The Everlasting Story of Nory

19. A Chinese Monk

So Nory did tell stories like that before she met Debbie, to herself, but Debbie was a wonderful friend because she was willing to let the story go where it preferred to go, and she could think up disasters for Samantha that Nory couldn’t conveniently think up by herself. Debbie had a very wide, wide face, and long black hair that was shiny and perfect, because her parents were Chinese and Filipino, although she spoke only American, plus the Mandarin Chinese they learned in the International Chinese Montessori School, which was also called ICMS. Neither of them could speak Cantonese, which was a totally different bowl offish from Mandarin. When the two of them were drawing something together, though, they would sing a song in Mandarin that their Chinese teacher taught them, called ‘Namoowami tofo.’ The song went something like

Xie er po, mao er po,

Shen shang de jia sha po.

What it meant was basically, ‘His shoes are broken, his hat is broken.’ Or rather, that was the translation that the teacher gave them. The problem was that their teacher hardly knew a giblet of English. Nory’s translation to herself was, ‘Shoes are torn, hat is torn, his whole outfit is torn.’ The song was about a crazy monk. The best part was just a sound, ‘Namoowami tofo,’ which was the prayer to the Buddha that the monk used to do his magic. He was born from the Buddha. His name was Ji Gong. He was very free, even though he was a monk.

Nory still sang the song quite often, because some Chinese songs are so great that how can you not sing them? But she was at the point of forgetting a lot of the Chinese characters she used to know, such as

which means ‘wood,’ or

which means ‘spill.’ She never wrote Chinese now. Nobody in her class now at Threll Junior School was Chinese, even though there were some Chinese kids in the Senior School, and so there was nobody who even understood what a Chinese character was, and what pin yin was, and how you had to memorize the order of the strokes.

Her parents originally thought they might get a Chinese tutor for her in Threll, but Nory had school on Saturday mornings here, and plenty of homework, and that left her only one day off. If a Chinese tutor came on Sunday, Nory wouldn’t be exhausted so much as thinking, ‘Oh, my poor scrabjib of a weekend!’ When would they have time to drive to a castle or a palace, which is what they did every weekend? At Oxburgh Hall, high up in the tower where the princess stayed and sewed, they saw a little brick place where the Catholic priest would have to stuff himself when the government inspectors came sniffing.

So that was just the fact of it: Chinese was going to grow faint in her mind. She hadn’t known all the characters in the world, anyway. Four years was how long it took her to learn Chinese, as much of it as she knew, which wasn’t all that much compared to what an adult or an older child would know, so she thought that in French it might take her about two years to learn it, because it wasn’t as difficult as Chinese. But still, French was nice and hard — nice and hard. Dix was a very meaningful word. ‘It already means ten, in a sensible way,’ Nory thought. When she first heard ‘dix,’ she thought, ‘Oh, puff, that’s not like ten.’ But very soon it meant ten in quite a sensible way. And Je was actually quite a better word for ‘I’ than ‘I.’ No language was easy. It was a bad mistake to think so. English was about the most blusteringly hard language you could get. Verbally Chinese was much easier than English.

Certain languages from Africa weren’t as complicated in some ways, though, Nory thought. They didn’t do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, drrrrrr, their numbers didn’t go for infinity. They went one, two, three — and then ‘many.’ For instance: ‘There were many people at the store.’ Well? Does that mean four, or does that mean twenty-five? Their next-door-neighbor in Palo Alto, who spent a whole year in Africa, in Bombay, told Nory that about the numbers. Nory told it to Debbie, who said it couldn’t be true, because how could they have phone numbers or know how much things cost? Say you went to see The Little Mermaid with your family in Bombay, and the person said, through the little hole in the glass, ‘Two adults and two children? That will be many dollars, please.’ Or hickles, or gumbobs, or whatever Bombayan dollars are called. Many dollars? How many dollars?

Nory had to agree that her friend Debbie had a worthwhile point. Debbie was very smart and talented at a lot of things, including the piano. She was an all-around wonderful friend, the kind of friend you think finally just has to be your best friend, because there is no other choice but to have her be your best friend. Especially when Bernice said she was going to live in a house with her ‘real’ best friend, which was rude and mean. Bernice had a two-color retainer with a picture of a silver mermaid on it. Debbie had silver writing in her retainer that said ‘Debbie.’ When Debbie got her retainer, it left Nory as the last girl in the class not to have a retainer. That was one reason she thought, long ago, when people started getting their retainers one after another after another, ‘I know! I’ll be an orthodontist, and design people’s retainers for them.’ She would design one with the image of a big teethy smile on it. If Littleguy needed one, she’d do one with a steam train. You could think of the teeth as a train chuffing around the jaw.

In England it would be almost impossible to be a professional orthodontist, because almost nobody in school had retainers to speak of, or rather ‘false palates,’ as they were known by the select few. Probably the reason nobody had them was exactly because of that awful, queasy-making name, false palates. You might as well call them ‘bladder-stones’ and get it over with.