Beautiful Country Read online

  Money was the cure.

  * * *

  * * *

  Around that time, I decided that I would become a lawyer one day. My reasoning was simple. First, lawyers had money. Lots of money. The ones I saw on television were always wearing fancy suits and talking quickly about money. I didn’t mind that they were always white men. In my early days in Chatham Square, I had come upon and gulped down condensed biographies of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall. Ruth and Thurgood showed me that lawyers didn’t have to be men, and they didn’t have to be white.

  Second, I knew that I was going to do what Ruth did. She made it so that no woman would have to endure what she went through. That was what I was going to do for immigrants like us. But I just didn’t know how that was going to happen. I had wasted time: I was already nine. I hoped I had enough time left to figure it all out. Ba Ba had once told me that Harvard was the best school, and it was where the lawyer who gave me the ladybug had gone. So I fixed my sights on Harvard. There, I would figure it all out.

  I clung to this plan. Nobody liked it when I shared it, though. My classmates said it was boring and lame, not like their dreams of becoming astronauts and dancers. But even more so than the other kids, the adults really didn’t like my plan. Sometimes they laughed, but not in a positive or happy way. It was always more of a chortle. Other times, they frowned. They rarely said anything in response.

  When I told Ba Ba and Ma Ma, they were quiet for so long that I wondered if they had heard me.

  Then Ba Ba pierced the silence. “It’s great to have big dreams, Qian Qian, and to work toward them. That’s even more important than accomplishing the dream itself. It doesn’t matter if the dream doesn’t come true, so just don’t be too sad when that happens.”

  The last adult I shared my plan with was my new fifth-grade teacher, the first male teacher I ever had. His name was Mr. Kane, and he had very short hair and small blue eyes that hid behind rectangular glasses. He made many jokes and talked so much it almost seemed as if he had no one to talk to at home. I didn’t know this for sure, but I did know that if I didn’t have Ma Ma to speak to, I might have tried to get more attention in school.

  Although Mr. Kane shared many words, they were light, like fluff floating in the air, impossible to grab or hold on to. They were nothing like words from Ba Ba and Ma Ma, which were made of heavy metal, which you stored in your pockets and balanced on your shoulders.

  When I told Mr. Kane my great plan, he paused and then chuckled. He said nothing and after waiting for a while, I walked back to my desk, cheeks hot, blood in my ears. It wasn’t as if I had told him I wanted to be a lion when I grew up, I thought.

  I couldn’t make sense of any of it. After that, though, I stopped sharing my plan. But I clutched it hard and close, carrying it against my chest like a hidden compass. The chortles and chuckles followed me, but I didn’t mind. They reminded me that I had an audience to prove wrong.

  Chapter 19

  MARILYN

  I began to talk a lot about pets. I wondered often about what it would be like to have someone always on my side. Someone who saw me and noticed me and got excited when I came home. Someone who didn’t need me for advice, someone who was just there for me.

  In fifth grade, I had a friend who had a hamster. One morning before school, she put his cage in the sun so that he could get a tan—his belly was too white, she said. But when she came home, she found him immobile at the bottom of the cage, next to his wheel.

  She said she opened the gate and reached in to wake him up, but he was hard as a rock.

  “At least you had a pet at some point,” I responded when she recounted the experience to me. “I’ve always wanted one but the one time I asked, my parents told me that they can’t even afford to feed me.”

  “Your parents don’t feed you?”

  At this, I bit my peeling lips. I had said the wrong thing. We would be deported now, as soon as someone came to investigate why I didn’t have enough to eat. I kept talking, hoping new words would squeeze what I had just revealed out of my friend’s skull.

  “In China, I sometimes got little chicks who followed me around the house, all in a row. But they never lived longer than a day or two.” I thought back on running to the cardboard box on Lao Lao’s balcony upon returning from school. The images came to me all at once. Three little unmoving puffs, yellow feathers matted and tinged with brown. Tiny eyelids in pink-brown leather, refusing to wake up no matter how hard I shook the box. Warm teardrops blanketing the cardboard, the feathers, the beaks.

  “They died,” I said. “And then there was a bunny rabbit, so cute and white, with black spots around her eyes.” There I paused, as that memory simmered. “She disappeared. Da Jiu Jiu and I came home and she was gone. But a few days later, I walked around the corner of our building and there was a man sitting on the street, selling all kinds of animal skin. One of them was a rabbit with black spots around her eyes.”

  In response, my friend declared, “China sounds weird.”

  She was Chinese, too, but not Chinese like I was. So much of my life had been coming home to find things gone. She didn’t seem to know anything about that kind of Chinese life.

  * * *

  * * *

  It happened on just another Sunday. I brought into Lao Jim’s car, and then McDonald’s, my library book of the moment, a book I could not put down about a girl around my age who came into possession of a litter of kittens. She named each of the kittens after a Hollywood star, like Audrey Hepburn and Vivien Leigh. Lao Jim asked me about the book as he chewed up his Quarter Pounder.

  “Do you like cats?”

  “Yes, I would like any pet, a cat or a dog or even a rabbit or mouse.”

  “Would you like to have a cat?” Lao Jim did not look at my parents as he asked me this. He kept his eyes trained on me and I wasted no time nodding my head until everything in sight began to shake.

  “We don’t have room for—”

  “We can’t afford to feed—”

  The fast protests from Ma Ma and Ba Ba piled on top of each other.

  Still, Lao Jim kept his eyes on me, and for once I didn’t mind. “My sister has a cat. She would be perfect for you. I can bring her next week.”

  Then, looking to Ma Ma and Ba Ba, he said, “We can bring some food. And if it doesn’t work out, you can bring her back to us.”

  Time passed glacially after that. I found seven books from the library that promised to teach me about caring for a cat. But as soon as I started reading, I realized that I could not do any of it. Why did they recommend things like buying cat beds and cat toys, I wondered, when no one could afford them?

  My only hope was finding something on the sidewalks, and I approached shopping day with more fervor than ever. My mission failed each time, but I always came home with the sense that next time, I would succeed.

  Meanwhile, I contented myself with stealing Q-tips from our roommates’ bathroom storage and taping them together in bunches as makeshift cat toys. I hoped that it might be enough for Marilyn—for that was what I had already decided to name her, after Marilyn Monroe, who Ba Ba told me had been the most beautiful star of all of Hollywood. He showed me a photo of her once and I was awed by the perfect paleness of her skin.

  Sight unseen, I already knew that mine would be the most beautiful cat in the world.

  When the day finally came, I awoke at eight a.m., my stomach in little twists and knots. I had never gotten up so early before, and was happy to busy myself with watching morning cartoons for the first time ever. Although I was eager to see what the fuss was about, I discovered that I could not process anything that I was watching. It was as if the scenes before me went in through my eyeballs and out the back of my head. All I could think about was how slowly time was moving, how many commercials there were for toys I no longer cared about.

 
The sounds of the TV pierced the curtain dividing our rooms, and Ma Ma and Ba Ba roused, marveling that I was already awake. Ba Ba always commented that my sleepiness in the morning and alertness at night—zao chen bu qi, wan shang bu shui—would be the “end of me,” as would my slovenliness. He said this no matter how well I made my bed and cleaned up, even when I woke up early before school to do it all. The few times I shared with Ma Ma how much Ba Ba hurt me with his words, she told me not to be so emotional or to take them so seriously. After all, she said, Ba Ba was known for guarding his warm heart with cold words.

  Ma Ma didn’t seem to notice that no matter what I did or how hard I worked, there was Ba Ba’s voice, flowing out of his head and getting lodged in mine, reminding me that there was little I could do but march toward the “end of me.” I did not know what it meant, not really, only that the phrase brought about images of me thrashing under a crescendo of gray-blue waves, fighting to survive despite never having had the chance to learn to swim.

  That morning, though, Ba Ba simply said nothing. It was a brief reprieve, and one that I savored.

  By the time afternoon arrived, I was bouncing from the corners of the room, sticking occasionally to the window of the tiny sunroom. When I saw that familiar Town Car round the corner, envisioning with my mind’s eye the gray ceiling fabric swaying with the motion of the wheels, I bounded into the hallway and out the two front doors.

  That day, Lao Jim had brought his sister, a nun. He had three sisters. They all lived together in the Brooklyn home where they had grown up. He had said that all of the sisters were nuns; I remember this well even though I have no memory of what Lao Jim himself did before retirement, maybe because I worried that I would one day meet his sisters only to find that they were the same monsters in black cloth that I had seen five years before in the Beijing airport.

  As Lao Jim and his sister stepped out of the car, I was relieved to find that she was wearing almost normal clothes. I could see her full face, and as she approached, I registered that her eyes were not blue but a murky brown, like Lao Jim’s. Lao Jim retrieved a cage from the backseat. I was surprised that they did not just carry Marilyn out, or put her on a leash, but then I realized I did not know what people did with cats, least of all what white people did with them.

  “Ma Ma! Ba Ba! Kuai lai ya!”

  I could barely believe that my parents were acting as if it were just a normal day. We were welcoming a new family member—nothing would ever be the same.

  Ba Ba and Ma Ma waited in the hallway as Lao Jim and his sister walked through the front doors and into our living area. Earlier that morning, I had set out a folding chair so there would be enough seats for everyone. Did the cat need a seat? I had pondered this for a second before realizing that she would just be sitting on my lap.

  Lao Jim groaned into the couch and set the cage on the floor. I peered into it and met with a flash of black, white, and tan fur, and round eyes aglow. Lao Jim’s sister bent over the cage. She was thin and moved easily; it was as if Lao Jim had done all the aging for her. She pinched the two metal bars in front of the cage door, and then, at long last, out came my Marilyn.

  She was a skinny little thing. Through the black fur coat, I could see the ripples of ribs. She walked in a straight line and assessed me with doubt. Her face was a collage of black down one side and a swirl of white and tan on the other. Her eyes were dark, full of mysterious intelligence. With a swish of her long black tail, she came over and rubbed her head against my ankle, leaving strands of black hair on my jeans. Next, Marilyn studied Ma Ma, who looked back at her with reciprocal suspicion. I knew from Ma Ma’s gaze that she did not like that Marilyn was mostly black, with an unbalanced face. I had by then drifted pretty far from Chinese culture, but even I knew that such asymmetry, such darkness, was considered very bad luck.

  “She likes you.” Lao Jim smiled.

  By the time Marilyn reached Ba Ba, I could tell that his mind was made up. “They must have gotten this cat off the street.” He shared this in Chinese while keeping his smile intact, his tone gentle, so as not to betray what he was saying. “Look at it. Its face is all asymmetrical. What horrible luck to bring into our home. We can’t afford a curse like this.”

  Ma Ma nodded while continuing to smile at Lao Jim as my heart crumbled. I must have appeared okay, though, because Lao Jim’s sister began speaking to me with her quiet voice and pursed lips.

  “I understand you’ll be the one taking care of…Marilyn, is it?”

  I nodded solemnly.

  “Well, then, let’s walk you through what you need to do.”

  She talked me through the litter box and the food as I tried to focus while blinking back tears. There was so little I could do to keep my parents from doing the inevitable.

  “Will you come visit her?” I asked. My parents would not lose face and throw Marilyn out if Lao Jim and his sister were due for another visit.

  “Only if you like, dear. This is her home now.”

  I looked to Marilyn, who had started to clean herself while sprawled on the floor.

  How cruel it was that home could be so temporary.

  * * *

  * * *

  Marilyn was even more incredible than I imagined. Our living area had the thinnest, narrowest of moldings protruding from the wall less than a foot down from the ceiling. Marilyn could leap from the floor to that molding with a single push of her hind legs. She then walked around the perimeter, observing us from above. She also learned to fetch the Q-tip bundle, though often she leapt up to the molding with it in her mouth. I watched her walk around with it, sometimes following her around the room, hoping that she would drop the bundle in my hand. I would do this until my neck started to hurt, and then I would look down for a while before following her again with my eyes.

  Our room was a warmer place with Marilyn. She wasn’t a lap cat and she was never particularly excited to see me, but still, as I had imagined, it was nice to come back to someone who was there just for me. I spent hours watching her jump from here to there, tracing the muscles and bones that grooved under her skin. I enjoyed watching her eat most of all. Once we ran out of the food from Lao Jim, Ma Ma bought the cheapest dry cat food from the store. I always mixed it, though, with whatever rice and chicken I could find. With my elbows on the ground and my hands cupping my face, I watched on as Marilyn crunched through the hard food using one side of her mouth, and then the other. This brought me more delight than any eating I could have done on my own.

  The moments I spent watching Marilyn were the rare times when I did not worry about Ma Ma, her trouble with Ba Ba, our impending deportation, or how I would find my way to Harvard. No, when I was watching Marilyn, it was just me and her in all of the world, a little girl and her first real pet.

  Ba Ba did not like Marilyn from the start, but it only got worse. Marilyn never cuddled, and this went against what Ba Ba thought a cat should do. One night, Ba Ba placed Marilyn on his lap, but with a swish of her tail, she leapt off. It was her signature move, one that I had come to expect. But Ba Ba never gave up on anything. He grabbed her again, and with another swish she was gone. The third time Ba Ba grabbed her, she hissed and ran under the couch. Only her tail was visible from under the spotted fabric, slapping with annoyance against the floor.

  This only made Ba Ba madder. He walked out of the room and I held my breath, hoping that he had gone to take a walk but knowing better. He reentered just a few seconds later, with our broom in hand. We had found the broom on one of our shopping days, and it had a green plastic covering on the stick that peeled and stuck to our hands in bits and pieces. The bristles at the end stuck out every which way, making it impossible to collect all the dirt in one spot.

  Ba Ba directed the bristled end under the couch. Marilyn’s tail disappeared and Ba Ba stuck the broom even deeper, moving it about. Marilyn emerged from the other end, and I said nothing, ho
ping Ba Ba would not notice. I did not know what he was going to do to her, and my chest felt as if it were sandwiched between two cleavers.

  Ba Ba noticed the black of Marilyn’s tail just as she disappeared into the cold sunroom. He ran in, still holding the broom, and shut the door.

  “Stop!”

  He ignored my plea.

  “Stop, please, Ba Ba!”

  I did not follow into the room, but instead ran over to the couch where Ma Ma sat frozen.

  From the sunroom came only the sounds of Ba Ba thumping the broom against the floor, followed by Marilyn’s hisses and the scrape of her claws against the hard floor. I buried my face into Ma Ma’s chest and put my hands against my ears. Ma Ma wrapped me in a tight embrace, still saying nothing. For the first time in a long time I was close enough to breathe in the comforting smell of soap on her skin.

  I don’t know how long this went on, but I aged decades in that time. At some point, the door creaked open with a thump of the broom and I saw Marilyn’s black paw emerge from the corner between the door and the frame. In a flash, she ran out and into our living room, leaving with each step little streaks of red.

  “She’s bleeding—Ma Ma, she’s bleeding.”

  Ma Ma’s eyes traced the floor before her body came awake. By this point, Marilyn had run under my bed, toward which Ba Ba was now directing the broom.

  Ma Ma rushed over, with me following. When she opened her mouth, I was not braced for the fire that blazed from her throat, the volume of her voice.

  “Xing le ba, ni. Xiang xiao hai zi yi yang.” That’s quite enough. You are acting like a child.

  Ma Ma gripped the end of the broom that protruded out through Ba Ba’s arm and torso and pulled it away from him. Ba Ba turned around and I saw that he had the devil in his eyes—that was what Ma Ma and I called it when he became truly mad. I covered my face, fearing what he might do next but also knowing that I needed to stay close and stop him if he directed his rage at Ma Ma. In a blink, though, the devil flickered and died. Ba Ba let go of the broom and walked out of the room.