Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,50
shop than it had been for me. I had no choice; Soo Chee did. I can imagine what she must have been feeling, considering all that was at stake: her parents’ reputations, their standing in the local Chinese community, her own position as the first of her family to be educated in America. She would’ve had plenty of doubts waiting in that dingy front room, seeing the biker and girlie magazines on the coffee table. Meeting Greg, she thrust the piece of notebook paper into his hand. Greg was cautious—he made sure she knew what she was doing. “Yes. Of course, I know. Let’s begin,” Soo Chee said, hopping up onto the cot. The poster of the Buddha put her strangely at ease as Greg talked her through the painful procedure. When she arrived at school the following day, she proudly showed everyone what she’d done: there, high on her left breast, was her name spelled out in Chinese characters—Soo Chee Chong, the beautiful sound of jade.
Anne Harding, who’d had her brace removed that year, and who was rumored to be a candidate for class valedictorian, was the second to go. Was it easier for her, after Soo Chee had gone first? I doubt it. I see her marching through the front door of the tattoo parlor, stoic and brave, to put her request to Greg. “Mark me here,” she might’ve said, jabbing her finger low at the back of her neck where her skin had been covered up for three years by the padding of her brace. In an elegant Parisian art deco script entwined with green vines and small red buds, hers read, “It made me stronger.”
The next was Christy Lee. She skipped morning classes the following day, and when she returned to campus after lunch she was wearing a permanent chain around her upper left arm. That was all, no lettering. At the outside of her arm, where you could easily see it, the chain was broken and the two ends dangled free.
The nuns tried to send the girls home, but they refused to go, and instead brought three chairs from the library, placed them deliberately on the front lawn of the school near one of the oak trees, and sat. The girls’ parents were summoned, and there were threats and tears and raised voices. Still, the girls wouldn’t budge. Soo Chee’s mother, a small, elegantly dressed woman, tried to drag Soo Chee from her chair, tilting it sideways onto two legs, but Christy Lee grabbed hold of Soo and wouldn’t let go. The parents retreated to the principal’s office to try and figure out what to do next. The girls, settling in, took out their books and notebooks and began studying for an upcoming trigonometry test and drafting letters to the editors of the local school newspapers.
When a Cathedral High School photographer, the one who’d taken Chip’s place, came by at noon to take pictures, Sister Evelyn tried to block his entry to campus. But he put up a fight, shouting about the freedom of the press, until the classes at the front of the building were disrupted; the principal decided it would be less trouble to let him take his photos. Attracted by the disturbance, other girls wandered out between bells to chat with those on the lawn; some brought their lunches with them, sat, and stayed. In the afternoon, boys driving home from CHS slowed their cars on the road in front to see what was going on. They honked their horns and shouted from their windows at the girls milling on the lawn; the girls shouted and waved back.
You couldn’t call it a protest exactly, Anne Harding said, keeping me posted by phone. But clearly the nuns were getting nervous. Sister Evelyn seemed to be trying to wait them out, hoping the trouble would blow over if she just ignored them. But instead of blowing over, it grew.
Before the week’s end, four more girls made their way downtown. A frizzy-haired girl named Lisa, who idolized Janis Joplin, got a rose on her right ankle. Another got a small, discreet dove on her hip. The third girl got a cross with a crown of thorns, dripping blood, on her shoulder blade. When they arrived at campus, wearing their bandaged tattoos like badges of honor, these girls didn’t even bother going to their homeroom classes, but went straight to the front lawn to join the charity cases, who’d since equipped themselves with blankets and thermoses