“ Ni kan,” said my mother as Shirley’s eyes flooded with tears. And I would see Shirley tapping her feet, or singing a sailor song, or pursing her lips into a very round O while saying, “Oh my goodness.” My mother would poke my arm and say, “ Ni kan”-You watch. We’d watch Shirley’s old movies on TV as though they were training films. At first my mother thought I could be a Chinese Shirley Temple. We didn’t immediately pick the right kind of prodigy. There were so many ways for things to get better. She had come here in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her family home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls. What does Auntie Lindo know? Her daughter, she is only best tricky.”Īmerica was where all my mother’s hopes lay. “Of course you can be prodigy, too,” my mother told me when I was nine. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could work for the government and get good retirement. My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. Shirley Temple: a child singer-actress, famous in the 1930’s and 1940’s Prodigy (n.): a very smart, specially talented child Peter Pan: a boy from a story Jing Mei gets a short haircut like Peter Pan Beyond Reproach (n.): perfect, not making any mistakes
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