1001 Cranes Read Online Free Page B

cousins and I call her Baa-chan—yeah, like a sheep crying out to another sheep. My grandpa on that side is called Jii-chan. Jii-chan and Baa-chan live in the East Bay near Berkeley. Baa-chan’s fingers are kind of bent, but she doesn’t let that stop her from pinching my arms and cheeks. She buys me stuff all the time, but she keeps the price tags on everything, because she knows that her taste isn’t the same as mine.
    Even though we call her Baa-chan, Dad’s mom knows nothing about Japan. Nothing. She and Jii-chan, have a Japanese scroll in their living room and sometimes she wears clothing made of kimono material, but she always tells us, “I’m pure USA, born and bred. Hundred percent American.”
    If you’re 100 percent, I think, why are we calling you Baa-chan? And why did you beat all that monku stuff into Dad’s head?
    Grandma Michi is really different from Baa-chan. She never touches me unless it’s to push me along so I’ll walk faster. She doesn’t tell us stories about living on a farm and catching rabbits in the summertime. I don’t really know anything about Grandma Michi.
    But Grandma Michi does know a lot about Japan. I asked her once if she had ever lived there, and she gave me a long, cold look, as if I had accused her of being a Nazi. “No, never,” she said, barely looking at me.
    Then how come you know so much? I wanted to ask her. That’s how it is with Grandma Michi. It’s like you’re walking in a minefield and you don’t know when the bombs might go off right underneath you. That’s why I’ve learned to keep quiet and watch.
    Right now Grandma Michi has me sitting at the counter at Gramps’s flower shop. She has spent the past hour talking all about 1001 cranes. Some of it is actually interesting.
    She explains to me that the tradition of a thousand cranes goes back to a long time ago, when Japanese people walked around with samurai swords.
    “Origami” is the combination of two words: “ori,” meaning “to fold,” and “gami,” “paper.” “But ‘gami’ is really ‘kami,’ ” she explains. “When the Japanese say ‘paper,’ they say ‘kami,’ not ‘gami.’ ”
    “Well, why don’t they just say ‘orikami’?” I ask.
    “Sometimes when they combine, they change the sounds a little so it’s easier to say the word. But ‘kami’ can also mean ‘hair’ or it can mean ‘god.’ So you have to be careful.”
    Careful of what? I wonder. It isn’t like I’m going to be walking around saying “I want a piece of kami to write on. I need to brush my kami. Kami bless you.” I don’t dare verbalize my thoughs, because Grandma isn’t the type to take kindly to jokes. And she is in an especially bad mood right now.
    I am having my first crane-folding lesson in the flower shop, the 1001 cranes’ “first base of business,” Grandma tells me. This is where we snag most of our new customers. If they need flowers for their wedding or anniversary, they often need a 1001-cranes display. Back at the house is where we make the displays.
    My lesson with Grandma is not going well. She has created a D pile and even an F pile for the ones that don’t make her cut.
    “Always match the edges. You can’t go wrong if you go from there,” Grandma Michi says, peering over my elbow. “And no white should show,” she repeats for the tenth time, as if revealing white is as bad as letting someone see your underwear.
    Why don’t they just make origami paper that is colored on both sides, instead of leaving one side white? That would get rid of the “white” problem for sure.
    The most boring part of origami is making folds and then unfolding them. “Now you have guiding lines,” Grandma says. From these lines you can flip the paper and make more complicated folds. So it begins: fold the square piece of paper in half, like a sandwich, and then open. Fold it in half in the other direction and then open. Then it starts to get a little trickier: fold two diagonal