Beautiful Country Page 25

Ma Ma was released again from the hospital just before my graduation. Still, I held my breath—by then I had learned that bad luck did not just go away, even though Marilyn had.

  On graduation day, I found my place early in the playground, where we were to line up in alphabetical order before filing into the cafetorium, which had its divider walls removed so all of our parents could enjoy our off-key performances. I was muttering the newly learned lyrics to myself when Mr. Kane came upon me, his glasses tinted under the sun’s rays. He had the fancy ones that turned into sunglasses, but when the shade only partially came into effect—like under the courtyard’s semi-light now or when our classroom’s bulbs had just been replaced and were still a little too bright—he looked like he was blind.

  “Qian! There you are! I’ve been looking for you all week.”

  I responded with a meek smile. One of the things I was most looking forward to was getting away from Mr. Kane. My first experiences with a male teacher—and a white man—had me worried about how I would do in the world, where, according to Ba Ba, they controlled everything. Mr. Kane had a knack for bringing out only two modes in me: uncomfortable or sad. He never did anything overtly bad, so it was hard to explain. But he was, as Ba Ba mentioned after a parent-teacher conference, a “liu mang.” The word has no real linguistic equivalent in English, though America had many human equivalents. Roughly translated, the word meant something between a rogue, a pervert, and a creep. That gray space was a good fit for Mr. Kane, but even so, I was loath to use the term for him, because there were so many moments when he seemed to be no more than a lonely child, just like me.

  When I offered no response, Mr. Kane released the sigh that always preceded his protective scolding.

  “You did not go to at least half of the Graduation Week activities, Qian. I know because I checked. You have to participate. I don’t want to tell you this, but I am only offering this for your own good: if you don’t participate, if you skip out at every chance, you will get nowhere in life. You hear me? Let those be my parting words to you.”

  I didn’t know why, because I had lasted all year with Mr. Kane, but it was at this point that I felt my throat hitch and develop a lump. All the scents and smells from the previous week came back to me—the needles and jars and packs of medicine, the dripping bags of fancy water, Ma Ma tiny, so many tubes coming out of her. I blinked fast and avoided eye contact. Then I croaked out a clumsy “thank you” before walking out of the courtyard and into the bathroom, where I slid into a stall and drenched the top of my wedding gown with tears.

  * * *

  * * *

  The ceremony was long and balmy. The school had no air-conditioning and limited ventilation. The cafetorium had few windows—certainly not enough to cool the polyester-covered bodies of my entire fifth-grade class and all of our family members—and I started dripping sweat within just a few minutes of sitting down. We students were in the auditorium half of the room, with the teachers on the stage in front of us, and our parents behind us on the cafeteria benches. The teachers gave many speeches about how wonderful and special we were, a message belied by the dullness in their eyes. They gave the same speeches year after year—this truth hung in the viscous air. I didn’t know why they needed to pretend, especially because many of the parents and children in the room, like Elaine’s family, had already attended identical ceremonies for older siblings, who had also been declared special and wonderful in the exact same ways.

  The ceremony plodded toward its end with the songs we had rehearsed in pain (for our throats and ears alike). At the principal’s command, we all rose in unison like the sweatshop workers at lunchtime and turned to the back of the room to face our families, who were cocooned in their own sweat. We then launched into our three songs, one after another, as the speakers blasted renditions sung by the original performers. Our contributions were juvenile and unnecessary, like drawing penciled, school-desk etchings on top of subway graffiti art.

  And then there was the most confusing part of all: to this day, I do not understand what two of the three songs had to do with graduation. They were old, adult songs, nothing like what we listened to. First there was “Every Breath You Take,” which Mr. Kane said was popular for weddings, but after I read the lyrics, I didn’t understand why married people would threaten each other, or why we had to threaten our parents at our graduation. Then there was “True Colors,” which seemed to be about one person asking another person to reveal his true self. I didn’t understand why we were asking that of our parents. Ma Ma and Ba Ba were always their true selves with me and sometimes it was scary. If they were hiding more, I didn’t want to see it.

  The last song, though, made perfect sense to me. As the music shifted and swelled, I continued looking around the room for Ma Ma. But there were too many faces and eyes, and we were all standing at the same level. I leaned this way and that, searching the audience, before a teacher came and put a firm hand on my shoulder. Because we had turned around, alphabetical order had, for the first time in my life, placed me in the very front row.

  When Bette Midler’s crooning began, I gave up on finding Ma Ma. I contented myself with looking up instead, at the ceiling, and singing with my full, tone-deaf voice. I did not last very long, though. At the end of the second verse, as we hit upon “A beautiful smile to hide the pain,” I came undone. But there was already so much sweat on my face that no one could tell I was crying.

  For the first time since stepping into that school, there, in that cafetorium with my classmates, each of us soaked through in our now-translucent whites, I let myself cry in abundance. We limped toward the song’s closing, sputtering, “Thank God for you, the wind beneath my wings.” For the entire song, I kept my blurred vision fixed on the ceiling, by turns thanking God for Ma Ma and begging him not to take her away from me, as he had done with everything else I loved.

  Chapter 27

  TAMAGOTCHI

  I stepped into the summer with caution. Without school, it was my sole job to monitor Ma Ma and get her back to the hospital as soon as necessary. I had failed her twice. I could not do it again.

  That summer, Ma Ma managed to graduate with her degree, too, having stacked the little swiveling table by her hospital bed full of books with big titles like Algorithms, a word I remembered and pronounced as “Al Gore Rhythms.” We attended the graduation on a sweltering day. Ma Ma had lost so much weight that the black robe swallowed her up, and from where Ba Ba and I sat in the audience, she was a tiny face drowning in a black sea.

  The graduation didn’t seem to make much of a difference, though: she had a computer science degree now, but she still couldn’t get a real job. Ma Ma looked, but each time they asked her for paperwork, she came home stomping, mumbling about how we had to figure out a way to become legal or we would have to leave. In the meantime, she was back to spitting in tea mugs for Henry Yee, who had hired and then fired two women in Ma Ma’s absence.

  Ma Ma insisted that she was all better, but I noticed all the ways in which she was frail: She ate with care now, and she moved slower, no longer rising as soon as she was done with her plate. She stopped frying chicken. She drank more water. But most of all, she stopped talking to me so much about everything that was worrying her. Written on her smaller, deflated face was everything she was not telling me and carrying on her own. She spent more time out, too; she had made a new friend who lived on Long Island and she often went to visit her.

  “Ma Ma, zen me le?” Sometimes, I managed to coax her stresses out of her. Other times, she remained distant, brows furrowed. I wondered if she had decided not to tell me anything anymore because I had failed her twice.

  Ma Ma pointed out that bad luck hit our family every five years: the entire past year, with the sickness and surgery, and five years before that, with Ba Ba leaving China. We needed to change things, she said, before the next wave hit.

  I took note of what she had left unsp
oken: that five years before Ba Ba left China, I had been born. I thought back on what Ma Ma had told me long before—that they had me because Ma Ma had already gotten pregnant twice and was afraid to get another abortion. The previous pregnancies were boys, Ma Ma had said, but then she ended up with me, a girl.

  For weeks thereafter I pictured my two older brothers with me everywhere I went. How much fun it would be to have them in real life! How much safer I would feel. I mentioned that once to Ma Ma, but she only chuckled. “Silly Qian Qian. We were only allowed to have one child in China. So if I had one of them, you wouldn’t be here.”

  That was less fun to imagine, so I started imagining that I had a twin sister who was with me everywhere I went. Being a twin meant that I could be born but still have a sibling. But of course, all of that was before Ma Ma got sick, when I was not preoccupied with the task of watching her and making sure I was ready to call 911 at a moment’s notice.

  The other change in Ma Ma was a fun one. She had always saved a dollar or two from our grocery budget to buy a lottery ticket. It was important, she said, to have hope. But after the surgery, she started putting even more money into the lottery. She had spoken to a lawyer, she told me, and as it turned out, there were business visas we could pay for if we had enough money. I had asked her how much we needed, because maybe I could go back to working at the sweatshop, but Ma Ma had responded that it was a number bigger than what I could even imagine.

  On Ma Ma’s way home from work every day, she bought two or three lottery tickets that together cost a total of five dollars. She always bought a boring one—the one with many black numbers printed on a small white sheet. Whenever I complained that it was no fun, Ma Ma reminded me that it had the largest jackpot—millions of dollars, maybe close to the big number that we needed for a visa.

  The other two were much more fun. They were always in shiny color foil—some pink, some red, some blue, with a numerical chart down the right side that said bingo on top. On the left were balls with hidden numbers under them. The goal was to scratch the foil off the balls to reveal numbers, one by one, and then scratch off the same numbers where they appeared in the grids on the right. Winning meant having five scratched off in a row, across, down, or diagonally.

  Ma Ma always saved the Bingo sheets for me. With a fresh sheet in hand, I’d give a good-luck blow to my quarter and set about the game, relishing each scratch. The game could take me up to thirty minutes, especially when I doled it out in small bits, scratching off a number, placing it on the charts, blowing off the gilded dust, and then reclining on the couch to watch a few minutes of Family Matters. I dragged out the game as long as I could. So long as I had not yet finished scratching off the numbers, there was still a chance I could win.

  Ma Ma had told me early on that there was a special spot on the Bingo pages where you could scratch to see if you had won without needing to play the actual game. But it felt like cheating to me, and in any event, I didn’t understand why anyone would want to skip the game and cut short the window of hope where it was possible to be hundreds of dollars richer. I always made sure to scratch that spot at the end of the game, though, just to make sure I never missed a win.

  The most Ma Ma and I ever won was five dollars. When we realized what we had won, we celebrated for a few minutes by talking about how we might actually get to the number we needed to buy visas. Then we walked back to the bodega to invest our winnings in new shining tickets of hope.

  * * *

  * * *

  The summer of 1998 marked the most acquisitive time of my American childhood. At graduation, my dream had come true: I had won an award from the local Lions Club that came with a fifty-dollar gift certificate to Barnes & Noble, a store I revered so much I rarely dared to enter its doors. After the ceremony, I had walked to the East Broadway subway station between Ma Ma and Ba Ba in a daze, pinching the gift certificate between clammy fingers, rings of wetness developing on the paper. Even so, I couldn’t bring myself to stow it away in a folder in my backpack, as Ba Ba had urged. If I stopped holding it, I would cease to believe it was real, for I had never dreamed that I would one day have so much to spend at an actual bookstore.

  The following Sunday, Ba Ba took me to Barnes & Noble. The green awnings and gold letters stood on the chest of the multilevel store that beamed with pride over the trees of Union Square. For the next two hours, we made our way through the store, I poring over the titles on the shelves as Ba Ba looked on through sleepy eyes. At the end of each floor, we took the escalator up to the next level, my arms loading up with far more prospective purchases than I could afford.

  We settled down in the kids’ section and surveyed my choices. The decision weighed on me, drooping my shoulders. On the one hand (quite literally), I had several Baby-Sitters Club books that I had for years longed to own for myself. Their covers were shiny and smooth; their pages still rested tightly together, unmarked by the intrusion of strangers’ fingers. On the other hand, I had books of duty that Ba Ba commended to me: a textbook with a tree on the cover, overlaid with the words What Your 6th Grader Needs to Know, and a hardcover Merriam-Webster dictionary that I had only ever seen on a special wooden stand at the library. The dictionary was so large that my arm had started to shake under its weight.

  “Qian Qian”—at the tone of Ba Ba’s voice, I knew his mind was made up—“you know you can come here and read those babysitter books anytime.”

  “I can?”

  “Yes. This is just like the library, except you can’t take the books home for free.”

  I looked around and took in for the first time the little white boys and girls, sitting on stools, on the floor, and on their parents’ laps, flipping through pages with all the time in the world.

  “I didn’t know. I thought they would kick me out. But I have fifty dollars—shouldn’t I use it?”

  “Of course. But use it on something you can’t read here. Something you need to have at home.” He pointed to the books of duty.

  I hesitated. The covers did not excite me. They did not comfort me. They made me sleepy.

  “You can learn big words, so they’ll never know that you’re an immigrant. Look”—he grabbed the dictionary with indentations along the side for each letter of the alphabet, and flipped to a section just before the C indentation—“you can look up a word like bird, and here’s a section showing you what it means.”

  “But I already know what bird means.”

  “Oh, but think of everything you don’t know! They’re all here, Qian Qian. The whole world is here, between these covers.”

  I liked the sound of that. Most of all, I liked that I could help Ba Ba believe that one day, no one would think we were immigrants, that we really and truly belonged here.

  Wo zai zhe li sheng de. Wo yi zhi jiu zai Mei Guo. I was born here. I’ve always lived in America.

  “And, you see?” He knocked his fist against the cover. “It’s great quality. It will last you until college.”

  I thought back to what Ma Ma had said before she got sick, that there were certain colleges that didn’t ask too many questions, if I was good enough to get in. I could not spare a single effort. That solved the dilemma: I bought the dictionary and spent the remaining amount on the textbook, vowing to work through each of them every day. I left the Baby-Sitters Club books in a neat pile by our chairs. Perhaps I could come back to visit them. Or they might bring joy to someone else.

  I walked away from the cashier hand in hand with Ba Ba, proud to give him hope. I would study five words a day every day, I told him, and within a year I would know all the words in the world.

  He smiled and it was all I could do to reflect his joy.

  But as I carried my purchases out, I noted that the bulging green bags brought me no happiness. Instead, I felt heavy. Somber. At least, I reminded myself, I was fifty dollars closer to attending college.

  * * *<
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  —

  I never did touch those books again. For the rest of our days in America, they sat by my bed, a reminder of Ba Ba’s waning dreams for me.

  * * *

  * * *

  My second big acquisition came later in the summer, when the Brooklyn heat had us passing time on the front steps after dinner, enjoying the breeze that fanned the setting sun. Ba Ba came home through that heat one evening in a soaked-through white shirt and pride on his face. Before changing out of his clothes, he presented me with a box in a stiff, translucent plastic bag.

  Hope dashed through my chest over what it might be. For the entire school year, I had lusted after my classmates’ Tamagotchis, little egg-shaped electronic toys in varying colors, each housing a digital chick that needed to be fed and played with, like Marilyn. Over the fourth-grade summer and into the start of fifth grade, all of my friends got one. I had showed up to class one morning to find that I was the only one who did not have a beeping, needy pet in her palm. Some of my classmates even had three, each in a different color. I would spend most of my classes looking over my friends’ shoulders at their pet chicks—a constellation of black pixels, really—and all that they demanded. They needed to be fed, cleaned, played with, and disciplined, all within hours. If they were ignored, they died, something that once happened to Hanna Lee twice in one day. The whole idea seemed stressful and not particularly fun, but everyone had one, so of course I wanted one. I had spent most of my fifth-grade year walking around with my eyes fixed on the ground, convinced that I would find one dropped by a careless kid. I pictured myself picking the egg out from between a grate, dusting it off, and giving the chick a clean, loving home full of games and food and discipline. Whenever a friend let me hold her Tamagotchi, I imagined running off with the chick and living together in happiness until I raised him into a full-grown rooster, with a pixelated comb and all.