Summary

Ma and Kim discover that their apartment has no heat, and soon after, learn that they are the only tenants living in the apartment. Kim is still skipping school, but suffers through staying at home in the freezing apartment. There, she sees her first snowfall. In her adult life, Kim recognizes that “my predominant memory of that phase of my life is the cold” (46). One day, she watches a mother and baby across the way in another apartment, and remembers the simpler life she had with her mother in Hong Kong.

In the factory, Kim helps Matt with skirts for the hemming station. Matt asks if Kim if she liked school that day, but then catches her in a lie: he knows that she has been skipping school. Matt tells her that the day was Thanksgiving, and that she needed to lie to her...