"Class! We have a new person here," Mrs. Cheng, our teacher, a woman in her late twenties, announced. Her voice carried a cautious tone. I noticed that she didn't say "a new comrade" or "a classmate." She said "a person." That was another sign. It gave obscurity to the girl's background. "She is a transferring student from Number Nineteen District. Her name is Wild Ginger, pronounced as Wu-Jiang Pei."

"Wild Ginger?" Hot Pepper's eyebrows frowned. "What a strange name!" She began to laugh shrilly. "How do you write it?" The sound was characteristic of the bully. It gave me goose bumps every time.

"WU as 'Wild,' a luxuriant growth of weeds. It is written with a Grass head on top of the character Nothingness," the newcomer said, stepping out of the sun's shadow. There was no fear in her voice. "Jiang as 'Ginger' with a flat tone. You can call me Wild Ginger."

The class was quiet, actually surprised.

Hot Pepper stood up. "But Wu-Jiang can also be described as 'A wasteland.' Correct me if I'm wrong, Mrs. Cheng."

Mrs. Cheng pretended to be deaf.

The girl raised her eyes cautiously.

I blinked in disbelief: the sunlight hadn't fooled me. The pupils were yellow-green! I stared. Is she a foreigner? The eyes were almond shaped, wide apart; they couldn't have been more Oriental. The nose had a high bridge, narrow and long, with only a short distance between her nose and upper lip. The shape of her face was like a goose egg, and her neck was gracefully long. Her skin color was lighter then everyone else's in the room. Except for her gleaming black-lacquer hair, she could indeed be taken for a foreigner.

"What's wrong with your eyes? Is it a kind of disease?" Hot Pepper sat back down and kicked off her shoes.