Beautiful Country Page 11
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The gift exchange was mortifying. Everyone else, it turned out, had placed their gifts in wrapping paper and gift bags of all colors—red and green and gold—and though I had no way of knowing how much each person spent, the gifts were much bigger than my tiny little brown package, still covered with eraser smudges, enclosing the tinier-still pencil. My face melted into embarrassment as my classmates opened their gifts—Lewis with his water gun; Julia and her beautiful hair clip covered with rhinestones; me, even, with my very first American teddy bear. Finally, it was Jennifer’s turn: in front of a silent class, she unrolled the crinkled, smudged paper bag and produced the pencil.
I could not afford a card or gift tag, so I had simply written on the bag itself, “Merry Christmas, Jennifer! Love, Qian.” Until then, I had thought that “Love,” was how we signed everything in America, but judging by the giggles that rippled through the room after Jennifer read out the note, I was wrong. My face burned bright, matching the baby pink pencil I had gifted in foolishness. Every word that the gracious Jennifer shared to conceal her disappointment only made it worse.
Shame ensnared me, taking home in my body until I was tucked into bed that night, my arms wrapped around my new teddy bear, who still had tags on him. He was mine, all mine, just like the day’s humiliation.
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Fifth Avenue was my favorite thing about Christmas. One Sunday, Ma Ma wrapped me in two of Lao Lao’s thickest sweaters and then piled my only coat on top, before covering my neck and mouth with her own itchy scarf.
“I can’t breathe, Ma Ma,” I muttered into the knit, feeling my warm, wet breath bouncing back at my chin and lips and all around.
“We can’t afford for you to get sick! Now, come on.”
Ma Ma led me to our regular subway station, but from there we transferred from one train to the next, each one marked by letters, numbers, and colors I’d never before seen on trains.
When we emerged from underground, I was shocked to see that the sun had set. But it took me a second to notice under the lights all around us. We walked a few blocks in throngs of people so thick it felt like we were back in Beijing. Then, Ma Ma led me to the base of the largest, brightest tree I had ever seen. The tree was surrounded by buildings, perfectly framed as I looked up at it against the night sky. Like the one in class, this tree wore decorations, balls, and figures of all kinds. Some were lit from within like Halloween decorations while others had glitter, and still others shone with their bright colors alone. I went up to one, a gold ball that was so shiny and large that I saw my own face in it. In the reflection, my eyes shone back at me a sparkle that I would carry in my body for the rest of the night.
Ma Ma had still more to show me, so she walked me onto the wide streets that had signs telling us that we were on Fifth Avenue. It was the cleanest and fanciest street I’d ever seen in Mei Guo. The storefronts were huge and tall, with men dressed in suits at the doors—some of them were white, some Black, but none Chinese. We stopped in the middle of a crowd of passersby admiring the front of a store that had strings of lights adorning its face. With a twinkle here and a flash there, the lights announced that a show was about to begin. I held my breath and waited, gripping Ma Ma’s hand. Out of the corner of my eyes, I caught her smiling as the music began and filled the street. Slowly at first and then all of a sudden, more lights appeared, one light bulb giving birth to another, then another, before spreading across the entire building, each bulb dancing to the beat of the music. And though we’d never heard the melody before, soon Ma Ma and I began moving with the swaying crowd, shaking gently to the beat, joy vibrating through us. The whole world was dancing and so were we. We exchanged another smile and I marveled how, in all the stories of the gold-paved Mei Guo and the dangerous Mei Guo, no one in China knew about the lights of America, about how they were so delightful that they could stop us in the middle of the street, in the middle of our lives and our worries, in the middle of strangers living stranger lives, all just to fill us with music and hope.
Tracing it all back, I know now that it was the moment I first became enamored with the idea of America. It was the first time I saw the beauty and glamour of the country, and really, of New York City—though at that point the two were one and the same to me. The lights and the joy among the crowd that night showed me all that the city was and had to offer: a completely different face of America than the one we had come to know. Finally, the Beautiful Country’s name made sense.
Amid the crowd of people, with eyes reflecting the lights on the buildings all around us, we kept walking as lit-up figures and animals in storefront windows danced and laughed. Ma Ma and I came upon a street that opened up to a fountain on the left. On the right, there was a building with many flags on its forehead. We walked through an area full of trees and greenery that I didn’t know existed in America. Lining the edges of the tree area were horses, white, black, spotted, all wearing red headdresses that matched the harnesses on their backs and the plush lining of the seats in the carriages they pulled. I kept my eyes on the horses until Ma Ma pulled me into a large building with another serious man in a suit standing by the door.
The store was large and bright. Greeting us at the center was a fat old Santa Claus on his throne, a little white boy sitting on his lap. The boy had cowlicked hair and eyes spotted with excitement and fear. A line of people began a short distance from Santa and wound around the store, full of happy children and exhausted adults.
I pulled Ma Ma away from the line, too shy to approach the large white man. Her hand in mine, I walked down aisle after aisle with my other hand out, touching the soft and the fluffy, pressing down the plastic and the noisy, rattling this and grabbing that. It was the most I’d seen of toys since boarding that plane in Beijing. I was a wanderer who, upon stumbling on the desert’s edge, could finally afford to recognize my monthslong thirst.
When the colorful aisles gave way to a stairway, I climbed them without hesitation. Ma Ma followed closely behind. At the landing, what came into view stopped my breath, already shallow with excitement. Before me was a giant keyboard that took up an entire section of the room. I had seen it on TV just weeks ago, when a white man had danced on it, making his own music. The scene had caused me to stand up and move closer to our tiny TV, so close that I had fogged up the screen with my hot breath in our cold room.
But there was no fog between me and the giant piano now. It was right there, for me to play with and dance on, and all for free. I could hardly believe it. There were already several children stomping on it when I approached, most of them white. I hung back, afraid of intruding. I looked to Ma Ma, who stood by the landing.
“Ni qu ya,” she urged me on.
I walked forward, each step a little more sure than the last, and by the time I was on the keys, I had settled on my route: I hopped from one white plank to a black one and then back, the art of play coming back to me with the banging tones. It was a melody all my own, and when I closed my eyes, I traveled back to a time and place where it never occurred to me to question whether I belonged. I saw myself back in that courtyard, singing and dancing to a semicircle of captive audience, without worry or fear that I was singing out of tune, dancing out of step, or performing out of turn. That little stage had been mine, and now so was this one.
When we left the store later that night, I did not ask Ma Ma if I could buy a toy. I had recovered a little piece of my previous life, my former self. My heart glowed as Ma Ma and I walked hand in hand, past the lights and back into the shadows.
Chapter 10
CHATHAM SQUARE
I discovered Chatham Square early. A few weeks after I went back into her class, Ms. Tang guided me and my classmates out of the school, turning off of Division Street and onto East Broadway, before ushering us into the red door of a white building just a few steps away from Ba Ba’s office.
The building, it turned out, was a branch of the public library, and its name was Chatham Square. Once inside, Ms. Tang led us up a flight of steps before telling us to sit on the floor in front of a lady in a chair. She had wild, curly hair and long chains made of beads of different colors that dangled from the legs of her gold-rimmed glasses. Once we were all seated, she pulled out The Very Hungry Caterpillar, a book I had read, reread, and read again during my time in the special-needs classroom. As the lady made her way through my hairy friend’s journey to unfurling his beautiful butterfly wings, I realized that it was the first time I had heard the words spoken out loud. I knew them well, of course, having first stumbled over them, only to later fly past them, but it had all happened over the course of days spent in solitary silence. There was something reassuring, I realized, in hearing the words spoken by a grown adult, just for us.
After the lady finished the book and then another, Ms. Tang funneled us back down the stairs. From the top, I saw the children’s section in a corner of the first floor, full of colorful books and bright posters encouraging us to READ. There were also clumsy computer stations scattered throughout, with an unwashed man sitting at one and a bespectacled lao lao at another. As Ms. Tang directed us out of the red door and back to school, I was sad, but I knew that it was just the beginning.
I returned hours later. Instead of going to Ba Ba’s office after school, I walked past his building and in through the red door. I went straight to the children’s section, where my mind had lingered all day. It was the brightest part of the library, and I could barely believe that I would get to read all of the books in it for free. Here and there, a few picture books were propped up for display. Old friends greeted me: Amelia Bedelia, the Berenstain Bears, and Clifford. For the first time since leaving Zhong Guo, I was home.
Every day after school, I passed countless hours in that little corner. I dove into one book after another, forgetting for stretches at a time where I was and what I had to worry about. Between each set of covers, I was just another American kid. This was especially true of The Baby-Sitters Club and Sweet Valley Twins, my two favorite series. In Stoneybrook and Sweet Valley, I was a normal girl cradled by supportive family and a stable circle of friends. I saw myself in Kristy Thomas and Elizabeth Wakefield, and in them my worries were no bigger than being grounded or doing poorly on tests.
I felt so at home at the library that I took it upon myself to keep it organized. I didn’t like that the spines of all the picture books were lined up along the edges of the shelves. It was too precarious; their faces jutted out instead of sitting in safety toward the back. I also didn’t like that they were not organized by height—they looked messy and sloppy, tall ones next to short ones, the tops of some books sticking out over the tops of others next to them. So I developed a daily habit of organizing the shelves, placing the larger, hardbound version of Goodnight Moon before the smaller, paperbacked Berenstain Bears books.
One day in the spring, I had engaged in this organization for the better part of an hour—small, dirty fingers working nimbly, tongue peeking out of dried lips, eyes dancing with excitement—when I was approached by a birdlike librarian with a nest for a bun at the top of her head.
“Can you stop that, please?”
“What?”
“Please stop moving the books around.”
“But I’m helping you organize.” Indignation was my only response.
“The titles are harder to read when the spines are farther from the edge. They can’t be pushed all the way to the back.”
“But they look better this way.”
“Please stop.”
She walked away but she must have known that I was sneaky. She looked back over at me every now and then, so I retreated back into my Stoneybrook corner, sad that I could not bring order even to this home.
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From then on, there was no saving me. I lived and breathed books. Where else could I find such a steady supply of friends, comforts, and worlds, all free for the taking? And so portable, too—everywhere I went, there they were: on the subway, at recess, on the steps just outside of Ba Ba’s office. Unlike my teachers and classmates, they were reliable.
But even though libraries were homes, bookstores were dangerous. I rarely let myself go in. I was afraid that they would show me that there were worlds beyond what was already freely available to me, and make me want more than I could afford. I resented even school book sales, when Ms. Tang made us stay in the school library for thirty minutes, locking us up among shelves whose free books were replaced with shiny bright volumes that cost as much as ten dollars apiece. Even then, I refused to contemplate what was just out of reach. Instead, I fixed my focus on the table of free bookmarks, which sometimes had characters from The Baby-Sitters Club on them, though most of the time they just showed addresses and photos of stores. Still, I willed myself not to look away from the free table, praying that none of my classmates would notice that the girl who brought the cheapest Secret Santa gift was also the one who only took free things from book sales.
Chapter 11
HAIR
Our first full summer in Mei Guo, Ma Ma and Ba Ba decided that we had heard the word “chink” too many times and moved us out of the creaky building.
This happened a week after I did a very bad thing. I took in a stray cat I had found outside the door and stowed her away in the vacant bedroom on the first floor. Before it became empty, someone whom Ba Ba called a “boat person” used to live there. Ba Ba explained to me that this meant that he had come over on a boat to escape hardship, and I wondered for years why he hadn’t just taken a plane. In exchange for rent, the boat person took care of the old lady’s husband. But one night an ambulance pulled up, its sirens lighting up the entire street, and men in identical outfits took the old man out on a bed with wheels.
The boat person left after that, and his bedroom stayed empty for weeks. The room was right by the front door and I always tried to turn the doorknob on my way in and out of the house. Most of the time it was locked, but one day I found it open and went in. The room contained only a bare mattress with a metal frame. Before shutting the door again, I ran up to our room to grab some tape, which I put over the part of the lock that clicked it in place. I had seen someone do this on TV once, and I was glad to find that it worked.
On the day I came upon a cat out in front of the house, rather than in the backyard like the others, I decided that she was mine. She was all black, with yellow eyes that beamed like the moon. Ma Ma said that cats were bad luck, and that black cats were even worse luck, and I thought back on my poor crab friends in China. No, I could not risk Ma Ma seeing my little Moonlight, so I did the only thing I could: I put her in the abandoned bedroom and returned every hour or so, telling Ma Ma and Ba Ba that I had to go to the bathroom, the kitchen, the backyard. With each visit, I stole from our neighbors’ kitchen goods—a saucer of milk, a sliver of sausage—and slipped into the room. I sat on the bare mattress with its loose, loud springs until Moonlight came out from under the bed. Then I gave her my offering and, as she ate, I patted her on the head and stroked her back. As soon as she was done, she went right back under the bed, not even leaving a tail out to be pet. Toward the end of the evening, she refused to come out at all, and I found myself lying flat on my side on the floor, staring into two moons, bright and full, at the back corner of the bed.
I didn’t get a chance to say good night to Moonlight because on my last run, I told Ma Ma that I was going down the hall to brush my teeth. But Ma Ma came out of the room, too, saying that she might as well brush her teeth with me. I had already “used the bathroom” several times earlier that evening, so there was little I could do but diligently brush my teeth by Ma Ma’s side. She then marched me to bed. I fell into a fitful sleep, full of nightmares of Moonlight starving, crying, and shivering.
I awoke to screa
ms and shuffles, following by panting steps up the stairs, and then pounding on our door. Ba Ba dragged himself out of bed and opened the door. Through it, I saw the old lady in her ghostly nightgown, hair splayed out from her head like rays from the sun.
“Zen me me?”
“Xia bian! You ren!”
I jolted out of bed. The old lady had heard something from the empty bedroom. She thought it was a burglar. I took a second too long to consider whether I should tell Ba Ba about Moonlight. By the time I chickened out, it didn’t matter anyway, because Ba Ba had already shut the door and run downstairs.
Ma Ma sat up in her bed and stared at me. All my life, she had a way of knowing when I was hiding something. I looked at Ma Ma and vomited the truth.
My memories of what came next are sleep-stained. Ma Ma and I lumbered down the stairs as if in a three-legged race. At the bottom, we came upon several open doors: the door to the room, the door to the broom closet across from the room, and the front door of the house. We darted toward the last one, following the noise. As we crossed the threshold, the hot summer air greeted us. I found Ba Ba by the sidewalk, holding a dustpan with various shaped poops, looking at a small black figure seated on the patchy sidewalk grass. There, looking back at us through her dilated yellow eyes, Moonlight sat carrying a gray and hairy clump in her mouth, a long tail trailing out just under her cheek.
I walked toward her, but this only caused her to bolt. She stopped only to turn around for a last glance before disappearing down the bend of the street. And just like that, there went another thing I cared about that I would never see again.