Beautiful Country Read online

  As these images bounced across my brain, my focus trailed past the black words on the page in front of me. I looked at the pages like I always did, but none of the words got into my brain. Still, I kept my eyes trained down. I knew that if I glanced up, I would see a sad old man all alone in his bed on wheels, or a white lady with curls and a long dark skirt sitting in the next row, crying into her hands. Even when I had gotten up earlier to pace the blue line drawn on the ground, toward the nurses’ desk and back, I kept my eyes on the floor until Ba Ba told me to sit down because I was moving too much, making him nervous.

  I wondered about the old lady with the bear: Was she waiting for me to show up? Did seeing me every day mean as much to her as it did to me? I wondered what Mr. Kane was saying in class and whether I would be able to catch up. I had just read Where the Red Fern Grows, and every time I thought about the ending, my eyes throbbed with new tears. I had so much to say about the book, but now, when I got back to class, it would be too late. My thoughts would be irrelevant. I had missed my chance to speak up in class for once and finally prove to Mr. Kane that I was really smart enough to be the person who wrote my essays.

  One by one, the hours crawled past us, and my butt grew sore from the chairs. At some point, Wu Ah Yi and Lin Ah Yi arrived. Ba Ba greeted them and smiled, but it was a smile formed by his mouth only. Ba Ba had not smiled, not really, for many days.

  I looked toward the hallway to the right of the waiting room every now and then. Ma Ma had been wheeled in that direction in the morning, although it felt like years ago. The surgeon had talked to us then, just before his people took Ma Ma away. He had a face formed by sharp angles and blue eyes so light they were almost silver. His strides and gestures were quick and efficient. It was something that Ba Ba had noticed, too; I knew because he had told Ma Ma that she was in good hands, literally. Actually, he had said, “I can just picture his hands dancing while holding the knife.”

  At this memory, I squeezed my eyes to shut out the image of the angular doctor slicing Ma Ma’s belly open with one of the X-Acto knives Mr. Kane sometimes handed out for projects. In that vision, his dancing fingers were wearing ballet flats.

  I was not looking when the doctor emerged again from the corner. I had failed. I had not checked the hallway for a while, in fact, because Lin Ah Yi was asking me about my book and I was trying my best to remember all that I had read in the past few hours.

  It was not until Ba Ba stood up that I noticed the thin figure all clad in blue. Shaking off Lin Ah Yi’s gentle touch on my wrist, intended to hold me back, I followed on Ba Ba’s heels.

  The doctor wore a blue cap, and a blue mask for his nose and mouth like the one Ma Ma had worn while biking in China. Under the mask, his nose and chin formed a mountain ridge that created an impenetrable divide between the east and west of his face. As he removed his mask with a swift wave of his hand, I noticed for the first time that he had thin, light-colored lips that were redder in some places than others. He sank his white teeth into them during surgery, I imagined, as his hands danced with the X-Acto blade.

  “The surgery went well.” He spoke like he moved: kindly, but at a clipped pace. I had just read that Charles Dickens was paid per installment. This had contributed to the flowery and belabored prose I had just started to love. This doctor, it occurred to me, would not have been able to feed himself as a Victorian writer.

  “There was no cancer.”

  And for the first time that day, I was able to gather my thoughts. I spotted a new feeling in my stomach—relief? Joy? Yes, but also: hunger. Ba Ba and I had had no thought of food at any point in the day, but Lin Ah Yi had brought some homemade buns and I already felt myself wriggling toward the bag next to her.

  “But we did have to remove the entire gallbladder and a large part of the liver, so she will have to be careful with greasy foods and alcohol—”

  Ma Ma was allergic to alcohol. The slightest bit gave her hives. Didn’t he know that? I wondered whether we should be worried that Ma Ma had been cut open and sewn up again by a doctor who didn’t even know that. I looked to Ba Ba for signs of anger but found only relief.

  “—you should be able to see her soon. We’ll let you know when she’s ready for you. Do you have any questions?”

  I did not need to turn to Ba Ba to know that he would have no questions. He asked fewer and fewer questions in America. Somehow, by leaving China, Ba Ba had grown more Chinese, starting to adopt our government’s silly ideas about how asking questions was bad and disrespectful. He took on the form of what America expected of us: docile, meek. He had even started teaching me the importance of keeping my head down, of not asking any questions or drawing any attention, seemingly forgetting that he had taught me the exact opposite in China.

  The night before, I had watched Ba Ba pull the brown briefcase out from under our bed. Ye Ye had a similar briefcase, so even without Ba Ba’s habit of pulling it out every night, I wouldn’t have needed to look at it to know what it contained. The briefcase held our entire lives: our birth certificates; Ma Ma and Ba Ba’s marriage license, with a picture of them at twenty-four, unrecognizable and young, faces bright with hope; our three passports, in covers that were still stiff because they had each been used only once; and finally, stacks of cash that Ba Ba spent nights counting and recounting and then strapping together with the rubber bands we got off scallion bunches.

  The night before the surgery, Ba Ba had taken particular care to tally the bills, most of them in fives and tens, some twenties, before separating out a chunky stack and placing it in a wrinkled brown envelope from China.

  Now, standing in front of the dancing-hands doctor with a mountain down the middle of his face, Ba Ba reached deep into his pants pocket and produced the envelope. Ba Ba had already told me that he and Ma Ma would give the doctor a whole five hundred dollars of our life savings.

  “Is it really necessary?” I had asked.

  “We have nothing else to give,” he had responded.

  Ba Ba handed the offering to the doctor with both hands and the slightest bow.

  “Thank you, Doctor, for saving my wife. We don’t have much—and without you—who knows—”

  Ba Ba had never had trouble with words before. The doctor smiled.

  “Really. It’s nothing.”

  His ice-blue eyes beamed warmth. But then he grabbed the envelope casually with just one hand, as if it contained coins instead of our life savings, and strode down the hall.

  Ba Ba and Ma Ma would see him again, but that was the last I remember of him. In the years to come, I would forget his name and the color of his hair, but I would never forget—could never forget—the saint who graced St. Vincent’s; the surgeon who charged us a mere five hundred dollars for saving Ma Ma’s life.

  * * *

  * * *

  We returned to sitting on the metal chairs a while longer until an Asian nurse waved at us to follow her. Wu Ah Yi and Lin Ah Yi were not allowed in, but they had to go home anyway, so we said our goodbyes, me making sure to hang on to the bag of Lin Ah Yi’s homemade buns.

  Then we followed the nurse, who barely looked at us. Discontent was painted on her face. I thought nothing of it at the time, only that she was a fancy nurse and we were poor. Only later would I gather the life experience to wonder whether she had treated us that way because she had been assigned to us for no reason other than our shared race.

  As we turned down the hall that the surgeon with the dancing hands had disappeared into, I saw that there was a set of doors, above which bold font spelled out intensive care unit. This seemed promising to me. Intensive care sounded better and more important than laid-back care, after all. And as we walked through those doors, which swung every which way on loose, squeaky hinges, I saw that the rooms were very different. The hallway was much narrower, and instead of windows looking out into the sky, the windows of the rooms looked onto the
hallway, such that we could see into every room as we walked down the hall. And although there was just one bed in each, the rooms were not much smaller than the other room Ma Ma had stayed in. The rest of each room was filled with equipment: cords and machines, tubes and needles. Most of the rooms at the beginning of the hallway were empty, and I winced each time we passed a new room. I did not want to see a person in the beds, hooked up to all the machines and plugged with needles. Even less did I want to see Ma Ma like that.

  I was relieved to see, though, that the figures in the occupied rooms were not Ma Ma but small, old, shriveled. But then I came upon the window overlooking the sixth occupied room and realized that it was just an optical illusion. For there was Ma Ma, also looking small, old, shriveled. As I had feared, she had many things plugged into her, tubes and screens, as if she were the power source for all of the dripping and beeping.

  I held my breath as we pushed the door open, not knowing whether it was safe to breathe out, not knowing whether she was fully closed up yet. Were we supposed to change into the blue outfit the doctor had worn? I had seen people do that on TV. But surely the nurse, irritated though she was, would have told us.

  Ma Ma was not awake yet. She would wake up, right?

  Ba Ba exchanged English words with the nurse and approached the bed just as I was about to sit in the chair pushed up against the opposite wall. Were we to wake her? I ran to Ba Ba’s side.

  “Neng ting jian ma?”

  Ma Ma’s eyes remained shut and she moved only her lips. Her head tilted to one side of the pillow.

  “Zhen tao yian. Hai bu kai shi. Deng duo chang shi jian le.”

  She thought the surgery had not yet begun, that she had been waiting all day for it.

  Ba Ba was silent, but I figured one of us should assure her that the surgery had already taken place, that it was successful.

  “Ma Ma! Shi wo, Wang Qian.”

  “Wang Qian?” At my name, Ma Ma shifted her head toward the center of the pillow.

  “Ma Ma, shou shu yi jing wan le. Mei shi le!”

  Ma Ma did not respond. She had fallen asleep again.

  We turned to the nonplussed nurse.

  “She’s still under anesthesia. She will be drowsy for the next few hours, but she will come out of it.”

  I had no idea what “anesthesia” meant. By the looks of Ba Ba, he wasn’t sure, either. But the words had jumped so curtly out of the nurse’s mouth, one after another, that we did not dare ask.

  Keep your head down and don’t ask any questions. I guess the new rule applied with other Asians, too.

  Out of the corner of my eyes, I caught sight of two bulging bags of liquid hanging low from Ma Ma’s bed. One was dark yellow and the other was deep red. My mouth opened and I was powerless to stop the words from running out.

  “Is that—her blood?”

  Ba Ba stayed silent, but his eyes darted to Ma Ma’s body. It took a few seconds before they fell upon the bags.

  “We have a catheter for urine and bodily fluids. It’s normal. She’s on her period.”

  I had no idea what “catheter” meant, either, but found myself comforted by the matter-of-fact way the nurse delivered the news. She would not have talked about something dangerous just like that, no matter how poor we were. Then the nurse sauntered out of the room, and it was just Ba Ba and me alone with Ma Ma, hooked up in her socket of a bed.

  Ma Ma moved only a few times. We thought she would awaken each time she did, but every time it turned out that she was just shifting to get more comfortable. There would be a shuffle and then the room would again fall into silence, punctured only by the beeping and dripping Ma Ma powered.

  Ba Ba and I remained seated, helpless in the cacophony of a certain, indeterminate fate.

  Chapter 25

  GIFTED

  The week Ma Ma was to finally come home from the hospital—after nearly a week of monitoring, several days out of the ICU—PS 124 had an overnight trip to some castle just north of the city. It was a special event, just for those of us who were due to graduate soon. My classmates were all abuzz with excitement over their first official sleepover trip, but I refused to go. I would have no fun, I knew, and I would do more good at home, where I could take care of Ma Ma.

  Not so, said Ba Ba. It would be easier to get Ma Ma acclimated back at home without me around. I was just something else he had to take care of. He didn’t come out and say that, not really, but I knew that was the truth. He had said it enough in days past, especially when Marilyn had returned to our door and Ba Ba had caught me feeding her rice and meat that I had siphoned out of my dinner plate and into my greasy pockets.

  How could you take on this burden, especially now? Don’t you think I have enough to worry about?

  This was not exactly what Ba Ba said, but he had said versions of these things, in softer notes, and over time, his voice had gotten trapped in my head, feeding on my brain cells and growing larger and meaner. It was an ever-present roar now, among the loudest of the ones I carried inside myself. It spoke to me even when Ba Ba was absent, when I was all alone.

  So when Ba Ba said no, I should go on the field trip, I heard the rest of what he meant without his actually saying any of it. I acquiesced, praying only that what I had shared with Marilyn would be enough to carry her until my return.

  * * *

  * * *

  The bus ride was long, forgettable. Every time I left the city—and it had happened only one or two times—I was shocked that the rest of the country was not just like Manhattan and Brooklyn, draped in cement and steel. I had assumed that everything in America was the same as all that was around us, but as I stared out the window at the budding greenery, I realized that there was a lot of America I had yet to see.

  By this time, my friends had gotten used to my vacillating between silence and bullying. It made for excitement, I suppose: they never knew if they would meet with quiet assent or sharp retort. I never dwelled on the verbal abuse and lies I unleashed on them; my focus was on Ma Ma. I would be rid of them in a few weeks, anyway. I was going to attend a special public school next year, called the NYC Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies. It was in a different part of Manhattan, Chelsea, an area that was closer to St. Vincent’s and had few Chinese people. Back then, the school labeled itself as one for gifted children, and I had passed a written test and an interview to get in.

  The entire process had been dramatic. Ba Ba insisted that I keep my head down and draw no attention to myself:

  Why not just attend the school that we are zoned for in Brooklyn?

  You don’t need to commute to Manhattan now that you speak English, Qian Qian. Now you can really claim that you were born here!

  You don’t need to prove that you’re special. Plus, do you really think you can compete with those rich white kids in Manhattan? Their parents have fancy jobs; they pay for all sorts of things we don’t even know about. Too much pressure.

  How sad will you be when you get rejected? How embarrassing. So much face lost!

  Ma Ma would have been the tiebreaker, but she was out of commission, and where I went to school next year was not important enough to bring into her hospital room.

  Instead, I made the decision on my own. I figured that if what Ba Ba said was right, then I wouldn’t get in anyway, and there was no harm in trying without his knowing. Chances were that nothing would change. I didn’t understand what he meant about feeling embarrassed and disappointed. I had never understood it, the big deal about saving face. I figured being rejected was just the same as not trying—worse probably, because I would always wonder. Perhaps that was Ma Ma’s voice within me, telling me that I could do everything she hadn’t done but wished that she had, promising me that whatever I saw out there, whatever I envied, could be mine as long as I chose to make it so.

  I took the subway to Lab on my own
and attended the interview without Ba Ba knowing about any of it. Like the very first school I had seen in America, Lab had security guards and metal detectors. But it also had kids of all colors. I was directed down one hallway and then another, and as I marched my way down each, I pretended not to let on how very startled I was by the size of the other kids, how brown and empty the walls were, and how different they looked without bright, childish drawings of stick figures and birds with beaks and wings just a little too big. When I was at last in the right office, I found a dark-haired man who was so short that his torso came up only partway in his large office chair. The man had brown beady eyes that studied me so closely that I would have switched cars had I seen him on the subway. But there was little I could do during the interview other than remain seated under his eyes, feeling small and scared and thinking that I had made the wrong decision by not telling Ba Ba where I was. What if this man had me deported? What if he abducted me? Ba Ba had enough problems without my adding to them.