Beautiful Country Read online

  By the time my tears had dried and my throat was too hoarse to let out a single decibel, Ba Ba had dropped off his me-size suitcase on a moving belt. We then took escalators and walked down one hall after another before being directed to a doorway with ropes around it and da ren who were all dressed alike. Ba Ba stooped down to my level, and I knew then that what he was about to say was Very Serious, and for me only. It was important for me to listen closely, I knew, and I dared not breathe or blink.

  “Guai, Xi Mou Hou, ting Ma Ma de hua, unh?”

  I nodded. I would be a good girl and listen to Ma Ma.

  “Try your best to nap at lunchtime, even if it’s just pretend, and even if you are just asking questions with your eyes closed.”

  I nodded some more. I was still moving my head when Ba Ba bent over and pressed his lips to my left cheek.

  Out of nowhere, there was a frog in my throat and a rock in my heart.

  I watched Ba Ba unfold to his full height. He and Ma Ma exchanged words I was too short to hear, and then, for the only time in my life, I saw them exchange a kiss. He then waved and took big strides toward the ropes and the da ren with the same clothes. As Ba Ba was about to walk into the world behind the ropes, I saw my arms unfurl before me and a cry escape from my mouth: “Ba Ba!”

  Ba Ba would later tell me that he saw my outstretched arms whenever he closed his eyes, every single day for years to come.

  And in the millisecond that he turned to me, I saw that his face was like mine, yellow and red like our flag, wrinkled like a used napkin.

  Then just like that, he was gone.

  * * *

  * * *

  Now Ma Ma and I were also on the flying machine to Mei Guo. It was finally time for us to get off, but Ma Ma was still collapsed into her chest.

  “Ma Ma,” I said, prodding her. “We’re in Mei Guo now!”

  The lady with the fake face was walking past us.

  “No, dear,” she said, bending over and putting her now-melted face much too close to mine. I pulled my face back. I had never seen anything like it before.

  “We are in Ri Ben,” Japan.

  I didn’t know what Ri Ben was so I figured that we must have gotten on the wrong flying machine. This one had not taken us to Ba Ba. But I didn’t want to frighten Ma Ma, so I stayed silent.

  “Looks like your mother needs a wheelchair. Someone will meet you at the gate—he will take you to your connection.”

  I nodded in the way that I did when I needed to pretend that I was not confused or scared. Ma Ma was still asleep and I would have to figure out what a connection was and whether it would take us to Ba Ba or home. Maybe we would get home in time to eat Lao Lao’s chive-and-pork dumplings. Maybe the sun would still be out and I could go to the little shed where I had had to lock up all my things and pull out my bike and dolls and say, “Surprise! I didn’t disappear like Ba Ba.”

  When the lights in the flying machine came on, Ma Ma could barely stand up. She leaned on me, and I became her legs. It was the most weight I had ever carried. I pretended I was just carrying a book bag or a giant teddy bear. I stowed my doll away in my backpack, telling that her that it would be only a moment—I needed both hands to hold on to Ma Ma.

  Ma Ma had put one full vomit bag on the floor but was carrying another. I don’t remember how we got our suitcases out or who carried them, only that it wasn’t me. It couldn’t have been me; supporting Ma Ma was all I could handle.

  It was a long trek down the narrow aisle out of the flying machine, and once we were out, I saw that we were in a hallway that was not really a hallway. I knew because there were some tiny windows just a little higher than I was tall and when I looked out on tiptoes, I saw that we were very high off the ground. I choked on my breath and Ma Ma roused.

  “What?”

  “Don’t look, Ma Ma,” I said and slunk my way down the fake hallway with her in tow, wondering if Ri Ben was some weird place high up in the sky.

  At the end of the journey, we met a da ren who looked just like the other da ren at home, except he was smaller and shorter. He had a big wheelchair with him.

  “Ni hao,” I said.

  “Ni hao,” he responded, but his tones were strange, making him sound mechanical.

  “Has your mother had water?”

  I nodded, feeling important like a da ren.

  Ma Ma gave a weak smile to the confusing man and settled into the wheelchair.

  We walked down one corridor and then another, past many strong-smelling restaurants that made Ma Ma gag into the remaining bag, until finally we turned to an area where many paler, wider, taller da ren spoke the same scary tongue as had the blue-eyed figure in black. Most of them wore similar outfits: shorts, T-shirts, sneakers, and little black bags strapped around their balloon waists. Their clothes were in all different colors yet they all looked the same.

  The Chinese-but-not-Chinese da ren parked Ma Ma in front of a seat in the waiting area and she slid into it while keeping her eyes closed. He folded the chair up and looked at her, then me, for a while. I looked back and smiled, doing what I did when any da ren looked at me, clueless to the fact that he was awaiting his tip. He looked away and then looked back expectantly at Ma Ma, who stayed curled into her chest, desperate, she said, to keep the room from spinning. A few more seconds passed before his shoulders slumped ever so slightly and he walked away.

  Then it was just me and a sleepy Ma Ma again, waiting in front of the big door to a second floating hallway and a second flying machine, which the Chinese-but-not-Chinese da ren had told me about. I sat next to Ma Ma, on the lookout for any predators that might come. It was my mission to get us to the safety of Ba Ba’s arms.

  Chapter 3

  TYPE B

  After Ba Ba left Zhong Guo, Ma Ma and I moved in with Lao Lao and Lao Ye. Da Jiu Jiu lived there, too, so every day should have been a party. But I became very unlucky.

  The first time Ma Ma and I went grocery shopping after Ba Ba left, it suddenly became important to me to show how much of a big girl I had become. After we had returned from the store, as Ma Ma was locking her bike outside our building, I grabbed from the bike basket a carton of eggs and a glass bottle of vinegar—things that Ba Ba would have carried to our top-floor apartment. I darted into the building and up the stairs before Ma Ma took notice. By the time she screamed, “Qian Qian, be careful! Don’t fall!” I was already running up the second of five tall flights.

  Ma Ma’s steps approached soon after, but by then it was too late. When she finally came into view on the fourth-floor landing, I was already on the ground, having tripped on loose laces, my white frilly dress covered with the yellow-brown of raw eggs and vinegar, broken glass and cracked shells framing my bloody right arm.

  From then on, I started falling more and more. It was almost as if the shards of glass from the vinegar bottle had stayed in my right side, tipping me off balance. Going down escalators became particularly treacherous. I took to committing to the first step gingerly, my heart thumping in my throat, but it rarely worked. Over and over, I fell. I kept thinking that I would get used to having the spiked teeth chew into my sides as I rolled down each metal step—then, at least, I would act like a big girl and not cry. But each time, the pain surprised me and brought big baby drops to my eyes. Once, just after it happened in a store, as my tears were still drying and my face was not yet puffy, Ma Ma pointed to a big wheel a few steps away from the landing.

  “Look, Qian Qian,” she said. “You can spin it to win a toy. You love those things!”

  But I saw that there was already a crowd around the wheel, with girls and boys of various ages, each of them holding the hands of their ba bas on one side, their ma mas on the other.

  I shook my head and declared, “No, I’m bad luck now.” I then pulled Ma Ma by one hand, away from the wheel and toward the next down escalator, to wh
ich my other hand reached.

  * * *

  * * *

  Ma Ma talked less and smiled less. I figured this was because I had disappointed her by not being a big girl. We used to have a game where I pointed out characters on street signs and asked her what they meant. We would pass hours doing this, She answering heartily and I throwing myself into pointing and asking. But after Ba Ba left, she often didn’t respond at all. Although her outer shell stayed the same, she no longer lived inside.

  Ma Ma was meaner, too. I was the kid who stuffed her face and always ate what she was given. But just as I had to ask what every character was, I had to ask what I was eating. Ma Ma knew the question was a pre-meal ritual, but when I engaged in it one day after Ba Ba left, Ma Ma attacked me with barks that I had never heard from her. Lao Lao was also at the table and opened her mouth to object, but that only caused Ma Ma to bark some more.

  “Don’t tell her,” she commanded. “She’s only pretending not to know for attention. She’s spoiled rotten.”

  We passed the rest of the meal in silence, Lao Lao speechless, I questioning what I had done wrong.

  At night I heard Ma Ma sniffle into her pillow in the bed we shared, and I wondered whether someone had come one night to take away my dear Ma Ma and replace her with an imposter.

  Another thing that changed after Ba Ba left was our Sunday nights. We started walking through the night market, but we never stopped at the stalls to taste the source of their yummy aromas. Instead, we kept going until we got to the giant brown building where Lao Ye worked. The building’s windows watched us like the government’s eyes. Ma Ma always looked around before opening the main door and having us climb the stairs in darkness.

  “Where are the lights, Ma Ma?”

  No answer. But I knew she was there because I was holding her hand.

  After thirty-four steps—I made sure to count each time, and each time I worried that the number ended in four, which was bad luck because the character was pronounced si, like death—we fumbled in the dark and opened another door and walked down the hallway. After several steps, Ma Ma unlocked a door and we went into a room and sat down, Ma Ma always on the desk chair and I always on the couch, my feet dangling off the ground. The room did not seem to have lights, either, so I could make out only the shape of Ma Ma’s silhouette against the slices of streetlamp light sneaking in through the window blinds. The phone had a big wheel in the middle with numbers on it, making a clack-clack-clack sound to which I kicked my legs. Sometimes it was so dark that Ma Ma made mistakes and would have to start over, and it would be many clacks and leg kicks before I heard Ba Ba’s voice from the handle.

  Ma Ma always talked to him first. From the couch, I heard that Ba Ba sounded sick, with a hoarser, deeper voice that was sometimes interrupted by sniffles. Most of the calls were uneventful, filled by Ma Ma’s voice assuring him that everything was okay at home.

  Every now and then, though, Ma Ma would say, “You’re never coming back, are you? It’s a new number every month. You’ll never make enough. It’ll never be enough.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about, but I shuffled to Ma Ma to comfort her, sliding into her lap and giving her a tight hug. Sometimes she sobbed into my hair, her breath sending a tingling warmth onto my scalp. Other times she did not seem to notice me at all, patting me on the back in the absent way that I hated, until I couldn’t bear to comfort her any longer and crawled back to my couch in the corner.

  My conversations with Ba Ba were always the same. I told him about the game I played at school, including the mother hen game in which I was invariably the hen who had the job of protecting all of her chicks. Every now and then, Ba Ba offered “Unh, unh” in acknowledgment, but he never had anything to say or ask. I had never known him to be like that before, so it was all I could do to continue talking until Ba Ba or Ma Ma said, “Hao, Qian Qian, give the phone back to Ma Ma.”

  As the months ticked on, this happened more and more often until Ba Ba spoke only one sentence to me before asking me to give the phone back to Ma Ma: “Guai, Qian Qian, Ba Ba xiang ni.” He always made sure to tell me how much he missed me. And then, with a “good night” to Ma Ma, Ba Ba’s voice disappeared.

  * * *

  * * *

  Just before Ba Ba left for Mei Guo, I went with him to the doctor to get his exam and shots. We walked to the clinic that smelled like chemicals and that was white for the most part, except where the walls had started to yellow. Ma Ma was working, and it was up to me to make sure that Ba Ba went through with everything. This was because I was the only one who was more afraid than Ba Ba of the yi sheng, the scary old men in white jackets, and he had to be a good example and show me how to be brave. I learned all of this by listening to Ma Ma whisper it to Ba Ba at night when they thought I was asleep.

  I’d always been sneaky.

  When it was Ba Ba’s turn to get shots, he had to take his pants off and get the shot on his butt. He had been very busy for the weeks before, wrapping up his job and packing his things, so he was a smaller Ba Ba than I had ever known. The image of his gaunt butt cheeks on that day carved itself into my skull. I did not know until then just how bony butts could be. I had only ever seen my friends’ butts, which were very round and sometimes dirty, on the playground. I was chewing on this discovery when the yi sheng stuck a shiny metal needle into Ba Ba’s butt and automatically, uncontrollably, I wailed. I heard myself wailing but couldn’t stop, and I continued until Ba Ba ran over while pulling on his pants. He stopped short and looked down at the ground, and only then did I realize I had dropped the bottle of pills I had been holding for him. The little capsules splayed all over the floor, like freckles on a butt. The hu shi, nurse, and yi sheng looked at me and laughed, but I didn’t care because I could not stop wailing.

  Ba Ba scooped me up and ran me out of the room. I began to recover a bit, licking up the tears that had dripped down my cheeks and onto my chin. “Mei shi, mei shi,” he lulled, but only later, over ice pops on the sidewalk, was he able to convince me that the yi sheng had not wrecked him and his bony butt, and that everything was okay.

  * * *

  * * *

  Two years later, it was my turn to endure the same indignity. By psychological designs beyond my grasp, I remember no part of the process during which the needle was inserted into my not-so-bony butt cheek. All I remember is getting the blood test results and finding out that my blood was not Type A, but rather what I knew, from the order of the English alphabet, to be the inferior Type B. My face drooped and I shared my dismay with Ma Ma, who laughed and laughed and said not to worry—she was Type B, too. This did not reassure me at all. It told me only that my inferiority was coded into my blood and my genes.

  The next stop was the dentist, whom I hated even more than the yi sheng because he wielded loud and metallic tools that I knew were designed to crack his victims’ skulls open. The dentist was mean. I couldn’t see his mouth because he wore a white cloth over the lower part of his face but his eyes were dark. I had a hole in my tooth that needed to be filled, he declared as he cranked a lever to lower the long chair I was on. He placed a small metal thing on my tongue and I froze. Next, he took a drill and aimed it at a poor tooth in the back, causing stars and light to fly across my eyes.

  “Aughhh.” Out burst a scream as saliva pooled in my mouth.

  “You stupid child. You swallowed the filling!” He ripped his mask off and I saw that his mouth was as downturned and dark as his eyes.

  “Dui bu qi,” I squeaked out in a garbled apology while balancing the tools that were still dangling from my mouth.

  He produced another gray metal chunk, which he again placed on my tongue.

  “Let’s try this again,” he said. “Do. Not. Swallow.”

  I nodded and then kept my tongue perfectly still as a memory from the first week of school floated to my brain. The boy sitting nex
t to me had stapled the flesh of his thumb in the little space between his nail and the skin. I looked on while he watched without expression as his nail popped off the top of his thumb and blood squirted onto his shirt and my desk. A few weeks later, I saw the same boy run down the hallway as a teacher chased him with a broomstick. He refused to listen in class and kept sticking things in his body.

  If the boy could survive that, I could survive this. I kept my muscles so rapt at this memory that I moved not an inch. The rest of the procedure must have gone on, but I remember none of it.

  * * *

  * * *

  The second part of our long trip to Mei Guo was uneventful. I was exhausted from my sentry post and felt all of my muscles unclench the minute I strapped myself and Ma Ma into our seats. Ma Ma, I assumed, was empty and spent from throwing up what seemed to be all of her organs. The two of us collapsed into each other. Ma Ma fell asleep while I only pretended to sleep, keeping my eyes closed but my ears on guard. I did not open my eyes again until the cabin’s overhead lights flickered on and we had no choice but to gather ourselves up from the sunken, worn-out seats.

  I do not remember much of customs. I do recall Ma Ma being wheeled off the plane again as a man appeared—he was actually Chinese this time—and helped us answer questions from a uniformed man with white skin and eyes that were green instead of blue. Before we approached, Ma Ma turned to me and instructed, “Bie shuo hua.” She would say this more and more to me during our time to come in Mei Guo.

  Be silent. Say nothing.

  My voice no longer had a place.

  After the questions, the Chinese man told us to walk through a large set of doors before taking Ma Ma’s empty wheelchair and saying goodbye. The doors opened to a large room with flat circular belts, each with suitcases on them. We found our two giant suitcases, which we had packed tightly with ribbons tied around them. The ribbons were gone now, and the black cloth of our new luggage greeted us, naked and exposed. A feeble Ma Ma shook as she dragged each suitcase off the flat escalators and onto the cart she got for them. I helped her push the cart, but the handlebars went over my head. The cart, along with the suitcases, all but obscured my vision of where we were walking.