Free China Dolls by Lisa See

rehearsal, we poured into the street. Fog draped heavy and white over the city, leaving the sidewalks eerily quiet. The melodies of chattering young girls rang through the night like police sirens. As the other ponies melted into the fog, Helen and I headed to Chinatown. For all of Mr. Fong’s insistence that Helen always be escorted by her brother, the practice was haphazard at best.
    Ruby waited for us in Sam Wo, our favorite café. “I’m starved,” she announced.
    That first night on the street outside the Forbidden City, somethinginvisible but very strong had clicked between us like cogs catching and holding a tractor wheel. Now, as we ate, we talked about insignificant things.
    “The hair on the left side of my head is fine and won’t hold a curl,” Ruby revealed. “That’s why I pin gardenias above that ear.”
    “My feet are too long,” Helen complained, even though they were smaller than Ruby’s or mine.
    I told them my bosoms were growing too big, to which Ruby agreed, saying, “They’re whopping for a Chinese girl.”
    We ate—I was now adept at using chopsticks—and laughed as Ruby told us about her latest job.
    “I don’t know anything about housekeeping,” she chirped. “The apartment was so nice I was afraid to touch anything. The lady released me. And after only one day! But that wasn’t a good position for me, because I’m not neat, and I can barely wash a plate.”
    We never talked about deep things— why I’d run away, how scared Helen must have been when the Japanese pilot tried to shoot her, or when Ruby had made up her mind to pretend she was something she wasn’t. Instead, Ruby taught Helen and me how to hula, Helen taught Ruby and me how to make simple soups on our hot plate, and I taught them things I’d learned from the movies, like how use makeup to make our eyes look more dramatic. Ruby and I had to watch our money, so we showed Helen how to make false eyelashes by taking strands of hair from our brushes, winding them around our fingers, snipping them with scissors, and gluing them onto strips, which we then applied to our eyelids. We copied my favorite actresses’ hairdos and the way they plucked their eyebrows. We didn’t spend a cent, but, along the way, we fell in love with each other. The show kids said we went together like ginger, scallions, and garlic: put us in a pot and you get the perfect dish.
    Now, as we lingered at our table, sipping tea and waiting for Monroe to pick up Helen, I got up my nerve to share a little more about myself. I told them about three girls back in Plain City whom I’d named the evil triplets. Velma, who was Finnish by blood, hadonce been my best friend. When we started kindergarten, we met another girl named Ilsa, also Finnish. The three of us played together all the time, but at the end of first grade, Maude—another Finnish girl—got taken in by Velma and Ilsa, and I was pushed out for good. Soon, their sole pleasure came from teasing and bullying me.
    “In fourth grade, the evil triplets told the class not to give me a card on Valentine’s Day,” I confided, “even though the teacher said that kids needed to give cards to every child in class or not give them at all. The evil triplets argued that I wasn’t a proper Christian, even though I was baptized in the same church they were. When I tried to fight back, they chanted, ‘Ching chong Chinaman sitting on a fence, trying to make a dollar out of fifty cents.’ ”
    Helen got steamed—“That’s awful!”—and Ruby shook her head sympathetically. To have these girls hear me and feel for me made me like them all the more.
    “It must have been easy for you to have friends,” Ruby said to Helen, “since you grew up in Chinatown.”
    “Hardly. When I was little, I was supposed to stay inside with my mother.” Helen tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “When I got to school, the other girls only played with me because their parents said they had to. Those girls are