Beautiful Country Read online

  It was pleasant for a while. I stopped being hungry. I no longer smelled food. I couldn’t hear my stomach rumble. My mind and body knew nothing but to run. By the time I realized what had happened, I was many blocks down the wrong direction, by Grand Street, but I didn’t stop. Tears clouded my already-eroded vision, but I didn’t dare stop. I kept going until salt was all I tasted. I kept going until the only shaking I felt came from my aching feet as they pounded against the concrete to the rhythm of my palpitating heart. Still, I kept going. Forever would I keep going. Keep going, Qian Qian. Keep going until the hunger is gone.

  On that run, only one thing kept pace with me, and it was not hunger. It was fear. Fear was all I tasted; fear was all I contained; fear was all I was.

  * * *

  * * *

  Not everything was bad. Hardship is dimly lit, and its darkness shielded us. It was all we knew in America so it was simply something we accepted and took for granted, as much as the air flowing through our nostrils and the sunlight shining onto our heads. And then there were things that we no longer took for granted—that we could never again take for granted—simply because of how they now contrasted with our every day.

  Once in a while, we got to enjoy a truly delicious meal. Whether it was delicious only because my hunger had grown to a certain peak, or whether it was objectively, inherently delicious, I will never know. But to this day, stored in my senses are the filling, delectable feasts that Ma Ma somehow conjured out of our weekly twenty dollars. Ma Ma made use out of every sliver of food. I don’t know if it was her culinary alchemy, my hunger, the rosy distance of time, or most probably, a combination of all three, but there are still moments when I find myself craving the taste of her salted watermelon rinds and her vinegared carrot peels.

  And on an even rarer occasion—a handful of days, really—Ma Ma returned from the store with a box of Entenmann’s baked goods. I liked the small dusted donuts the best. I stuffed them in my mouth so fast that they made me cough and coat the air with a blizzard of powdered sugar.

  And then there were Sundays. Sunday was the only day that stayed somewhat similar in Mei Guo and Zhong Guo. For, in both places, Sunday was for dumplings. Every Sunday, Ma Ma and I scraped together the ingredients in our communal kitchen, cobbling together leftover meat, Chinese lettuce, and garlic from meals long past. Occasionally, one of our roommates popped his head in.

  “Sunday dumplings again?”

  We never took the bait. Where in Zhong Guo we welcomed guests and gave away extras, we now had no food to spare.

  On the Sundays when Ba Ba was also home, he made the wrappers, rolled vigorously from all-purpose flour. He was more forceful than Ma Ma was with the rolling pin we got from the 99-cent store, the one that always seemed seconds away from dissolving into wooden dust. We dreamed of one day buying the premade wrappers on display at Hong Kong Supermarket, but Ma Ma said they were too expensive, and she was sure they didn’t taste all that great anyway.

  Dumplings were a four-hour event on the only day Ma Ma stayed home from the sweatshop. Some days, depending on how tired she was from the week, we sat in meditative silence, our breaths punctuated by the rocking of the rolling pin and the clacking of chopsticks against the rusting, metallic bowl that held the dumpling filling.

  Other days, when the week had not drained all light from her face, Ma Ma reminded me how fun Sundays had been at Lao Lao’s.

  “Remember, Qian Qian? Da Jiu Jiu would make the wrappers, and it would be a race to see if we could finish making the previous dumpling before his new wrapper hit the board!”

  At this, I heard the laughter that rollicked as the competition got under way.

  “Remember, Qian Qian, when you had a competition with Lao Ye to see who could eat the most dumplings and you ate twenty all at once and couldn’t even move?”

  For a second, I was no longer hungry. I was full. Stuffed, even. I could fit no more into a single crevice of my stomach. I was so full I almost burped, and for a moment I believed that the rumblings from my belly were actually sounds of digestion.

  “And we would sit together at the kitchen table, and we would dip the dumplings in that sweet-sour vinegar—remember that vinegar? And the meal would last hours; remember that, Qian Qian?”

  I did not remember how long the meals took, but I tasted the sweetness of the vinegar, its darkness marking the corners of my lips. I remembered the taste of the chives and pork as they mushed and blended under my teeth and slid down my throat.

  But most of all, I felt the warmth of Lao Lao’s dining table, the love of family wrapping me in its embrace, crossing borders and living on through time.

  Chapter 8

  SUSHI

  Thanks to the one-room employment agency, Ma Ma had many jobs: some all at once, others swiftly, one after another. Ma Ma cried more now, regularly, and depending on the job, she cried more some days than others.

  “I quit,” she announced with triumph, surprising me after school one day on the steps of PS 124. She was supposed to be at her shift bussing tables at a Cantonese restaurant on East Broadway.

  “I spat in a dish—so what?” she huffed as we walked down Division Street. “They can serve one customer leftovers from another’s plate, but I can’t spit in some bastard’s food. Did they ask me why I did it? They don’t give one shit about me.”

  By then, Ma Ma had taken to telling me absolutely everything, and, as on the playground in China, I slipped easily, naturally, into the role of the mother hen. In fact, I was very happy to be, as she called me, her “xiao yi sheng,” her little doctor, her on-call therapist.

  “It’s okay, Ma Ma,” I soothed. “There are other jobs you can do.”

  “But what do you think, Qian Qian—should I try another restaurant?”

  She went on without giving me a chance to respond. And it didn’t matter what I had to say, because I knew there was much more she needed to get out first.

  “Everyone says a restaurant gig is the job to get, once you make your way up to waitress and get those tips! Especially the lao wai, they give so much. But I don’t know if I can make it that long, Qian Qian. You should see how they treat me.

  “I was a professor. I was published. And now it all means nothing.”

  I intuited that there was more yet and that if I kept listening, she would be able to spew it all out and then I could lull her into peace.

  “Mandarin is the language of the Chinese intellectuals. Of the Beijingers. But no, here, all these Cantonese assume that if you speak Mandarin you’re a farmer from Fuzhou.”

  At this, I thought back to the jab I had felt in my gut when Janie called Mandarin my “loser language.” But still I said nothing.

  “Me, a farmer! Really. Our world has really turned upside down, hasn’t it, Qian Qian?”

  I nodded in support, projecting the contentment I wished for Ma Ma. I steered us toward the other side of the street, to the door of the sweatshop, which she had quit in a fury earlier that week.

  She refused to follow. “I told them I’d die before stepping foot back in that place again, and I meant it. Let’s go see what shit they have for us today at the agency.”

  Ma Ma had a flair for melodrama.

  As it turned out, the job on offer that day was at a sushi-processing plant. It would win the competitive title of Ma Ma’s worst job during those dark years, but we did not know it then. That day, we only saw the number after the dollar sign, wooed by the—relatively, it was always relative—lucrative pay and our dreams of a better life. And really, Ma Ma said, how bad could it be?

  I would not know how bad it was until a few days later. The next morning, Ma Ma went off to the address the fat man had scribbled on the slip of paper. It was somewhere by the Holland Tunnel, she told me, in an undeveloped part of Manhattan. It was too far for me to walk on my own after school, so Ma Ma told me it was better t
o go to Ba Ba after school, and then go home with him.

  It seemed indulgent to me, lazy even, to not work after class but instead to just focus on my homework. But I was selfish and lazy, so I agreed.

  * * *

  * * *

  Ba Ba had, meanwhile, quit his laundromat job. A friend of his from Zhong Guo, Lao Bai, had started working as an interpreter and clerk for a white immigration lawyer with an office on East Broadway. The lao wai had only Chinese clients, and most of them spoke no English. He felt no compunction, though, about taking any client who walked in the door, legitimate immigration claim or not. Those unique ethics had made him more money than he knew what to do with, and he was looking to hire another clerk. It was good pay, Lao Bai had promised, and the lawyer was never there. The clerks were the ones who ran the office and did the legal work.

  “What kind of a lawyer is that? Ta ma de.” (Ba Ba’s favorite curse literally translated to “His mom’s.”) “Mei Guo really is almost as fucked up as Zhong Guo.” Ba Ba took another puff of his cigarette as we walked down East Broadway with Lao Bai.

  “Who cares? He hasn’t made many citizens but he’s made lots of money.” Lao Bai chuckled. “We may as well take some of it.” Even more so than the lao wai lawyer, Lao Bai had a moral flexibility unique to those determined to survive at all costs. Ba Ba told me that years ago, Lao Bai had joined the Communist Party in Zhong Guo, pledging his allegiance to it, even though he had zero faith in the party or the government, and no intention of staying in the country. Ba Ba had refused to do the same, even though the pressure grew over time as each of his friends joined. When I asked why, Ba Ba’s face darkened and he said he would never forget what they did to him. He would happily eat America’s shit before feasting on China’s fruits.

  Ba Ba joined Lao Bai one morning in the thin brown building, climbing the smoke-filled flights up to the one-room office. It was the kind of office where, to use the bathroom, you had to get a key with a long wooden bar attached to it by a paper clip, and if you were gone too long, someone banged on the rattling door. (I knew this because it was there that I strained after school, poop-shy, until a lady from down the hall slammed on the door and shouted in Mandarin, deliberately for my benefit, “That little kid is shitting again!”) In the summer, the office was cooled by one rusty floor fan, and in the winter it was heated by cigarette smoke and the hot air flowing out of too many mouths. Four desks were strewn about the room, one facing this way, another facing that way. Three were for the clerks, and one, with an ever-vacant leather chair, was for the absent lawyer.

  The third clerk was a younger woman with an impressively round and always-made-up face. Her skin was alabaster, pale like the skin on Clifford’s owner and on the white children I had already learned to envy. Everyone called her Zhu Xiao Jie, or Ms. Zhu, a homonym in Chinese for both Miss Piggy (how Ba Ba referred to her) and Ms. Pearl (how I thought of her until I learned of Ba Ba’s disdain for her strong will). To this day, I remember Ms. Zhu by her most distinctive attributes: her large eyes, round like her face; her penchant for stir-fried fish cakes, which she ate every day at her desk, filling the entire room with the smell of yummy grease; her burgundy lipstick, which she reapplied after eating; and her acerbic tongue, something I admired more than I realized at the time, and a model for my future self.

  Ms. Zhu was the most glamorous woman I met during those years, and she was the only woman who could have held her own in that room, against Lao Bai, Ba Ba, and the droves of immigrant men who sought out her desk, forming a line that sometimes led out of the room and down the hall.

  When I went to the office with Ba Ba after school, I got to sit on the steps just outside of the office, at the end of the hallway. Sometimes Ms. Zhu’s clients waited there with me. They were a smoky, creepy, amusing bunch. So even setting aside the reprieve from work, I was happy to go to the office, and eagerly anticipated finishing my homework early to relish the people watching.

  On one particular day, I sat on the steps and found myself distracted by the stories that the immigrants were telling each other and to Ms. Zhu, Lao Bai, and Ba Ba. One man had arrived almost six years ago and had never met his son. By the time he finally paid off his snakehead, his son was five and it was all he could do to send money and toys home every month, hoping they got there soundly, and that they would be some comfort to his motherless child. His wife had died from cancer. And the last lawyer had taken all his money and closed up the makeshift law office. Wasn’t there anything they could do?

  Another man had an aging mother with no one in Zhong Guo to care for her. He had paid an orphan from the deeper countryside to be her nanny, but the nanny had robbed his mom and run off with the neighbor’s son. It was his mom’s dying wish to see him again. How could he get to her? Wasn’t there anything they could do?

  I could have answered the questions before Ba Ba and Ms. Zhu did. The answer was always the same: “Oh, no, I am so sorry. That is awful. We can try, but it will be difficult and expensive.”

  The clients, almost always men, brought me candies, pastries, and leftovers from their restaurant shifts. I must have reminded them of a daughter they had in recent years seen only through photos. They, too, were a salve for not just my belly but also for the aching in my heart for Ye Ye, Jiu Jiu, and Lao Ye.

  So I was not entirely without family in Mei Guo. They simply came to me in short, sporadic moments. Over time, I fashioned a little office scrapbook, in which I hung on to these treasured moments with sketches of my adoptive family and their souvenirs—a candy wrapper glued to one page, a greasy pastry bag, crumbs and all, taped to another.

  Even the lawyer, the one time I met him, reminded me of family. He was white, and not at all Chinese, but he had fair skin with some pink peeking through, just like Lao Ye, who, when he traveled abroad for the government, was always mistaken for a lao wai and greeted with English. The lawyer was tall like Lao Ye, too, with thinning silver hair. There the similarities ended, but for a child who had left her home without a photo of her beloved grandfather, he might as well have been Lao Ye himself.

  Donning a full gray suit under a tan trench coat and carrying a peeling black leather briefcase, he strode down the hall toward me one afternoon, slowing down by the office door, then walking past it and coming up to the steps.

  “Why, you’ve got to be Chan,” his tongue stumbling over my name as all white tongues did. “You look just like a little Vincent!”

  I recognized Ba Ba’s English name, bestowed upon him by the Italian landlord he had lived with on Staten Island before Ma Ma and I arrived, but resented the comparison. I looked nothing like a boy.

  “I was hoping to run into you today, in fact!” he continued, clueless in the way that da ren tended to be, and reached into his trench coat pocket.

  “Here it is! For you.” His palm was wrinkly but white like his face, with purple and pink veins running through it. In its center was a wooden, rectangular pillbox, its corners rounded and smooth. It was the color of his coat.

  “Open it.”

  I obeyed, flicking the top up at the hinge. Greeting me from within was a wooden ladybug, painted red, with five black dots on her back—an odd number of dots was good luck; evens were bad, Ma Ma had told me once while my knees were still in the dirt of our building’s sandbox. Or was it the other way around? I could never keep it straight, and, after all, this was a lifetime ago, back in China, when I still played and Ma Ma still had time for me.

  The bug had googly eyes that moved. A skinny wooden stick poked out of her belly, making her look like she was standing in midair. Her four toothpick legs, also painted black, had a slight bend to them and were hinged but not fixed to her torso. I shook the box and the legs danced, sending me into giggles.

  “Thank you!” I looked at the lawyer in time to catch his smile as he walked toward the office door, disappearing into the room. Not wanting to miss the dance, I
returned to the googly eyes, which were now crossed toward one another.

  Ba Ba would tell me later that the lawyer was a rich man who had gone to Harvard Law School. But he had a tendency to get married and divorced, and he had some lazy children to support, which Ba Ba said was common among lao wai. Each time the lawyer got married and had a lazy child, he had that much less money for himself, so Ba Ba reminded me that I should be very grateful for the gift.

  Ba Ba’s caution was unnecessary. I treasured that ladybug. It was the first gift I ever got in America.

  * * *

  * * *

  On the first Saturday after she had gotten the new slip from the fat man, Ma Ma woke me early. Drunk with sleep, I followed her to the subway station, napping on the train and then sleepwalking out of the station, down several blocks, up and down a pedestrian bridge or two, before waking up to find us on a deserted block, the streets lined with cobblestone and buildings all in drab gray and brown. There must have been water nearby because the smell in the air reminded me of the one time I had been to the ocean and a crab had grabbed my big toe. It was only a version of that smell, though. The smell in my nose now was thicker, putrid, more viscous than what that scent had been. There was no lightness. It was heavy, as if the crab on my toe had stayed there and died.

  As it happened, this was not too far from the address Ba Ba had given to my school. But it was clear even to me that no one had lived there for a long, long time.

  Ma Ma led me up the chipped steps in front of one brown building with dark-brown liquid pooling out of one of the open side doors and all the way onto the road. When she opened the other door, I smelled what was inside before I could see any of it: it was the scent of the sea, mixed with the scent of what I somehow knew to be death. My nose saw a thousand squids as they lay dying, a hundred eels making their final squirms through a sewage pipe.