Beautiful Country Read online

  “Qian Qian, bie nong.”

  Recognizing the tone in Ma Ma’s voice, I stopped. But it grew boring so I pulled at her skirt until she had to pick me up and sit me on the counter. From my new perch, I could see that the little bald man had only a few stray hairs on his shiny head. He sat in front of a monitor and a pile of papers bearing the red markings of rubber stamps.

  I wondered if his stamps made colorful animal shapes like mine did.

  The glass connected to the counter at the bottom and there was a little slot of space between the two. I stuck my fingers under the glass and waved them at the man, who still did not see me.

  “Qian Qian, bie nong.”

  I tried to sit still and look cute again.

  “Please,” Ma Ma was saying. “My husband hasn’t seen his daughter in two years. She doesn’t even remember what he looks like anymore.”

  This was true. I had only a general impression of Ba Ba. In my head, he was the man who played Emperor Qian Long on the show on TV. This meant I was supposed to be a ge ge, a princess, with a pretty headdress and servants who walked behind me with fans.

  I turned toward the booth and saw that the little bald man was shaking his head now. Ma Ma’s own head dropped and she began to collect her things.

  “I miss Ba Ba!”

  My face was our flag again, red and yellow, gushing tears. I didn’t know where they came from. I just knew that it was the right time for them.

  The little bald man looked up and looked away just as quickly. He sighed, then picked up a stamp and pounded it on the papers in front of him. He then stuck them through the slot and waved us away without another look.

  I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew Ma Ma’s face. As we hurried out of the embassy, I reveled in the thought there was a good chance I would get to eat Beijing duck that night.

  * * *

  * * *

  On the flying machine, the lady with the fake face was now pushing a skinny cart down the aisle. Clanking in the cart were cans of pretty colors. I wanted to drink them all. I wanted to ask her if she had the sweet yogurt drink Lao Lao got me from the market, but when I opened my mouth to speak it felt as if someone had shut the doors to my ears. So instead I just asked for a small cup of water, warm, as we always drank it at home.

  “Ma Ma.” I prodded. “My ears can’t breathe, Ma Ma.”

  She looked at me but there was no life in her eyes. I jabbed my pinkie into my ear, trying to break through.

  “Bie nong.” She swatted my arm away and coiled back into her seat.

  I sat on my hands and tried to ignore my ears, my mouth, and all my senses as the flying machine bumped and shook us all around, the rest of the world sounding as if it were several rooms away.

  Chapter 2

  DANCES AND SHADOWS

  Ba Ba loved to dance. Before he left for Mei Guo, he went to the dance hall every week. Ma Ma did not enjoy it as much, so she often had me go with him instead. There were too many women, she said, and it helped to have his daughter there to remind them he was married.

  Ba Ba was a professor, like Ma Ma. But where Ma Ma taught math, Ba Ba taught English literature. He was tall, but not very tall. Still, that didn’t keep his students from blushing when they saw Wang Lao Shi, Professor Wang. He liked to wear white gloves to teach. I thought they were funny and made him look like Mickey Mouse. He also had a pointer stick that extended and collapsed. He could never find it because I often took it to teach my dolls the ways of the world, and to launch stealth attacks on Ma Ma when she was cooking.

  Before Ba Ba left, my childhood was simple in the way most childhoods are: joy was a way of being. My favorite things in the world were my train set and the building’s sandbox. Da ren often told me that I didn’t act like how little girls were supposed to act. I was dirty and smelly and I liked to run around with equally smelly and dirty boys who lived in our complex.

  I acted like a girl, though, in one respect: I loved to dance. So going to the dance hall was double joy for me—I could dance and I had a duty to discharge: keep the ladies from Ba Ba. And boy, did I dance. I stood on Ba Ba’s feet and he shuffled me about the room. Other times I hopped, skipped, and twirled in a big frilly dress—always a frilly dress; Ma Ma insisted—and acted like a wild, rhythmless banshee who fancied herself the most graceful of gazelles.

  Dancing, too, was a way of life. I danced everywhere. On summer nights, the lao ren, elderly, sat on stools in the courtyard eating sunflower seeds, chatting, and playing go. I loved to jump in front of them and command: “Watch me!” before dancing to no music other than that playing in my head. They clapped their hands and I wouldn’t stop until hours later, when Ma Ma dragged me away because the lao ren had to sleep.

  Dancing was breathing. I shook around and convulsed even as Ma Ma cooked to radio music. Ma Ma said that I danced before I walked. Whenever music came on while she was pregnant, I shook my as-yet-undeveloped legs in her belly. And she liked to tell me that when I was born, I didn’t cry but instead kicked my legs and yanked my already-long hair before letting out a big, satisfying sneeze.

  Ba Ba and I shared a special dance. When I was just a few months old, he made up a song for us, all in gibberish:

  Xi mou hou

  Li da so

  Li wa li ga li sa sa

  Ah-ah, Ah-ah, Ah-ah-ah

  We sang it always twice in a row, always while dancing, my little feet on his big feet. It was a ritual we played at every day, as soon as Ba Ba got home from work. It became such a fixture that Ba Ba started calling me “Xi Mou Hou.”

  For a long time, I thought the lyrics were actual words that I had not yet learned. But even then, I didn’t need to understand the words to know that they meant that Ba Ba loved me very, very much.

  * * *

  * * *

  Ma Ma taught me about duty. She showed me that when your daughter got chickenpox and woke up every night scratching herself, you did whatever it took to help her, even if it meant kneeling for hours in your neighbor’s aloe vera garden, picking through the plants as they pricked your already-bloody fingers. Later, between cooking dinner, preparing for the next day’s lecture, and washing our clothes, Ma Ma peeled and boiled the plant until it became a gooey balm, which she then layered on my reddened body, all as I screamed in her ear.

  But it was Ba Ba who taught me that when I couldn’t fall asleep in the big bed the three of us shared, when I couldn’t keep my nails off the red, puckered, oozing skin, I could distract myself from the itch that crawled all through me and into the center of my brain by holding my hands up in the space between the wall and the little bent-over lamp with the long neck—the one that reminded me of Ma Ma, hunched over at the sink—and move my hands this way and that to make different animals: a duck here, a bird there. And in the moment that Ba Ba’s bird came swooping over my quacking duck and I shrieked with laughter, the itch and the red spots disappeared. All I could see was a pond and a happy duck playing with her flying bird.

  It was also during those shadow puppet plays that I learned that while Ma Ma’s job was to always be there, Ba Ba was allowed to go away, even if his body stayed. Occasionally, I turned away from the wall and caught that, though Ba Ba’s bird continued to fly about this way and that, his eyes had been taken over by a shadow. The bird was still there with me, flying and swaying, but Ba Ba, he had gone to another place. Sometimes he returned quickly, in only the time it took me to beckon him, and other times, he seemed so deaf to my ventures that I wondered if he would stay like that, a zombie whose mind went away while his hands continued to flap like a shadow bird for eternity.

  Ba Ba taught me that fun was to be relished, in part because I never knew when it would end. When I was five, just before he left, Ba Ba made a kite in the shape of a diamond, split into four triangles, each a different color, and we flew it around the cliff near our comple
x. The cliff looked over a stinky ditch into which people threw trash. It must have smelled terrible, but I never noticed because I was too busy running around with the kite trailing behind me. The last time we went to fly our kite—weeks before Ba Ba left—it got caught on a tree branch and when I yanked it, the kite disentangled from the tree before coming loose from the string. Ba Ba and I watched, mouths helplessly open, as the colorful diamond careened down the rocky hill and into the trash pile.

  “How will we get it back, Ba Ba?”

  “Don’t worry, Xi Mou Hou. I’ll make you another one.”

  We didn’t know then that he would never have the chance.

  * * *

  * * *

  Ba Ba was popular. He could make a whole room burst into laughter with just a few sentences. He tended to be quiet when we were alone, but the more people there were, the more he came alive. He had a deep, booming voice that demanded attention. And he had a way of weaving little words into one giant poetic blanket. The whole world admired him as much as I did.

  Ba Ba also read a lot, and had many thoughts that he couldn’t say in public. He said them at home but I wasn’t allowed to repeat them: he hated the government, and he hated being told what to think.

  “They won’t let us question them, but that is what we must do.”

  I had no idea who “they” were, but I was afraid to ask.

  Ba Ba did not notice the confusion that had colonized my face. He continued, “But don’t let them know it. The smartest people always appear to be the dumbest. Mian li cang zhen.”

  Hide the needle in the silk floss.

  * * *

  * * *

  Ba Ba’s parents, Ye Ye and Nai Nai, lived in the Chunchang village of Handan, which was somehow in the same province where we lived while feeling like a universe away. We had to sit on a crowded train for several hours—such that the uniformed men with the little food cart would roll past us at least twice—before we arrived. Then we had to get into a car that took us close enough to the village, which was still called that even though it now had many tall buildings that were younger than Ba Ba.

  We didn’t make the trip very often because, instead of Mandarin, Ba Ba’s family spoke only their local dialect, which Ma Ma and I could not speak. And Ma Ma did not like it there because the family was very poor. The home was in an old-fashioned courtyard. It had no showers or bathrooms. We had to walk down several hu tong, the alleys between courtyards, to get to the public bathroom. But there were no showers or faucets there. There was just one long ditch with no running water, piles of dung on other dung, flies swarming all about, the stink invading our nostrils.

  I loved it there anyway. Lao Ye and Lao Lao called me their “wai” granddaughter, or outside granddaughter, because I was born to their daughter. But to Ye Ye and Nai Nai, I was a full, unconditional granddaughter. In fact, I was the only full granddaughter, my dad being the only son to have had a daughter. Ba Ba told me that this meant I was the “pearl” of the family. But I don’t know if this was why Chunchang, for all of its discomforts, felt like my true home. All I know is that my memories of those rare visits are coded into my senses:

  Running down the hu tong. Little feet tripping on uneven ground, kicking up yellow dirt, impatient to reach the Wang courtyard, beckoning Ma Ma and Ba Ba to walk faster. The smell of burning coal growing as we get closer. The fragrance of home.

  I step through the familiar gate adorned with tattered strips of red paper and black calligraphy characters. In my earlier memories, Nai Nai is always in the courtyard, no matter the season, moving between the basin of cold water and the tiny, dark little kitchen, cooking, cleaning, placing before me big steaming bowls of this and that, homemade noodles and dumplings and congee. In later memories, the courtyard is sadder; Nai Nai is in bed, always in bed, paralyzed from stroke, taking care of me now only by voice, reminding me to eat.

  There are other members of the family, cousins and uncles and aunts, milling all around, impossible to tell apart because they all look so alike, so much like me and Ba Ba. The generations are always difficult—there are people I call cousins, the children of Ba Ba’s eldest siblings, who look like they should be aunts and uncles; and people I call aunts and uncles, several degrees removed, who look like they should be cousins. But no matter: they are always happy to see us, rushing to us in a clamoring wave, a big, draping quilt all knit from the same thread.

  And then there is Ye Ye, his face fanning open into light at the very sight of me. He is reading the paper, fingers stained black, or riding his bike laden with groceries, or reaching out to take me by the hand on a walk. Always, he has a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

  Ma Ma tells me that I took my very first steps toward Ye Ye, in the nearby town square where Ba Ba once saw some awful, terrible things. But I don’t remember any of that. I remember only that Chunchang sits at the core of everything I know as home, belonging.

  * * *

  * * *

  I was not made for Zhong Guo—China, the self-named Central Country, the Middle Kingdom. In prekindergarten, as everywhere, we were required to take a wu jiao, nap, in the middle of the day. I hated it. I would either stay awake the whole time or fall into resistant sleep, only to awake with a headache. I would have much rather spent the time dancing, drawing, or playing in the dirt outside.

  But in Zhong Guo, everyone had to do the same thing at the very same time, and for an hour every day, I lay in my criblike bed, amid my classmates in their own beds, and stared at the ceiling, counting numbers and singing songs in my head. On other days, I stewed, growing angrier that I was the only one awake until I decided to poke at the kids on either side of me.

  “Hey, hey,” and after a few vigorous jabbings my friend would finally awaken.

  “What?” The face that uttered this word was unfailingly drowsy, irritated.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Sleeping!”

  “Oh.” Desperate to prolong the conversation, I inquired further: “Do you like it?”

  At this she usually groaned and turn her back to me, but there was almost always another kid on the other side for me to try again.

  This exercise reliably consumed ten minutes of nap time.

  I was also bad in Zhong Guo because I asked questions that my teachers said were unnecessary. Once, I made the mistake of asking why two plus two equaled four. As punishment, the teacher forced me to write “Wo dui bu qi,” I’m sorry, in characters one hundred times. Despite that it cost me an extra character per sentence, I proudly wrote instead: “Wo bu dui bu qi.” I am not sorry.

  The teacher never noticed because it was not what we wrote that mattered. It was the ability to control us.

  * * *

  * * *

  One day, Ba Ba came home and told Ma Ma that he said the wrong thing again in class. He often came home mad. He did not like that they were told what to say, and that they could not answer when students asked about something called the Cultural Revolution.

  “They are always listening to us, watching us. Don’t talk about this, don’t acknowledge that. Ta ma de.” As he said this, he emptied his small glass of strong-smelling rice wine in one gulp.

  Ba Ba looked forlorn so I snuck onto his lap. At this, he smiled, but it lasted for only a minute.

  “It’s too much.” And he shook his head.

  A little while later, Ma Ma and Ba Ba decided that Ba Ba would go to Mei Guo. Everyone in our family had something to say about it.

  “It is beautiful there, but they don’t treat the Chinese very well,” declared Lao Ye.

  “Aiya,” cried Lao Lao. “They shoot people on the street.”

  “I heard everyone starves and they have no food for anyone,” came from Da Jiu Jiu.

  “How great,” celebrated Xiao Jiu Jiu, Ma Ma’s youngest brother, “I heard the roads are covered with money and gold.
”

  Once, I saw Mei Guo on TV. There were rows and rows of dirty da ren and children in rags sitting on the street, holding rusted bowls. At one point, someone found a hamburger, and everyone dove for it. Before I knew it, I couldn’t tell one person’s head from another’s hands as they became a giant blob that ripped at itself. It reminded me of another scary movie Ma Ma had let me see, where birds attacked until one person’s head became just a skull.

  I didn’t want to go to Mei Guo. I had had a hamburger only once and I did not like it. The hamburger had been from a restaurant in Beijing. The restaurant had the scariest thing: a white clown with red hair, a giant red mouth, and big red shoes.

  What would I eat when I lived on the street in Mei Guo? I didn’t like the frilly dresses Ma Ma made me wear in Zhong Guo, but the rags I saw in the Mei Guo on TV barely covered anything and they looked smelly. But Ba Ba had to go to Mei Guo, for some reason. And although I was sad, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go with him.

  * * *

  —

  Ma Ma and Ba Ba took me to the airport with them on the day he left. I had never been to an airport before. It looked like a giant mall except it didn’t have places that sold dolls. We waited with Ba Ba in a long line with other da ren. Everyone in line had suitcases so big I could have fit inside them with all of my toys. As I looked around, my eyes landed on three figures dressed all in black with strips of white. I pointed and screamed and soon the black blurred in my eyes because I was crying.

  One of the figures said something to me in passing. I didn’t speak English at the time and wouldn’t know that the figure was a nun and that she was blessing me until Ba Ba explained. In the moment, I knew only that the figure spoke in an incomprehensible tongue and had blue eyes, which I didn’t even know existed.