Useful Phrases for Immigrants

by May-lee Chai

  But he thought about his grandfather and the money they’d be making, and maybe they’d be able to hire a real lawyer for his father—he wasn’t supposed to have heard about that, but he’d overheard his grandparents talking when they thought he was asleep on the train. If they could hire a city lawyer, his father would be all right. They just needed more money.

  Xiao Yu would show these men then. He’d expose their corrupt restaurant to the police. With their rotten food and their dirty tricks. He’d show them a country boy wasn’t so stupid after all.

  But for now he picked up four of the buckets of guts, two in each hand, and carried them to the back door. He wasn’t afraid to work. He’d make his family proud.

  The night air was cool against Xiao Yu’s flushed cheeks. When they’d first arrived in Zhengzhou, he’d found the air gritty, strange, with a smell so different from the village air that he had pretended in his head that he was a taikonaut, the first Chinese on the moon, and he was walking in a heavy white suit with a fishbowl helmet over his head. The air he was forced to breathe, recycled and coming from tanks on his back, smelled like Zhengzhou’s air. Like air that had already been breathed in and exhaled by nine million people. But after four hours in the smoky kitchen squatting over the buckets of fish guts, he found the night air no longer smelled so bad. It wasn’t country air, but it wasn’t kitchen air either.

  He put the buckets down for a second and allowed his weary lungs to breathe deeply before he set off for the dumpsters. He closed his eyes, listening to the distant sounds of traffic, horns honking, voices of invisible people arguing and laughing, a bus rumbling by on the street beyond the alleyway. Then it was time to get back to work.

  Xiao Yu was gingerly pouring the first bucket’s bloody contents into the dumpster in the dark alley behind the restaurant when a ping! like the shot from an air rifle ricocheted off the dumpster’s metal side. He turned around immediately. There was a group of boys on bicycles, fancy bikes, the kind he’d seen on TV, the kind you could do tricks with: wide tires, low handlebars, bright colors. City bikes.

  “Hey, Little Rabbit, what’s up?”

  Xiao Yu eyed the four boys arrayed between him and the door of the restaurant. They were older, high school students, he guessed. And there were four of them.

  He didn’t want to speak, afraid his accent would give him away.

  “What’s the matter? You a mute?”

  The tallest boy approached. The others circled closer. Xiao Yu put the bucket down and wiped his slick hands on the sides of his pants, even though they were his best pants and he wasn’t supposed to get them dirty. He’d been very careful in the kitchen actually, leaning far over the buckets so the guts wouldn’t splatter. Finally, one of the cooks had given him an apron and he’d spread it carefully over his pants, purchased by his father from the city just for this trip so that he’d blend in with the other city kids. He’d been proud. Proud to have new clothes, even if they’d been purchased to make it easier to hide, so police wouldn’t spot them on the streets, the way they imagined, and send them back to the village. They hadn’t realized how little anyone in the city would care about their appearance. “You look like a young man now,” his grandfather had said proudly, seeing Xiao Yu in his new clothes. “No one will know you haven’t grown up your whole life in a city.” All these thoughts circled through Xiao Yu’s mind as he eyed the boys.

  “What’re you doing here?” A boy with a round face and flat nose pointed his chin at Xiao Yu. He had extremely small eyes, making his face seem more pig-like than a normal human’s. The tall boy stood back now. Xiao Yu figured he was the leader. The other two boys were thinner, acne dotting their cheeks. As they approached, Xiao Yu could see they chewed their lips. They were cowards. They would be the ones he should attack first if it came to that. It was going to come to that. He felt the hair on his neck rise. He could feel the sweat pouring from his armpits.

  “This is our alley. What are you doing here, Little Rabbit?”

  “I work for the restaurant. The boss told me to—”

  The boys charged. They were faster than he thought. The two skinny ones grabbed him from behind, twisting his arms up into the air behind his back; the pig-eyed boy punched him in the stomach.

  Xiao Yu thought he might throw up. The alley turned completely black.

  Now the boys were kicking him. He couldn’t even call out. The nausea was overwhelming. He wretched. He hadn’t eaten all night, there was nothing to throw up, but he wretched again.

  The tall boy came over and he felt hands going through the pockets of his pants. “No money. This tu baozi is as poor as he looks.” He felt the boy’s spit land on his face.

  Then the boys were kicking him again, and he curled into a ball. “Hey, hey, watch this! Watch me!” It was Pig Eyes’s voice.

  Suddenly Xiao Yu felt wet slimy entrails raining down upon his head.

  Laughter.

  The blood made him want to wretch again. But something about the cold fish guts revived him. His vision was returning.

  The city boys were bent over laughing. They were turning away, going to their bicycles.

  Xiao Yu felt along the ground searching for a rock. He had good aim. He could make a stone skip thirteen times atop a fish pond. He wouldn’t miss, even now. But he could find no rocks.

  The boys were retreating.

  Then Xiao Yu’s fingers felt the beer bottle. It was broken, empty, rolled beneath the dumpster. He gripped it tightly.

  He staggered to his feet, and with the adrenaline and anger just enough to make him dangerous, he found he could run. He ran toward the city boys and lobbed the bottle as hard as he could at the back of the tall boy’s head. It struck, shattering against the boy’s skull.

  The tall boy dropped his bicycle and clutched his head with both hands.

  “That mother fuck!” The pig-eyed boy turned toward Xiao Yu.

  “Beat his balls off!” the tall boy gasped. Blood, black in the dim light, gushed from between his fingers.

  “Fuck your mother, Rabbit Boy!” The skinny boys rushed him.

  Xiao Yu retreated to the dumpster, and one of the boys slipped on the spilled fish guts. Xiao Yu managed to punch the other skinny boy in the face, but then Pig Eyes grabbed him tightly, wrapped his arms around his chest, squeezing so that Xiao Yu couldn’t breathe. He thought his back would break.

  He shouted now. He howled.

  “I’ll fuck your mother and your grandmother!” Pig Eyes slammed Xiao Yu against the dumpster.

  Xiao Yu’s head struck the metal with a loud thunk.

  “Cut his face.” The tall boy approached, his left hand still holding the back of his head. In his right hand he held a piece of broken glass. “Hold him still and I’ll cut the fucking eyes out of this bumpkin’s head.”

  Xiao Yu felt the boys’ hands around his arms and legs, around his neck, as he tried to squirm free, but Pig Eyes was big. He leaned his weight into Xiao Yu, setting a knee on his chest.

  Then a triangle of light flooded from the open kitchen door.

  “Hey, you little bastards, get the hell away from here!”

  One of the cooks had come out to see what was taking Xiao Yu so long. He was carrying a cleaver. The light behind him, he appeared in silhouette, as black as the sky.

  “My father will put you in jail. Do you know who I am?” the tall boy shouted back.

  “You’re going to be tonight’s main course if you don’t get your junior-high ass off the Boss’s property! Do you know who owns this restaurant?”

  “My father will have this restaurant closed down! My father will have all of you thrown back to the countryside where you belong! My father—”

  “Your father’s going to bury his son in a paper bag.”

  The cook turned back and shouted something into the restaurant. A burly man with a bald head and a large tattoo on the side of his neck, spiraling up the side of his cheek, appeared.

  “You have no idea who you’re talking t
o. You’re just workers.” The tall boy tried to laugh, but even to Xiao Yu’s ringing ears, his voice sounded less confident.

  The burly man didn’t stop to talk, he approached the boys rapidly. They backed away from Xiao Yu, standing away from the tall boy, too. Xiao Yu watched the world from the asphalt, through his one eye that wasn’t swollen shut yet.

  The burly man went right up to the tall boy and pulled out something shiny. Xiao Yu thought it might be a knife. He pointed it at the boy’s face.

  “You wouldn’t dare. My father will—”

  The man pointed the shiny object at the brick wall beside the restaurant and fired his gun. It was louder than any gun Xiao Yu had ever heard. In the countryside, when men hunted with their air rifles and ancient weapons, the sound of gunfire was absorbed by the huge open sky, not like the sky here, which was small and distant, trapped between buildings. Lights turned on from the windows at the tops of several buildings. But more lights went out.

  The man pointed the gun at the tall boy’s face and pulled the trigger. Even Xiao Yu could hear the click. Unmistakable. But there was no bullet. The man cocked the gun once more.

  The man said, “Do you think I have another bullet or not, little shit?”

  The boys took off running. They ran to their bikes, jumped on them, and rode off into the night.

  The burly man re-entered the restaurant. Now two of the cooks rushed to his side. Xiao Yu recognized them from the smell of the garlic and cigarette smoke on their skin. His vision wasn’t so good anymore. The world was a blur of light and shadow and more shadow.

  “Look what those little hoodlums did to the fish boy,” he heard one say.

  “He’s fresh from the countryside, this one. Has no idea how the city operates.”

  “Hard worker though.”

  “All right, help me pick him up.”

  Xiao Yu felt the men grab him under his arms and drag him toward the light coming from the open kitchen door. He recognized the smell of smoke billowing into the night air.

  The two men stopped to inspect him. “He doesn’t look that bad. He’s just beat up a bit. Still got all his parts.”

  “Hey, you’re lucky,” one of the men shouted into his ear.

  “My shoes. They took my shoes.”

  “What? What was that?”

  “Don’t try to talk, kid. Not tonight. Give it a few days.”

  “My good shoes,” Xiao Yu tried again, but the men couldn’t understand him.

  That night he didn’t have to gut any more fish. The Boss came in briefly; he could tell from the man’s voice and the way the kitchen grew quiet when he entered. Someone gave Xiao Yu a glass of hot water and some pills to take. Then one of the cooks helped him to wash in the kitchen staff’s toilet. It was a filthy room, the toilet was stopped up, and the whole room smelled of urine. Xiao Yu barely moved as the young cook washed Xiao Yu’s face, splashing water from the sink on him, over and over. The water was cold. It hurt and it didn’t hurt. Everything hurt and nothing hurt. His body was throbbing, beating along with his heart. He was floating. He was watching this shadow self covered in blood and fish guts slumped against the wall in his underwear, this boy being doused with water from the rusty pipes.

  Xiao Yu thought of how clean his grandmother had kept their indoor toilet back home. She would never let any room in their house become this filthy. They lived like civilized people. Xiao Yu remembered his father supervising as the men had put in the pipes, then the sit-down toilet, even the shower and the water heater so they could have both hot and cold water inside their home. Their house was clean. He would never walk into anyone’s home with his shoes on. Here, people wore their shoes indoors all the time. In the dormitory, he’d seen men sleeping in their shoes even.

  Xiao Yu had never imagined that city people would be so unclean.

  “HURRY UP, kid. There’s blood everywhere. Don’t just sit on your ass all night.”

  Xiao Yu jumped up from his stool beside the bucket over which he gutted the fish and grabbed the mop from the storeroom beside the smelly, bubbling, overpacked fish tanks. Seven months in the city and the filth no longer fazed him at work or in the streets or in the dormitory.

  Xiao Yu grabbed the metal bucket, filled it with water from the concrete sink there, and mopped up the entrails spilling onto the kitchen floor. Chicken guts, duck guts, goose guts, fish guts, snake guts, even lizard guts. (Lizard was the week’s special. Xiao Yu had never imagined the prices city people would pay to eat food a farmer would eat only in times of great famine. The cooks laughed about it and then shrugged.)

  Life in the restaurant had taken on a kind of sameness: filth and shouting, the same jokes, the same insults. The Boss barked orders at the cooks, the busboys, even a couple of the waitresses in their shiny, too-tight qipaos. The Boss’s cigarette butt dangled perilously over a dish of ma po doufu he inspected, until, satisfied with his power, he pulled his pants up a bit—they tended to slip down beneath his bulging gut, like a pregnant woman’s, Xiao Yu thought—and rushed back out into the dining room to banter obsequiously with the drunken customers.

  “Ta ma de,” one of the cooks swore, tossing a heavy iron wok full of shrimp. The flames leaped up, following the oily wok, licking its round bottom. Nonchalantly, the cook tossed in a dash of spiced oil, steam emerging in a cloud, and set the wok back down over the possessive fire. The room soon filled with the smell of hot Sichuan peppers.

  “Whad’ya do that for?” Another cook coughed and spat on the floor. “Hey, kid, open the back door. We’ll all suffocate in here. That rabbit’s daughter is trying to kill us.” He coughed some more.

  “Ha! This is how you make Sichuan shrimp. You people can’t handle a little spice.”

  Xiao Yu set the mop in the concrete sink then carried the bucket of bloody water in one hand, the bucket of miscellaneous entrails in the other. He headed toward the back door, stopping only once to set the heavy buckets down for a moment, wipe his hands on his cotton pants, and slip a knife from the counter into his pocket, a pack of cigarettes up his right sleeve.

  He left the door propped open with a stone, just wide enough to let in fresh air—and so that he could hear the cooks arguing—but not so wide that they could see him make his way through the alley to the dumpster behind the restaurant.

  Four boys were waiting for him.

  “What took you so long? It’s cold out here.”

  “I could have taken a shit if I’d known you were gonna be so late tonight.”

  “What’s stopping you now? Wanna shit, go shit,” Xiao Yu shot back. Then he pulled out the knife and the pack of cigarettes.

  “That’s nothing,” one of the older boys sneered. “Tiny knife like that.”

  “Oh yeah?” Xiao Yu scratched the tip across the metal of the dumpster. It left an impressive scar.

  “Chef’s knife. Nothing sharper.”

  “Shit! How’d you get that?” one of the boys gasped.

  “Never mind. What have you got?”

  One of the boys pulled out a crumpled pack of Panda brand cigarettes and a whistle. The other boys including Xiao Yu groaned. “That’s nothing. Send that home to your grandma for Tomb Sweeping Day. She can leave it on the graves she sweeps.”

  “What about you?”

  The others brought out knives, a rusted cleaver, a set of tools—screwdrivers with different size heads and a few hammers, and a bottle of clear white rice wine.

  “That’s as small as your penis!” one of the boys sneered.

  “What are you looking at his penis for?”

  The boys laughed. The angry boy threatened to kick the mouthy one. They got over it.

  “Hurry up. I can’t stay out here forever.”

  “I’ll trade you my knife for the bai jiu.” Xiao Yu nodded at the wine.

  “No way. That’s genuine Maotai. Know how much that costs?”

  “Let’s drink it,” someone suggested.

  “Don’t be stupid. I could sell this for money.�
��

  “My knife and the cigarettes. They’re foreign. American brand. Smoother than Chinese. I’ve smoked them.”

  “They wouldn’t give you one.”

  “Sure did.”

  “Okay.” The boy handed the expensive, tiny bottle of liquor to Xiao Yu. He put it into his pants pocket. Then thinking better, tucked it into the hidden pocket his grandmother had sewn into the interior of his t-shirt, just in case there was some emergency and a hidden pocket might come in handy. At the time, Xiao Yu had had no idea what she was thinking. Now he appreciated her guile.

  Before anyone could object or try to negotiate a better trade, Xiao Yu dumped his buckets into the dumpster and ran back toward the kitchen, leaving the other boys, all restaurant workers from the neighborhood, to bargain over the remaining loot.

  THE NEXT morning, Xiao Yu woke early as usual. His grandfather was snoring, exhausted from his night job. He slept like the dead, unmoving, his body stretched out straight and stiff across his bunkbed, dressed in his clothes. He’d been too tired to remove them after he got back to the dormitory. As usual. If not for the potent snorts and hoots that emerged from his nose, his grandfather could truly have been mistaken for dead, Xiao Yu thought. It was a good thing the other men sleeping here were just as exhausted or they might have complained. But in the dormitory they were all migrants, none of them with a legal work permit; no one complained about noise.

  Xiao Yu zipped his jacket and grabbed his shoes from under the bed, then ran out of the dormitory quietly. He didn’t stop running even as he slipped his feet into his sneakers, sprinting down the hallway that led to the toilets. The light was dim from the tiny windows. Not yet dawn but soon. The night-shift workers had come to bed at four. The day-shift workers would begin rising at five. He had the hallway to himself, the air reverberating around him with snores.

  The window opposite the toilets didn’t close properly. The men kept jacking it open, to mitigate the smell. It was the only window in the entire dormitory that wasn’t sealed and locked. Xiao Yu hiked it up easily, wincing at its squeak, but no one came from the factory or the toilet or the dormitory. He squeezed through the opening and dropped to the ground some six, seven feet below. The window was unsteady. It would squeak its way down soon enough, as Xiao Yu had discovered. Now he ran, as fast he could, but quiet-quiet, too, so as not to wake the guard dogs in the cages on the sides of the courtyard where the morning shift workers were required to gather for morning exercises or pep talks or simply to stand while being shouted at by the bosses through loudspeakers. Sometimes if a worker tried to leave his shift early, they’d stick him in the dog cages or make him kneel on the concrete in the sun as punishment, the dogs barking behind him. The bosses threatened to release the dogs if the man didn’t obey. The men always obeyed. Xiao Yu kept scraps from the restaurant in his pockets. If the dogs woke, he threw them the meat through the bars of their iron cages. They knew him by now. They wouldn’t bark long. The dogs were like men. They only worked because they were hungry.