Beautiful Country Read online

  “I didn’t catch all that they were saying to her,” Ma Ma recalled to me. “I remember only that they asked her who the president was.”

  “What did she say?” Why did they ask that? I thought. Is that how they determined who was here legally? I made a mental note to always have the president’s name at the ready.

  “She answered, ‘Henry Yee.’

  “Then they said, ‘No, the president of the United States.’

  “And again she answered, ‘Henry Yee.’ ”

  Ma Ma was looking off into the distance as she recounted this. It was an impressive impression of Ai Ah Yi.

  “Then what?”

  “They put her on the stretcher and then got her in the ambulance. I sat with her the whole way there and waited while they took her in. They asked me some more questions, but they didn’t let me in.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I came back here. I don’t remember how, though. It’s a blank.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Ma Ma came home late a few nights later. She had gone to visit Ai Ah Yi. I was just getting into bed, and Ba Ba was watching TV on the other side of the curtain, in the living room.

  “How is she, Ma Ma?” Tales of Ma Ma’s day were my lullabies.

  “She had a stroke. She didn’t recognize me at all. Her head—it was swollen to double what it used to be.”

  “What will happen now?”

  “I don’t know. And I don’t think she had any other visitors.”

  There had been nothing in Ai Ah Yi’s hospital room except a large basket of flowers that Henry Yee had sent her, Ma Ma recounted.

  “Didn’t Henry Yee visit her?” He was racist and wrinkly, but she still loved him.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. She doesn’t recognize anyone anyway. But the flowers, a nurse put them right next to her, and she kept turning to look at them.”

  Later that week, Ma Ma learned that Ai Ah Yi had died. She had to clean up Ai Ah Yi’s desk, but she had no relatives to send her things to. Ma Ma placed the box of items on one of the warehouse shelves.

  “What was in her desk?”

  “Just papers, things that had her notes on them. I couldn’t bear to just throw all of it out. Her whole life was working for that man, Henry Yee.”

  “What about personal stuff?”

  “She had a mug for her tea. That was it. I put it in the box, too.”

  “She didn’t even have a photo of her son?”

  “What son?”

  “Didn’t she have a son?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  * * *

  * * *

  For many years following Ai Ah Yi’s death, I was plagued with a recurring dream:

  Ma Ma, Ba Ba, and I are on an old Chinese train, the kind that Ma Ma and I once took to Shanghai. We are running from men in uniform. We run from one car to the next, and then the next, and then the one after that, until we are in the first car, the one that is the head of the train. We look through the window on the door to the conductor’s cabin. We see not a conductor but a uniformed man with beady eyes, staring back at us.

  I scream but Ba Ba covers my mouth. Then he turns to open a side door in the car and we three jump out, all at once, into a grassy clearing. It does not hurt, and we roll in unison before standing up. We turn around and see uniformed men behind us, jumping out of the train, one by one. We start running again, but every time I turn around, the field holds more men. Soon, it is no longer green from grass but from the uniforms. I run as fast as I can, slowing only when Ma Ma and Ba Ba can’t keep up.

  After some time, always after some time, as exhaustion crawls up my legs and into my torso, we see a fence that stretches the full horizon of the clearing. From afar, the fence looks like it has bulbs and balloons in the gaps between its links. We have no choice but to continue running until we close in on the fence. The uniformed men follow.

  They always follow.

  And then, just as I turn around to see them reaching their arms out to grab Ma Ma and Ba Ba, the world fills with the sound of popping.

  Bursts of liquid fall onto my face.

  I turn to the uniformed men, but they are gone.

  I turn to Ma Ma and Ba Ba, but they, too, are gone.

  The field is empty and I am alone, always alone, when I realize that the grass is no longer green. It is now red.

  I turn to the fence and realize that those are not balloons between the links.

  They are human heads, bloated and engorged with blood, water, pus.

  Each looks at me with lifeless eyes and then off into the distance behind me.

  I stand there, unable to move, as, one by one, they pop and burst onto my face.

  Chapter 18

  NORMALCY

  As my nights began to fill with dreams of horror, my life slipped into a sort of normalcy that I didn’t think was possible in America. It was this that scared Ma Ma: she started saying more and more that we needed to change something, we needed to move and leave this place that refused to recognize us. But even this refrain—along with my weak assurances that it would take just one step at a time—became a mundane routine of sorts. My memories of those days started to blur into one another, as I imagine that memories of uneventful childhoods tend to do.

  I do remember, though, that fourth grade was the first time I realized I could be smarter than some adults. And one adult in particular: my teacher that year was Ms. Glass. I thought of her as a grandmother. She had orange-red hair and the frenetic energy of someone who could never hold on to a single idea long enough. She seemed to be forever chasing after the train of thought in her mind. The knowledge that I was faster and more intelligent than the adult in charge of me was exhilarating. I almost always knew what Ms. Glass was going to say before she stumbled her own way there. This helped me develop awful classroom habits that would follow me for the rest of my schooling. I spent most of my classroom hours daydreaming, doodling, and counting down the seconds and stomach rumbles to lunchtime.

  For at least the early part of the year, home life was much the same. I took the subway home and did my homework in front of my PBS Kids family: Wishbone and The Magic School Bus. Other than the days when he stayed out late, Ba Ba often came home first. He asked me about school before taking over the television.

  If Ma Ma came home first, she, too, would ask me about school before sharing her day with me: her fears about Ba Ba’s dalliances, her longing for our lives to change, her anxieties about school. That last part included Ba Ba’s objection to her going to school at all. This went on until Ba Ba came home, at which point Ma Ma headed into the kitchen to cook dinner in silence.

  I preferred when Ma Ma came home first because even though Ma Ma and Ba Ba spent the same amount of time listening about my day, with Ma Ma it felt closer and less selfish because she also shared her day with me and asked me for advice.

  By this point, we must have been doing better with money. This was clear to me only in hindsight, for Ma Ma’s school cost a little bit of money, and Ba Ba joined some sort of gym where he went on Sundays. Plus, Ma Ma had come upon a new recipe for chicken and, every now and then, we had a whole smoked chicken for dinner. I did not notice it, however, in the moment. Other than the smoked chicken, my life was very much the same, and for that I was grateful. I longed for some sort of continuity, even if it had to be in the form of a life that Ma Ma hated.

  After Ma Ma prepared dinner, the three of us sat at the rickety communal table in the kitchen, the one with the rusty metal legs and a white top with green and blue specks. Ma Ma and Ba Ba fought more and more, propelling their cutting words across our dinner table. The argument was always the same: Ma Ma wanted to leave, to move, and Ba Ba said no. Where would we go? We are just as American as the next family. This would make Ma Ma spit o
ut something mean, like, What’s so great about this America of yours, where they treat us like shit? and What kind of coward are you that you’re so terrified of change?

  Me, I stayed silent, head down over my plate to keep from crying, mouth stuffed with white rice and stir-fried potatoes.

  Other times, better times, Ma Ma and Ba Ba got mad at me instead. They spent those meals berating me about having gotten so chubby and having grown messed-up teeth that made my entire face look crooked. Once they got to this topic, they stayed on it for the entire meal, and sometimes, for the remainder of the night. I was never going to make anything of myself, they said, with that fat and asymmetrical face. And no one else would ever tell me the truth but them. It was their job to tell me my flaws, Ba Ba said, because who else would do it? I could not trust the rest of the world. Everyone else would only lie to me out of politeness.

  Those dinners were confusing; I never knew how to feel. A big part of me was glad that, for once, Ma Ma and Ba Ba were on the same side. That was rarely the case anymore and I found warmth and safety when they were aligned, even if it was against me. At the same time, though, I never felt more alone than when Ma Ma joined Ba Ba in his critiques of me, for it was often the case that just minutes before, she had been sharing with me all the ways in which Ba Ba was bad and selfish.

  Those dinners marked the only times that I could not finish eating. I got upset but I had to swallow that feeling until it became a stomachache that squeezed out hunger. Seeing this, Ma Ma and Ba Ba would pivot to how spoiled I was. How dare I not finish the meal they offered to me? Didn’t I know that food cost money, and that we had none? I was too spoiled for my own good, they said, and I received too much love.

  This only added more to my confusion and stomach pain. If I was fat and we were poor, why did they want me to eat more?

  I believed everything they said at those dinners, as I did everything Ma Ma told me. It never even occurred to me to think that they might have been wrong. But looking back, I had not gotten fat, not really. I continued to skip breakfast and depend on the free lunch at school and any free scraps I managed to find, either on my way home from school or in our communal kitchen. But I had bloated from weekly binges on free McDonald’s with Lao Jim. The hour after those excursions marked the only time of week that I felt full—almost approaching the kind of full I had once felt in China.

  The photos of my face back then recall a cartoon I had once seen on television in China. A boy squatted over a frog on the ground and tapped it with a chopstick. At each tap, the frog’s chin grew bigger and bigger. The skin grew tauter, looking less green and more white with each tap. That was my face: large and growing larger with each McDonald’s visit—not from nourishment but from malnutrition. Indeed, I was chubby in the way that only the poor could be: from too much sodium, too many canned goods.

  As for my teeth, by this point I had not seen a dentist in nearly three years. I was grateful that most of my teeth were straight except for the bottom right canine that protruded (and protrudes to this day), locking my jaw in whenever I closed my mouth.

  Nor had I seen an eye doctor. At school, Ms. Glass’s writings on the chalkboard grew fuzzier by the day. I relied on tablemates to read out words and numbers to me.

  Many nights, I awoke to pain in my legs so piercing that I could not move them. I could only clutch them and roll around, doing my best to keep quiet until Ma Ma awoke, which she always did, assuring me that it was only growing pains, that I would be done with them soon. As she said this, she moved to the edge of my bed, where she sat and massaged my legs. I would fall asleep again only under the blanket of her soft whispers and strong hands.

  Our family was closest in the face of pain.

  * * *

  * * *

  We passed some weekends and holidays with two other families from north China who were also stranded and could not go home to be with their real families. Ba Ba had gone to school with the mother in one family and the father in another. After each time we saw them, Ma Ma and Ba Ba said that they would not have chosen to be friends with those people if we were all still in China. But we were in America now, so what were we to do?

  The other two families each had one son. We were all doomed to be sibling-less, thanks to the one-child policy we had left behind. One of the boys was a year younger than me, smart, quirky, and nice enough. He was short and had the look of a mad, talented artist who was always pondering some grand idea. The other was several years older than me and an utter idiot. I rarely had anything to say to either of them, but Ma Ma said that we didn’t get to pick our family when we were so far away from home. Maybe, I consoled myself, this was what having real brothers was like.

  Our get-togethers were never fancy. The three families took turns hosting. One lived in Brooklyn, like us, and the other lived in Queens. Inside, our apartments were nearly identical: two-room setups, sparsely furnished with sidewalk treasures. What made each a home was the savory smells that told of northern Chinese home cooking. Our gatherings in the winter were more often at the other homes, because both of those families had their own private kitchens (and bathrooms, for that matter) and the kitchen was where we gathered to stay warm in the cooking heat. We—kids and adults alike—would sit in a circle on folding chairs around a dining table. The table was often so full of potlucked snacks that it threatened to topple over. Sometimes there were peanuts and sunflower seeds and, if we were lucky, even small pieces of chocolate. The kids sat quietly as the parents went on about how great life had been in China, how hopeless life had been in China, how much they missed it, and how they did not miss it at all.

  The adults did not notice us kids, and least of all me, the girl. When they did notice me, it was nothing like it had once been in China. No one ever commented on how pretty I was anymore. Mostly, they talked about how smart I was, how well behaved and mature. Guai. Dong shi. It was the only value I had in America.

  I took this as further evidence that Ma Ma and Ba Ba were right: the other adults could not say that my face was fat and crooked, so they had to talk about something else. They didn’t think that I remembered that in China, no one could stop talking about how pretty I was and how I would surely be on TV one day. I carried this silent loss with me from room to room, home to school, nursing it and resolving to make up for what I had lost in looks with determination and hard work.

  I got this idea partly from the show that we watched with the other families. Beijing Ren Zai Niu Yue, or Beijinger in New York, had been a hit book and series in China even before we left. It was not until we got to New York, though, that we had watched it, renting the VHS tapes one by one with money pooled together from the three families. The series featured a young man from Beijing who followed his wife to New York City. It showed them living a life similar to ours, mediated somewhat by the gloss of television. We watched them struggle with English, money, and new American ways of living. We watched them interview for, and work at, the same odd jobs that Ma Ma had. The main character even had the same last name as me and Ba Ba.

  “Ma Ma, what is the point of watching our own life on television?” I asked during one such gathering.

  “Well, isn’t it nice to know, Qian Qian, that we’re not alone?”

  But I didn’t think it was nice at all. It didn’t seem right that there were many more people out there feeling alone and homesick and hungry in the same moments when we were feeling those things. Hundreds of lonely people, I figured, was far worse than three lonely people.

  As the television played a scene of people bullying Wang Qiming, the main character, the “us” on the show, Ba Ba shuffled his folding chair over to me and whispered, “You see, Qian Qian? Qiming was on top in China but now he is on the bottom in America. Just like us.”

  At this point I wondered: Were we that far from the top in America? Everyone around me seemed to be living just about the same life we were. I had given
the worst Secret Santa gift, but I figured that had just been my fault, that I had been too selfish. Sure, my classmates had toys and better clothes and even fancier pencils. And they never seemed to be very hungry, nowhere as hungry as I felt. But aside from Julia and Jennifer, they didn’t seem so much richer that I thought they were at the top and we were at the bottom. I considered Elaine’s home. Yes, it was cleaner and bigger and the family talked more, but it was strange there. I knew how my home worked, at least. Theirs had strange rules. Was that what being on top in America meant?

  I much preferred the later episodes of Beijinger in New York, because they showed that after many years of hard work and chi ku, swallowing bitterness, Wang Qiming became so rich and successful that he lived in a house with more than two rooms, and no longer needed to beg for odd jobs. This turn in the show energized me. As the screen panned around Wang Qiming’s fancy new home, all bright with sunlight, I turned to Ba Ba and said, “Wang Qiming is on top again, Ba Ba. Like we will be, right?”

  I did not say this quietly enough. All the adults around the room heard me and chuckled. An odd look took over Ba Ba’s face, like the time he told me not to say the word “chink,” and I waited for him to scold me again. But he stayed silent.

  Later, turmoil found Wang Qiming and his family again, even despite their success, hard work, and wealth. I saw this as no mirror. I had been a close study of television since arriving in America, and I knew that it always had to make things difficult for the characters. Money, I thought, protected people from everything. In China, we had money and no problems. In America, we had no money and only problems.