Chinatowns -- Pacific States -- Fiction; Chinese Americans -- Fiction; Short stories
“You are wrong, mother!” said she, turning with a beaming face to old
Sien Tau. “This is the happiest day I have known.”
Explained the father of the babe: “The gods, seeing my unworthiness,
took from me to give to you.”
And Little Me, straggling to the teacher’s side, piped in the language
she herself had taught him:
“I have one brother. I love him all over. You say baby boy best gift, so
I give him to you when my father and mother not see. Little Me give
better than Lee Chu and Hom Hing.”
It was some time before the tumult occasioned by Little Me’s boastful
but sweet confession subsided. It had been heard by all, but was
understood wholly by none save the teacher.
* * * * *
That when no watchful eye was there to see, the baby had been carried in
Little Me’s sturdy arms from under the home roof to the teacher’s
tenement room, was made plain to everyone by the child himself. But it
devolved upon Miss McLeod, in order to save her little scholar from
obviously justifiable paternal wrath, to explain his reason for the
kidnapping, and this she did so clearly and eloquently that the father,
raising his first born to his knee, declared in English: “I proud of
him. He Number One scholar,” while the mother fondly smiled.
Little Me looked at the baby in his mother’s lap, and then at the
teacher. His eyes filled with tears.
“You not like what I give you well enough to keep him,” he sobbed.
“Yes, yes,” consoled Miss McLeod. “I like him so well that I put him
away in my heart where I keep the baby of my story. Don’t you remember?
That was what the Father of the story gave the baby for. To be kept in
the people’s hearts after he had gone back to Him!”
“Ah, yes,” responded the child, his face brightening. “You keep my
brother in your heart and I keep him in the house with me and my father
and mother. That best of all!”
THE STORY OF ONE WHITE WOMAN
WHO MARRIED A CHINESE
I
Why did I marry Liu Kanghi, a Chinese? Well, in the first place, because
I loved him; in the second place, because I was weary of working,
struggling and fighting with the world; in the third place, because my
child needed a home.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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