The Paper Crane

Rosa was nine years old when her family moved from Guadalajara to San Francisco. Everything in the new city was different: the hills, which were so steep that her legs hurt; the fog, which came in from the ocean every afternoon; and the school, where everyone spoke much too fast.

Rosa knew some English, but when her teacher, Ms. Lee, asked her a question, the words that she knew disappeared from her head. At lunch she sat alone and pretended to read. The other children weren't unkind. They just didn't know what to say to a girl who never said anything.

At home, Rosa folded paper. Her aunt in Mexico had taught her how to make a crane, a bird with long wings and a pointed tail, and Rosa could fold one in less than two minutes. One evening she made a small red crane, and the next morning she left it on the desk of the boy who sat in front of her. His name was Leo, and he was the only person in the class who had smiled at her on her first day.

When Leo found the crane, he looked around the classroom in surprise. Rosa kept her eyes on her book. He didn't say anything, but the next morning there was something on Rosa's desk: a blue paper frog. When she pressed its back, it jumped.

That was the beginning of a silent conversation. Rosa left a star; Leo answered with a boat. Rosa folded a fox; Leo made a fish whose tail moved when you pulled it. Soon the whole class was watching. Every morning, the children who arrived first ran to see what was on the two desks.

One day, Leo turned around. "How do you make the crane?" he asked slowly. "My grandmother is from Japan. She makes them too, but in a different way." Rosa didn't understand everything, but she understood "crane" and "grandmother". She took a piece of paper and showed him, step by step. When she didn't know a word, she used her hands. They both laughed a lot, especially when Leo tried to say the Spanish word for crane.

On Saturday, Leo invited Rosa to his house, where his grandmother, a small woman who had been folding paper for seventy years, taught them both a new animal: a turtle. Rosa didn't need many words to follow her. Paper, she discovered, speaks every language.

By the end of the school year, Rosa's English was much better and she had lots of friends. Above Ms. Lee's desk hung a long string of paper birds that the whole class had folded together. But the first red crane, the one that started everything, stayed in a box that Leo kept under his bed.