Beautiful Country Page 4

  After some more lines before uniformed people in booths, of which I have but a vague memory, another pair of doors opened up to a bustling room holding people of all different shades. I had never seen anything like it before. Some were like us; others darker, brown; still others like the nun I’d seen two years ago, with eyes that were not just blue or green but blue-green, green-brown! Humans were a moving kaleidoscope of colors I did not know were possible.

  Seeing Ba Ba again in that crowd was like looking at my own knee right after a fall—he looked new yet familiar, mine yet not mine. Like a joint newly reddened, blood seeping out from cracks in the skin, Ba Ba looked like himself, but skinnier, gaunter, more tired. A caved-in sallowness had taken over his face, over all of him. He wore a plain white shirt that was starting to fray at the edges, and wrinkled pants.

  “Ba Ba?” Somehow, it emerged as a squeaky question, not an excited greeting.

  “Qian Qian, ni zhe me da le!”

  How big I had gotten.

  Ba Ba, how short you’ve gotten. How skinny and old you’ve gotten. But I bit my tongue and he and Ma Ma greeted each other with a long embrace. We then wheeled our suitcases out and placed them in a yellow car with a man sitting in front, on the other side of a screen.

  In Zhong Guo, I had sat in similar cars with Ma Ma, except the car was not yellow and the driver was Chinese. I would learn later that Ba Ba had saved up for months just to be able to welcome us to Mei Guo with a yellow car.

  Ba Ba said something to the man in English, who brought the car into motion. Then Ba Ba turned to us, patting my head with one hand and rubbing Ma Ma’s shoulders with the other.

  “Zen me yang? E bu e? Lei bu lei?”

  Were we hungry? Were we tired? Yes and yes. But most of all, we were happy to have our little family reunited.

  It was then, with my head on Ba Ba’s shoulder, the new city’s wild lights flashing outside the window, and my doll forgotten on the floor, that I finally fell into a deep and safe sleep.

  Chapter 4

  THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY

  Mei Guo was nothing like what everyone promised. Everything smelled strange and looked different. We lived in a place that Ba Ba called Brooklyn. Most of the people around us had brown skin and dark hair. Other than our Cantonese landlady, we rarely ever saw anybody who looked like us, and when we did, they never talked to us in Chinese. I wondered if we had left behind the only place in the world that had our people.

  Our new home was a single room on the second floor of a three-story wooden house that was always groaning under our weight. The other bedroom on our floor was occupied by a revolving carousel of new immigrants like us who could just barely put together enough money to pay for it. The door next to that was a bathroom that everyone shared. One of the first things Ma Ma said to me in Mei Guo was that I had to always lock the door when I was in there. We were not in Zhong Guo anymore. I could not leave the door unlocked. And I’d better not ever leave it open.

  On the first floor were two bedrooms. Another family lived in one of the rooms. Ba Ba said they were Puerto Rican. Even in Chinese, those were words I had never heard before. The communal kitchen was also on the first floor. Though it was the worst house I had ever been in, it had the largest kitchen I had ever seen. Chinese kitchens were female spaces, so they shared with outhouses the lowest status in the home. Kitchens were often relegated to the smallest, dirtiest, and least ventilated areas. And even though we had to share our new kitchen with everyone else in the house and all the cockroaches, it had an island and a walk-in closet.

  For some reason, our landlady liked to hide in the closet while everyone ate. She was a little old woman with a kindly face, white hair, and a hunchback that reminded me of a steamed bun. Every time I said anything while we were in the kitchen, Ba Ba shushed me and pointed to the closet, reminding me that the little hunchback lady was in there. I didn’t believe him for the first month, until one day I turned the light off after dinner and hid behind the island. After just a few minutes, I heard the closet door creak and the house grunt under new movement and shifting weight. Peering out from the corner of the island, I spotted our landlady’s stooped back making its way toward the door.

  She left the closet door open behind her. I had never seen it open before, so I took the chance to run in. I pressed the door closed behind me, the click of the knob echoing through the wooden chamber. There was a vent by the door, along the bottom of one of the walls. I slid down, placing my eyes against the slats. Sure enough, I could see out perfectly. Lying on my side with my eyes looking through the vent, I stayed on the hard ground, waiting for someone to spy on. It must not have been too uncomfortable because I slipped off into sleep.

  The next thing I remember is waking up to the old lady’s eyes, lined with wrinkles and cloudy with cataracts. She was yelling in incomprehensible Cantonese, leaning her weight on her scratched cane. As all of the blood rushed to my face, I squeaked out an apology—“Dui bu qi!”—and slid through the opening of the door before bounding up the stairs to our room.

  I don’t remember where Ma Ma and Ba Ba were during this time, only that in Mei Guo, they left me on my own more than I had ever been before. They never found out about the incident, even though I held my breath in the days after, awaiting my punishment. The next time I saw the closet door open again, the little room was no longer empty but full of bags of rice and cans of cat food.

  * * *

  * * *

  At night in our new home, Ma Ma and I sat draped in darkness, far from the window. Each time I inched closer to the window or the light, Ma Ma shouted, “Wei xian!” Dangerous. According to Ma Ma, everything in our new country was dangerous. It was dangerous even to step close to the windows or turn the lights on. The popping sounds outside were gunshots, she said, and if they saw that we were home, they might shoot us, too.

  I never questioned what she told me. And I was too scared to ask why people would want to shoot us.

  So every night we sat in darkness, I in my little bed inches away from Ma Ma in her somewhat bigger bed, both of us sitting up and leaning on the wall opposite the window, until we heard Ba Ba’s tired steps climb the stairs to our room. He always flicked on the lights as soon as he entered.

  “Wei shen me guan zhe?”

  Why were the lights off, Ba Ba invariably demanded of Ma Ma. There was no need, he insisted. But Ma Ma, she became unsure of everything in Mei Guo when Ba Ba was not there.

  “Qian Qian, ni kan,” Ba Ba said, gesturing to me with a brown paper bag. He held the bag oddly, on its side, laid across both hands.

  “Shen me?”

  “Ni kai ya!” Open it, he commanded.

  So I snatched the bag from his hands and twirled it upright, as it should have been, I thought.

  “Xiao xin!” Ba Ba said.

  I had always wondered why “little heart” meant “be careful” in Chinese.

  Opening the bag reminded me of that one time I looked into the mouth of a bulldog. Ma Ma’s friend had brought him over and he had come right up to me. Steam swallowed my face and crept into my pores, and I reeled from a strong smell.

  “Gou!” I shouted in disgust, drawing peals of laughter from my parents. Ba Ba explained that there was no dog meat, that it was just what the Americans called “pizza.”

  My handling of the bag had caused the pizza to roll into itself, giving it a wraplike quality. The cheese stretched and pulled in strings as I bit a piece off. They were tenacious, sticking to my fingers, the paper bag, my chin, propelling me into a fit of giggles. What was this terrifying, amazing, delicious substance, and why was this the first I had ever tasted of it?

  It took me a second to discover the sliced brown mushrooms, also unlike anything I had ever had before: a little rubbery, a little less flavorful. After a second chomping of the “pizza,” I passed it along to Ma Ma, content to savor the leftov
ers stuck on my fingers.

  The brown bag contained one slice, dinner for all three of us. I had already learned that meals were much smaller in Mei Guo. The food we ate filled us up quickly, cheese and dairy being things we had rarely eaten before. Yet I always got hungry again within the hour. Eating American food was like gulping down giant and instantly gratifying bubbles of air.

  * * *

  * * *

  The stray cats were my favorite part of our new home. The house had an enclosed backyard full of them. Throughout the yard, the old landlady set out trays of cheap cat food mixed with rice and bowls of water that had once been fresh, but that were soon muddied with leaves, dirt, and rainwater. There were cats of all colors: white with black spots; tabby; striped. There were rarely ever stray animals in Zhong Guo, and when Da Jiu Jiu told me I’d see things in Mei Guo I’d never seen, I never imagined that I would be so lucky as to live among cats. But if the cats were any indication, Mei Guo was to be full of unreliable friends. Every day I went out in hopes of finding them, and some days they were there, friendly and cajoling. Other days, they were aloof, hiding in cracks and corners, making me pursue them. Their eyes seemed to change with the weather, one second admiring, the next dismissive. It seemed that their moods changed as quickly as life had for us.

  I found a far more steadfast friend in the yard. The back wall of the yard had a narrow platform affixed to it, with a slight protruding roof. On that platform was a Buddhist shrine, which contained framed photos of people who looked like the landlady but who were by turns older and younger, along with incense and plates of fruit. On the end of the platform was the smallest television I had ever seen, spanning maybe twelve inches in width.

  The first time I came upon the platform, the only source of noise came from The Simpsons airing on the small TV. None of the words made sense to me, but I could not look away from the bright colors and the odd-looking characters. The white characters had darker yellow skin and the Chinese characters had lighter yellow skin. I knew they were supposed to be Chinese because they had eyes that were thinner, elongated, and slanted. I had no idea before then that Chinese eyes were supposed to look like that, but it quickly became how I saw myself, teaching me then that there was something wrong with my eyes.

  Seeing my race through the white gaze brought to my mind a story that Ba Ba had shared with me in China. One of his fellow English professors had come to Mei Guo before he did. Unlike him, she returned to China to recount her experiences. She told Ba Ba that she had never before realized how flat our faces were, and how three-dimensional and mountainous white people’s faces were, with protrusions in the brows, cheeks, and noses that we so envied. All of this was drilled into her spirit when she heard a white colleague referring to her as a “pancake face.” Ba Ba and I shared a laugh because we thought this was the most ridiculous thing we had ever heard. But the colleague, she had not found it so funny. She had told Ba Ba, in English for emphasis: “I cried for days and nights.”

  For the first time, I felt her sadness. But I tried to console myself with the fact that everyone was odd-looking in The Simpsons. For example, the mother’s head was impossible: tall, long, and blue. I started going to the shrine every day at the same time, and after a few days, I came to recognize most of the characters, with their bulgy eyes, jagged spikes and all.

  The next week, Ba Ba came home with a little TV that he had found by trash bags on the sidewalk. It was even smaller than the one at the shrine and had a crack along the back of its plastic casing. I loved it. It introduced me to PBS Kids, a new world of friends. Ba Ba had to go to work and Ma Ma had to find a job, but it was still summer and school had not started yet. So for a few days, I stayed in our room alone under strict instructions not to leave, except to use the bathroom and to go to the kitchen for food, which I was to bring back and eat in the room. Over the course of those long hours, the TV and I became kindred spirits. Like me, it was sad and lonely, having been abandoned on the curb by its bigger and less cracked Ma Ma.

  The TV was always on in our room, even when I was reading or napping. The free channels— FOX 5, PBS 13, and the later-named UPN 9, and WB 11 —made my life feel less empty. Before leaving Zhong Guo, I had never been alone. So it was nice to be embraced again by the sounds of people, even if they were in a little screen, even if they spoke in a language I did not yet speak. PBS Kids, in particular, supplied me with my surrogate family members, from shows I would later recognize to be Reading Rainbow and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. And new shows joined my family soon after, such as The Puzzle Place and Wishbone. Though my parents were gone, Mr. Rogers was there, telling me that there was only one me, and that he liked me just as I was, even if I did not yet have the English to understand it.

  The Puzzle Place was my absolute favorite. I watched it with relish whenever it was on, even if they were repeats of episodes I had already seen. I loved that all of the puppets seemed to be friends even though they were different. There was one puppet of each race, and something about this felt right to me. Even though the puppets’ faces hinted at their race, they all looked similar, human and happy.

  Of the puppets, my favorite was Julie. She was Chinese and every now and then, she shared things from our culture that I was able to recognize through the thick fog of English. And in those slivers of time, it was almost as if I were home again.

  * * *

  * * *

  In real life, the rare Chinese people we saw acted nothing like Julie. I was so excited the first time I saw another Chinese person on the street that I opened my mouth to exclaim, “Ni hao.” The only thing that stopped me was Ma Ma’s warning about talking to random people.

  Don’t talk to anyone, she said. We can’t trust anyone.

  No one? What about police officers, Ma Ma?

  No one. Especially police officers. If you see a uniform, turn around and walk the opposite way.

  Why, Ma Ma?

  It’s dangerous. We’re not allowed here. Don’t trust anyone.

  I didn’t understand what that meant, but every time we walked past other Chinese people, I could tell that they didn’t trust us, either. They wore a look that I had never before seen in Zhong Guo. Their eyes did not greet mine when I looked at them; their mouths did not smile; and the pall of exhaustion shaded their faces. Mei Guo had done something to them to change them forever. It was the same look I had seen for the first time on Ba Ba at the airport, and it was a look that was permanent for the Ba Ba I knew in Mei Guo. I started to wonder if that was how I looked, too. Every night in the shared bathroom, I stared at my own reflection, poking at my cheeks and tugging at my eyelids. I was confused each time. I didn’t look any different. But why did everything feel so, so different?

  Ma Ma and Ba Ba were overtaken by shadows. They were still attentive and doting at times, but more often they were distracted, elsewhere, sighing and saying big words to each other that held no meaning for me. Many of the words they used I had never heard before, nor had I heard them all jumbled together like that, rolling out through tired tongues.

  Whenever I had a question, I had to repeat myself at least twice before Ma Ma and Ba Ba noticed. “Ma Ma, zhe shi shen me?” I’d ask about the endless new things all around us. But Ma Ma and Ba Ba were by now both replaced by shells. They always seemed to be looking around, scanning our environment for something. I wished that I could help them find whatever they were looking for so they could focus on me again. Even when we sang and danced to Xi Mou Hou, which we did now on only rare occasions, Ba Ba had a faraway look in his eyes that told me that he was not really there. Xi Mou Hou had once been the highlight of his day, and now it was a burden.

  As for strangers, I began to fear the humiliation they brought. I was no longer a normal kid, and everything I did was wrong even though I didn’t understand why. I quickly learned that it was not okay, even in Chinese, to ask Ba Ba on the subway why a Black man had hair lik
e that, because it would cause Ba Ba to laugh and the man to get upset. I also learned not to go into the kitchen whenever our roommates were there because they would pull at the corners of their eyes and make faces at me. And I learned not to make too much noise eating, because even though we were supposed to do that to show Ma Ma that we enjoyed the food she made, doing it in Mei Guo just made others laugh at us.

  Most of all, I learned that we were “chinks” now, even though I wasn’t allowed to use the word. Almost every day, someone said it to us as they walked by on the street. The first time I heard the word, a big boy leaned over from his passing bike and shouted it deep into my ear. Everything sounded a little farther away through that ear for a while after. Ma Ma had startled and screamed, but I only knew that because I heard it with my other ear.

  That day, we went home to ask Ba Ba what it meant, but he refused to tell us. Then I said that it was probably Mei Guo’s word for Chinese people, that that’s what we were called: “We are chinks now, Ba Ba!” This brought Ba Ba back from his faraway dream, and he looked right into my eyes before speaking: “That is a very bad word, Qian Qian. Don’t you ever use it.” Then, just as quickly, he looked away and drifted off again.

  I wanted his attention back, badly. I considered using the word again, because that seemed to work. But instead I just sat there, worrying that I might do something wrong again, biting the inside of my mouth as I listened to the ringing in my damaged ear.