I figured out that the fastest way was to grab the next bag in the roll with my hand, which was moist with sweat and thus sticky, give the bag a slight twist so that the bottom dropped open and then, as I pulled it down and over the hanging garment, to strike the serration line with my other hand so that the bag separated from the others in the roll as it fell. Before the plastic had fully dropped to cover the entire garment, I was lifting it up by the hanger to get it off and onto the rack on my left. Then I grabbed another one with my right hand.

Pants took slightly longer because most of them were belted, which made them unbalanced on the hanger, and if you didn’t grab them with both hands as you lifted them, they would slip off. I developed hard muscles in my arms from all of the lifting.

By the end of that summer, when I’d hit my rhythm, I could get almost five hundred skirts bagged in an hour, about seven seconds per skirt. Later, when I was older and stronger, I would reach a top speed of a bit less than five seconds per skirt, doing more than seven hundred in an hour.

Despite my dislike of Aunt Paula, I worked harder and faster whenever she passed by to show her that we were industrious people, valuable workers and loyal to the factory. I still hoped that maybe we would be rewarded for our good behavior.

Once, Matt was hanging around the finishing station, helping us tag some skirts in his free time. On the days a shipment went out, we finished in the order we were placed in the garment procedure. Since he helped his ma with thread-cutting, a much earlier part of the process, his part of the work for the final shipment had been done earlier in the day. As the finishers, Ma and I were always last. Matt could leave but sometimes he stayed to hang around me.

Ma gave him a smile. She had to speak loudly to be heard over the noise the steamers made. “You’re growing up, Matt. I never realized what fine human material you were made of.” She was saying that he was handsome.

Matt grinned and flexed his muscles. “It’s all that thread-cutting, Mrs. Chang. Makes a guy strong.”

I was a few feet away, bagging as usual, but I couldn’t help sneaking a glance at his shoulders. He was still skinny but the white undershirt he wore revealed the broad frame of a young man’s body. Matt glanced at me, as if to see if I had heard Ma’s compliment, and caught me looking at him.

He struck a pose, with one arm raised and the other on his hip. “How do I look?”

I giggled. “Like the Liberty Goddess!”

He pretended to be insulted. “What would you know about that? You probably don’t remember what she looks like.”

I sobered up, remembering all my old dreams of New York. I’d thought we’d be living in Times Square, known in Cantonese as the Tay Um See Arena, and what I’d gotten was the slums of Brooklyn. “No, actually, I’ve never seen it.”

“You must be talking the big words.” He meant I had to be lying.

“I’m serious.”

“You mean, you haven’t seen Min-hat-ton?” He pronounced “Manhattan” the Cantonese way.

“Only Chinatown.”

“Hey, I’ll take you out on Sunday. You can’t live in New York and not see the real Liberty Goddess.”

I could feel my lips form a small, delighted “O” but I didn’t know how Ma would react. She had her back to us, working and pretending not to be listening.

“Mrs. Chang?” Matt said. “How about I act as your tour guide on Sunday?”

I felt a rush of disappointment even as I recognized his cleverness. Ma would be much less likely to say no if she’d been invited too.

Ma turned around with a teasing smile on her face. “Now, I wouldn’t want to be a lightbulb.”

“Ma!” I was glad I was already flushed from the heat, or I would have turned bright red. Her joke, that she would be there as a chaperone-stopping the lovers from kissing because of her presence, like a lightbulb in a darkened room-made public my private hope: that Matt’s invitation might actually be a date.

Matt shook his head like a dog, hiding his embarrassment, but he managed to look flirtatious at the same time. “No, no. You look so young, everyone would think you were only coming along to shell peanuts.” It was a good line. He meant the younger brother or sister who is sometimes sent to accompany a couple to the movies, shelling peanuts and preventing them from making out.

Ma laughed. “You have such good mouth skills. All right, I’d like to-”

Suddenly, one of the men at the steamers started to scream. It was Mr. Pak. I didn’t know much about him except for his name. I didn’t think he had any other family working at the factory. He was surrounded by steam, so it was hard to see what had happened, but the other three men who worked on the steamers raced to his side. They were working to release the metal top of the steamer as Matt, Ma and I rushed up. Finally they got it open and Mr. Pak clutched his hand. He was still howling. I didn’t dare look at his hand directly.

I immediately knew what had happened. When the men at the steamers are under pressure, they need to work so quickly that they simply slam the top lid down hard enough that it latches closed by itself. Then they open the lid and switch garments at lightning speed. Matt had told me that if they weren’t fast enough when they slammed the lid again, their hands could get caught.

Aunt Paula and Uncle Bob had arrived, and they pushed their way to the front of the crowd that had formed.

“Why are you so clumsy?” Aunt Paula yelled. She grabbed Mr. Pak, who was sobbing and hunched over his hand, and she pulled him in the direction of the exit. Uncle Bob hurried after her, with his swinging limp. She called over her shoulder, “Nobody call a lifesaving-car! We’ll take him to the factory doctor! Everyone, get back to work, tonight the shipment goes out!”

As the crowd dispersed, I turned to Matt. “I didn’t know there was a factory doctor.”

His voice was low, shaking a bit from what he’d just seen. “He’s just a friend of Dog Flea Mama’s. Someone who won’t report the accident.”

I was trembling too. “You probably want to go home, Matt. Don’t worry about us.”

“No one’s at home anyway. My ma is getting the needle-rescue treatment for her pains.”

Later, I was working as fast as I could bagging skirts-I still had to finish them all before the shipment could go out-when I saw Aunt Paula had returned to our work area. She moved briskly, and I thought she seemed stressed by what had just happened.

“I was going to talk to the two of you about something anyway when that incident occurred. There’s been a change in the factory policy.” She didn’t bother to use her false smile. “Due to bad economic conditions, after this shipment goes out, the rate for skirts will have to drop to one cent a skirt.”

“What?” Ma said.

“Why?” I asked. And then I knew. Aunt Paula had seen me working fast. Too fast. We’d started earning more, and she’d calculated that we could receive less and still survive. And I’d imagined I was impressing her.

“Sorry, but that’s the way it is. Company policy. For all the finishers.”

We were the only finishers at the factory.

“That’s not fair,” I blurted. Ma, standing behind me, poked me under my shoulder blade.

Aunt Paula turned her attention to me. Her lipstick was smudged in one corner. “I wouldn’t want the two of you to be unhappy. You’re free to make your own choices if you feel uncomfortable. There’s no slavery in America anymore, is there?” And she started to walk away.

Ma, who never touched anyone casually, shoved past me, ran after Aunt Paula and grabbed her arm. “Older sister, I’m so sorry. She is such an outspoken child.”

“No, no,” Aunt Paula said. She sighed. “Those bamboo shoots, they’re like that. Don’t worry about it.”

“Bamboo shoot” was a term for a kid who’d been born and raised in America, meaning he or she was too westernized. I’m a bamboo knot, I wanted to say: born in Hong Kong but brought over here young. A bamboo knot blocks the hollowness of the bamboo shaft, yet the knot gives the bamboo its strength as well.