Beautiful Country Read online

  “Okay, Qian Qian, you can go back to Ms. Tang’s class. But they are going to treat you like any other student.”

  “Good!”

  “Are you sure? You’re going to have to take tests like everyone else, and follow along somehow. Can you do that?”

  I didn’t know that I could for sure. But as Sister Bear had felt at the end of her first day of school, I had the sense that I would be able to figure it out as I went. That had been enough for her, so that was enough for me.

  “Yes, Ba Ba.” I barely took the time to reach for a hug before running up the stairway and toward Ms. Tang’s classroom.

  * * *

  * * *

  There was a spelling test during my first week back in Ms. Tang’s class. By spelling out words that were on the signs hung around the room—A for Apple, D for Dog—writing gibberish, and copying not so covertly from a handwritten list of words I had in my pocket (Ms. Tang caught me twice, though she said nothing), I scored a proud 33 percent. So began my path to graduating from college with an English degree fifteen years later.

  By Halloween, when Ms. Tang gave each of us a tiny pumpkin and a knife with the smallest and dullest of blades, I was able to generally muddle through class without incurring Janie’s wrath. In fact, when Ms. Tang told us to empty out the pumpkin’s belly innards before carving three triangles—two facing down at the top for eyes, one facing up at the middle for a mouth—I understood instantly and went to work. And by November, I was even able to tell when Janie took credit for my answers, which I occasionally offered by raising my hand and then whispering to her. So proud was I to have figured out what was going on that I didn’t even bother to rat on her. I knew that soon I wouldn’t need her at all. Soon, I would make Ma Ma and Ba Ba proud, and it would be just as if I had always been here, as if I had been born here, a native English speaker at last.

  Chapter 7

  DUMPLINGS

  America was a living lesson in hunger. Our kitchen contained more cockroaches than food. I learned quickly and out of necessity that I could get away with tiny, nimble thefts from our roommates’ shelves, but because they were small enough to go unnoticed, they fed me only in spirit.

  I also learned to be vindictive. In payback for the jeers and faces, I developed a habit of dipping the other family’s toothbrushes into the toilet whenever I was in the bathroom. But over time, this didn’t seem like enough. So one day, while pondering another act of minimal thievery, I studied the contents of the fridge and noticed a container of vanilla ice cream. The paper carton was cheaply made: instead of a lid, the carton simply closed shut with four extended flaps. I peeled each flap open to find the ice cream, untouched, white, and marked only by brown specks and the flaps’ indentations. I knew that a missing spoonful would be too risky. So instead, I contented myself with running my tongue, flat, across the entire surface. I tasted only a few small bits of sugar and cream. It left me wanting more, but I knew I could not get away with it. If discovered by the roommate—the one who put on the squinting, bucktoothed face every time I saw him—he would just scream “chink” louder in Ma Ma’s face next time.

  This left me only one choice. On his family’s shelf in the pantry, I recovered four white-and-blue packets of salt, next to two brazen cockroaches who looked back at me before sauntering away. I opened the packets all at once, ripping them across the top, turning their open mouths upside down over the ice cream, and distributing them with a smooth motion across the surface. Someone watching me might have thought that I had done it before, that I was a professional ice cream salter.

  I put the lid back and returned it to the freezer, its label facing in as it had been when I found it. I closed the door and took a step away before something dawned on me. I stepped back and removed the carton from the freezer again. This time, I placed it upside down, with its top lid on the island. I grabbed two more white-and-blue packets from the same shelf before unfolding the bottom of the paper carton, gently ripping apart the flaps congealed on top of each other. I then salted the bottom surface before placing the flaps back into place and orienting the container as I had found it in its frozen home.

  * * *

  * * *

  We didn’t eat much in the kitchen, but I spent a lot of time there anyway. At night, long after all of the tenants had eaten their last meals and had returned to their one-room apartments, I snuck back. I liked to cower under the light switch and listen to the tap-tap-taps against the wood-like walls across the entire kitchen. Counting to an arbitrary number in silence—sometimes ten, sometimes two—I stayed crouched but reached up and flicked the light switch as quickly as I could. I then watched the walls as they receded in color from dark brown to tan as the cockroaches that papered them in darkness retreated to their lairs. As soon as the walls regained their full tan color, I flicked the switch back down again, waiting and listening as a single tap emerged, then another, and then another, a new chorus crescendoing. And then, as with mother hen, the game would start anew.

  * * *

  * * *

  In daylight, time passed in a molasses of hunger. That I might be far hungrier in the Beautiful Country than I had ever been in my short, lucky life in Zhong Guo occurred to me just a few days after we got off that plane. When we walked past bakeries and stores now, there was no pausing, no pushing our noses up against the window, no lingering before we decided to go in because we deserved to treat ourselves. It was almost as if Ma Ma no longer saw my hunger.

  Hunger was a constant, reliable friend in Mei Guo. She came second only to loneliness. Hunger slept only when I did, and sometimes not even then. In China, all I needed to do was say that she was there, and Ma Ma would find food for me. In Mei Guo, I quickly learned that I could not voice her presence. It only hurt Ma Ma. Her face reflected the pangs in my stomach, and the few times when I ventured to ask for food, Ma Ma did something she had never done before: she told me that hunger was good, that it was fine to feel shaky and distracted, and that I should see if I could hold on until the cold sweat came, because that would mean that I was really growing and really getting stronger. If that was true, I must have grown extraordinarily strong that first year in Mei Guo, because I felt the cold sweat come on every time I walked past a grocery store or restaurant, and every time I saw someone my age slurping a melting ice-cream cone.

  * * *

  * * *

  In time, I found ways to help Ma Ma without her knowing. As my English grew, I learned that there were some things that Ma Ma didn’t know how to do, but that I did. Over time, she came to see that, too. As I stopped asking her questions, she started asking more of me.

  “Qian Qian,” she would say in a quiet, biding tone, and I would know a Big Question was coming.

  Then she would launch into questions, like should she ask Ba Ba for more cash for groceries? No, I’d say, we don’t want to deal with his temper tonight. We had twenty dollars every week, and that would have to be enough.

  Should we go back to Zhong Guo? Yes, of course, always. China was home and America smelled like pee.

  As these questions came and she listened to my answers, not always in her actions but always at least in the moment, I learned that life for adults was much harder than I had previously realized.

  One night, on our walk home from the sweatshop after a full day of school and a fuller day of snipping threads, I turned to Ma Ma and told her that I no longer needed breakfast.

  “Wei shen me?”

  Because like lunch, breakfast was free at school.

  “Ah! Wei shen me bu zao shuo? Ke yi sheng bu shao.” Why didn’t I tell her sooner? We stood to save a lot of money.

  Actually, because we lived a long commute away and I never got enough sleep after our sweatshop evenings, I hadn’t mentioned it earlier because I never got to school early enough to eat the mythical free breakfasts I had only ever heard about.

  I didn�
��t say this, though. Instead, I apologized to Ma Ma for being greedy, and said that she would no longer need to feed me two meals at home.

  From then on, her face glowed a little bit brighter, and whenever she phoned home to Lao Lao, telling her of the beautiful home we did not live in, the overflowing, steaming bowls we only dreamed about, she also told her about how wonderful and generous Mei Guo was. Here, they fed kids for free twice a day!

  * * *

  * * *

  My reality was far darker than the vision in Lao Lao’s and Ma Ma’s minds. In the long hours ticking toward noon, I spent my time in the classroom going through my memory’s catalog of delicious meals I’d had in Zhong Guo: roasted duck covered with oily, crispy skin; stir-fried tofu with onions and peppers; stewed beef dripping with soy sauce. Over the course of the morning, my hunger fed on itself and cast shadows over everything, its heart beating with the ticking of the classroom clock, its cavernous mouth swallowing the classroom whole.

  By twenty minutes past noon, the chalk on the board was powdered sugar, my number-two pencils were breadsticks, and my teacher’s coiled hair was a taro bun. And the instant lunchtime arrived, all the energy in my body drained to my legs, which carried me to the school’s auditorium-cafeteria, where I lined up with my back stiff and straight against the wall, holding my place in line among the other poor, unfed, unwashed kids. It would be several minutes more before the rich kids trickled in slothily, towing multicolored lunch bags full of homemade food. And though we poor kids were the first to arrive, we were the last to eat. As the richer, cleaner, less hungry kids opened up their containers of yummy meats, sandwiches, and cheese sticks, ate half of their bounty and discarded the rest, we stood on the sidelines, stomachs grumbling and mouths drooling, leaning on the walls. We were the rich’s Atlases, charged with holding up their lunchroom ceiling as they ate.

  The poor kids, we never looked one another in the eyes. We exchanged a few words whenever one cut another in line—no one wanted to be later to receive the congealed brown sludge that the lunch ladies, with their gray hair trapped under nets, slopped onto our disposable trays. But beyond that, acknowledging one another would bring into too much focus the fact that we each were just like the hungry, stinky kid standing next to us, with an itchy, flaky scalp and an itchier dry throat.

  Usually, by the time the line started moving, most of the rich kids were already finished eating and out at recess. The beginning of our lunch was the end of theirs. By then, I was often light-headed and dizzy, and I trudged through the line listlessly until I plopped down at one of the table-benches to swallow my entire lunch whole. It took just a few minutes for my stomach to bounce from the ache of emptiness to the ache of eating too much, too quickly. It took much longer before I registered with any satisfaction the new, temporary fullness. But by then, I was already downing the free carton of milk, eager to fill my stomach with something, anything.

  Out in the playground, rarely was I able to run or play. My stomach and bowels spent the afternoons in a civil war, wrestling with each other as the pockets of air that formed in the morning did a painful dance with the clumps of food and milk. I spent most afternoons with one hand on careful guard in front of my tummy, in case it betrayed gassy gurgles to my less tortured classmates. I trained my mind on controlling the sounds of my belly, and on the rice that awaited after school, at the sweatshop.

  * * *

  * * *

  As bad as normal days were, half days were worse. Most often, I forgot they were happening and instead spent the morning luxuriating in the happy delusion that soon I would have lunch. The realization always came in a jolt. My shoes filled with lead as my classmates skipped to the lobby. I cheered and celebrated along with everyone else, if only to mask the rumbles from my stomach. It seemed like everyone else always had fun plans and big lunches for those abbreviated days, though I’m sure some were, like me, quietly dreading the early end of the school day. But for the most part, my classmates talked so much of their great plans that I was often relieved by the time I got to the door. From there, they went bounding down the street toward their embracing homes and piping-hot meals, leaving me alone to walk toward the Confucius statue on the corner of Division and Bowery.

  Confucius was more noble on some days than others. Some days, Confucius had large clumps of pigeon poop on his shoulders, and sometimes he even had a pigeon standing proudly atop his head. The statue threw my life into relief. It was a shitty day even for Confucius. Who was I to complain?

  Bread crumbs often lay scattered before the Confucius statue, a feast for the birds of Chinatown. The sight of the bread crumbs, browned with dirt, was especially painful on half days, when drool pooled in my mouth and my stomach gnawed on itself with particular ferocity.

  On half days, I tried to walk past the statue with rare focus, determined to avoid the crumbs. On most of those afternoons, I was torn between the free rice that awaited me in that dank, dark sweatshop room and the hungry freedom that abounded outside. I usually lasted only an hour before succumbing to the pull of the cavernous food.

  I had a typical route that I took before reporting to the sweatshop. I turned onto Catherine Street and then East Broadway, making my way past the shops. I loved browsing in my favorite store, one that sold stationery, touching a Hello Kitty pen here and a Keroppi sticker there, dreaming of the day when I might get to take one home. But my stomach was easier to ignore when my arms and legs were also complaining, so I continued down East Broadway, hoping to chance upon free samples or newly abandoned food.

  Chinatown bakeries rarely helped because they did not have the bowls of free bread that I had been lucky to find a few times in white stores. Instead, Chinatown bakeries just taunted my senses, causing me to drool more. The fish smells from the markets were a handy antidote to this, and I was grateful for the nauseating scents by the time I got to the Manhattan Bridge overpass. I was luckiest when I came upon a restaurant just as a busboy dumped pails of brown-gray water off the edge of the sidewalk. Staring at that muddy river helped stave off the angry hunger roiling my stomach.

  Sometimes, though, it backfired: sometimes the sludge and water reminded me only of black sesame and chocolate milk. Sometimes even the fish smell—which the white tourists unfailingly wrinkled their large noses at—lulled me back to a warmer, safer place in Zhong Guo, where it was once possible to eat too much and be too full.

  I typically pushed on until Pike Street, which found me standing in front of Hong Kong Supermarket. On lucky days, there were free samples, and I savored each chew of those morsels. But on occasion the samples only made the hunger angrier, and it was all I could do to run to the open mouth of the sweatshop’s rice cooker, succumbing to the cold sweat oozing out of my pores.

  On one specific half day, there had been no samples at Hong Kong Supermarket, and I had pushed onward along East Broadway. I soon came upon Seward Park, by the F station. There, a mirage greeted me: a truck of people handing containers to a line of old and not-so-old Chinese people. My nose knew the containers’ contents long before my eyes did. The scent of fried rice was so vivid that I had to pinch myself with shaky fingers.

  I joined the queue without thought. Only while waiting, while the tremors in my arms and legs came on full display, did I start thinking. As the processional moved, from the twenty-some people before me to fifteen, then ten, I began squinting my eyes toward the window of the truck, attempting to make out who was handing out the food.

  They were uniformed, I saw.

  Were they asking for IDs?

  I didn’t think so, but I couldn’t tell for sure.

  Should I risk it?

  What would I give them if they did ask?

  I needed certainty, so I squinted some more. I squinted until my eyes became slits and I became a caricature of my race. I squinted with all of the remaining force of my being. But I still couldn’t be sure enough.

/>   I would never be sure enough.

  Still, I stayed in line, my body fighting my brain in a living deadlock.

  Then there were seven people in front of me and I still couldn’t be sure that I wouldn’t be caught.

  Always walk the other way when you see the police, Qian Qian. Ba Ba’s voice guided me wherever I went. If anyone asks you for documents, say you don’t know, say that your ba ba has them. Say that you were born here, that you’ve always lived in America.

  This was not China, and I could no longer get by on the color of my skin and my gap-toothed smile. I was no longer normal: I was never to forget that.

  Six people.

  My entire body joined my hands in their shaking, but it had nothing to do with hunger.

  Five.

  I can’t get caught, I thought. I can’t get caught, was all I could think. Illegal. Deported. I don’t know. Ba Ba has them. I was born here, I’ve always lived in America. I can’t get caught.

  Four people.

  How would Ma Ma and Ba Ba find me if I got caught? No, I couldn’t get caught.

  Three people.

  I was so close that I could see the uniformed people’s white hats, their shirts and skin in matching color. They were smiling big, wide, open smiles. They were holding only containers. I looked into one of the women’s eyes and she looked back with a smile that hugged me from head to toe.

  I could trust her. It wasn’t a trap. No, I couldn’t. Yes, it was.

  At this point I was dizzy from arguing with myself, spent from fighting every urge.

  I didn’t know at what point the stalemate broke. I didn’t even register it. But it happened. My body gave in and, as it has all my life, my mind triumphed. Before my legs could protest, I broke into a full-on sprint, speeding down the street toward the safety of the sweatshop.