Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok

years,” he said, as he walked away with a swagger.
     
    I’d heard about the myth of Santa Claus in Hong Kong, although we’d assumed that he chose not to visit the warmer countries. Since he wasn’t an active presence there and no one talked about him much, I hadn’t learned that he wasn’t real, unlike most other kids my age. Now that I was in the U.S., I assumed he would be appearing like all the other strange things I had heard of but had not seen until now, like red hair and mittens.
    We gave Mr. Al a small wooden elephant from Chinatown, to bring him money and a long life. Ma wasn’t afraid to give him things she actually liked, because she knew he was crazy about everything Chinese. His wife had died long before and he said that he was going to settle down with a nice Chinese woman someday. He always made me ask Ma if she had any pretty friends and how to say things like “I love you” in Chinese.
    “I’m going to keep this next to my cash register, bring me good luck,” Mr. Al said. And he’d given us a small red desk lamp from his store. I put it on the table I did my homework on.
    We didn’t have a Christmas tree or lights in the apartment, but Ma did her best. She bought a used paperback book of Christmas carols and we sang them together. I’d heard some of them at school, and Ma could read the music if not the English words. She provided the melody wordlessly while I sang in English loudly and off-key. She tried accompanying us with her violin, but it was much too cold and she couldn’t play with her gloves on.
    I didn’t have a stocking, though on Christmas Eve, I laid one of Ma’s socks, which was bigger than mine, on the low table I did my homework on. When I woke up, there was an orange and a Chinese red envelope with two dollars in it, a fortune. I saw immediately there was no Santa Claus, only Ma, but that was enough.
     
    A few days after the Western New Year, we found a true gift. Our regular route to the subway took us past a big building and one morning we saw some men working near its dumpster. Soon, they left and we saw what they’d thrown away: several rolls of the plush cloth used to make stuffed animals. The building must have been a toy factory.
    We both stopped short, riveted by the sight of the warm material.
    “Maybe if we are very fast-” Ma began.
    “No, Ma. We can’t risk being late with Aunt Paula again,” I said. “We have to come back later.”
    Throughout the long day at the factory, Ma kept asking me questions. “Do you think other people would take something like that? Is there trash collection today?”
    The only answer I had for her was, “I don’t know.” It would be my fault if the material was gone by the time we could leave the factory that evening.
    When we finally hurried out of the subway station and rushed to the toy factory, we saw that everything was still there. Ma laughed with joy at the glorious find. Yards and yards of material that could keep us warmer. Even though the cloth was fake fur, lime green and prickly, it was better than anything we had. The streets were deserted in the bitter cold but Ma and I made several trips to pull as many rolls out of the trash as we could and dragged them home.
    Ma made us robes, sweaters, pants and blankets out of the toy factory cloth. She used it to cover parts of the floor and windows. She even made tablecloths out of it. We must have been a funny sight, dressed up at home as two large stuffed animals, but we didn’t have the luxury of minding. Since then, I have wondered if we would have survived the winter without that gift from the gods. The material was heavy and carpetlike, not having been intended as clothing, and when I slept under our new blankets, I woke with my limbs aching from the weight. However, at least they covered our entire bodies at once, unlike the piles of clothes we’d used in the past, and they were warm.
     
    All of the gods leave at midnight on the night before Chinese New