When My Name Was Keoko Read Online Free

sorrier for her than for myself. She didn't want to beat me, but she had to—because Onishi-san was there.
    It was so unfair. First our names were taken away, and then we weren't given even a few days to learn everyone's new name.
    So when the bamboo cane swished through the air I was angry, not frightened. With each stinging whack, the word rang in my mind ...
unfair—unfair—unfair—unfair—unfair
.... Best of all, I was too angry to cry.
    At home that night Omoni pressed her lips together when she saw the fierce red welts on my legs. She soothed them with a paste made of herbs, but the marks stayed there for several days. I was glad they didn't fade right away. Seeing and feeling the sore redness of those welts always made me a little angry all over again.
    I wanted to stay angry about losing my name.
    ***
    The changing of my name made even Tomo cross. When we played together after school during those early days of the name change, he kept catching himself. "Sun-hee—I mean, Keoko," he kept saying.
    Once, after correcting himself for what seemed like the hundredth time, he stamped his foot in frustration. "Keoko-Keoko-Keoko," he said, as if trying to pound the name into his brain. "Keoko-Keoko-Keekeeko-Kekoko—" He was getting his tongue all twisted.
    I giggled. "Kee-kee-ko? Ke-ko-ko?"
    "Ke-ya-koo! Ko-ko-ka!"
    Now we were both laughing.
    "Ka-koo-ko!"
    "Ke-ay-ka!"
    Tomo was laughing at the silly sounds. I was laughing for the same reason, but I was also secretly pleased to be treating my Japanese name with such disrespect.
    At last our laughter faded and we caught our breath. Tomo glanced at me quickly, then looked away again. "Maybe, when it's just the two of us alone, I could still call you Sun-hee. What do you think?"
    It wasn't often that Tomo asked for my opinion. I wanted to answer carefully, so I thought for a moment. "Wouldn't that just make it harder?" I said. "You'd have to switch to my Japanese name when we're with other people. You might get mixed up and—and forget."
    I didn't say all that I was thinking—that as the son of the principal, Tomo always had to set an example. A mistake from him would be worse than a mistake from other students; he would lose a lot more face. I didn't have to say it, because it was something Tomo lived with every day.
    "You're right," he said. He flicked another glance at me. "It's such a nuisance, isn't it?"
    And I knew this was his way of saying he was sorry I had to change my name.

    It was our last year of school together. Elementary students all went to the same school, but in junior high, boys and girls went to separate schools.
    Not that Tomo and I saw each other much in school anyway. The Japanese students had their own classrooms. Tomo had told me that in bigger cities the Japanese had their own
schools.
But our town was too small for that.
    I only saw Tomo at assembly times, which were in the morning, when the whole school met in the courtyard to recite the Emperor's education policy. We also sang the Japanese national anthem and did exercises together. And once in a while there were special assemblies.
    Even though I couldn't read Japanese when I first went to school, knowing how to speak it made all the lessons much easier for me. At the start of my second year I was made Class Leader because I was the best in my class at reading and writing.
    We had to learn three kinds of writing. Two kinds used the Japanese alphabet, and there were two different alphabets. The third system, which most of my classmates found terribly difficult, was called
kanji.
    Kanji has no alphabet. Instead, each word is a separate picture-character. Altogether there are nearly fifty thousand characters! Not even scholars who spend their whole lives studying kanji can learn them all. We had to learn about two thousand basic characters—to recognize them in reading and to write them ourselves.
    We had calligraphy lessons as part of studying kanji. I loved