Beautiful Country Read online

  It happened on a typical summer’s shopping day, as I labored with my tiger mother looming over me, sweat sweeping across my forehead and down my back. My parents and I had split up to minimize the time we needed to canvass the area; they had grown tired of fighting my insistence that I was old enough to go off on my own. I crept farther from our street, knowing from experience that the farther I went, the better my finds would be. I had long learned that everything was segregated by neighborhood, including trash. Where we lived, trash was trash. It smelled bad, looked bad, and was worth nothing. But forage outward, and trash was marvelous.

  I would have no sense of just how beautiful trash could be until over two decades later, when I walked my two dogs in the Upper East Side on what I still thought of as shopping day. I was aghast at what my neighbors threw out: a fully functional elliptical machine; a handcrafted desk in pristine condition; a child’s basketball set, with a perfectly inflated ball. As one of my dogs lifted his leg to unleash a yellow stream onto a sturdy bookshelf, I reminded myself that none of the objects fit the bill anyway: they were not portable, they had only frivolous uses, and most of all, I most definitely would have become attached to all of it.

  I could not fathom any of these riches in Brooklyn at age eight, of course, as I made my way down Chester Avenue. Drops of sweat trickled down my back, staining the shirt that I was to wear for another three days. At least, I consoled myself, the smell was not too bad tonight. My tiger mother loosened her grip a little bit that evening. She even rewarded me every now and then with a gentle breeze. I surveyed the clumps of bags, hypothesizing where the treasures might be. A single white Rite Aid bag stopped me. It was a white pearl sitting in the black sea. It was rare for true trash to be left out in a bag like that, and if it was, it was usually bathroom trash—the worst kind, containing used toilet paper, bloody pads, and cakey, dried rubber things that I would not recognize as used condoms until many years later. Opening those bags was always a bit of a thrill; a lottery of sorts.

  This particular bag was different. Through the translucent plastic, I could see the candy colors of plastic cases.

  Could it be?

  It couldn’t.

  I held my breath as I untied the bag with disbelieving hands.

  It was.

  In the bag were six Polly Pockets—the same toys I had watched my classmates play with at recess. I had gotten to borrow them every now and then, but only for a few minutes, and only to hold. I had committed to memory their commercials; when they came on TV, I kept my eyes wide open, unblinking, hungry to absorb as many morsels as possible of the pastel cases and the homes and dolls. I memorized their shapes and colors so that when I closed my eyes late at night, they danced before me and carried me into sleep.

  And now here they were. Six of them, each a different shape in different colors, all for me to hold—to play with! To keep!—for untold minutes. Here was a purple pentagon with a restaurant inside. There, inside a book with a clasp, a mermaid’s underwater world. Next, a round one, a ballerina’s theater, with a beautiful white girl spinning center stage for all to admire. And then an octagonal yellow one, a beauty parlor and hair salon, with girls, all white, lined up for glamorous hairdos. But there was still more: A full house with separate bedrooms for each resident! A camper van that unfolded to reveal its own private kitchen!

  Each was a portal to a different world, one where shopping day didn’t exist—or, perhaps, where every day was shopping day; was that how it worked?—and all I had to worry about was what dress I would wear and how I would style my hair.

  I wondered if I was dreaming. Surely, this was too good to be true. Six Polly Pockets? Six Polly Pockets? If it was a dream, I was okay with prolonging it awhile. I scooped all six Pockets—all six perfect Pockets—back into the Rite Aid bag and walked back home, the rest of my shopping expedition forgotten.

  Chapter 13

  MCDONALD’S

  It was at the hair salon that Ma Ma met James Lombardi, a name that to me remains synonymous with McDonald’s.

  James Lombardi was an old man. Ma Ma often cautioned me against men who looked “dirty,” but I didn’t know what she meant, not really, until I met James.

  James was a regular at Ma Ma’s hair salon. But he did not have a regular stylist. He preferred to try the newest, “most appealing” worker of the day. He came only during off-peak hours, so he had easy pick of the women who worked there.

  I cannot claim to remember James with any objectivity because the very thought of him causes my body to tense. My memory of him cannot be decoupled from fear, for James was my first reckoning with the fact that as women, and Asian ones at that, Ma Ma’s body and mine would never escape the colonizing stake of white men’s eyes.

  As I remember him, James was fat and balding. He always smelled faintly of onions and seemed to spend all of his days eating Chinese food and trawling for Chinese women in Sunset Park. I can’t even remember what he did for a living before retirement, so steeped into his bones was his way of life. He always had at least one used napkin in his pockets. I knew this because he had a habit of taking everything out of his pockets every now and then, as if looking for cash. But no cash ever appeared; instead, it was just more of those napkins, tinged with yellow, brown, and red relics of meals past.

  Later, the sight of Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets never failed to recall to me James Lombardi, and no matter how many years had passed, the smell of onions would pass through my nostrils.

  On one of the days that James showed up at the hair salon, Ma Ma had the misfortune of standing by the door, sweeping the floor. I imagine it went something like this:

  James sees Ma Ma and asks her boss, the Witch, whether she can do his hair. The Witch responds, “Don’t be silly! That’s our newest apprentice. Only the best for you, Mr. James.”

  (The Witch does not care one whit whether James gets the best or the worst. She cares only that he pays full fare for senior stylists, which he rarely does, so drawn is he to the younger, newer workers.)

  “Well, let’s give her a chance. There’s not much left that you can cut on me, anyway.”

  The Witch pulls Ma Ma aside, settling for a sale, even a small one, and Ma Ma responds along the lines of: “No way. I’m not touching that old pervert.”

  A debate ensues, with Ma Ma succumbing as always to the promise of tips and a promotion that would mean higher wages.

  Ma Ma puts down the broom and takes James to the shampoo area, where she lathers his sparse strands and proceeds to the scalp massage.

  Not all of this came from my child imaginings, for later that day Ma Ma came home to me, crying and saying that what she did at work made her feel like a prostitute. I had no idea what prostitutes did, but I thought from Ma Ma’s face that it must have been very bad.

  I myself did not meet James until weeks after he had met Ma Ma. One Sunday, Ma Ma said that James would be coming over and driving us to McDonald’s.

  Would Ba Ba come, too? I asked. Yes, he would, she assured me, and for some reason that made me feel better.

  I had never been to a McDonald’s in Mei Guo. I still remembered the one in Zhong Guo, with the clown who had the scary giant red mouth. But eating at a restaurant—any restaurant—was not something we got to do anymore, so I got dressed with alacrity.

  When James arrived to pick us up, I saw that he drove an old car, long and square. Ba Ba leaned down toward me and whispered, “That’s a Lincoln Town Car!”

  James did not get out; I could see through the windows that his belly was wedged nicely between the steering wheel and the seat. Some of the hairy flesh peeked at me through the gaping buttons of his shirt. He waved us in. Ba Ba got in the front and Ma Ma and I went into the back.

  The first thing I noticed was the smell. It was old-man sweat, mixed with onions and musk that had a tang to it.

  The second thing I notic
ed was the ceiling of the car. A thin cloth clung to it, but was so loose and low in places that it touched our heads. Here and there, staples pushed the cloth back in place. But the areas without staples draped down like little balloons. Other than the taxi from the airport, my memories of which were fogged up by exhaustion, I had never been in a car in Mei Guo before. Was this how they made them here?

  “So nice to finally meet you, Vincent, and you, too, Chan.” James tried to turn around but his big belly and thick neck allowed him only to look at me through the corner of his murky eyes.

  “Crane has told me so many wonderful things about you two!”

  Ma Ma and Ba Ba had adopted Americanized names, because, they said, lao wai had thick tongues and could not handle the delicate elegance of our language. I stayed with Qian. Why should I have to change what I was called just because their tongues were too clumsy?

  James started talking to Ba Ba about China, how long we’d been here, how good his English was. It was the ritual dance Ba Ba was forced to do with every white person he met. But where Ba Ba would have been short with another Chinese person, he was always gracious with the lao wai. I couldn’t tell if it was because he respected them more, or thought they were dumber people who needed more coddling.

  I took this opportunity to collect several of the staples from the ceiling. They came out of the foamlike material easily, ready to bite with their straight metal teeth. As more of the staples came out, more of the ceiling draped down onto us. The da ren did not notice, probably because James had moved on to talking nonsense:

  “You know, ‘Vincent’ is another name for ‘James.’ This means we have the same name, Vincent.”

  I would have rolled my eyes but I was preoccupied with sticking the staples back in the ceiling just in the area directly above my head. The staples went in as easily as they had come out, and, placed together, they kept the ceiling fabric up nice and tight, like they had been in the cars I had ridden in in China. I had one last staple in my hand, but as I raised it to the ceiling, one of its teeth latched onto my hand.

  “Ah!” The cry emerged from my mouth before I could stop it.

  Ma Ma turned and caught me staple-handed.

  “Qian Qian, bie nong.”

  I sat still for a few minutes until she looked away, slipping back into conversation with the old man. Then, just as we pulled into a parking lot with a giant yellow M overlooking it, I stuck the staple into the remaining part of the ceiling. After that last handiwork, the ceiling—my part of it, at least—was nice and smooth. The rest of it billowed in the air.

  We walked into the restaurant behind a waddling James. Once we were through the doors, the smell of greasy fries and cleaning solution greeted us. James sat down at the nearest booth and slid his way in, squeezing his belly against the table. He opened the wallet in his hands and extracted two twenty-dollar bills. Before he closed the wallet up again, I saw at least five other twenty-dollar bills in his wallet. My breath caught in my throat. I had never seen that many American dollars in one place. This guy was rich!

  “Order whatever you’d like for yourself and Chan. I’ll have a Quarter Pounder. Chan can wait here with me.”

  Ma Ma and Ba Ba nodded and walked off, talking about what they might be able to get with all that money. I followed them with my eyes and then looked back at James. He had little hair on his head indeed, but he did have much more hair coming out of his ears. Why did it grow there, I wondered. I reached my right pinkie into my ear to see if I, too, had hair there.

  “So tell me, little girl—what do you know about China?”

  At this, he placed his clasped hands on the tan table. His knuckles were hairy, as were his forearms. His head was the only place short on hair.

  “I dunno,” I managed to squeak out, uncomfortable under the watch of his murky eyes and wishing I had gone with Ma Ma.

  “Tell me,” he persisted. “Do you know Maw Chit Ton?” With these last syllables he sounded like he was choking on regurgitated food, just like each time he attempted my name.

  “Who’s that?”

  My response seemed to suffice, because he stopped looking at me, and instead retrieved from his pocket a stained napkin—the first of many that he would produce in my presence—which he unfolded and refolded before wiping it across his brow. I took the opportunity to feast my eyes on all that was around, and let my gaze linger on a window on the other side of the room. It looked into another room with nets and slides all over it, plastic balls filling the floor. There was a little Black boy in the room, diving into the balls and then reemerging, his ebony face poking out from the pink, blue, and yellow plastic.

  I debated asking to go into the room, but concluded that I wouldn’t know the right way to play anyway. Plus, I probably wasn’t dressed properly. My jeans were tattered and lined with dirt and markings from last winter’s street salt. My sneakers, which had been white when Ma Ma and I bought them almost a year before, were now brown from daily wear and had holes with loose thread coming out of them. When I took them off, they filled the air with the smell of sweat, rainwater, and unwashed socks.

  No, I could not go into the ball room even if I did know how to play. I would stink up the place.

  When Ma Ma and Ba Ba returned with plastic trays full of food, the ball room fled my mind. Ma Ma had gotten me the same order as Ba Ba: I was going to get to eat a whole Big Mac meal, just like a real grown adult. Ma Ma had gotten the fish burger, she said, because she figured it was the healthiest option. James’s Quarter Pounder was huge, and as he rammed it into his mouth, my brain clicked into place why he had so many stained napkins.

  As we were all chewing in contentment—I most of all—James frowned and made as if he had something very important to say to Ba Ba.

  “Vincent, I must tell you, I am very concerned about Chan.”

  “Why’s that?” Ba Ba gave me a look that I returned with a blank.

  “It’s important for her to know her culture. She doesn’t even know Maw Chit Ton!”

  I thought he was choking on his burger this time, but I realized that he was just trying to speak Chinese again.

  Ba Ba looked puzzled, too. He took a bite of his Big Mac, which squirted its orange-yellow juice onto a corner of his mouth. Ma Ma remained focused on squeezing ketchup from a neatly opened mouth of a packet, drawing a thin red line onto each individual fry.

  “Qian Qian,” Ba Ba spoke in Chinese, “you don’t know Mao Zedong?”

  “Oh! Is that what he was trying to say? Mao Zedong?” I intentionally responded in English. “Of course I know him. He”—with this I pointed a finger at James—“can’t pronounce Chinese names.”

  When this emerged from my mouth, all three da ren chuckled. But I could tell from the tone and length of Ba Ba’s laughter that I would soon receive another lecture about saving face and giving face, especially for old lao wai like James. I knew what I would respond with, though: Why were we expected to speak English perfectly while praising Americans for even the clumsiest dribble of Chinese?

  James fixed on me his cloudy eyes, now full of suspicion.

  But why would I lie and pretend to know something I didn’t, I thought as I bit with bitterness into my Big Mac. The food was good, but it wasn’t worth sitting under James’s scrutiny.

  * * *

  * * *

  As it turned out, Ma Ma thought the free burger was worth it. We saw James again a few Sundays later, for our next outing to McDonald’s. By then, he had already earned the moniker of Lao Jim in our household.

  Ba Ba said he had to work that day. When Lao Jim’s car arrived, I saw Jim in the front passenger seat, with a younger Chinese woman next to him, behind the steering wheel.

  When we got in, I noticed that the car smelled not like onions but like Rite Aid’s perfume section. My attention then turned to the fact that someone had removed the constella
tion of staples in my corner. They were now distributed again, balloons billowing throughout the ceiling.

  “Crane, Chan, this is Mimi.” With each word, Lao Jim infused the air anew with onion and old-man smell.

  Mimi adjusted the rearview mirror to make eye contact with Ma Ma. She waved a few slender fingers at me without turning around.

  “Hello,” she said in English.

  She was not pretty, not really, but I was confused because she acted like she was. She was skinny and wore tight clothes, but her eyes looked sly. She reminded me of a fox. She looked graceful but, like with everyone else, I knew I couldn’t trust her. And who was she to speak English to us when we were all equally Chinese?

  Ma Ma returned Mimi’s greeting while I stayed silent. Mimi put the car into drive and, unprompted, told us the story of how she had met Lao Jim. I settled into tuning her out and reconstructing my staple masterpiece. I looked away from the ceiling only when a song came on the radio that elicited a squeal from Mimi. She turned the volume up and started singing to a voice that sounded like it belonged to a very skinny and hungry lao wai.

  When the song hit its crescendo—and the whiner on the radio demanded what sounded to me like “spread your lemon fly”—Mimi lifted her butt slightly and started moving it from side to side. Ma Ma did not notice, but even from where I sat, directly behind him, I could see that Lao Jim had shifted his entire body to stare at Mimi’s flat, bony butt.

  It was the most disgusting thing I had ever seen.

  Once we were in McDonald’s, Mimi insisted that she order for everyone. Lao Jim opened his wallet and retrieved the same sum he had given Ma Ma and Ba Ba—two twenty-dollar bills—but Mimi sauntered closer to him, almost kissing his ear as she said, “Jimmy, you know that’s not enough.”