Beautiful Country Read online

  But the beady-eyed man did nothing more than ask me mundane questions about what subjects I liked (English) and what subjects I didn’t (science—I had decided that the year before, when I had gotten sick of being the one kid who did not have a least favorite subject). He also asked me what book I was reading. It seemed like he was expecting only one answer, even though I was in the middle of five different books at the time—one for the subway, two for home, and two of course for the bathroom, depending on my mood. So I told him the name of the subway book I had with me: Alice in Rapture, Sort Of. For years later, I would reflect how fortuitous it was that the title happened to have a fancy word in it, one that I had looked up just a few days before, when I had come upon the cover in the library.

  The beady man looked impressed when I mentioned the title, as if he knew the book and that it was of great renown, but that could not have possibly been the case: the entire Alice series was about a girl growing up with her father and her brother. Alice’s mom had died from leukemia when Alice was very little. Male teachers, I had learned by then, were rarely impressed with stories about girls. Mr. Kane was always telling me to read something more worthwhile, like Hatchet. But I didn’t understand why a boy’s stories about growing up were more worthwhile than a girl’s. Even so, immediately after my tongue tripped over the Alice in Rapture title, I wished that I had said Hatchet instead.

  From there, the interview proceeded uneventfully. I startled only once, when the beady-eyed man asked what my parents did for a living. I said that Ba Ba worked as a translator (which was technically part of his job) and that Ma Ma was not working at the time (also technically true). He seemed content with that as he jotted down some notes, and soon I was set free again to roam the halls. Lab was the first place where I saw kids of different races hanging out together, as if it were no big deal. Down the hallways, there were groups of Chinese kids laughing with white kids and Black kids and Latino kids, just like on The Puzzle Place.

  PS 124 was mostly Chinese—the few white kids in the gifted program kept to themselves and their colorful, reusable lunch bags full of home-cooked meals—and there weren’t that many other types of kids for us to hang out with, even if we were interested, even if we didn’t see ourselves as inferior and lesser, by virtue of being Chinese. And outside school, in Chinatown and Brooklyn, I had never seen many casual gatherings across races. Most interactions were tense and distant, and I was on guard at all times. I found myself wanting to linger within the walls of Lab, if only to continue watching these kids who did not seem to care about skin color. But my stomach reminded me that I was getting too close to missing lunch period.

  A few weeks later, when I received my acceptance to Lab, Mr. Kane and Ba Ba expressed shock. Mr. Kane called me up to his desk again, and this time tried to talk me out of attending. He had his protective voice on, and said something about how the classes might be too hard for me, that being hardworking would only get me so far, but I stopped listening as soon as I confirmed that he was not accusing me of copying my recent assignment. At home, Ba Ba was dismayed that I had been sneaky enough to apply without telling him, but he quickly lost interest in fighting me. The hours on the subway traveling to and from the hospital had depleted him.

  After the acceptance, I passed more time in my head, jumping from thoughts about the past to reveries about the future. The present was scary, depressing: Ma Ma was sick and we didn’t know if she would get fully better and whether the hospital would come after us. But somehow, I had gotten into a school that Ba Ba had said was meant for the white kids who were born here and who were so rich that they lived in Manhattan and probably had parents who worked in tall buildings. If that had happened, what else was possible? Maybe Ma Ma had been right: maybe I could create everything I wanted for myself, for the three of us. And this was the first step.

  It was in this egotistical, deluded fantasy that I spent the bus ride up to the castle. When we pulled up in front of a giant gray brick building with a circular driveway, Mr. Kane stood up and launched into his standard comedy routine.

  “Okay, everyone, we’re finally here at Mickey D’s!” He paused, awaiting laughter that would never arrive. It was in those pockets of silence—as the realization emerged on his face that he had disappointed his audience yet again—that I found him to be most like me. He covered it up well, though: he used his pointer finger to push his glasses up by the bridge and gave an awkward chuckle.

  “I’m just kidding, guys. We’re here! Let’s line up to get off the bus, single file. And if you were supposed to be on the bus but aren’t, let me know, would ya?” Pause. Chuckle. “I’m just kidding, guys.”

  When I got off the bus, I saw that there were trees all around. For all I knew, they could have just taken us to the middle of Central Park. The castle wasn’t really a castle, just a big gray building with sparse furniture and no heating. It was still only May, warmer, but chilly once the sun was gone.

  We wandered around the building as a group. There were some paintings and animal heads stuck to the walls. There was no explanation of the history or meaning behind any of it, but it was better than the classes where Mr. Kane had us sit in front of the TV on wheels and rewatch the same episode of Tom and Jerry that we had watched for the preceding three years.

  After dinner—some stew and bread at a long table so roughly carved that I fancied we were knights in the Middle Ages—Mr. Kane and the other teachers had us sit in the main lobby by a fireplace. A white man with tan overalls and a tan bucket hat stood at the front of the room. He had a yellow, thick, fleshy thing resting on his neck and shoulders. When I first entered the room, I thought it was some sort of scarf, but as I approached, even my eyesight was not so bad as to miss that the scarf was actually a scaly python. The thing was so long that its tail draped all the way down the man’s right arm. I suppressed an instant urge to vomit—I couldn’t ruin Christine’s shoes again; she’d never stop talking about it—and shuffled toward the back of the room.

  As the tan man blathered on, we were forced to touch the snake, one by one, as it opened its mouth at us and showed us its vacant gums. I managed to get by with touching it using just the tip of my index finger while looking in the opposite direction. This sufficed for Mr. Kane. I had learned much earlier in the school year that we had two choices: do what he said or make him laugh.

  We got hot cocoa after the excitement of the snake—though my stomach was too unsettled for me to swallow any of it—and then we were shown to our rooms. My room was among the smaller ones: just two bunk beds for four girls. Christine and I shared a bunk, of course, but the two other girls have since fallen away from my memory.

  Lights out was at nine p.m., and for once, I was excited to go to bed early. The earlier I went to bed, the sooner I would see Ma Ma. I was sick of being around so many people all day, removed from the cocoon of my family’s little room. We were assigned to a hall just for girls, and I was new to the teacher who was our floor’s chaperone, though I had seen her around school. She was among the few non-Chinese teachers, and she was shaped like a grapefruit. As her footsteps clacked down the stairs, fading from our hall, I heard room doors creak open all down the floor. Emerging from those creaks were the excited whispers of girls already giggling from breaking the rules.

  My roommates joined in on the giggling and shuffles.

  I groaned. “Do we have to?”

  “It’s freezing in here anyway. Come on!” And with that, the two faceless girls disappeared through the door. Christine stayed in the dark with me. She had many faults, but loyalty ran deep in her bones.

  We lay in silence together, one stacked on top of the other like cinder blocks. We listened to our breaths and the hushed laughter and chittering just beyond the door. I pulled the thin blanket all the way up, snug across my shoulders and neck, but soon found myself in shivers, my teeth clacking against each other. I had gone to bed fully clothed and stil
l I was shaking. Christine started snoring. How had she managed to fall asleep in such cold?

  For the next few minutes, I debated grabbing the blankets from the two other beds, but even in my mind’s eye, I could not orchestrate the task without my current blanket slipping off of me, exposing me to frostbite. I didn’t quite know what frostbite was, but the final scenes of “To Build a Fire” had stalked me since my first reading, and I figured that I was not about to risk my limbs for two blankets so loosely woven that they would have let cold air flow in anyway.

  It was the first time I had been cold enough for my teeth to clack. I thought back to the itchy sweaters that Lao Lao had mailed to us, neatly lined up against our drafty windows; to the strong little radiator in our main room that hissed and spat whenever it woke up. It was then that I realized I could be homesick for a place even though I no longer knew where home was.

  I took my mind to the only place that brought peace. I pictured Ma Ma and Ba Ba laughing together at home, on the couch where they shared their rare happy moments. In the alley outside our window, Marilyn was licking her paws, her belly stuffed with food, her body purring with warmth. And then I stepped through the threshold of sleep.

  * * *

  * * *

  Ma Ma’s return did not go well. She stayed in bed and was in constant pain. I wondered why we had gone through the trouble of the surgery and the hospital if nothing was going to change. Ba Ba did all of the cooking now, and we soon pushed up against the limits of his culinary knowledge. Ma Ma had refused to teach me to cook. Cooking well was a curse for women, she said, because it meant you would have to do it every day for the rest of your life.

  A few times, when Ma Ma was asleep or in too much pain to have me around, I went to the store with Ba Ba. I spent most of that time standing by the deli section, where a glass case displayed shiny brown chicken bodies rotating on a silver stick. Just outside of the case were plastic bags with holes poked through them, each a coffin for those who completed their spinning dance. That display case was a delight for every sense: an ever-changing performance under bright lights; wafts of yummy oil and grease; the hot air rosying my cheeks and sending heat through my body. If I closed my eyes and indulged in the smells, I could almost taste the savory chicken between my teeth, on my tongue, sliding down my throat.

  * * *

  * * *

  One day, I happened to be reading White Fang in the sunroom (spring was sliding into early summer and it was just bearable in there) when I saw Marilyn through the window. She was climbing up the outdoor steps with something brown, white, and bulbous in her mouth. Ba Ba was busy preparing our dinner, and Ma Ma was passed out, as she always seemed to be now. I slipped out of our room and through the double front doors, where Marilyn sat waiting for me on the landing. Just in front of her was a brown feathered thing with a large white belly. Pride beamed from Marilyn as I bent over to examine the item. I then stared back at her as paragraphs from the many cat books I read came back to me—notes about cats who presented to their humans gifts of dead birds and mice.

  “Marilyn!” I stepped past the bird, my fourth gift in America, to scoop her up, grateful for the surprise reunion. “You saved the sparrow for me, even though you must be hungry.” She purred and I walked the two of us past the front doors and into our room. In the bedroom area, Ma Ma was still asleep, lying on her side with her hands wrapped at her waist, her body curled like a shrimp. I placed Marilyn on the bed and she spun around three times before settling into a ball against the crook of Ma Ma’s arms, her face purring into her tail.

  Reluctant to leave Marilyn, I retrieved White Fang from the sunroom before returning to the sleeping area, where I climbed onto my bed with the book. I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew, Ba Ba’s anger filled the room.

  “What is this filthy thing doing in bed with Ma Ma?”

  I opened my eyes to Ba Ba towering over me, holding Marilyn with just one hand as she hissed, writhing and squirming in search of freedom.

  “I—I let her in—” I jumped up to grab her, but Ba Ba walked out of our room and toward the kitchen. I gave chase, catching out of the corner of my eyes a view of Ma Ma, who was now sitting up in bed, still clutching her midsection.

  By the time I entered the kitchen, Ba Ba was already dropping Marilyn out of the open window.

  “No!”

  * * *

  —

  Time slowed and my speech slurred, but I got to the window just in time to see Marilyn land on her feet and scamper off. Ba Ba pushed the window shut so quickly that I had to pull my hands back to avoid having my fingers smashed.

  He used the calm, low voice that scared me most. “That cat is bad luck, ni ting dong le ma?” I willed myself to nod but wasn’t quite sure that I was actually doing it.

  “We have enough bad luck without you bringing in more. Now, set the table for dinner.”

  We ate in quiet unease. The late-descending sun of June kept the sky lit, the rays of dusk filtering in and setting our dinner portrait in sepia tones. With each tasteless gulp of food, I swallowed the realization that going to a better school would do nothing to change our family’s bad luck.

  Chapter 26

  GRADUATION

  Ma Ma was back at St. Vincent’s the next week. It happened while I was at school: Ma Ma felt sharp pains, and she called the doctor, who told her to come back immediately. Ba Ba met her somewhere: an in-between subway station in Manhattan, or perhaps just the hospital. I was in class—maybe math or English, attention fixed on dumb daydreams while Ma Ma got hooked up to needles again.

  I was sad but not shocked that Ma Ma was sick again. Ba Ba had warned me and I had not listened. I saw Marilyn several times after the incident. Instead of feeding her, though, I ignored her and pretended she was just like any other cat on the street. One morning, she followed me three blocks to the subway station, and when it was clear that she was not giving up, I grabbed a long, broken-off tree branch from the ground and waved it at her.

  “You’re bad luck. Go away!”

  I had not seen her since.

  But it didn’t matter; it was too late. The bad luck I carried in had infected Ma Ma again.

  Ma Ma’s body, it turned out, had not adjusted to being without its gallbladder and half its liver. And the food that we had been eating had not been clean or healthy enough, so Ma Ma now had something called pancreatitis. I had no idea that something like the pancreas even existed, and now it was ruining my life.

  It turned out that pancreatitis was a common disease for alcoholics, so the rotating set of nurses and young doctors always asked that about Ma Ma. I took it upon myself to inform all of them that Ma Ma was very, very allergic to alcohol.

  The doctors had Ma Ma stop eating entirely. Instead, they hooked her up to bags of clear liquid. “Each bag,” Ma Ma said as she pointed at the liquid that dripped from the suspended plastic sacs, “costs four hundred dollars. If I go through three of these every day—that’s twelve hundred dollars!”

  After three days on the bags of the expensive water, Ma Ma’s cheeks grew rosy and she lost the swollen, waterlogged look that we had both developed during our years in the Beautiful Country.

  “You need to eat less sodium,” one Korean doctor said with a shiny smile and a white coat.

  “Less grease. Eat natural, healthy,” directed another doctor, who was white but not the surgeon with the dancing hands and clipped words.

  “No more canned goods,” admonished a third with brown skin and hazel eyes.

  By the time Ma Ma collected a full plate of advice that we could ill afford, she had been in the hospital for nearly a week, and was pumping—by her own meticulous calculations—over six thousand dollars in liquid nutrition. The veins on her arms and hands grew so poked-through that they again had to resort to those on her feet.

  That was also the week before gradua
tion, five days filled with useless but pricey trips to museums, movie theaters, and restaurants, all so our teachers would no longer have to go through the motions of teaching us. I skipped all of it, attending school only when we were scheduled to practice for the graduation ceremony, and then taking the subway to the hospital.

  For the ceremony, girls were to wear white dresses and boys were to wear white tops and black bottoms. It seemed odd to me that we had to dress like we were getting married just to sing random songs. And it created a problem for me because I did not have a single piece of white clothing. I eschewed dresses, embracing the tomboy look because it was cheaper for us to buy separates that I could grow into over the course of the year. And we almost never bought white; it was much too likely to dirty and yellow. But I had no choice: wear any other color and I would be a gob of mud among my classmates’ purity.

  One of Ma Ma’s friends took me shopping for the dress. I can’t remember who it was, but I’d like to think it was Lin Ah Yi, even though we never got to go when I stayed with her. Whoever it was, she took me to Macy’s, which Ma Ma and I had only dared to window-shop. She led me to the floor of fancy dresses for girls and told me to choose whatever I liked. The racks upon racks of frills and bows were terrifying. I had never had the luxury nor burden of such choice in America. Most of the dresses were tiny—perhaps for girls who ate non-greasy, low-sodium, and all-natural diets, and whose mothers never had to be rushed to the hospital to be pumped full of nutrition—but I managed to find one that fit and did not make me look like a tiered cake with legs. At the cashier, I uttered a few feeble protests as Ah Yi reached out to pay. We both knew it was an act, that Ma Ma and Ba Ba had no money for this frivolous little bridal gown.

  * * *

  * * *