Beautiful Country Read online

  A year before we moved to Mei Guo, when I was six, which meant she must have been thirty-one, Ma Ma published two textbooks on mathematics and computer science. By then Ba Ba had already left, so she showed the books to me. “Look, Qian Qian,” she said with the same pride I bestowed upon my favorite pet rock, pointing to the bottom of the covers. “That’s my name!”

  I took in her name—indeed, there it was—and thumbed through the books. They mostly contained symbols and Chinese characters that I’d never seen before.

  “Wow, Ma Ma.” I did my duty by smiling my biggest wide-eyed smile. Then I walked away to play with my Ninja Turtles.

  Sometimes when we walked around our hometown, Shijiazhuang, we ran into people who called Ma Ma “Lao Shi,” Professor. But until I left Zhong Guo, I didn’t register that it was possible for women to be anything other than a mother. To me, that was all Ma Ma was, and it was exactly what she was born to do.

  Once, a da ren asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I beamed and declared, “I want to be Ma Ma.”

  Misunderstanding that I wanted to be just any mother, Ma Ma scolded me.

  “Qian Qian, how shameful! You should dream of becoming something more than a mother.”

  But to me there was nothing nobler, nothing greater, than being Ma Ma.

  * * *

  * * *

  Ma Ma was good at everything. She cooked the best meals. In Zhong Guo, I had a little stool by the sink that I stood on, sometimes to help her wash dishes, sometimes just to watch her. She peeled apples magically, keeping the detached skin all connected in one long coil. I played with the coil and made it dance in the air, until I inevitably broke it in half and then laid it to rest in the trash can.

  Ma Ma made everything a game. The tomatoes talked and the cucumbers laughed, and washing them was not a chore but the joyous task of giving them a bath.

  Ma Ma didn’t know it, but she was the reason my imagination burned alive everywhere I went, the reason I saw love in all beings and things.

  Once, Ma Ma brought home two crabs and left them on the living room floor, handing me a pair of chopsticks so I could play with them. It was the best hour of my young life. The crabs followed me this way and that, waving their claws about as I hooted with glee.

  Later, I put them in the sink so they could have a drink. As they blew bubbles in the water, Ma Ma filled up a pot.

  “Why don’t you go out to the sandbox and play for a while? Let the crabs take a nap.”

  She didn’t have to tell me twice. I bounded out.

  I returned to the dinner table to see my two hard-shelled playmates—now red, no longer blue—on a plate.

  “Are they still sleeping, Ma Ma?”

  “No, Qian Qian. Come on, let’s eat.” She handed me my small pink chopsticks.

  And so we ate, my meal seasoned with tears.

  * * *

  * * *

  Ma Ma was particularly good at design and sewing. We didn’t need to make our own clothes in Zhong Guo, but she had a talent for it, and she could never sit still. Ma Ma was always working, even when she was not teaching or writing. Every week she came up with a new design, always a dress, always with lace. She spent much of each weekend bent over our sewing machine, humming to herself while alternating between pressing the pedal and marking up reams of cloth with chalk.

  I protested every Sunday when she put her new creation on me, always complete with a matching ribbon for my hair. “It’s itchy!”

  “But look how pretty you are. Stop tugging, please. No squirming, either.”

  She sometimes made matching outfits for the two of us. My favorite was red with white polka dots, in silk. Both of our dresses had fitted bodices and full, A-line skirts. When we walked down the street, I felt as pretty as Minnie Mouse.

  The polka-dot dress was different from Ma Ma’s other designs. That one was so comfortable I could even be myself in it. I wore it regularly to the sandbox with my best friend, a boy just as smelly as me, but who didn’t have to wear itchy, frilly socks with lace edging his dirt-covered ankles.

  I don’t remember what happened to that dress, or any of Ma Ma’s designs. When we boarded the plane in Beijing airport, I never saw them again.

  * * *

  * * *

  The cocoon is boiled with the silkworm inside. The heat kills the silkworm but the water makes the cocoon easy to unravel.

  * * *

  —

  At hour twelve in the sweatshop, we were processed and released. I don’t remember how much I made that day. I don’t remember how much I made on any given day. But I do remember asking, as usual, to be paid in pennies instead of bills.

  That way, it felt like more.

  Ma Ma usually agreed, but only for one dollar.

  My pennies fit in a box the size of a deck of cards. I jangled it. It was my tambourine all the way to the East Broadway subway station.

  As we descended the stairs of the station, pain burned at the back of my neck, uncoiling and worming its way down my spine, inch by inch.

  * * *

  * * *

  We harvest the silk and eat the silkworm.

  * * *

  —

  Once, before Mei Guo was ever part of our thoughts, I ate a fried silkworm. Ma Ma bought it off the street from the dark, hairy man with the greasy cart. Ma Ma biked past him every day after she picked me up from preschool. Those rides were my favorite. From my bucket seat, I pointed at the signs we passed and asked her what each character said and how it was pronounced and what it meant. She answered unfailingly through her white cloth mask—a biking necessity in the pollution—even though I asked her about the same characters for days on end.

  I panted when I saw the shiny, greasy cart, beckoning its hello under the sleepy sun. Adorning the cart were various brown-yellow creatures and body parts on sticks: scorpions, frog legs, silkworms, crickets. I poked at Ma Ma’s back and begged her to stop. She always pretended to consider it for a second before agreeing. The seasoned whole quails were my absolute favorite. I felt like a da ren because the vendor would smile at me, say xie xie, and hand me—not Ma Ma, but me—the stick that ran up the middle of the prostrate bird. Ma Ma would get going again and the rest of the ride would blur by. I always started with the beak. First, I poked Ma Ma in the back with it, then I stuffed it in my mouth, crunching on it and working my way past the eyeballs, the brains, and down the spine.

  But one day, the quails were sold out.

  The vendor gave me a silkworm instead, free, he said, for his favorite little customer. I stared at its ridges, disappointed that there was no beak. I could not even make out eyeballs, which were the best part. I chewed on one end, but did not know whether I was eating the face or the butt. It didn’t seem to be a thing that had once been alive. Yet it was savory, just like the crab.

  Chapter 6

  NATIVE SPEAKER

  I had many first days of school, and I never liked any of them. On the eve of my first-ever day of school in Zhong Guo, when Ma Ma told me I would be starting school the next morning, I dissolved into a puddle of sadness. This had Ma Ma and Ba Ba laughing, something da ren liked to do when kids cried.

  “Ni ku shen me?”

  Da ren were always asking me to justify my emotions.

  School was scary, I sputtered. I didn’t know what it was and I wanted to stay home, where I could play with my dolls and train set.

  You’ll like it, they promised.

  But the more they insisted, the more I resisted, and the next morning found my face bloated from tears. I refused to get dressed until finally Ma Ma had to rush out of the door for her class.

  Ba Ba stayed. He sat across from me, staring me into submission.

  It won’t work, I thought. I was his child and if there ever was someone more stubborn than him, it was me.

&
nbsp; There was a Chinese idiom I came to know later because Ma Ma and Ba Ba would repeat it to me in those moments: “Purple comes from blue but is superior to blue.” It was inevitable, they seemed to believe, that I would one day outshine them in the best and worst ways.

  After untold minutes of staring at the half-genuine misery painted on my crumpled face, Ba Ba relented.

  “Hao, hao.”

  He walked to the kitchen and returned with my favorite kind of ice pop, as much for the taste as for the fact that it turned my tongue blue. “I know what it’s like. I never wanted to go to school, either.”

  “Really?” I asked, eyes still wet but wide open.

  He gave a quiet, sad nod. I saw him go away for a while, like he did sometimes when we played with the shadow birds at night. Then he offered, “How about we put off school for another day and instead go to the zoo?”

  I nodded my head as vigorously as I could while still holding on to the quickly disappearing pop.

  And so I donned my jacket and my new backpack—why not carry it, Ba Ba said, since it went well with my polka-dot dress—and skipped downstairs, climbing victoriously into the seat at the back of Ba Ba’s bicycle. How smart was I, I thought as we passed through town, that I had tricked Ba Ba out of a full day of school. I could keep this up forever, and every day we’d just go to the zoo.

  When we turned the last corner, though, it was not the smell of grass, monkeys, and manure that greeted us. Instead, it was the sight of red gates, of a hundred little kids just like me, running around with their pigtails and their backpacks. Worst of all, they did not even seem upset that they’d been conned into being there. By the time Ba Ba got off his seat and kicked down the stand of his bike, I was crying again. In disbelief, I watched him lead me by the hand to the gate and place my hand in that of a woman with big square glasses. Through the betrayal, I saw him give me a kiss on each cheek and tell me that Ma Ma would come get me in a few hours. That I should be good for Lao Shi. That I should have fun. I watched as he kicked up the stand of his bike, mounted it, and rode away. And in that moment, I swore that I would not forget the joy-turned-bitterness of betrayal, that I would never believe Ba Ba again.

  * * *

  —

  But I did believe him again. The next morning, in fact, when I pleaded to skip school that day—I couldn’t go back there again—not today, not so soon, and again Ba Ba seemed to relent and again I climbed aboard the bike happily, thrilled to actually go to the zoo this time. I forgot all about my resolve from the previous morning until we turned the corner and I saw the red gates yet again.

  The next morning, I cried again, but I did not ask to stay home. And I never again believed Ba Ba—not in the same way; not when he told me we were going somewhere fun; not when he told me he’d come back from Mei Guo in a month, then another month, then the month after that; and certainly not when he told me that everything would be okay.

  * * *

  * * *

  The first day of school in Mei Guo was also full of false promises, but in the worst way, because they were of a new kind. For weeks, when we had walked past the neighborhood school, gated with a barbed-wire fence, Ma Ma and Ba Ba had told me that it was the school I would be starting at in September, and each time, Ba Ba reminded me that on that day in September, I was to tell everyone that I had been born in Mei Guo, that I had always lived here. Each time he said it, I wondered why it mattered, and how anyone could believe me.

  We only ever saw brown children funnel into the graffitied building. I wondered why Ba Ba wanted me there, given the rules that he had prescribed me for our new life, the ones that I had memorized without question: None of the other races were our friends. The white people had the most money, but the others were dangerous, too. To all of them, we were weak, easy targets who wouldn’t fight back.

  Just remember this, Qian Qian: we are safe only with our own kind.

  On the actual day in September when Ba Ba brought me to the school, my face again stained with sadness, he seemed to see for the first time how very different we were from everyone else, how unwelcome we were, how poorly we fit in.

  Staring down the pipeline of my future as playground roadkill, Ba Ba stopped short of approaching the school and turned to me. He asked whether I wanted to start school a different day. Sure from our past that he would only lead me to an even scarier school, I nodded anyway, and followed him with bated breath as we walked away from the school, down the blocks, into the subway, onto the train, then after many, many stops, out of the station, and several blocks down. I did not resume my natural breathing until I saw that he had brought me to the door of the sweatshop. I ran upstairs, eager to find Ma Ma and get to work before Ba Ba changed his mind. I spent the rest of the day wondering why Ba Ba had told the truth this time, and whether I would be spending the rest of my days in that dark room, yanking threads loose and then cutting them.

  The next morning, I thought Ba Ba would bring me to the sweatshop again, but just as we approached the grimy street entrance, its steps lined with abandoned bottles of yellow and brown liquids, Ba Ba crossed the street and I chased along. He stopped there for a second and knelt down to my level to utter the sentence that I already knew by heart: “Gao su ta men ni zai zhe li sheng de, ni yi zhi jiu zai Mei Guo.” Tell them I was born here, that I have always lived in America. I nodded while repeating the sentence back.

  Ba Ba then climbed up the few small steps of the red building I’d admired for weeks, as much for its clean façade as for its windows, which were not only many in number but wide and papered with beautiful colors and fun drawings. It was the kind of building where, when you looked at it, you knew life abounded within. It was beautiful for the same reason that the sweatshop was not.

  Ba Ba led me into the lobby and down the halls, which matched the windows in its colorful papering—of cats, dogs, babies, and rainbows—of real and surreal drawings of childhood that I hadn’t seen since entering Mei Guo’s gray world. During that walk, my new world grew many shades brighter, and I passed by one drawing after another to both the palpitation of excitement and the chorus of fear and dread.

  Having found the room of da ren he seemed to be looking for, Ba Ba guided us in and led me to a tall and skinny man with a handsome but very rectangular face. The lines of his face were so severe and angular that he reminded me of a robot. He didn’t seem to speak Chinese, though, choosing instead to talk to me in the sharp, brusque tones that I had begun to recognize as English. I did what I could, smiling and staring back blankly, while Ba Ba exchanged the same tones with the man.

  Ba Ba then knelt down and told me to be good, guai, and to remember what he had told me time and again. He said that Ma Ma would meet me outside, on the steps, when the day was over. And then he was gone, leaving me with the tall robot, who steered me up the stairs and down another hall, full of more colors that were already losing their effect on me.

  Robot Man brought me into a large, sunny classroom—the sunniest room I’d been in since boarding the plane. The room was full of kids grouped into fours, with each of their desks pushed together into rectangular clusters. At each rectangle, two kids on one side faced two kids on the other side. Facing the front of the room on each desk was a white placard with letters on them. The cards all stood at attention facing a woman in a long dress who was writing on the chalkboard. She was Chinese and wore a big smile. She reminded me of an ah yi, an auntie, one of Ma Ma’s friends back home.

  All eyes turned to me as I entered the room with Robot Man. I felt the warmth of embarrassment take over my face and neck. Without even realizing it, I resorted to the mantra Ba Ba had bestowed upon me: “Wo zai zhe li sheng de, wo yi zhi jiu zai Mei Guo.” But each time I assured myself under my breath that I belonged there, that I was born there, I believed it that much less.

  There was a pause, too long for comfort, before anyone did anything. No one smiled at
me but Ah Yi. Relieved to have something to distract me from the mantra and the sharp pangs in my stomach it stirred up, I smiled back at her as the Robot Man shared a few incomprehensible tones with her, and then turned to me with a quick, efficient grin, before clicking out of the room.

  Ah yi, who told me her name was Tang Lao Shi, spoke Mandarin with a tongue that seemed to have been stung by a bee. None of the words sounded quite right, but with some careful deliberation—which, I realized only in hindsight, must have convinced her that I was not too bright—I pieced together what she was trying to say.

  After some whispering by Tang Lao Shi and reshuffling of my classmates, including a girl in a pink dress who was not happy to be separated from her friend in a ponytail, Tang Lao Shi sat me at the cluster of four closest to the chalkboard. I turned to examine the girl with the ponytail, who was now next to me.

  “Wo jiao Janie.” She wore a scowl as she said this. Her Mandarin was better than Tang Lao Shi’s, but it was caked with an accent I had never heard before.

  “Wo jiao Wang Qian.”

  “Wang Qian,” Tang Lao Shi assured me in Mandarin, “Janie will translate everything for you, because everyone only speaks English or Cantonese. But if you have a question, just raise your hand, okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Can you write your name on this card here for everybody?”

  I wrote the two Chinese characters that had taken me months to perfect. The second character in my name was particularly hard and I could never get it quite right without sticking my tongue slightly. As I finished it, I looked up and saw Tang Lao Shi grin, and all too conscious of my face, I retracted my tongue.

  “No, in English. Can you write it in English?”

  “I don’t know English.”

  “Pinyin?”