Beautiful Country Read online

  As I peered in, I saw that the humans within were like those in the sweatshop. All cloaked in light-blue plastic, they did not notice us entering and instead stayed focused on their work with deadened determination. They stood hunched over a long, steel, tubular trough that snaked its way, mazelike, through the room.

  Ma Ma gestured for me to enter and I pinched my nose shut before stepping into an anteroom with hooks from which plastic onesies dangled, each of them looking like a blue man who had given up on life—one hollow, three-dimensional hangman after another. It was only when the door shut with a smelly whoosh that I realized that though it was early winter outside, it was even colder inside. Ma Ma rescued a hanging blue man from his hook and handed him to me.

  “Put this on, quickly. It will warm you up.”

  It was too long in the arms, the legs, the everywhere, but I obliged. The hood fell down past the bridge of my nose and I shoved it up, once, twice, three times before it obeyed. I scrunched the sleeves up, crinkling with every movement as if I were made of foil. Ma Ma had her blue man over her too now, and we were twins, one short and shriveled up, one tall and fully grown.

  She was putting boots on now, boots made of rubber and smellier than even the room, with the same sludge tracked on each bottom. She handed me a pair large enough to hold three of my feet, but I bent down to put them on anyway. As I reached to pull the boot up, my sleeves fell down again, and then my hood did, too. I could see nothing, touch nothing, move nowhere. Laughter convulsed through me as I became a large blue plastic bag, shaking in the sea-stink wind. I nudged the hood up again and, just before it fell, I caught the sight of Ma Ma smiling despite herself.

  We trudged into the main room, me much slower than Ma Ma, and I followed her to a post by the basin. We were at the corner of the room, where the trough changed directions.

  I stood with my torso pressed against the steel wall of the tub. I was just tall enough to look over the boards that lined the edge of the basin and see the water slushing out of the faucets fixed above. Beyond that there was a moving belt of fish, whole, silver, and still. Water flowed across the trough, over and through the crevices between ice cubes crowded together and stacked upon each other. To Ma Ma’s left, a small bucket sat suspended over the flowing water, fixed onto the edges of the basin.

  The cold supplants many of my memories from that room. I can no longer tell whether the images come to me from my firsthand experience or whether they have since been diluted by scenes filtered in from movies and documentaries. But in my mind’s eye, I see Ma Ma whisking a dead fish out of the cold water and placing it on the chopping board, slicing its belly open and then beheading it, exposing the orange flesh inside. With a few flicks of the knife she removes bloody innards, which she dumps into the bucket. She then puts the fish on the belt, which carries it around the room to the next station, where the fish loses its fins, and then another station, where it surely would have been sliced and cut, and so on and so forth, until it becomes just a bunch of flattened orange pieces that I would not taste for the first time until many, many years later. I see blue-draped women and men slicing with flicks of their bony wrists, removing large white bones, and then smaller white bones with pliers. Some of the bones are so small that I can barely see them, even as I creep up the stations and to the men and women holding pliers in their hands, purple from the cold.

  When the fish complete the journey around the room, they end up with a pudgy woman in a gray plastic suit. She places them in a bin and every now and then, she takes that bin behind a set of steel doors.

  This I do remember just as if I am right back in the room: at the bottom of the basins where Ma Ma worked, there were small cracks that set free drops of water that fell onto the ground, our boots, and occasionally our socks as they glided down across the surface of our plastic blue garb. Over the course of the day, ice water gathered on the floor and inside our boots, chilling us just like the salmon.

  Shaking and numbness spread by the hour. I watched as Ma Ma’s hands pruned while our shivers expanded from our fingertips to our palms and then to our arms, until our whole bodies convulsed all over. There were rubber gloves, Ma Ma said, but they made the knives hard to grab.

  To stay warm, I took many walks around the room, looking at each person at her station. Only one person has stayed with me over the years. She was an old woman around Lao Lao’s age. Even through the blue plastic, hers and mine, I could tell that her skin was purple all over. Her lips came in a matching color, protruding and swollen. There was wetness on her cheeks. At first, I thought she was sweating, but no, of course not. The source of the drops was not her pores but her eyes, cloudy and gray. She was too old to be so cold. Too old to be there.

  When I returned to Ma Ma’s side, her eyes turned to me for a second before returning their focus, and there I stood on a stool, just as I had in our kitchen in China, grabbing the fish for her to slice. We worked until, in the world outside, the sun set. Farther uptown, sushi restaurants opened and then closed, their waitstaff placing chairs and barstools on top of the tables, locking the doors and rolling down the gates. In the time it took the city to wake up, get dressed, go out, and crawl to bed, we in that room stayed frozen: frozen with our fish, frozen in our boots, frozen at our stations. And all that time, my mind never strayed far from the lao lao just a few rows over, a cold wind and a bin of fish away from giving up.

  The fish plant hovered over us long after Ma Ma and I unveiled ourselves of the blue plastic, unshelled our frozen feet of their rubber casings. We continued shaking on our walk to the subway, braving the cold outdoors, which mixed with the cold of the room, the cold that flooded our veins. The fish smell stayed on our skin and in our hair until our next washing, and we did not stop shaking until long after we wrapped ourselves deep in our comforters, our purple arms with their goose bumps and dark-blue veins crossed against our chests.

  I drifted off to sleep that night with thoughts of my luck. The day after tomorrow, which was our off day, our lucky day, I would have school. I would not have to return to the plant until a full week later. My skin would have time to chase away the goose bumps, to regain its pink smoothness. Ma Ma’s would never look the same.

  Chapter 9

  LIGHTS

  We spent our first winter in Mei Guo by turns cloaked in darkness and emboldened by light. Before we knew it, all the trees were naked, their crunchy orange clothing shed to the ground and then covered with the sheen of frost. Lao Lao started mailing us the itchy sweaters that she made at her post in front of the TV. Her packages smelled like mothballs, a scent I came to associate with Lao Lao’s home, and I loved to bring the sweaters to my nose and feel their scratchy tendrils, the smells of family climbing up my airways and stepping into my lungs. Sometimes Lao Lao’s packages came preopened, ripped and then taped back together, the letters—with characters blacked out—wrinkled. The outsides of the packages were covered with rubberstamp markings, indicating that they had passed censor board approval and were allowed to leave Zhong Guo and fly here.

  The heater was not on very often in our room, and we could see our breath when we exhaled. When we got home, I crawled into bed long before I was ready for sleep. While we were awake, we piled the comforters from both beds onto one for warmth. Under them, I wore layers of sweaters on top of one another and all of my socks on my feet. When the heat did come on, there was a telltale metallic smell, followed by a hissing from the radiator. At that sound, which never came until late in the evening, I hurried to the radiator with my hands out, fingers dancing as I hopped from one foot to the other. As soon as I felt the heat spread through my fingertips and up my arms, I ran downstairs to the kitchen to retrieve Ma Ma; so desperate was she to thaw from the sushi plant that she spent hours sitting by the stove, boiling and reboiling tap water.

  “Ma Ma, Ma Ma, lai ya!”

  She could tell from the rosiness in my cheeks and the fire in m
y eyes that warmth had finally found our cold little room, so we bounded up the stairs like two squirrels on a carefree chase. Once inside, I pulled Ma Ma’s still-shaking purple hands to the radiator and beamed.

  It was in moments like this that Ma Ma’s eyes filled with an inscrutable gaze, one of joy and sadness, love and despair all at once. Only looking back at the scene through an adult lens do I see in the cracks of her face the sweet pain Ma Ma must have felt in those moments. Gratitude for the little she had. Heartbreak in needing it. Confusion over what our lives had become.

  * * *

  * * *

  In the middle of one freezing winter night, we awoke to a thud, a squeak, and several thunks just outside our room. It was not the light tapping of cockroach feet that we had grown used to. No, it was made by a much larger, commanding subject, in the hallway outside.

  “Shh. I’ll go.” Ba Ba was up with a leap, already by the window and then the door. In the light that streaked in, I could see that he had the face he put on to look brave when he was really terrified. I had seen it when he had gone on a Ferris wheel with me in Beijing, his eyes not daring to look down, around, or at me, but his face the mask of courage.

  I sat up in my bed as Ma Ma crept to the door behind Ba Ba. He opened the door with a creak and stuck his head out. The flood of light through the cracks told me that he had dared to flick on the hallway light. With it came a squeak.

  “Eh! Wang sheng!”

  It was the tired voice of our little old landlady. I hopped up and joined my parents at the door, sticking my head out in between their bodies. She, a lady of eighty-some years, was at the top of a six-step ladder that leaned against the wall dividing our room from the hall. Those wrinkly hands with tubular, bulbous veins were on the heater control panel at the very top, where the wall met the ceiling.

  “What are you doing? Do you need help?” Ba Ba ventured a few steps forward, voice low in observance of our many roommates.

  “Lou shang kai da chuang ya. Baby hao xin ku ya!”

  Her Mandarin-Cantonese-English-jammered speech—which I realize now must have been impeded by dentures—had always been somewhat incomprehensible, but grew all the more so in the dead of night.

  “Oh.” Feigned courage dropped off Ba Ba’s face. Pretend comprehension took its place.

  “Mei shi le, mei shi le.” She descended the ladder, step by meager step, socked foot slipping in frilly slippers, frilly slippers sliding on wooden rungs. Ba Ba ran over to hold the ladder steady against the wall. As soon as the landlady got to the ground, she started sliding the ladder against the wall and toward the bathroom, next to which I saw an always-locked closet door open for the very first time. With determination, she brushed Ba Ba aside and took just a few seconds too long to stow the ladder into the closet.

  “Mei shi le, mei shi le,” she continued her mantra as she creaked and lowered her weight down the staircase.

  With a wave of the hand, Ba Ba ushered us back into our room and shut the door. As soon as the lock clicked shut, he burst into laughter.

  I started giggling, too, excited to see Ba Ba happier than I could remember seeing him in Mei Guo. Here he was again: Ba Ba of the past, the younger man who had never left China, the man who was worlds lighter because he had yet to experience day-to-day bullying, yet to chase down a naked man in the halls of a psychiatric institution.

  Ma Ma looked at the two of us, confused, and asked, “Ni xiao shen me?”—why are you laughing?—before catching the bug herself.

  “She said—she said she had to turn the heater off because—it’s too hot!” Ba Ba could barely get the sentence out between his laughs. “She said the baby upstairs has had such a hard life because it’s too hot. The parents even have to open the windows!”

  The family upstairs was the richest in the house, which really did not mean much, but to me, they were glamorous. They were also Puerto Rican, like many of our other roommates, but out of everyone in the house, they had the lightest skin by far. To me, they may as well have been white and wealthy: they rented the entire top floor with two bedrooms, a living room, and their very own bathroom. When I passed the mother in the hallway or kitchen, I couldn’t help but stare at her wrists and neck, wondering whether it was the private bathroom that caused her skin to look so much whiter, so much better than mine.

  “Can you imagine that! Can you imagine”—at this, Ba Ba, blessed with the art of drama, held his hand below his mouth and blew into the air. His hot breath condensed into misty fog before our eyes—“this being too hot!”

  I don’t know if it was the night’s cold, which had already started to sink to a graver depth, or our hunger for joy, but the three of us returned to the warmth of our comforters and laughed until our tummies ached and tears flowed out of our eyes. I was too cold to reach my hands out to wipe the wetness away from my face, so I fell asleep with it still drying.

  The next morning, when I awakened with the skin around my eyes taut from evaporated tears, I heard the pale father from upstairs lumbering around in the hall, by the heater control panel, muttering, “Stupid old communist bitch. Fucking twenty degrees outside and she turns the heater off.”

  We spent the rest of that winter shivering under our two comforters, listening to the nightly thuds and creaks. And every time it happened, we shared a little chuckle.

  * * *

  * * *

  Christmas quickly became my favorite time in Mei Guo. On Thanksgiving I had only gotten to watch on our tiny TV how lao wai celebrated—eating dead turkeys fatter than Chinese babies, innards stuffed with bread crumbs and vegetables. We did not dream of being able to afford any of these things.

  With Christmas, though, I got to participate. One day in early December, I walked into the classroom to find Ms. Tang in a red dress, with a small, spiky, plastic green tree standing on her desk.

  “Today,” she declared, “Christmas begins!”

  She pressed a button on the class boom box and cheerful music blared out. She then passed two boxes around the room. I watched as my classmates rummaged through the boxes as they made their way closer to me. I could not see, though, what each child pulled out. When one of the boxes got to me, I realized that it was full of tiny delights, all with stringed loops coming out of them: shiny balls, dancing ballerinas, fat, bearded white men in red suits. I took so much time to make my selection that just as I had settled on a fuzzy cat playing with a ball of yarn, Janie tugged the box out of my hands.

  Next, we went up, table by table, to hang our items on the tree. Its pines were coarse, bearing uneven, protruding rims of translucent green plastic. The branches were so loosely slatted into the trunk that several fell out as we hung our items. I placed my ornament with particular care, keeping my touch light so as to avoid disturbing the cat, the tree, and my very first Christmas experience.

  As the little tree took on a heavier and heavier load, Ms. Tang talked to us about the holiday. She told us that on Christmas, Americans everywhere showed people their love by giving gifts, like Santa Claus did, and by doing acts of service. That meant that we, too, would learn to do that—by organizing a Secret Santa in class. Because the idea was not really about gifts but about love, Ms. Tang said we were not to spend more than ten dollars. At this, I was both elated and nervous. I could not believe that I would get a gift that would be worth ten whole dollars. At the same time, though, I wondered how I would be able to afford to buy such a gift for someone else.

  When another box came around—this time to pick names, not ornaments—I happened to draw Jennifer Tan, the richest girl in our class. She lived in the residential building attached to the school, which made her royalty in my eyes. I had rolled my eyes just a few days ago when she had told her friend, the beautiful Julia Huang, that she was going to Disney World for Christmas. When Jennifer noticed me listening in, she gave me a friendly smile. This prompted me to turn to Janie and say,
“Disney World, what a baby.” Instead of looking at me, though, Janie turned to Jennifer and said, “I’m jealous—you are so lucky!”

  There was no loyalty in Mei Guo.

  The next week, I emptied into my school backpack the box of coins Ba Ba and Ma Ma had let me keep from my sweatshop shifts. Then, after school, with the coins jingling in my bag, I walked down East Broadway and into that stationery store. By then, I knew the store well—I was a frequent visitor, though never a customer. I went to the aisle that displayed the mechanical pencils I had ogled for months. There, I chose the pencil I had so coveted: a pink one with a round, white eraser at its head and Hello Kitty all over. It came out to just under three dollars, and I relished getting to spend a whole twelve hours with it before the gift exchange. The man at the counter with the gentle face placed the pencil in a little brown paper bag, and with a smile, I left the coins on the counter, ran out of the store, down the street, and up the flights of Ba Ba’s office building. I did not stop until I hit the little sitting steps, where I held my breath as I pulled out the pencil and clicked it with relish until the gray lead showed its face through the small pink mouth. Delicately, with the slightest pressure, I pushed the tip onto the brown paper bag, writing out my name. The lead felt harder, more durable, than the lead that came out of the sharpened yellow pencils I took from Ba Ba’s office. With this lead, I knew from having observed my classmates, there was no need to stop what I was doing just to stick it into the sharpener and grind it against the blade. No, this lead was reliable, not so needy.

  I luxuriated in writing out my last name before stowing the treasure back in its paper pocket, and placing it deep in my backpack, hidden from temptation. But alas, it would reemerge several times that afternoon and evening, so much that I had to stop outside the school the next morning and rub the pink eraser tip of one of my yellow pencils against the brown paper bag, which was now full of markings.