him a chance.”
    But Rebecca was gone already. She had gathered enough mud.
    “She’s right, you know,” God said. “Honor your father and mother. Big deal in my book. Big in Confucius’s book too.”
    “I do honor them,” Rebecca said. “I’m just tired of being a disappointment all the time. I’m not a very good Chinese daughter.”
    “There are many ways of being a good Chinese daughter,” God said. “Not just one way. Just like there are many ways of being a good Jew, even if some people think there’s only one way. Being a Jew is about being part of a family. Families aren’t perfect, but they’re always there for you.”
    “Yeah, wish my parents believed that.”
    God started to say something but stopped. He sighed to Himself.
    Rebecca went on shaping the mud. She was not a great sculptor, but since God gave her dispensation to be “rough” and liberal in her interpretation, she finished quickly.
    “What do You think?” Rebecca asked.
    “It’s very modern,” God said, diplomatically.
    The mud statue was about a foot tall. It had two very long arms, a stubby head, and eyes and a nose carved with fingernails. Rebecca had pinched tiny earflaps on either side of the head. One of the legs was longer than the other.
    “I ran out of mud.”
    The statue fell over. Rebecca blushed, and fixed the legs so that they were more even in length. Now the statue stayed upright.
    “What’s next?”
    “Now we practice calligraphy.”
    TWENTY MINUTES LATER, God was as frustrated with Rebecca as He had been with Jonah.
    “Of all the Chinese girls, I had to be stuck with the only one who doesn’t know any calligraphy. Don’t you know how to write legibly?”
    Rebecca wiped her sweaty forehead, which was now covered by mud. “Don’t yell at me! How was I supposed to know this would come in handy? I hated brush-writing. I’ve always typed or dictated.”
    She had tried over and over to etch the Hebrew letters for emet into the forehead of the golem with a chopstick. The Children’s Guide had examples of what the letters looked like. But time and again, she failed—the proportions of the letters were wrong, the lines were squiggly, the letters ran into each other. She had to wipe out the half-formed letters and start again.
    “This is the problem with modern education everywhere. Penmanship is just not valued.”
    “Sounds like a design flaw. Why did You make writing so hard and typing so easy?”
    “Again with the blame.”
    David poked his head into the room.
    “Hi,” he said, awkwardly. The fact that his daughter’s face was covered in mud didn’t faze him. He had seen his wife often looking similar. “Your mother suggested that I take you for an ice cream on the promenade deck. If you’re free.”
    “I’m a little busy, Dad.”
    “What are you working on?” He came in and sat down on the bed.
    “Making this golem. But God is mad at me because I can’t do calligraphy.”
    Since most conversations David had had with his daughter consisted of him yelling at her at Helen’s direction for some failure on Rebecca’s part that he didn’t fully understand, this actually made some sense.
    “Your grandfather was the same way with me,” he said.
    “You didn’t like brush writing either?”
    “Hated it. I preferred to draw pictures during those classes. The teacher told my father, and I got into a lot of trouble. But I eventually learned to like it.”
    “What happened?”
    “Your grandfather was good at making paper lanterns for the Lantern Festival. Back then, in China, every kid ran around with a homemade lantern for the Festival. He told me that I had to write the characters on the lanterns myself. And if my bad calligraphy