Beautiful Country Page 5

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  I learned quickly that people were dangerous. But I also learned that there were certain expressions, of anger and coldness, that I could wear to keep people a little farther away. I started to put on a mask of those expressions every time I left home.

  The mask did not work all the time. Ma Ma and I were walking in our neighborhood one day when we passed a sad old house, set back from the sidewalk with a fence that had holes in the chain links and patches of rust everywhere. The gate had only one hinge that was attached to the fence; the other hinge was loose. Ma Ma and I were almost entirely past the fence when we saw a white thing burst out from the house. The gate and the fence did little to block it, and the thing came to us first only as a blur. I saw only a jaw, full of teeth, open and snatching in the air as the thing lunged toward us.

  I ducked and shielded my face. My arm suffered the brunt, but when I looked up, I found no blood. The skin on my arm had managed to survive untouched, though my right sleeve was in shreds. By then, the owner of the dog had emerged from the house. He was white like his dog, who was now gnawing on the ripped cloth of my sleeve. We could tell that the man had seen what happened, but he said nothing and wore a smirk on his face. Ma Ma mirrored his silence and dragged me down the block by my other arm, my feet stumbling to keep pace, my tattered right sleeve flapping in the wind as it chased after us.

  Chapter 5

  SILK

  The summer days in Mei Guo were long, much longer than they had been in Zhong Guo. I was to start second grade in September. But just before that, I started another form of school. That school’s lessons stayed with me for far longer than anything I learned off a chalkboard.

  Before leaving for work one day, Ba Ba told Ma Ma that she could try to find work on East Broadway in Chinatown, and that bosses in the area would be more understanding of her bringing me because they were all Chinese. While Ma Ma and I wandered down that street, I timed myself to see how long I could go without breathing in the tempting, delicious smells that made my stomach growl.

  Halfway down one block full of restaurants we could not afford, we were stopped by a squat lady with a meat pie for a face. “Eh, eh,” she said. “Na zhe!” She stuffed a slip of paper into Ma Ma’s hand and tottered away.

  I had by then learned enough characters to read chapter books, but could not make out everything that was on the slip of paper: No something papers, it said, no problem.

  “Ma Ma, what’s it say?”

  Ma Ma did not respond. Instead, she directed us down this street and the next, finding our way to a one-room squalor. We met with peeling walls and crowds of Chinese people, none of them like the ones in Zhong Guo.

  “I need a job.” Ma Ma was from the north, blunt and to the point.

  “What can you do?” a fat man responded. The shape of his face reminded me of a steaming pork bun. Saliva formed in my mouth.

  “I was a math and computers professor in Hebei Province.”

  “Mei yong,” he shook his head. Useless.

  “Ever wash dishes?”

  “Ma Ma is good at everything,” I interjected after swallowing my drool.

  No one heard me. This was my new reality. There was a lot of noise in Mei Guo, and my voice was no longer loud enough.

  “I’m really good at sewing.”

  “Unh. Na zhe.” And another slip of paper was stuffed into her hand.

  Wading through the viscous August heat, Ma Ma and I made our way to a warehouselike building on Division Street, across from a red-brick building that Ma Ma told me was an elementary school. We climbed three flights of stairs and were rewarded with a gym-size room. Red and black cloth covered the two windows—the only source of natural light—recalling to me the calligraphy strips on the threshold of the Wang courtyard.

  In that room, there was no day or night; there was only work. The air was infused with steamed rice and salty sweat. Overhead, fans whirred, their blackened, rusted blades playing tag with swarms of flies.

  Visible from the door were rows upon rows of sewing machines, each with its own hunchback guarding the post. The hunchbacks moved minimally, as if each movement caused blood to drain from their wrists. Most of the hunchbacks were women, though a scattered few were men. And here and there, there was a little girl around my age. The curved backs of the people reminded me of freshly steamed mantou in different flavors. Here one clothed in white, plain flavor; there a purple one, taro, maybe.

  “You, sit here,” I barely made out from the Cantonese emerging from a lady whose skin reminded me of a dumpling wrapper pulled taut against too much filling.

  She planted me in front of a stool at the edge of a planked wooden table.

  “You, sit there,” she commanded Ma Ma, directing her to a sewing machine to my left.

  Before us stood mountains of cloth in two large canvas carts. In a basket on the table, a molehill of small white labels.

  Ma Ma grabbed a handful of cloth—they were shirts, I saw up close—and set them on her left. And then I watched as Ma Ma turned into a hunchback, taking a label and placing it on the seam of a shirt by the neck. She pressed down on the pedal under the machine, which whirred awake and spat out black thread.

  * * *

  —

  Once, back in Zhong Guo, I sat with Lao Lao in her bedroom as she was rounded over, knitting in front of the TV. Like I had taken to doing since leaving Zhong Guo, Lao Lao only listened to the TV; she never looked up. She was too entranced by the blur of wooden needles and red acrylic yarn in her hands. On that particular day, a documentary had been on. A chubby silkworm stared at me with beady black eyes as its fuzzy face spat white strings.

  The silkworm is an honorable creature, the TV informed us, that we have bred for thousands of years.

  Ma Ma’s machine did not have a fuzzy face or beady eyes, but it spat out string just the same.

  * * *

  —

  After Ma Ma finished attaching a label onto an article of clothing, she tossed it into an empty cart behind us. I had my own mountain and my own empty cart. I had my own job, too: to cut all the loose strings dangling off the seams. I had my own pair of scissors with a black handle and long metal blades. My right hand and wrist could barely support their weight. I had to put the scissors down after every other piece and shake my hand out. I tried to use it with my left hand once, but found that it was too heavy for that hand to use at all.

  In Zhong Guo, I had a pair of bright-orange plastic scissors. They were blunt with rounded tips, designed to pretend-cut things that were already cut. I wished for real scissors like the ones Ba Ba often used to cut his papers into strips, which he would then rip into even smaller pieces. So I was happy when I got to Mei Guo and received my very own pair at the sweatshop.

  Before he left Zhong Guo, Ba Ba warned me never to run with scissors, which of course prompted me to grab the pair from his desk and run circles around our apartment. I had made only three laps when I tripped on my train set, causing the scissors to bite a long angry gash in my left palm.

  “Ni kan kan,” Ba Ba chided. But his voice was gauze, not mad at all.

  After Ba Ba left Zhong Guo, there was no one to tell me not to run with scissors. So I stopped doing it because it was no longer fun.

  On the anniversary of the day Ba Ba left, I took his scissors—rusty from abandonment—and snip, snip, snipped at our leather couch. The cuts made two wings with a dip in the middle, like a TV show had taught me. (The TV show also taught me to snip only paper.) When Ma Ma walked into the living room, she yelled at me, not about running with scissors but about using them.

  “Qian Qian, what is this?”

  I thought it was obvious. But sometimes you had to explain things to da ren. They were too big to see the important things.

  “They are swallows, Ma Ma. The TV taught me.” She blinked
at me and this told me I had to be patient and explain some more. Sometimes da ren were a little slow.

  “They will fly to see Ba Ba in Mei Guo to make sure he’s not lonely.”

  Ma Ma walked out of the room, but I heard her sob in the kitchen.

  * * *

  * * *

  I played hide-and-seek every day at the sweatshop. The game was to find as many loose strings as quickly as possible, and it was easier to do this when I forced myself to blink less. On some pieces, there weren’t as many loose threads as I would have liked. When that happened, I yanked a thread loose just so I could trim it.

  I had always been an overachiever.

  * * *

  —

  The silkworm brings great pride to our country and we must uphold the honor it brings.

  * * *

  —

  The hours crawled along, Ma Ma attaching the labels, my finding (or creating) and trimming the loose threads. It was important for us to put all finished items in the empty carts. Ma Ma made three cents for each piece. I made one cent. Every piece mattered.

  The only sounds in the room came from the sewing machines, the fans, the flies, and every now and then, a coughing hunchback. No one budged other than to move pieces of clothing. I don’t even remember going to the bathroom—was there a bathroom? There had been one, surely?—or drinking water.

  Around hour six, a buzzer vibrated across the room. As if emerging from hypnosis, we all unhunched and straightened at the smell of steamed rice. Until I stood up straight, I did not feel the pain that rested at the base of my neck and trickled down my back. It wasn’t until I uncurled my spine that I realized how round I had become.

  We all got up and walked to the back of the room, lining up in front of the rice cooker.

  My mouth watered.

  I swallowed.

  Some of the workers had packed their own dishes, once warm but long cold in containers, which they brought with them in line at the ready to receive the fresh steamed rice.

  I rubbernecked to survey what my fellow hunchbacks packed.

  Stir-fried potatoes, edges browned just so with soy sauce.

  Tomatoes and egg.

  Bean curd with string beans.

  From my tummy came the rumbling of a boiling pot.

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  —

  To harvest the silk and keep it perfect, we must boil the cocoon before the silk moth emerges.

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  —

  Ma Ma and I did not have containers of our own. When we were in front of the rice cooker, the scented steam danced in my face and tickled my nostrils. Here was the dumpling-faced woman again, dropping one scoop of rice each onto two paper plates. I held mine in my right hand but the plate buckled, straining to support the weight of the rice that almost fell to the floor. I joined my left hand with my right.

  “Mei you kuai zi, Ma Ma.”

  “That’s okay. It’ll be a fun game. How many grains of rice can you pick up at once with your left hand?”

  So it didn’t matter that we didn’t have chopsticks—that was the point of the game we began the minute we returned to our posts. Ma Ma rested her plate under the sewing machine, the needle with its single eye staring, ravenous for the rice.

  “Ready? Go!”

  At this I clawed at my plate with my left hand, moving it like an escalator to my mouth. I kept my right hand behind my back. Rules were rules.

  Ma Ma moved slowly. She grabbed just a few grains at once, and gnawed on each of them, as if searching for a hidden message inside each grain.

  My hand was smaller but I won easily. I showed her my empty plate, as a few grains stuck to my cheeks and the corners of my mouth.

  “Wow, you are so fast!”

  I didn’t let Ma Ma in on my strategy. What if there was another race?

  My left hand was sticky with starch. I wiped it on the stiff yellow smiley face on my shirt. I put one grain on the crimson tongue. Everyone needed something to eat.

  The buzzer had not gone off yet. This meant I had some time to roam the room.

  I crept up row by row. I wanted to see what the room looked like from the very front. The farther up I got, the fewer paper plates there were. In the first row, everyone was still eating. They hovered over their containers of stir-fry. But the stir-fry looked different for some reason. It took me a few seconds to realize why: these people had stewed meat! Salted fish, even. And chicken legs.

  Down the row, I spotted a single round egg, gleaming proudly under the naked light bulbs dangling from the ceiling. The owner of that egg was a girl around my age. She showed it no respect. She poked it around the container with her chopsticks, not even eating it.

  I hated her.

  I slinked to our row in the back. Ma Ma was still chewing on single kernels. She was never going to beat me at our game.

  “Ma Ma, can we sit in the front row?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s for people who sew buttons.”

  I grabbed a grain of rice from her plate and chewed on this.

  “Can I sew buttons?”

  “Yes. But not yet.”

  I rolled my empty plate up into a tube.

  “How many cents do the Button People make?”

  “Ten.”

  I started using the tube to beat on the planked table and our piles of clothes.

  Half of Ma Ma’s scoop still sat on her plate. She pushed it at me, bartering it for my makeshift stick.

  I pretended it was the race again. I grabbed the entire remaining mound with my left hand and shoved it into my face.

  And then the buzzer rang, sending us back into our trance.

  * * *

  * * *

  Each stump had its own hunchback with its own stories. Ma Ma heard them over time, though I would not hear about them until years later, and then only secondhand. Her favorite was from a woman who was always rooted at her station, working without pause from the beginning of her twelve-hour shift through the very end. Not once do I remember her getting up for rice, for water, for the bathroom. Ma Ma, ever generous, offered to grab her a plate as she continued to push the reams of fabric into the mouth of her hungry machine. When Ma Ma returned, the woman nodded up at her in appreciation, but almost immediately, she looked back down at her machine and returned to her concentrated labor.

  It was not until after a month or so of such interaction—Ma Ma leaving the plate at the woman’s elbow, wondering when she would ever stop long enough to scoop the rice into her mouth—that the woman apologized for her focus. She had to make a certain amount of money, she explained, within a certain amount of time. There had been an accident. She had come to Mei Guo over a year ago with the hope that her son would soon follow, just as soon as she paid the snakehead for her fee, and then his. But bad news found her within months of her arrival. Her son had stayed behind in her ancestral home in the countryside, with her parents and her brother, who loved motorcycles. One afternoon, the brother parked his motorcycle in the family shed and neglected to fully turn it off. Gas leaked everywhere and fire caught, burning over half of her young son’s body.

  He needs surgery, but we can’t afford it, I imagine her recounting through quiet tears, Ma Ma’s and hers.

  Not yet, anyway. As soon as I pay off the snakehead, I can get the rest to him. I tried to use the money to go back, and then I tried to send it home, but each time the snakehead found out and said he would kill us.

  What good am I to him if I’m dead? Even more useless than I am now. What kind of mother leaves her son behind, across the world, to be burned?

  I see Ma Ma shaking her head and patting the woman on her back, injecting a current of compassion into the dark room. It was not your fault, she would say, her heart in torsion over the thought of it bein
g me who burned instead of that poor little boy.

  What purpose do I have now, but to make American dollars through these ugly clothes? I can picture the woman choking on her words just before turning back to her task.

  I came here for him, Ma Ma recalled the woman repeating through sobs, I only came here for him.

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  * * *

  Ma Ma was not meant to work at a sweatshop.

  She was the most beautiful person in the world. In Zhong Guo, she and Lao Lao often talked about how her eyes were too small, her lips too thin, and how she carried too much weight around her chest and hips. But I didn’t know what any of that meant. To me, she was the sun, a mug of steamed milk on a cold winter’s night, everything warm.

  Ma Ma was taller than most women in Zhong Guo, and, I later learned, most women in Mei Guo. She wore her hair in cascading waves, born from plastic green and pink rollers with foam cylinders in the middle. When we packed for Mei Guo, she jammed the rollers along the inner edges of our suitcase. The foam would slowly lose shape, but every night, in anticipation of her day at the sweatshop, she went to bed with a head full of them.

  Ma Ma liked to say that a woman could be beautiful without being pretty, but that a woman could not be beautiful without having dignity. It would take me decades to unravel what that meant.

  In Zhong Guo, Ma Ma wore giant glasses with frames the same shape as the large computer she sat in front of every day. The machine had a blank black face. On it was a dancing white bar that appeared and disappeared at the top left corner. So many times, I watched Ma Ma type in “CC:DOS” while speaking it out loud, pronouncing it “say say daws.” The machine spoke along with her, beeping like the roadrunner that the cartoon coyote could never catch.