![]() ![]() ![]() I was a dainty ballerina girl standing by the curtain, waiting to hear the music that would send me floating on my tiptoes. I pictured this prodigy part of me as many different images, and I tried each one on for size. In fact, in the beginning I was just as excited as my mother, maybe even more so. I liked the haircut, and it made me actually look forward to my future fame. I now had bad hair the length of a boy’s, with curly bangs that hung at a slant two inches above my eyebrows. “Peter Pan is very popular these days” the instructor assured my mother. The instructor of the beauty training school had to lop off these soggy clumps to make my hair even again. “You look like a Negro Chinese,” she lamented, as if I had done this on purpose. My mother dragged me off to the bathroom and tried to wet down my hair. ![]() ![]() Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz. Soon after my mother got this idea about Shirley Temple, she took me to the beauty training school in the Mission District and put me in the hands of a student who could barely hold the scissors without shaking. Ni Kan,” my mother said, as Shirley’s eyes flooded with tears. You watch.” 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. 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. She had come to San Francisco in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her 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 a 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. ![]()
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