Beautiful Country Read online

  Ma Ma’s goal was the TOEFL, which she was very nervous about. When she first told me about it, she explained that her English was so poor that she could barely touch the minimum score demanded by even the worst graduate programs.

  “You’re going to graduate school?” This was the first I had heard of it, and I was the first to hear of everything in Ma Ma’s world.

  “Yes,” she said. It was our only route to a better life.

  “I cannot live like this forever,” she continued, and I thought about her on the subway platform, gripping that ticket.

  “Will they let you? What if we get caught?”

  But Ma Ma had looked into it already. She had a friend in a similar situation. The friend told her that it was fine as long as she was careful with the school she chose.

  The friend must not have known that Ma Ma was always careful.

  “City College, they don’t check or ask any questions, just like your school.”

  I let out a breath that I did not even know I had been holding. Perhaps there would be college for me after all.

  “What will you study, Ma Ma?”

  “Computer science, as I was always meant to. As if I’d never left China.”

  I did not ask what she was going to do with the degree. I did not remind her that we never dared to apply to the real companies that I saw only on TV, the ones with offices high up and big windows overlooking Central Park, with watercoolers and huge mahogany desks. For their bright light would shine too brightly onto our Chinese passports, revealing the hole where our American paperwork should have been.

  Before we left China, Lao Ye gave me a little keychain. It was not just any keychain. It had several tools in it that made me feel safer in America whenever I had it with me. The keychain was in the shape of a foot, and it had a metal center with a brown plastic shell. On one side, it had a small pocketknife, with the tiniest of blades. On the other was a small pair of scissors. Both folded into the metal center. Four characters were written on the foot in white font: Jiao ta shi di. Feet on solid ground.

  “What does it mean, Ma Ma?” I had asked after running to show her my new shiny possession.

  “It means taking it one step at a time, Qian Qian, being grounded and looking at just what’s in front you.”

  The message of Lao Ye’s keychain served me well in our life in America. I learned to focus on just what was right before me, and in this instance it was supporting Ma Ma in the only pursuit that had managed to inject hope into her face since we walked out of that JFK terminal.

  The hard questions, I saved them for myself.

  * * *

  * * *

  Ma Ma studied over the course of the rest of the winter and early spring, using books that we got from the library. But she said the books were outdated and made it difficult to know if she was really preparing for the test she would be taking. She approached the end of spring with caution, like a rabbit darting past a sleeping lion.

  The test came and went quickly. The results were slower. I froze every time Ma Ma opened the black metal mailbox just outside our front door. In those moments, anything was possible—our lives hung in the air, just under that ballooning cloud of poverty.

  One day, I watched with disbelieving eyes as her hand resurfaced from the depths of the mailbox with the envelope. She ripped it open, nearly tearing the thin letter within. She looked at it, and then at me.

  I don’t remember the score, only that she started laughing.

  Which caused me to start laughing. Then jumping. Then cheering.

  Soon, we were laughing through tears, the sidewalk passersby looking at us and then pretending not to see us, two lunatic girls from mainland China.

  The cloud dissolved. I closed my eyes and felt the rays of the middle-class sun on my face.

  Things would be different. Things would change. One step at a time.

  * * *

  * * *

  When we packed for America, I slid the foot keychain into an external pocket of our checked luggage. I didn’t know why, but I felt that we might need it on our journey. Ma Ma had hooked the foot onto a spare nail clipper, so that came with us, too. Once we got to New York, I hung the foot and the nail clipper from a zipper on my backpack. I figured that was where my only keychain needed to go, since it was the place where plush happy faces and bright troll dolls suspended from my classmates’ backpacks.

  Over the years, I moved the foot keychain from one backpack to the next, and then finally to a storage bin where I kept nail clippers and files. The foot shed its parts over the years, first losing one brown plastic piece, then the other, until it was just a metal chunk with vestigial spots of dried glue. I have the keychain to this day, and though it is now barely identifiable as a foot, its message shines as clear to me as the day Lao Ye handed it to me, white characters on shiny brown casing and all. No matter where I wanted to go, I only needed to worry about one step at a time. Feet on solid ground.

  Chapter 17

  AUNTIE LOVE

  Ma Ma began to step a little lighter, buoyed by new hope. Soon, she told me, she would start school. Before that, though, she found a new job at a warehouse.

  The new job seemed to be an improvement over the hair salon. The warehouse stored supplies for restaurants, and her second week of work, Ma Ma returned home with a canister larger than her head, full of shaped yellow wafers that I had never seen before. Ma Ma told me that white people thought they were Chinese and called them “fortune cookies.”

  “Here,” she said, her eyes not quite focusing on me. “You can have it all.”

  That entire container became my dinner for the night, and I was not even hungry in school the next morning because I was still sick from all the fortune.

  A few days after that, Ma Ma returned with a box full of toothpicks with colorful paper at the end, suspended throughout by little matchlike sticks. With a push, the paper unfolded and opened out to a mini parasol. There were two colors: pink and green, each with flowers and leaves drawn on them.

  “Ma Ma, zhe shi gan shen me de?” They did not seem to have a purpose.

  “Xia wanr ba.” Something silly to play with.

  Within the week, our two linked rooms were filled with little paper parasols, taped onto the walls, sticking out of the fabric of the armrests of our couch, standing in the slats of our TV set.

  As I filled my stomach with fortune cookies and stuck toothpick parasols into every crevice of our home, Ma Ma mumbled on and on about her new boss, Henry Yee.

  “Henry Yee treats me like a servant,” she said as soon as she got home. “I have to wash his dishes and get him tea.”

  “Henry Yee doesn’t do anything,” she talked into the chopping board as she cooked our dinner. “He just sits there and reads his newspapers while barking out orders.”

  “Henry Yee is a racist,” she mumbled over her chopsticks as they suspended stir-fried string beans over her bowl of white rice. “He has no proof but he keeps saying the Black guys in the warehouse steal.

  “Then why hire them?

  “Because they are cheaper.

  “Because he is cheap.

  “Because he is racist.

  “Because he is a cheap racist.”

  Always it was Henry Yee, not Henry, not Yee, but both names together in one. It seemed as if he was not her boss if he was not both Henry and Yee.

  There was a woman who worked with Ma Ma at the warehouse. She was also Chinese but she was older, Ma Ma said, and she was in love with Henry Yee.

  “Isn’t he old?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Ma Ma affirmed, even older than the woman.

  “How could she love something so shriveled,” I marveled.

  “Loneliness makes people odd,” Ma Ma mused almost to herself.

  I was lonely, too, but I would never, I thought, be in
love with someone racist and wrinkled.

  From then on, I started to think of the woman as Ai Ah Yi: Auntie Love.

  * * *

  * * *

  One Saturday, the weather grew so hot that Ma Ma got permission to take me to work. She did not want me stewing all day in our tiny place. There was a little air conditioner in the window of the office, Ma Ma said. She shared that office with Ai Ah Yi and Henry Yee, though, so I would have to be good and quiet. I nodded with my solemn face, and hid my disappointment at having to miss a day of freedom, full of books and TV and no worries but my own.

  On the first morning I went to the warehouse with Ma Ma, she led us out of the subway at Canal Street, a station that I’d never seen before. It was at the opposite end of Chinatown. There were also Chinese letters everywhere there, but unlike on East Broadway, there were not as many Chinese people. The area had many white people who did not look quite right, though it took me a few minutes to figure out why. I concluded finally that they must have all come in from out of town, because they were fatter, clumsier, happier. They also dressed as if they were mimicking characters from TV shows set in New York. They looked like they were uncomfortable and not used to wearing those clothes, which were either all black or much too bright, and which did not look like they were meant to be worn together in the same outfit, much less by the people wearing them.

  As we continued walking, the excited, chubby white people thinned out and the crowd turned normal—gaunt New Yorkers wearing shabby clothes and exhausted faces. The surroundings started to remind me of Brooklyn, for though the streets contained warehouses, they were also covered with graffiti.

  Ma Ma slowed down at one of the warehouses and I saw that the door was raised off the ground, a big, levitating mouth that opened right up against the butt of the truck parked against it. We took the steps that led up and into the mouth. Several men, Black and Latino, were gathered in the warehouse, some lifting and moving boxes, others sitting. They did not have uniforms on but wore similar outfits—black T-shirts, stained jeans, tan boots. They greeted us with warmth and seemed to know my name, but I froze. I had learned by then to be guarded around all new men, and especially the ones who were not Chinese, as Ba Ba had taught me. But Ma Ma seemed comfortable around them, and she was almost never comfortable anymore. This prompted me to give a quick, shy smile before Ma Ma led me to the stairway at the back of the large room.

  There were many stairs, and as we climbed them, I felt Ma Ma’s hand tense up again. The stairway spat us out onto another floor of the warehouse. We walked past dark shelf after dark shelf before coming to an office, which just looked like another warehouse room, with bright tubes of light dangling from the ceiling, just under the metal pipes.

  On the floor were two rows of tables leading to rusty, large windows. The tables were each covered with stacks of papers and one feeble computer apiece. The table surfaces were made of wood so rough that my hand hurt from splinters at just the sight of them.

  Ma Ma and I were the last to arrive. At the seat closest to the doorway was a lady whom I assumed was Ai Ah Yi. Her appearance recalled the “pancake face” story from the recesses of my memory. She looked at us but did not smile before turning back to her computer. She wore such a serious and focused expression that, had she not blinked, I would have thought she was a mannequin. She also looked as if she had a Very Important Job, even though I knew that couldn’t be because she had the same job as Ma Ma.

  Next to her, separated by wide, tall stacks of papers, many of them wrinkled and yellowed, was Ye Ye. He was not Ye Ye, not really, but so much time had passed since I’d seen Ye Ye that I had started to spot him everywhere: on the subway, eating a mooncake; at a restaurant, bussing tables; on the sidewalk, walking with a woman who was not Nai Nai.

  The sight of Ye Ye brought to me a glow of joy and love. But when Ye Ye turned to look at me, I realized it was not him. The man was not unfriendly, but he kept his distance and his face did not burst into rays of happiness. So this was Henry Yee.

  I did not have much time to stare because Ma Ma told me to follow her down the hall. One of her morning tasks was to make tea for Henry Yee. Gripping a metal mug, Ma Ma took me to the other end of the warehouse floor, where there was an exposed little sink attached to the wall with a single leg supporting it, and a rusty metal spout and matching rusty handles above it.

  Instead of turning the handle and rinsing the mug with water, Ma Ma spat into the mug three times and turned it to move her spit around. She then turned to the other wall, where she bent over to pick up a sad black kettle covered with dirt. She filled the kettle with water and plugged it into the wall.

  I stood a few steps behind Ma Ma and surveyed the area. Next to the kettle was a microwave that looked like its sister: black and filthy. On the floor, by the sink, was a yellow box that looked to be as old as Henry Yee. It had the word lipton written on it. Propped up on the wall next to that was a broom from China. I knew it was so because it was made from many loose bamboo sticks tied together, not like any broom I had seen since leaving home.

  When the kettle sang, Ma Ma flicked it off, pouring steaming water on top of her spit. She unwrapped a bag from the Lipton box and dunked it into the mug without ceremony. We then walked back through the darkness and into the fluorescence of the office.

  I settled into a folding chair next to the window, as close as possible to the air-conditioning blast. Ma Ma sat in front of the computer and the stack of paper that apparently belonged to her. She stayed this way until Henry Yee barked out his next command, at which point she got up. The rest of the day passed much in this way: me following Ma Ma back and forth, from the lit room through the dark channel to the grungy cooking area and back. She stayed silent. I longed for the time when I was not just a dangling thread on her dress, chasing her to and fro as she catered to the whims of an old man who turned out to be nothing like Ye Ye.

  Henry Yee left at around five p.m., according to the big round face on the wall of the office. Periodically, though, the phone rang and Ma Ma ran across the room to answer it. Ai Ah Yi remained as she had all day long, seated at her desk, flipping through papers and typing endlessly, breaking only twice for the bathroom.

  Ai Ah Yi did not look at me until around eight o’clock, when she gestured for me to walk over. I hesitated, turning to Ma Ma for guidance. But she only kept her eyes on the screen before her, oblivious to my plea.

  I walked over but crossed my arms in front of my torso, braced for battle. I stopped just ten feet in front of Ai Ah Yi and then turned around to Ma Ma, who still had not noticed.

  “Lai ya, zai lai ya.” My gaze whipped back at Ai Ah Yi’s command for me to approach closer.

  I shuffled my feet, hoping that she would not notice how small my steps were.

  “How old are you?”

  This was an easy question, but her bottomless eyes made me worry that I might give the wrong answer. Again, I turned to Ma Ma for help. She remained absorbed in the screen before her.

  I had no choice but to answer truthfully.

  “Nine! My son might have been nine, too.” She looked away, in the direction of the windows.

  I took this opportunity to scamper back to my chair, where I dared not look up from my library book until Ma Ma told me that it was time to leave.

  When we walked out, Ai Ah Yi was still sitting at her desk, typing away, and every now and then, looking up through the windows.

  * * *

  * * *

  Many peculiar things happened during Ma Ma’s time with Henry Yee. One night, Ma Ma came home to tell me that she had found a nest of little baby mice—pinkies, Miss Pong had once said they were called. Ma Ma told me that she did not see a mommy mouse, so she had to flush the babies down the toilet.

  The story filled me with sadness. For nights after, I had dreams of little baby mice, scrambling against the tide of the spinning
toilet water and flailing their pink paws and legs before going limp and getting sucked into the hole at the bottom of the toilet bowl.

  * * *

  —

  A little while after that, Ma Ma came home with a wan and sallow face. She reported that Ai Ah Yi had collapsed just as Ma Ma got up from her table to go home. It was just Ma Ma and Ai Ah Yi in the room when it happened, and when Ai Ah Yi did not respond to Ma Ma’s voice, Ma Ma ran downstairs to find that all the warehouse men had left, too.

  She ran back upstairs, toward the hope that Ai Ah Yi had awakened while she was downstairs.

  No luck.

  Ma Ma at that point knew she had to call 911, so she did. But rumors of immigration raids and detention were strong kindling for the fear that pulsed through each of us. Ma Ma knew she had no choice, but still, she was terrified that the cops would arrive only to arrest her, pay no attention to Ai Ah Yi, and leave her there to be eaten by the pinkies’ mother while Ma Ma was sent off to China.

  Awaiting the shrill sirens, Ma Ma alternated between sitting with Ai Ah Yi and making sure she was still breathing to tidying up her own desk and packing her stuff, so convinced was she that she would be deported, never to step foot in the warehouse again. As she tells it, time froze and the paramedics took an eternity and a half to arrive.

  But once they were there, things moved quickly. Two paramedics stormed up the stairs and into the office with a stretcher. Even under the bright bulbs, Ma Ma was unsure of the text on their uniforms, knowing only that she was breaking every instruction she had given me by staying in the same room as them instead of running away.

  As they assessed Ai Ah Yi, the paramedics—Ma Ma never described them to me, so in my mind’s eye their faces are white blanks with black outlines of moving, drawn-in mouths—asked Ma Ma to describe what had happened just before Ai Ah Yi’s collapse. While Ma Ma stumbled over the few English words that she was able to summon on such short order, Ai Ah Yi opened her eyes. It was Ma Ma who noticed first, and she pointed to the blank-but-open eyes. The paramedics turned in unison and began speaking to Ai Ah Yi all at once.