Homesick by Jean Fritz Page A

death. It was a city with walls around it, and since the soldiers wouldn’t let anyone in or out, eventually the people would run out of food. I had read about sieges like this in my English history book, but in ancient days soldiers had worn armor and ridden horse-back and used battering rams against the city walls. These soldiers had only cloth caps and cotton clothes, but they had a cannon which they fired from the hills and they had bombs which they dropped on the city from the one airplane they owned. And they waited.
    I took Lin Nai-Nai’s hand as she sat in her embroidery chair. “How many brothers and sisters do you have?” I asked.
    â€œTwo brothers. One, ten years—Dee Dee. One, twenty-two. Two sisters, sixteen and twenty, but maybe they are married now and moved away. Maybe my parents are dead. Who knows? One thing is sure, anyone alive in Wuchang is hungry.”
    From that moment the whole war became for me a war against Lin Nai-Nai’s family. When I heard the cannon being fired across the river, I thought of Lin Nai-Nai’s little brother, Dee Dee, and wondered if his knees were shaking. The first time the Communist airplane flew over Hankow on its way to Wuchang, I ran outside and shook my fist at the pilot and shouted all the Chinese swear words I knew. My mother called me in.
    â€œWhat would people think if they heard you?” she asked.
    â€œThey’d think I was mad at the Communists.”
    â€œThey’d think you hadn’t been brought up right. And I think we’d better start lessons pretty soon.”
    But we didn’t start right away and meanwhile I began to worry about Yang Sze-Fu being a Communist. I couldn’t help seeing how he had changed. No butter pagodas now. He just slapped butter on a plate any old way and didn’t even try to make our company meals special. He acted as if he hated foreigners, especially me. Sometimes he pretended he didn’t hear me when I asked for cocoa.
    â€œI think my father should fire Yang Sze-Fu,” I told Lin Nai-Nai, but she shook her head.
    â€œThat would be wrong. Then he might become dangerous. He may be rude now, but no foreigners have been harmed by their servants.”
    But I wasn’t so sure about Yang Sze-Fu. One day as I was finishing a bowl of canned cherries, I saw a drop of red at the bottom of my bowl that didn’t look one bit like cherry juice. It looked like potassium. In strawberry season we used potassium to kill the germs on fresh berries. Of course before we ate them, we had to wash the potassium off with sterile water because potassium was poisonous. (In China we had to be very careful about germs.) I knew we had potassium in the kitchen and suddenly I knew that if I were writing a story about a Communist cook, I’d have him poison his foreign employers with potassium. The more I thought of it, the more sure I was that was exactly what Yang Sze-Fu was trying to do, so when no one was looking, I spit the cherries I still had in my mouth into my big linen napkin. After that, every meal I picked over my food, looking for traces of red, and sometimes with my mouth full, I’d suddenly get the feeling that I tasted potassium and I’d spit into my napkin again.
    After a few days the serving boy, who took care of the napkins, spoke to Lin Nai-Nai about it and Lin Nai-Nai asked me. We were sitting beside the embroidery window.
    â€œOh, it’s nothing,” I said. I didn’t want her to tell Mother. Grown-ups generally took the truth too seriously or not seriously enough; either way it meant trouble.
    â€œAre you sick?” Lin Nai-Nai asked.
    â€œNo. It’s just that sometimes when I think about the people in Wuchang, I don’t want to swallow my food. I won’t do it anymore, so don’t tell.” I was ashamed of myself for lying, so I ran out of the room to find Kurry who was a comfort to me in my guilty times. She’d purr and blink her