Miss Walters smiled. “It is rather awkward, I agree. However, I assure you that it is grammatically correct. All of you will now return to your seats and compose five sentences on your slates using the ‘Were I you’ construction. Then you may begin your reading.”

Hanna made her way back down the aisle. Behind her, she heard Dolly whisper, “Showoff.”

Would she have said that if I weren’t half-Chinese?

How many times in her life had she wondered that? She always hoped that cruel remarks were misunderstandings, benign, forgotten in the next breath. Instead, they were most often birthed by thoughtlessness or ignorance at best; at worst, by venom and malice.

Why does it always bother me when people say things like that? What’s the matter with me, that I must always be doubting—not just them, but myself?

She hated having such thoughts. At times they circled in her mind until she was so confused and dizzy that she would give in to tears. She held her breath, determined at all cost not to cry in school. Hastily she scrawled her five grammar sentences so she could take out her reader. Time and again, reading had saved her from her own thoughts, and she prayed it would save her now.

Sure enough, she was soon absorbed in Mr. Audubon’s account of the passenger pigeon. He wrote of their vast numbers and described their flight with such vividness that she thrilled to his words.

The image of the great mass of pigeons overhead was still in her mind’s eye as she slowly closed the book. A few moments passed before she was conscious of her surroundings; she heard Miss Walters calling for books and slates to be gathered up.

The school day had ended at last.

10

THE NEXT DAY, more indignities followed. Her slate pencil went missing. She opened her dinner pail to find that someone had half filled it with water, the biscuit disintegrated into slurry, the bit of salt pork sodden. A slate was passed from hand to hand whenever Miss Walters had her back turned. Hanna caught a glimpse while the Fourth Reader students in front of her were snickering over it. Someone had drawn a crude, cruel caricature of her face, bucktoothed and with slits for eyes. Above the drawing, a caption: Dirty Chinaman! Below it, the words Were I you, I would not come to school!

Her hurt was growing, and with it, her anger. She could feel the rage swelling and getting hotter inside her. She had to stop it.

They want me to lose my temper or try to get back at them somehow. Then they can say I’m a troublemaker and have me dismissed.

She would not give them that satisfaction.