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The end of the school year approached.
A craze of autograph books swept through the sixth grade. A few kids had them and started asking their friends to sign and within a few weeks, many children were circulating their autograph books around the room. I begged Ma to buy me one and she did, for 59 skirts from the Dime Shop. It had a red fake-leather cover. I learned from watching everyone else that after someone signed a page, I was supposed to fold the edges down or up to make alternating patterns of folded triangles in my book.
Annette wrote in my book: “2 Friends 4-ever!” The other kids wrote things like “Wish I had known you better” and “Too bad we didn’t know each other.” I wrote “Good luck for the future” in everyone’s book except for Annette’s and Tyrone’s. In Annette’s I wrote “You are my best friend.” When Tyrone shyly handed his to me, I saw that on the page before mine someone had written “You are the King of the Brains.” I thought a moment and wrote in Chinese: You are a very special person and may the gods protect you. Then I signed my name in English.’
“Wow,” he said. “What does it say?”
“Good luck,” I said.
He stared at the page. “That’s a lot of words for ‘good luck.'”
“It take long time to say something in Chinese.”
In my book, he wrote, “Wish I had known you better.”
The Bible and meaningful books 