Beautiful Country Read online

  Turning back to the house, I caught Ba Ba watching me. Ma Ma had already retreated to our room, so I turned away to look at our landlady, who seemed to already be falling back asleep.

  “Mao mao, hai yi wei shi ren ne,” she said as she shuffled back into the house, chuckling with a flap of her vein-covered hand.

  “Well,” Ba Ba said as he dumped the contents of the dustpan into the well of a sidewalk tree, “it’s a good thing the cat caught a mouse because she shat all over that room.”

  He paused for emphasis and stared at me.

  “And the person who let her in would have been in real trouble.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Our new home was a little bigger, a little brighter, a little safer. It was on the first floor of a two-story house that was laid out as if on a railroad track, one long skinny line, with windows on one side only. Our landlords, a gentle couple with two sons around my age, lived on the entire second floor. They could afford the home because, as Ma Ma leaned over to whisper to me after our first meeting, they were among the workers in the sweatshops who sewed buttons, and they had been in America so long that both their sons had been born here. This gave me hope. Perhaps by the time I had my own children—who would be real, true Americans—I might be able to afford to live on an entire floor of a house.

  We had the three small connected rooms at the front of the first floor, with other tenants living in each of the two rooms at the back. Separating our rooms from theirs were the shared tiny bathroom and kitchen, this one modest, with no island. I realized only years later that the entire floor had been meant for one family, our rooms the intended dining room, living room, and sunroom, though that third room was useless because it was both too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. We were grateful that the sunroom at least had a door to separate it from the two usable spaces. Between those spaces, we hung up a thin blue curtain we had packed from China.

  I spent much of that first summer on our couch, melting my brain with the four TV channels available to me. Ma Ma and Ba Ba didn’t think it was good for me to spend as much time at work with them as I did, so they left me at home with strict instructions not to go outside. They called every now and then to check up on me, but once I was confronted with a stranger when I expected Ma Ma on the other end.

  “Ma Ma?”

  “Hello! May I speak to your parents, please?”

  “They’re not home. Who is this?”

  “They’re not home! How old are you?”

  “Who is this?”

  “They shouldn’t leave you at home alone.”

  I hung up with a slam. For the next few hours, I sat on the couch, immobile, waiting for the cops to break down our door and arrest me for being left alone at home, only to deport me once they found out the truth. At least they would have no way of finding my parents. They could torture me and I wouldn’t tell them. They could tie me up and starve me, and I still wouldn’t tell them. How much hungrier could I get, anyway? Would they ship me off to China? Would I be allowed to see Lao Lao and Lao Ye, or would I be stuck working as a slave somewhere?

  I sat like this until Ma Ma came home, working out my plans and my answers and how I would scrimp and save if I were sent to live as a farmhand in the countryside.

  I never did get to put any of those plans into action. Even so, I stopped picking up the phone.

  By then, Ma Ma had stopped asking Ba Ba when we’d be going back to China. She also grew morose. Ma Ma and Ba Ba didn’t talk so much anymore, and Ba Ba often came home late.

  I worried that it was not good for my parents to be without me during workdays, but they said it was no place for a child. So I stayed at home, useless and selfish.

  * * *

  * * *

  Ma Ma had many dreams. She wanted to make a change, break out of the illegal Chinatown market. One night, after returning under a cloak of exhaustion, Ma Ma asked me whether I thought she should do hair or nails.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, as a job.”

  It was easy. I thought people who painted their nails were weird, but everyone needed to cut their hair. “Hair!”

  That answer set Ma Ma on a path. It took her a week to find a salon that was hiring unpaid apprentices, and the week after that she brought home a terrifying mannequin head that cost two weeks of our food budget and several nights of sleep for me. Ma Ma set the mannequin by the window in our bedroom. Late at night, the moonlight filtered into our room through the decapitated head, casting a large and terrifying shadow on the wall.

  The mannequin had long golden hair that was as coarse as a horse’s—at least according to Ma Ma; I’d never seen horsehair up close. The hair was so blond that I imagined it had come from the heads of the white people I saw on the subway. This was what their hair felt like, I figured, and apparently what horsehair felt like. Was my hair supposed to feel like that, too?

  The mannequin started off with hair down to her imagined knees, but over the course of days, Ma Ma chopped and snipped in a meandering path, until the mannequin was left with no more than a scraggly, uneven buzz cut.

  The biggest lesson Ma Ma learned from her apprenticeship went like this:

  “Qian Qian, there once was a barber-in-training who had a really bad habit.”

  “What was it?”

  “He spent months practicing close shaves with an expensive raw blade. Because he often cut his customers during the early months of his training, he started practicing on watermelons.”

  “Watermelons?”

  “Yes, watermelons.”

  “Yummy.”

  “And whenever his mentor summoned him during his training, he stuck the blade right into the watermelon rind and walked to his mentor’s station. By the end of each day, the rind would be all cut up.”

  “Could he still eat the flesh inside?” At this point I always drooled a little.

  “But it didn’t matter, because he never lost his expensive blade and every night, he brought home an easy-to-cut watermelon for his happy wife.”

  “So he could eat it! How great.”

  “Not so.”

  “Why not?”

  “Habits form your character. Slowly, but inevitably and always. When he was finally ready, when he finally stopped making mistakes, he got his first customer and, guess what?”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Yes, the phone rang and, without thinking, he stuck the blade right into his customer’s head.”

  At this she always laughed before continuing: “That’s why, Qian Qian, we must always act as if it counts even when it’s just practice.”

  The story haunted me. I figured that if it were true, Ma Ma’s practice did not bode well for her customers. But at least she never stuck a blade into the mannequin; she just gave it choppy and asymmetrical cuts. Ma Ma tried to even it out, but one side always ended up shorter than the other. In frustration, Ma Ma finally buzzed the coarse hair off, leaving a shorn, pixie mess.

  * * *

  * * *

  I got to visit Ma Ma’s place of slaughter, the hair salon, late into the summer. When we stepped out of the subway station, I thought we were in Chinatown because there were Chinese people everywhere. It was the first time I learned that lots of people like us lived in Brooklyn, too. Ma Ma told me that the area was called Ba Da Dao, Eighth Avenue, a neighborhood I would later match up with that more commonly known as Sunset Park.

  I remember two things about the visit.

  The first was congee. I was less hungry during the summer because, having no reason to believe I was getting my meals at school, Ma Ma made sure to prepare food for me before leaving for work early each morning. I woke up every day to our little table full of dishes. Sunset Park was like that table, but stretched out across several streets. There were restaurants upon restaurants, e
ach selling cheap meals. I slowed as we came upon one window front that had a sign advertising congee for sixty cents. Ma Ma nudged me in.

  “Really?”

  She didn’t even have time to nod before I bolted through the door. I asked for congee, please, and a Cantonese woman in a hairnet used a ladle the size of her head to sop the white-rice soup, specked with pork and century egg, into a translucent container. As she capped the container, Ma Ma deposited two quarters and a dime into her hand. I had no idea that, all this time, we could buy heaven for so little.

  I had never had southern Chinese congee before, only plain congee from the north. It was a delight to taste the rice, pork, and century egg all in one spoonful.

  “Ma Ma, do you want?” My words exploded into the air, garbled through bits of meat, rice, and egg.

  She shook her head. I recognized the look. She was determined and anxious to get to work. So I walked as quickly as I could while delivering spoon after spoon of congee into my mouth, spilling some onto my T-shirt.

  We stopped in front of an all-glass storefront with barber stripes on the window and $10 haircut next to it. The glass was cracked in one corner, dirt caked at its edges. Ma Ma pushed the door in and we were greeted by wafts of shampoo, dyes, and blow-dryer exhaust.

  The room was maybe six hundred square feet. Down one side, a row of swivel chairs with peeling leathery plastic sat before a wall of mirrors. On the other side, there were little tables with chairs around them. On that wall were not mirrors but small bottles of nail polish in different colors.

  I saw that we were not the first in the shop, for through the curtain at the back came a woman who looked just like a witch. Perhaps I only remember her this way because of the many stories of unkind acts that Ma Ma had shared with me about her boss, but in my mind’s eye, she held a broom and her hair was frizzy. Her lipstick was drawn way beyond her lip line. As she stepped forward, I retreated behind Ma Ma.

  “Hao ke ai!” she gushed as I tried my best to look unafraid. After several minutes of me hiding in Ma Ma’s skirt, resistant to her pleas, the Witch gave up and walked away. It took me a while longer to emerge from Ma Ma’s shadow, and by then other employees were filtering in.

  This led me to the second thing I remember about the visit. Cutting hair was not as glamorous as I had imagined. The customers who headed to the nail tables were mostly women, and they were either eager to chat with the staff or completely oblivious to them. But there were more men among the people who strolled in toward the hairstyling stations. They looked at Ma Ma and the other women strangely. They seemed to enjoy their scalp massage a little too much, and their hands had too many accidental brushes with the women intent on working on their hair.

  During breaks in the back room—a closet, really, with some stools and a mini fridge full of food labeled with names—I heard Ma Ma chatter with the other women about how gross and cheap they felt, how much they dreaded the shampooing and scalp massages. Ma Ma was the newest, so shampooing and massaging was all she did, again and again, throughout her ten-hour shift. It brought me back to the fish-processing plant, how she had had to dip her fingers into wet, gross stuff until they came out purple, shriveled.

  For the rest of my childhood, I carried in my heart the guilt of forcing Ma Ma into that job—not just through my existence and my need for food, but by simply giving her such bad advice.

  Chapter 12

  SHOPPING DAY

  Shopping days came twice a week. We didn’t always make it out both days, though we tried. We never knew what would be available and hated the thought of missing out. Spring was the best season. It rained often, but it was never too cold or hot. Plus, the rain left mist that stayed suspended in the night air, dew clinging to the mounds of the black plastic bags on the edge of the sidewalks. The sheen of spring’s hopeful freshness blanketed all—the bags, the sidewalks, our lives.

  Every night on shopping day, I wheeled our tottering cart out from its home between the sofa and the student chair. All three were treasures from shopping days past. The stains on the sofa were really not so bad. From far away, they made out what looked like an intentional design: flowers, maybe, or polka dots of various sizes. That’s what we thought they were when we first came upon the couch under flickering streetlamps. It wasn’t until we had carried it six blocks that the starkness of the room revealed the designs for what they actually were.

  The student chair was my favorite. It looked just like the ones I saw in the schools on TV, down to the stray etchings in the wood and the dried gum caked onto the underside of the attached table. Someone had even carved on it the S made of six interconnected lines that my classmates and I were obsessed with. It mattered not that the table was designed for left-handed students, or that one of the legs had lost its rubber cap. I wedged it in between the couch and the wall and spent hours nestled in its cocoon, rocking back and forth on the unsteadiness of the shorter leg, playing at raising my hand as if I were one of the students in the schools on TV.

  The shopping cart had rusty liver spots. Each time I retrieved it from its napping place, more spots appeared. It unleashed cantankerous squeaks every foot or so. The protests grew in the cold weather, when the snow, sleet, and salt attacked the arthritic wheels. Sometimes pushing it on the winter sidewalks was so strenuous that I closed my eyes and pretended I was on my very own lawn, somewhere rural and rustic, pushing one of those red mowers that I sometimes saw on TV.

  When it came to selecting items on shopping day, Ba Ba was specific: they had to be portable, they had to be practical, and we had to be ready to leave them at a moment’s notice. His admonitions were my mantra. Never forget, Qian Qian, that we might have to leave at any second. But that was not tragic, he told me. What was tragic was our attachments. I listened to Ba Ba because he knew just how dangerous attachments were. He had lost things, over and over again. But he also never truly lost them because he carried them with him still. I saw them in his eyes.

  Ba Ba told me this and I in turn carried it in my heart: so long as we didn’t stake claim to what wasn’t ours—the things, our rooms, America, this beautiful country—we would be okay.

  * * *

  * * *

  Ma Ma and I came upon a plastic lawn chair one shopping day. I sat in it and quickly found that it was one of those lightweight chairs that was too flexible, too empathetic, moving with my every motion. This particular one used to be white, but now it was brownish gray. It had a crack in its back that was long but did not go all the way through. It met all of Ba Ba’s requirements: it was easy to carry, we could sit in it, and the crack made it impossible for us to get attached. It was perfect because it might fall apart any day.

  We lifted the lawn chair onto the top of our groaning cart, already stuffed with a broom, a handful of recyclable cans—worth five cents each!—and a folding chair. I was pushing the cart, excited to return home and show Ba Ba our proud bounty, when I came face-to-face with a boy from school, walking with someone who might have been his older brother. What they were doing out in Brooklyn, I didn’t know. I had never talked to him—his were one of the many sets of eyes I avoided in the hallways and in our classrooms. The shock of recognition took lease of my face and I choked in a gulp of air. He did not slow his steps, and for a second, I hoped that he had not recognized me, but as he neared, his face twisted into a smirk.

  It took ten years for my face to stop burning. I didn’t dare look at Ma Ma as we waded through silence down the block. Around the corner, we came upon the elderly couple who lived down the street from us, the only other Asians in our area. As always, they wore beaming smiles on their prune faces as they strolled along with their young cart, which still had foodtown stamped across its chest. As our cart groaned, theirs boasted of its mountain of cans, all of them clack-clack-clacking against one another as the virile wheels bounded across the sidewalk terrain.

  “See,” Ma Ma said. “We
are not the only ones who collect cans.”

  We were doing exactly what the prune couple was doing, it was true. But that made me sadder. They were happy to be collecting cans while we were ashamed. What was a source of light for them seemed to be only the pit of darkness for us.

  * * *

  * * *

  Actual shopping was an exercise in willpower. We had no budget beyond what we had to spare for food, which really meant we spent as little as possible, ideally nothing. At any given time, my wardrobe contained four T-shirts—baggy and long to double as nightshirts and so I could grow into them—three to five of Lao Lao’s scratchy, stiff sweaters; and two or three pairs of jeans from Conway. In the winter, we kept all of our clothes folded in a stack along the windows. That way, when they weren’t keeping our bodies warm, they protected us against the draft.

  I got a new pair of shoes every September. During each annual visit, I spent hours at Payless ShoeSource, poring over my options and making sure my selection was something I would love for the next 365 days.

  The love never lasted that long.

  For the first four months or so, I cherished my shoes. I tiptoed around puddles and stopped off in the school bathrooms to give them careful wipes with wet paper towels. The subsequent season saw me acting more or less like a normal kid, not giving the shoes much thought. But for the last few months, when my growing feet bulged against the fabric, blackened and gaping at the seams, I rejoiced in my boylike freedom to kick trash on the sidewalks, jump into mounds of mud, run in the rain, and act like a feral cat.

  * * *

  * * *

  My favorite shopping day of all time came in the summer, the worst season for shopping. The Brooklyn summer was the tiger mother I never had. She was in every sidewalk crack, on every black plastic bag, and in every pungent smell. It did not matter where I went. She was forever in my face, telling me to sift faster, to ignore my discomfort, all the while squeezing thick, salty sweat out of every pore.