Beautiful Country Read online

  I seemed to confuse Mr. Kane, too. Once, he called me up to the front of the class, as everyone else got to get a head start on homework.

  “Qian.” His face twisted in confusion. “What is with your overalls?”

  “What?” It was all I could muster.

  “Why do you wear those every day? We’re not on a farm.”

  It seemed like a question that wasn’t really searching for an answer. I knew those well because Ma Ma asked them often, so I stayed silent and returned to my seat. I took my time walking back. I didn’t want to give him a chance to see my tomato-red face but was pretty sure he got a good view of the color from the back of my burning neck.

  * * *

  * * *

  Ma Ma got very sick one night.

  Ba Ba was not home. I had just taken an extended break in the bathroom, where I had caught up on the latest Baby-Sitters Club book and vented about Christine in my diary. I knew something was wrong the minute I came back to our room. Ma Ma was not in the living area, and the curtain dividing the sleeping area had been untied, blocking my view of the beds. Part of me did not want to lift the curtain. Instead, I wanted to run back to the bathroom and keep reading my book. Another part yearned to call Elaine and ask to sleep over at her house, where both of her parents were home and the children didn’t have to do the dishes and where there were rules for everything, like how you ate and where you sat on the couch.

  I lifted the curtain.

  * * *

  * * *

  Mr. Kane taught us the ways of the world. He stood at the front of the classroom and beamed at us one day.

  “Did you know that there are many sweatshops in Chinatown?”

  Most of our parents worked in one.

  “Most of your parents are uneducated. They can only work in sweatshops.”

  That wasn’t the reason.

  “Not Shirley’s mom, though. She comes to PTA meetings in suits. Or Qian’s dad. You remember, we saw Qian’s dad in a dress shirt by the government buildings when we went to the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  Mr. Kane also believed in limits. That is, we all had our limits and needed to be reminded of them. We also needed to accept them, without asking questions.

  The limits applied more to some than to others. And we were to be grateful for this white savior who taught us our limits early and often. It almost felt as if he thought he was protecting us.

  Writing had always been my strength. I always thought that if an adult read my writing, she would get to see into my soul, and I would get to prove that I belonged in America just as much as any other kid.

  Mr. Kane was the first to tell me that my talent did not fit my shell. It was not part of who I was supposed to be, what people expected of me. One day, he asked me to talk to him again at the front of the class. My face was already red by the time I got to his desk, but I clutched a bead of hope that it might be about something positive this time. Maybe he was touched by my essay. Then I looked down and saw that I was still wearing the same overalls.

  “Qian.” He was holding the essay from the day before. “Did you write this?”

  Was it a trick question? Maybe it was another question that was actually an answer.

  “I don’t think you wrote this, Qian.”

  Maybe it was one of those jokes he loved to make but that no one got.

  “Then who did?” I squeaked out.

  “This is…this is not the type of writing I see at PS 124.”

  “But I did write it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” But under his eyes, somehow, I wasn’t.

  “I’m very disappointed in you. Go back to your seat, please.”

  It was the first of many similar encounters I would have with white teachers to come. For the rest of my time in Mr. Kane’s class, I made sure to add spelling and grammatical mistakes before handing anything in.

  * * *

  * * *

  Ma Ma was rolling back and forth on the bed.

  Ma Ma, zen me le?

  Her face was gray and tears flowed out of her eyes, squeezed shut from pain.

  Ma Ma?

  What if she had passed out? What if she couldn’t talk? What could I do? Were our roommates around? I sat dumbly by her side, wading through these questions and rubbing her stomach.

  Qian Qian. When she finally spoke, I thought I imagined it. But I turned around and there she was, her eyes open, looking at me. Qian Qian, call 911.

  What? What’s going on, Ma Ma? What if they deport us, Ma Ma? What do you need?

  Guai, ting hua, hao hai zi. We can’t worry about that right now. It hurts—it hurts so much. I’m scared.

  Whenever Ma Ma said those words, I knew I had to be the adult. I could not be scared when she was. I firmed up my face just in case any of my horror showed.

  Tell me what you feel, Ma Ma.

  From there, the night blurred. Words tumbled out of Ma Ma, and though I didn’t quite understand what they all meant, separately or together, my brain gripped on to everything she said just in case I had to recount it all to someone else later. She said something about being afraid that there was a hole in her stomach. I had no idea that was even possible. I thought about my toenails rubbing holes into my sneakers. Was that how it worked? It sounded dangerous, so I grabbed Marilyn from the bed and locked her in the sunroom.

  I ran down the hall.

  Silence.

  Our roommates were gone.

  Then I ran up the hall, slamming open the first front door, shoving my thumb onto the doorbell for our landlords with all my force. I held down on the button and did not let go.

  Please be home. They spoke no English but they were adults, and that was all that mattered. They would know what to do. They had to.

  Please be home.

  Please be home.

  Please be home.

  They were home.

  They rushed down the stairs, their genial faces furrowed in worry. I told them what Ma Ma had told me and then they sat with Ma Ma on the other side of the curtain as I dialed 911 and talked to a lady whose stern voice came through the phone a little too loudly, hurting my ears.

  The ambulance came quickly. I noted with a sigh that there was no police car. The two paramedics came into our room with a skinny bed, long and narrow, on wheels. With them and the rolling bed there, our home felt small. I tied up the curtain so it was out of the way, but still, it was hard to breathe.

  The paramedics wore uniforms and at first I thought they were police officers. They asked me question after question as they examined Ma Ma and looked around. I waited for them to ask to see our papers or demand whether I knew who the president was, but they never did. Maybe that would come later, I thought, after they arrested us and put us in handcuffs.

  I don’t remember how or when, but at some point, Ba Ba came home. He looked at me with startled eyes as he entered the room. Ma Ma had once told me that when she was very pregnant with me, earthquake tremors had taken over our home in China. Ba Ba had told her to stay put before he went down the five flights of stairs to investigate. He did not return until over an hour later, when the small earthquake had passed.

  The problem, Ma Ma explained, was that his childhood left in him a fear so big that it eclipsed everything, even the people he loved most. Especially the people he loved most.

  I was glad he decided to come home this time.

  And then, just as quickly as everyone had showed up and packed into the little room that burst at its seams, they were gone. Ba Ba left with the ambulance and the kindly landlords offered me some food before returning to their home upstairs. It was at this point that I remembered that Ma Ma had been cooking dinner for us before I went into the bathroom, before she had collapsed in bed. I walked into the kitchen and found a meal awaiting a family that would
never arrive. I packed the dishes away into the fridge and walked back to our room, where I turned on the television and let down the dividing curtain again before crawling into the bed with Marilyn in my arms, the phone by my head.

  I closed my eyes and willed myself to sleep. Everything is fine, Qian Qian, I mumbled. Ma Ma is just on the other side of the curtain, watching television.

  * * *

  * * *

  In fifth grade, I decided to become a new person entirely. No one could ever pronounce my name. There was always that inevitable pause, at the beginning of the school year and whenever I met anyone new, when the spotlight insisted on shining down on me and my weird name.

  “How do you pronounce it?”

  “The Q makes a what sound?”

  And worst of all: “How interesting!”

  One day, in better times, before I had to call 911, I took my routine walk through Rite Aid after class. It had become my daily ritual to drool over new Lisa Frank stationery, and visit with all the fine-point pens in their assorted colors. That day, though, a rack of rubber stamps stopped me from getting to Lisa Frank. Each stamp was for a different name, organized alphabetically from Anna to Zane. They were all purple, each with a heart-shaped holder and a silver sticker that declared the name it would mark.

  There were no names beginning with Q.

  There was, however, one for Julie, that Chinese puppet from The Puzzle Place.

  Julie had shiny, long black hair like mine.

  She also had eyes that turned up at the outer corners, giving her a catlike, slanty look. I didn’t look like that, but still, she looked more like me than anyone else I saw on television.

  Julie’s last name was Woo, and she was Chinese American. Other than her eyes, she was no different from her friends. She spoke perfect English. She didn’t seem stressed out or hungry. She never lied. And all the puppets wore the same clothes all the time, so it didn’t matter that she did, too.

  She fit in.

  The stamp was $4.99, a fortune I could just barely afford with the pennies remaining from my sweatshop days.

  I grabbed it and walked to the cashier.

  * * *

  * * *

  Ba Ba did not come home until four or five o’clock in the morning. I know because I looked up every hour to check for Ma Ma and Ba Ba in their bed, and then to check the clock. I did not sleep that night, not really. I just closed my eyes and tried to ignore the fluttery ache deep in my tummy. I was awake the minute I heard Ba Ba’s key in the lock of our room door. Exhaustion pulled at his face.

  Ma Ma was not with him.

  “What happened? Is she okay?”

  “She just has to stay there for a little while.” Ba Ba directed his eyes at me but did not see me. “She will be okay. We waited a long time to see someone.”

  “How long will she be there?

  “What’s wrong with her?

  “Did they ask us to pay?

  “Did they ask for our paperwork?

  “Are we deported?

  “Should I pack up?”

  By then, Ba Ba had stopped hearing me. He walked to his bed and lay down, slowing only to take off his shoes. I had so many more questions—endless questions, none of which were destined to meet their answers.

  “Go to bed, Qian Qian. Guai, hao hai zi. You have to get some sleep before school.”

  I closed my eyes but the questions played on.

  What did sleep matter? What did school matter? What did any of it matter, now that I had failed to protect Ma Ma?

  * * *

  * * *

  I used my new stamp on everything. I stamped the walls, Marilyn, my hand, and most of all, my assignments, under which I wrote in smaller print, “Qian.” I loved the exhilarating moment after each stamp, when the ink on the surface was still wet and shiny.

  It felt good to mark things as mine.

  A few weeks after I donned my new name with my new stamp, Mr. Kane called me up to his desk again, and I again made the walk with a flushed face. I clenched my fists and dug my nails into my palms. I knew I should have put more spelling mistakes in the last essay.

  “Qian, I just realized that this essay with a big ‘Julie’ stamp on it also has your name.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve been giving the credit for all the homework with this stamp to Julia Huang.”

  Not her again. Didn’t she have enough? I turned to look at Julia, who of course had on another new outfit. She looked like Snow White, perfect and dutiful as she copied notes from the board. She was always good. She was always nice. She was never accused of plagiarism. I hated her.

  I turned back to Mr. Kane to find him staring at me. I batted back the tears welling in my eyes.

  “You have to decide. You can be Qian or you can be Julie. Which one is it?”

  I stared back at him, shrinking into myself with each ticking second.

  “Qian,” I finally said, but I didn’t know if he heard me. Even to me, even in the depths of my own head, my name came out as a squeak.

  * * *

  * * *

  Ma Ma was not there when I returned from school the next day. When Ba Ba appeared several hours later, he told me that Ma Ma needed to have surgery soon, but that we had to wait until a doctor was available. They had done a scan of her and it showed what he called a large mass. Ba Ba explained that this was like a big rock, and it was where her liver and gallbladder were. The surgery was going to last more than ten hours and it would be the only way to find out what was going on inside and whether Ma Ma had cancer.

  I had a lot to say and a lot to ask: She has a rock inside her! How did that happen? What is cancer? How do we find a doctor? Can we ask one of those Chinese basement doctors? How long do we have to wait?

  All this went on inside my head as I stayed silent. There was no need to talk or ask anymore. I didn’t need to say anything to know that Ba Ba didn’t have the answers.

  And anyway, none of it mattered. Because I had failed. It was all my fault.

  In healthier days, Ma Ma had reminded me that worrying was a talisman to keep the worst from happening. “If you worry about something,” Ma Ma said, “it won’t happen. It’s the things we don’t worry about that are dangerous.” And so I knew: I had not worried enough to ward off Ma Ma’s sickness. I had not worried about whether she would be healthy enough to see her graduation and to see us living her dream—leaving this awful, beautiful country for a different place, a world where we were just as human as everyone else.

  Chapter 22

  HOSPITAL

  Going to the hospital went against everything I had learned since leaving China. As Ba Ba led me into the lobby of St. Vincent’s Hospital, past the huddle of uniformed police officers and doctors in white coats, I fought every muscle’s urge to run out the door and into the underground subway tunnels.

  The hospital was different from the ones I’d gone to in China. The smells were much stronger, as if American doctors used more chemicals. And there were machines all around us, plastic seats everywhere. The seats were padded, and though it was a hospital, everything felt more luxurious. We went into an elevator and then through a set of doors, before going down one hallway and then another. There were so many turns that I wondered whether we would ever see Ma Ma. As we followed the twisting corridors, I pictured me and Ba Ba, turning this way and that, up these floors and then down those steps, walking forever in circles in the science fumes, never to arrive at Ma Ma’s bed.

  * * *

  * * *

  The hospitals in China were spare in contrast with American hospitals. I once snuck a look into the hall closet at PS 124 and it reminded me of the hospital where I had gotten my shots before we boarded the plane: the walls were unfinished, as were the floors, and both had random black markings on them going every which way. The closet wa
s purely utilitarian and it looked that way—there were hooks for brooms and dustpans, cubbies for the janitor’s items, and nails from features past. Nothing was painted, and nothing was any more adorned than it needed to be.

  In our years in America, I had seen a doctor only when the school required me to get shots. Since we could not get those shots recorded by the Chinese basement doctors, Ba Ba took me instead to the free kids’ clinics around Chinatown. We found out about the clinics only because they had been advertised on ratty papers stuck on the telephone poles around PS 124. Those papers promised us that the clinics were always free and that no one there ever asked about immigration status. We couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t a trap, but I needed the shots so Ba Ba had no choice.

  Going to those clinics gave me a little taste of what it must have been like to be normal in America: Ba Ba and I walked in and up to the receptionist as if we were regular people who had nothing to fear. After filling out forms, we sat down and I played with the toys on the table—usually wooden blocks meant for babies but sometimes Connect4 or checkers. With the games I played both sides, pretending that I was playing against my own twin, both of us American, as our American ba ba stared off into the distance of the opposite wall. I became so engrossed in this make-believe that I barely even looked up whenever the door opened. It was almost as if we were not waiting for an officer to walk through the doors and place us under arrest.

  And then, when the receptionists finally muttered my name—always incorrectly, even in this normal version of our lives—I walked up and in through the back doors with Ba Ba. Our legs betrayed only the slightest hesitation, tensing at the doorway in case an ambush awaited us. And then, just as quickly, we fell back into our normal stride, and it was almost as if I had no worries other than the impending stab of a long, thin metal thing. To the nurse who did not know any better, I was just another poor kid, bloated on sodium and fat, dreading the judgment of the scale.