Three Keys

by Kelly Yang

  It was Hank’s idea to call ourselves the “Californians Against José Garcia Deportation.” He said the letters would sound more powerful if they came from a group. And what a group we were. Hank even ordered us T-shirts, with artwork designed by Lupe!

  Meanwhile, immigrants continued swinging by the Calivista, attracted to our sign. To each customer who came in, we gave a copy of the flyer of Lupe’s mom. The petition Lupe and I created was getting longer and longer, thanks in part to all the help from our Kids for Kids members. We made an extra petition just for the motel customers. To our great delight, our customers all signed their names. My dad happily offered discounts for the night, but to his surprise, some of them didn’t want discounts. They insisted on paying full price for the rooms!

  The immigrants came from all over, from Mexico and the Dominican Republic to as far away as the Philippines and Kenya! Hank was tickled pink to see immigrants who looked like him.

  “My people!” he warmly welcomed them.

  On Sunday, the cash register was filled again. “Hey, look!” I said, showing my parents and Hank the stacks of cash. We called up all the paper investors, including Mr. Cooper. He was busy on a conference call but said he’d look at the numbers and call us back later.

  A few of the kids from Kids for Kids came to join the Operation Save José effort, including Jason, who stopped by after his cooking class. When Lupe saw Jason, she moved her body across the front desk to try to cover up the flyers of her mom.

  “What’s he doing here?” she whispered to me.

  “I heard that,” Jason said, picking up an envelope. He reached for a letter to stuff into the envelope but accidentally reached for the wrong pile and picked up a flyer.

  “No!” Lupe said, yanking it away.

  I looked at the two of them, puzzled.

  “We have to talk,” Lupe said, and took me by the arm, pulling me to our room and closing the door behind her. “I don’t want Jason over here, looking at that stuff about my mom. He and Mrs. Yao threw me and my mom out of their house when I was eight!”

  I listened in stunned silence as Lupe told me what had happened three years before. Her mother used to clean Mr. Yao’s house. While she cleaned, Jason and Lupe would hang out in his room. They were good friends then.

  “One day, Mrs. Yao came home and found the two of us rolling around on the floor. We were just arm wrestling, but she grabbed me and pulled me into her study. She said she was disgusted with me,” Lupe said. “And she fired me and my mom.”

  I put my hands to my mouth.

  “I thought Jason would stand up for me, but he didn’t do anything! He didn’t even come out of his room!” Lupe sat down on the bed and pointed at the door. “He says he wants to help, but where was he then?”

  I gazed at the door. I could feel her anger melting a hole in the wood and knew exactly how she felt. It was how I felt when Mrs. Yao pulled Jason out of the motel room that day. “I’m so sorry, Lupe.”

  She looked up from my cherry blossom bedspread. “Please, can you just ask him to leave?” she said.

  I nodded. “Of course.” I left her in the room and asked, as gently as I could, that Jason go.

  He looked back at me, eyes welling with hurt. “What’d I do?”

  I shook my head, not knowing quite how to tell him. “You just have to go,” I said again.

  Jason stomped out of the front office. As he threw open the door, he shouted, “You’ll be sorry, Mia Tang! I have feelings too!”

  I put my head down on the front desk, feeling a little bad for kicking Jason out. But as I peeked over at my best friend, standing by the door of my bedroom, I hoped she knew I would always have her back.

  “Folks, if you’re joining us now, you’re looking at live footage from City Hall, where some seventy to a hundred thousand demonstrators have gathered to protest Governor Pete Wilson and Proposition 187,” the newscaster reported.

  It was the last Sunday of October, the day of the big march, and Lupe and I were taking a break from stuffing envelopes. We leaned in toward the TV as the reporter pulled one of the marchers aside, a white man, and asked him why he was protesting.

  The guy, in sunglasses and a fedora hat, said to the camera, “I’m here because this proposition is not against illegals, it’s against children!”

  “Lupe,” I said, an idea popping into my head as I spoke, “we should go to the march! Think how many signatures we could get on our petition!”

  “Are you sure—” she started to say, but I’d already jumped up.

  “Hank!” I called.

  Hank came into the manager’s quarters and looked at the TV, his eyes transfixed. A guy from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was shouting at the podium, “California will not stand on a platform of bigotry, racism, and scapegoating!”

  “Wow! We should go see this!” Hank said.

  “That’s what I was thinking!” I said, reaching for the petition. It was ten pages long now, with all the signatures from the customers and from the kids in our club, some of whom had taken it to church for people to sign. “We could take our petition!”

  Lupe still looked uneasy. “But what if there are cops there?” she asked.

  I thought about what Jason said about how there might be all sorts of crazy racist people there. But it didn’t look that way on TV.

  Hank reassured Lupe, “We don’t have to protest. And we can leave anytime. But it’d be great for you to see it with your own eyes.”

  “Why?” Lupe asked.

  “Because it’s not right, what’s happening. And all those people marching—” Hank pointed at the TV. “They think it’s not right. And I want you to see that. I want you to feel that. Right here.” He put his hand to his chest.

  “Please, Lupe,” I said. “Can we go?”

  Her feet remained glued to the frayed brown carpet, though. “I wish I could ask my mom.…”

  Hank walked over to the front desk and grabbed the blue Yankees hat that we used all last year to signal to immigrants when Mr. Yao wasn’t around and they could come in.

  “You can wear a hat,” he said, putting it on Lupe’s head. “How’s that? No one will recognize you out there.”

  Lupe reached up and felt the power of the blue hat with both hands, a hat that had protected so many immigrants before her. Finally, she nodded.

  “YES!” Hank and I shouted, high-fiving each other.

  We ran out the back and jumped into Hank’s car. Hank put his foot to the gas while I rolled down the window and told my mom where we were going. As Hank sped down the 5 Freeway, Lupe pulled her blue hat down tightly on her head.

  “Here we go!” Hank shouted.

  We could hear the march even before we saw it. There was a pounding on the ground, almost like a roar, as great masses of people surged down the streets of downtown Los Angeles. Overhead, a helicopter circled. The traffic forced Hank’s car to a stop and Lupe pointed out the window at the marchers. “Look!” she cried.

  The protestors were crossing a highway bridge. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, men and women, white, Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American, mothers and fathers carrying children on their necks and backs. Many were waving the American flag and the California flag. A few were even waving the Mexican flag. Lupe put her knuckles in her mouth, overwhelmed with emotion. The marchers carried signs that said Stop Prop 187!; Fences are for pigs, not people!; Immigrants are People Too!; and No such thing as an illegal alien! I pointed to a sign that read We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!

  Hank handed us little packets of tissues. I hadn’t even realized I was crying. Hot tears glistened on Lupe’s face too. It was just so overwhelming to see.

  As we dried our eyes, Hank found parking. We got out and walked over to City Hall, where there was a stage set up with a mic.

  “We are workers, not criminals!” a Latina woman shouted into the mic.

  “Sí, asi se dice!” Lupe shouted, cheering and handing out the p
etition to all those around her.

  As the signatures filled the page, an Asian man took the stage. “This proposition is an insult to all immigrants!” he said.

  I clapped until my hands hurt. I wished my dad could have been there to see it.

  “If it passes, we are all suspect!” a Black man from Jamaica added. The crowd erupted in applause, and I felt his words, right in my heart. Hank was right, you had to be there.

  Lupe and I worked quickly, gathering signatures as people spoke onstage. When a thirty-seven-year-old factory worker took the mic and said he was an undocumented immigrant, Lupe looked up.

  A little boy joined him onstage. “This is my little boy!” the man told the audience. I looked over at Lupe. Her chin was trembling. “He’s six years old. He didn’t do anything wrong! You want to take away his education? You want to take him out of the first grade?”

  “NO!” the crowd shouted.

  With that, the crowd started chanting, “No 187! No Re-Pete!” With each thunderous “No,” I looked out at the sea of faces, every single one of them carrying hopes and dreams and fears, just like Lupe’s family and mine. As the crowd cheered wildly, Lupe took off the blue Yankees hat and threw it high in the air.

  At school, everyone was talking about the big march. Mrs. Welch went and got a copy of the newspaper and laid it out on a big table. We all leaned over and looked.

  I peered down, expecting to see headlines that read, “Tens of Thousands Take to the Streets to Renounce Hatred and Racism.” Instead, the headlines said, “Sea of Brown Faces Marching Through Los Angeles Antagonizes Voters.”

  “What’s antagonize mean?” I asked Mrs. Welch.

  “It means you do something that makes people not like you,” she said, frowning at the article.

  “Really? But we were there—” I said, looking over at Lupe.

  “We were there too!” Kareña said excitedly.

  “That’s amazing that you guys all went!” Mrs. Welch said. “What was it like? Can you describe it for us?”

  “It was …” I paused for the right adjective.

  “Electrifying,” Lupe answered.

  At that afternoon’s club meeting, we were all still talking about the march, except Jason. He was sulking.

  He finally came up to me after the meeting. “You hurt my feelings, Mia Tang,” he said as we walked back to class. “I don’t understand why you kicked me out the other day!”

  “It’s complicated, Jason,” I tried to explain, then stopped when I saw the wall by the bathroom. In small, dry-erase marker were the words Go back to your own school! This one is ours!

  I stared at This one is ours, feeling the anger pulsate on my lips.

  “C’mon, let’s go,” Jason said, trying to pull me away.

  “No,” I said. I went up to the wall and tried to rub the words out with my fingers, but they wouldn’t come off. Still, I rubbed and rubbed. Jason finally went and got me some water, and we worked together, rubbing until the white plaster of the wall shone through.

  Who wrote that on the wall?

  The thought looped in my head all afternoon. I didn’t tell Lupe about it. She’d been through enough lately.

  Hank was inside the manager’s quarters watching the news when we got back. Reports of hate crimes were on the rise after the march, the newscaster said. A woman in Pasadena tried to cash her paycheck, but the bank teller refused to serve her unless she showed her green card. A man’s house burned down in a fire, and when he called up the insurance company, the representative told him to “go back to his country.” All over the state of California, immigrants were called horrible names and turned away from stores, banks, restaurants, and even theme parks.

  The phone in the front office rang.

  “Calivista Motel, how can I help you?” I answered.

  “Hi, this is Karen from Senator Feinstein’s office. Is this the Garcia residence?”

  Did she just say Senator?

  “Just a minute!” I said, gesturing wildly to get Lupe’s attention. “It’s Senator Feinstein’s office!” I whispered loudly.

  Lupe ran over and picked up the phone while Hank and I went into my room to listen in on the extension.

  “Are you Mr. Garcia’s daughter?” the woman asked.

  “Yes!” Lupe said.

  “We’ve received your letter about your dad. Senator Feinstein would like to say that she will be throwing her support against the deportation of your father, José Garcia.”

  “I’m sorry, can you repeat that? Did you say against, or for?” Lupe asked.

  “Against,” the woman repeated. “We’ll try our best to help get your dad out. And Lupe?”

  “Yes?” Lupe’s voice was a tiny squeak.

  “Senator Feinstein is so sorry you’re going through this. We all are.”

  “Thank you.”

  The woman hung up the phone, and Hank and I whooped for joy as we ran out to congratulate Lupe.

  “AHHHHHH!!!” she screamed. She took my hand and we jumped up and down.

  “Senator FEINSTEIN—that’s big! We gotta tell the media!” Hank yelled, plunging into publicist mode. As Hank started making a list of places we could contact, Lupe and I called over the rest of the weeklies and my parents.

  “Definitely the Latino media,” my dad suggested.

  “That’s a great idea!” Billy Bob said. “And the local TV channels—Channel 7 and KNBC?”

  “Don’t forget radio,” Fred said.

  Hank grabbed a pen and a notepad and wrote all this down. “I’ll get right on it,” he said.

  I drummed my fingers, quietly mulling. I had an idea that was going to be a long shot, but it was worth a try.

  Lupe turned to Hank. “You really think they’ll want to report on this? With everything that’s going on?” she asked, glancing hesitantly over at the TV.

  “I think so,” Hank said. “You saw how many people were at that march. There are folks out there who care.”

  “Folks like us,” I added. I hopped off the stool and placed my hand on top of Lupe’s. Hank leaned over and placed his dark brown hand on top of mine, and my parents added their hands on top of Hank’s. And one by one, the weeklies added their hands too, until it was one big mountain of hands.

  I looked around at all the love and hope and compassion in the room.

  The tide was turning, I could feel it.

  That night, I worked on my secret idea—a letter to the editor.

  Dear Editor,

  As an immigrant child, I am deeply saddened by all the Prop 187 and anti-immigrant sentiments in the news. They are not reflective of the community of people I know and love. America is a country built by immigrants. People from all over the world come here to settle, like my parents, who gave up their careers as an engineer and a scientist so that I might have a brighter future, and my best friend’s dad, José Garcia, who is one of the kindest, most giving people I know and who has taught me many things, including the value of hard work.

  José Garcia came over from Mexico eight years ago. For years, he toiled in the Central Valley heat, picking grapes off the prickly vines until his fingers bled. Some days, the sulfur and chemicals were so bad, he coughed himself to sleep. Later, he became a pizza deliveryman, risking his life to deliver pizzas! Then after that, he taught himself how to fix the cable and became a highly skilled cable repairman. You won’t believe the channels he can add to your TV!

  He has a wife and a daughter, who is 11 years old, like me. His daughter’s math is so good, she’s going to become one of those crazy math people like my mom, who has pieces of math in her pockets.

  But her dad may not be there to see it because as we speak, he is in San Diego County Jail facing deportation proceedings. I urge you, kind editors and readers, to write to your congressmen and your senators to STOP the deportation of José Garcia. And to vote NO on Prop 187. It is inhumane to take education away from children. We have done nothing wrong. We are the future, and we have hopes and dreams
, just like you.

  Vote NO to hate, NO to deporting José Garcia, NO on Proposition 187, and NO to Governor Wilson.

  Sincerely,

  Mia Tang

  Age 11

  I reread my letter a thousand times, proofreading it according to all the grammar rules Mrs. Welch taught me. She was right, learning the rules made me sure, not just guessing. As I was finishing up the letter, Lupe came bouncing into my room.

  “Guess what?” she asked. “I just got off the phone with a reporter for a Latino newspaper. She wants to interview me!”

  “She’s not the only one,” Hank said, walking in behind her, his eyes shining. “I just got off the phone with Channel 2. They want you on camera.”

  “Channel 2? As in TV?” Lupe asked.

  “That’s GREAT!” I said.

  But Lupe took a step backward. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.…”

  “Listen to me, it’s going to be fine,” Hank reassured her. “I’ll be right there with you. It’ll be tomorrow after school.”

  But Lupe’s hands shook the way my dad’s did whenever the health department came by to inspect.

  In class the next day, Lupe sat at her desk looking a bit green and nauseous while the other kids talked about Michael Huffington, a politician running for Senate. The papers reported that he and his wife had employed an undocumented immigrant to take care of their kids—for five years.

  “Five years?” Stuart shrieked, squeezing his face with his hands like the kid in Home Alone.

  Bethany Brett was playing with her ruby necklace. “My dad says everyone needs illegal aliens to clean their house and take care of the kids.”

  Lupe muttered to Bethany, “They can do a whole lot more than that.”

  “What did you say?” Bethany asked.

  “I said, they can do a lot more than that,” Lupe repeated, louder this time.

  I looked up in surprise. All right, Lupe!

  “And it’s not illegal aliens,” Lupe added. “It’s undocumented immigrants.”

  Bethany Brett rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”