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May-lee Chai

Training Days

May-lee Chai is the author of eight books, including the memoir Hapa Girl, a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book; the novel Dragon Chica; and the novel Tiger Girl, which won an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. She teaches creative writing and literary translation at San Francisco State University.

First published by GemmaMedia in 2018.

GemmaMedia

230 Commercial Street

Boston MA 02109 USA

www.gemmamedia.com

©2018 by May-lee Chai

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

978-1-936846-62-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chai, May-Lee, author.

Title: Training days / May-Lee Chai.

Description: Boston MA : GemmaMedia, 2017. | Series: Gemma open doors

Identifiers: LCCN 2017040459 | ISBN 9781936846627

Classification: LCC PS3553.H2423 T73 2017 | DDC 813/.54–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040459

Cover by Laura Shaw Design

Gemma’s Open Doors provide fresh stories, new ideas, and essential resources for young people and adults as they embrace the power of reading and the written word.

Brian Bouldrey

Series Editor

Open Door

For Judy Blume

For Judy Blume

“If Sally could sing like her father, or even whistle, she wouldn’t be in the listener group in music class. It wasn’t much fun to mouth the words while everyone else got to sing them. Sometimes Sally would forget to just listen and she would sing too. Then Miss Vickers would ask, ‘Sally Freedman . . . are you singing out loud?’ and Sally would go back to mouthing the words.”

—Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself

Characters

Aunt Mei, pronounced “MAY”

Cindy Van Lenten—Jun-li’s classmate

George—Jun-li’s Siberian husky

Jeremy—Jun-li’s brother, three years younger

Jun-li, pronounced “JUN-LEE”—eleven-year-old girl

Linda—Jun-li’s mother

Madison—Jun-li’s cousin, daughter of Aunt Mei

Maria Glinbizzi, pronounced “glin-BIT-zee”—Jun-li’s friend with dark, curly hair

Mr. Tralucci, pronounced “trah-LOO-chee”—father of one of Jeremy’s classmates

Nai-nai, pronounced “NYE-NYE” (rhymes with bye-bye)—Jun-li’s grandmother

Sean, pronounced “SHAHN”—Maria’s brother, one year younger

Uncle Roger—Aunt Mei’s husband, father of Madison and the twins

Walter—Jun-li’s dad, brother of Uncle Roger

Ye-ye, pronounced “YEH-YEH”—Jun-li’s grandfather

Chapter 1

“Did you get yours yet?” Maria asked. She pulled the package out of her dresser. It was her new training bra. It was white and stretchy and had two pink rosebuds sewn between the cups.

I felt my cheeks grow hot. I looked down so my hair fell in front of my face, like looking at the bra was so interesting, I just couldn’t look up again. “My mother says we’re going to wait till the end of the summer.”

“That’s in case you grow,” Maria said. “That’s what my mother was worried about, too. But my dad said she’d better hurry up. Can you believe it? At the dinner table. In front of Sean.”

“Oh my god. I can’t believe your dad said that.” I was suddenly thankful my father was too busy to ever notice anything I was doing.

“I know,” she said. Maria twisted one of her long, dark, curly locks around her index finger. “That’s why I’m hiding it. I think Sean and his stupid friends were looking through my stuff.”

“What a jerk,” I said.

“He’s a pervert,” Maria agreed.

Maria’s brother was only a year behind us in school. Sometimes I’d see Sean in the hallway, waiting with his friends to go to the bathroom or lining up in front of the drinking fountain. At Maria’s house, he was like a little kid, sitting in front of the TV, shooting a toy gun at the Klingons, pew pew pew! But at school, the boys he hung out with whistled in the halls and called girls names.

I was glad my brother, Jeremy, was three years younger. It made him more manageable.

At least when we started junior high in September, Sean would still be in elementary school, and we wouldn’t have to worry about him for a year.

“Look, Jun-li, do you wanna guess where it was made?” Maria pulled the bra’s tag up so that I could see. In very clear red letters it said, made in r.o.c.

Suddenly, my face burned anew. Republic of China. I knew exactly where that was on the map. It was a small island in the sea next to the bigger mainland. Dad had lived there as a boy, but I couldn’t picture him there. Instead, I thought of my grandparents who’d lived in Taipei before coming to America five years ago. Ye-ye always dressed up in his suit when we went out to eat dinner as a family, and Nai-nai wore her Chinese-style dresses in New York. Still, the image came to me of dozens of old women who looked just like my grandmother hunched over sewing machines, sewing little bras for American girls. I felt ashamed, although I did not know why. I braced myself for whatever Maria would say. Would she think my family had made her bra?

“Rock,” she pronounced. “Isn’t that funny? What kind of country is that?”

Poor Maria, I thought, relieved. But then I realized that maybe this was secretly why we were friends. I could feel safe with her. I was always one step ahead.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s like Rocky the movie.” I laughed. “Yo, Adrian!” I called in my best Rocky voice.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s just like that,” she said, and she snatched the bra and put it over her shirt, her fists in the cups. “Yo, Adrian!” she called to herself, and then pranced around. Maybe she was supposed to be Adrian, or just some woman with a bra, something ridiculous like that. We both laughed and laughed until Maria farted and then she turned red and ran outside her room, then back inside, and farted again. We both rolled on her carpet, hysterical.

Chapter 2

I was still on Nancy Drew 43: The Mystery of the 99 Steps, and the muggy days in northern New Jersey stretched taffy-slow from one Good Humor truck to the next.

That summer, my father was under contract to write a new textbook, and he was stressed-out, tense and angry all the time. There were pages of the book spread on the dining room table, on the folding table Dad had set up in the living room, and on the ping-pong table in the basement. Jeremy and I weren’t allowed to go into the rooms where Dad was working, so there was no ping-pong for us all summer.

At least this work meant Mom and Dad were arguing less than usual. In fact, they weren’t really talking much at all. Dad was busy typing and Mom was busy teaching summer school.

I hadn’t thought about getting my bra until Maria brought it up. Then I felt left behind. A new anxiety crept up on me.

But when I asked Mom if we could get mine, Mom said she was too busy to go shopping for school clothes. She was teaching night classes and was gone most evenings. On the weekends, she had papers to grade or meetings to attend.

“But Maria Glinbizzi’s mother already bought hers,” I said.

Mom clicked her tongue against her teeth. “I didn’t need a bra until I was thirteen.”

I wanted to add that she hadn’t grown up in America, but in Canada, far away. Who knew what was normal there? But I held my tongue.

The thing I wanted most was to be just like my friends in school. I knew this meant that I should do the things they did. My parents did not always understand. Neither of my parents had been born in America, and sometimes I wondered if that was why they argued so much. My friends’ parents seemed to argue less, but it was hard to say. Sometimes parents hid things in front of other peoples’ kids. My parents did that.

The handouts for junior high were clear. The list of things we had to buy before we started in the fall was printed in bold: book covers, No. 2 pencils, three-ring binders with “No Imagery on the Cover,” gym shorts and T-shirts in school colors, the right kind of sneakers (no black soles that would scuff the gym floors), and “gender-appropriate underwear.” And then in parentheses, it was spelled out so everyone knew what that meant: bras for girls and jockstraps for boys. I pointed this line out to Mom. She glanced at the sheet and said, “Oh, bother.”

Mom later handed me the Sears catalog with the corner turned down on the page for training bras. There were three kinds, all of them as white as a starched nurse’s uniform. One had a tiny pink-and-blue tennis racket between the cups, one had a white daisy, and one was plain.

Mom was going to order one from the catalog, but then she said, “You’re probably going to need to try it on first.” And she sighed, as though I were becoming one more burden she had to deal with in the day. You’d have thought I was like my cousin Madison the time she got ringworm. Mom’s voice sounded like I had caught some illness that could spread. I didn’t tell that to Maria, though.

I hadn’t thought much about bras up till this point. My chest was flat and straight, and my belly was round and smooth and still pressed against my shirts. I wondered if my lack of breasts might be due to the fact that I was Chinese (no one said Taiwanese in those days). But I had no other Chinese classmates, no one to compare myself to except my mother, who always seemed perfect in her womanhood, the opposite of me. I had no way to tell if I was normal.

But when I talked to Cindy Van Lenten, I noticed she was even flatter than I was—and six months older. I felt some relief. I asked her straight up if she was going to try to do without, but Cindy shook her head gravely. It was too risky, she said. If you didn’t wear a training bra in gym class, for example, and your boobs started to come in, they could grow crooked, and they’d be two different sizes. They would never be normal when you grew up, she said, unless your training bra was there to press them into place. That’s what the orientation packet meant. They hadn’t fully explained because they didn’t want to scare us.

I nodded, because that seemed right. Adults were just like that. They only ever said half of what they meant.

Chapter 3

Mom told Aunt Mei about my needing a training bra. I couldn’t believe my ears, the way she just blurted it out. I thought my mother would have had a clue. After all, Mom had been my age once. But adults were always disappointing me.

It was late in the summer. Mom’s night classes were finally over, so we’d gone to pick up Madison to play at our house, but Madison was still at her swimming lesson. Aunt Mei let us in to wait. She said the twins were finally sleeping. We all sat down in the living room, Mom on the piano bench and me on the armchair and Aunt Mei on the rocker. There were laundry baskets on the sofa and a diaper genie in the corner. For the first time, the house didn’t smell like Madison’s rabbit. It smelled worse.

“I was just soaking myself,” Aunt Mei said. She unbuttoned her blouse and I saw her nursing bra. It was bright white and thick, with snaps and triangular flaps that opened. She put wet, cold Lipton tea bags through the openings, sighing.

“Old wives’ trick, my mom used to say.” She laughed, a short bark, like a seal.

Then she closed her eyes and leaned her head against the back of the rocking chair.

“I bottle-fed Jun-li,” Mom volunteered. “I wanted to breastfeed her, but I was under a lot of stress. I lost all my milk.” (I kept waiting for her to add, “And she turned out all right,” as she had at home, when she’d told my brother and me this story.) “But when Jeremy came along, I was able to breastfeed a full six months. And he had quite the appetite.”

“My mother breastfed me until I was almost four years old,” Aunt Mei said with her eyes closed. She rocked back and forth, back and forth.

“Oh, is that so?”

“Mom was old-school. Everything had to be the way her mother had done things. And my grandmother, Po-po, was a tyrant. I remember when I was growing up, Mom and me had to scrub the floors on our hands and knees. Po-po said it was the only way to really get the dirt. She lived to be ninety-seven, if you can believe it. Outlived Mom by five years.”

“Did I meet your grandmother at the wedding?”

“That was her in the wheelchair with the oxygen tank.” Aunt Mei let out another seal-bark laugh. “I don’t think she knew who I was anymore. Kept calling me by my mom’s name. Really, she took care of me more than my mother did. She lived with us the whole time I was growing up so Mom could work.”

“When did your father die?”

“Dad died of a heart attack before I was born. I always blamed all my problems on his dying. If I’d grown up with a father figure. A father, I mean. If I’d gotten used to having a man in the house, maybe I’d understand them better.”

“No,” Mom said. “Nothing prepares you. Nothing helps. I had a father and two brothers.”

“And no mother. You had to raise yourself.”

“I had no training for life. It’s true,” Mom said.

Slumped into the rocking chair, Aunt Mei looked as though she were asleep. But her right hand was moving, patting at the tea bags, adjusting them, prodding them. The rest of her body just lay there, dead.