Preparation for the Next Life

by Atticus Lish

  spreading his fingers wider each time. He seemed to be conducting music. This is the time opportunity, real opportunity. You look: the Olympics will be to China. How great!

  What is the pay like?

  It is rational, he said.

  Minimum wage?

  Of course. That’s the law. I have to obey the law. You have to obey the law. Everyone has to obey the law in society.

  He asked for her working papers, knowing all along, she thought, that she didn’t have them.

  This is a very severe problem, he said. If I hire you, I have risk.

  Right? he insisted, when she remained blank.

  I have risk. Very serious. If I have risk, who is responsible? You have to be responsible. If I give you the break, you give me the break. Only fair. So the salary will be adjusted. He wrote it on the paper, circled it. This salary.

  She did the math in her head.

  One more dollar, she said.

  He smiled, no.

  I give you break, he said.

  Really. Do not be disappointed. I tell you something, the truth. This a lot of money.

  15

  HER FIRST DAY, ZOU Lei arrived in the food court early and had been waiting for half an hour before she heard the exhaust fans come on in the kitchens in the back. Then, with a snap, the lights came on. She heard a rustling plastic bag and someone banging things around and then saw a woman with a mask-like face moving around under the lights.

  Good morning, Zou Lei said. I’m here to work.

  The woman snorted and took a drink from a plastic tub of yellow liquid. Zou Lei looked around. She waited. She couldn’t see the man who had hired her. She ducked in under the counter.

  Nobody invite you, the woman said, a wonton hanging from her lip.

  I’m here to work.

  You just remember that.

  They made her wait. The register girl came in and said, Could you move? Flung her purse on a shelf under the counter. In the back, a wok was getting beaten with a shovel. They brought the fish-tofu out. Stinky tofu is mad good, the register girl said, glitter in her wolf hair. She held the skewer between her acrylic tips. They talked in slang she couldn’t follow. Everything was number nine. She would learn it meant cock or dick. You can’t stand there. Zou Lei moved again. The cook came out and slammed another tub into the steam table, purple burn marks on his arms.

  Go hang that up. You can’t work like that. They meant her jacket. The peg was under the security camera. The woman threw away her soup. I the supervisor. She had a glazed white face, slanted eyebrows painted on her forehead—a Cantonese. Where your apron at? Come on. She showed Zou Lei the fryers, the salad dressing, the congee, meat paste—she flipped the metal lids and pointed, whacked it with a ladle—custard! Don’t forget it! Yanked a crate from underneath a rack. You need a garbage bag, you get it here. Kicked it back. Fried leg, she pointed. There was meat bobbing in water. Fishball. They stepped around a bucket. The exhaust was going. The cook banged a wok over the gas fire. Sink, wok, knife, scrubber. You chop at this table, not over there.

  Come on! she said. She took Zou Lei to the storeroom with the hanging rags, the gallon cans of starch.

  Time schedule, she pointed. A clipboard with a ballpoint taped to a string. You check it every day before you go.

  What did you say?

  What?

  I don’t understand so well, Zou Lei said.

  I say already.

  Say what?

  Ask somebody else if you don’t get it.

  She was given a uniform shirt, a visor, and an orange apron. You have to pay for that.

  When she asked what? they thought she was putting up an argument.

  Because we all did. Nothing free in this life.

  They sent her with a cart to go and get the trays. The basement was roaring. She collected everybody’s trays in the food court. No, only ours! they said when she returned. Basic common sense. No one had told her. She was sweating. There was other people’s food all over her hands. It’s okay, the little one said, the one called Sunnie. Just separate them and put the other ones back.

  She made up for it—she tried. She hauled the dishware off in tubs. There was Chinese techno playing overhead. Watch out! the register girl snapped at her. Okay. She stepped around the bucket. The tub weighed almost more than she could take. Her fingers slipped—she caught it with her knee—and swung it down into the sink. They were yelling orders from the front. Sa-cha. The cook repeated sa-cha.

  You know how to wash? She nodded. She stuffed the chopsticks in a vented can. Some stuck through the vents. She shook them and rapped them in place and blasted them with the sprayer. It threw water on her orange apron. Steam came up. The cook snatched the sprayer from her and blasted the dishes. Water thudding off the metal sink. He squeezed the soap, and bubbles came out floating sideways, quivering, heavy, rainbows on them. He wheeled away. She took on the dishes with a scrubber. Fast, fast, fast! he shouted. He was slamming pots around, wiping down the stainless table, whipping back and forth with his rag. She was pulling out the plates, one, two, three, water raining off. Her arms were wet. The blast of the water thrummed on the steel sink. Everything was wet, the rubber treads on the floor were wet. She could smell the black muck being worked out of the fissures and moldings, silted in the drain trap.

  The rush was over. In front, they were standing around drinking cups of soda.

  No one said anything to her. She poured a full-sized Coca-Cola, no ice, and drank it straight down, gasping. Now that was good. The sugar flashed inside her like sunshine in the desert.

  She took meat from the steam table and made him a care package. She filled a Styrofoam shell with rice, beef, dumplings, and put it in a plastic bag and hid it on the shelf by the cornstarch and took it to him after work. She had only one plastic fork and he said, no, you keep that, and he ate it cold with his fingers, having done this all the time in the infantry. When it was her turn, she leaned down and ate in her own way like any Asian working person using the fork as a shovel. The two of them had to take turns at the trough or their heads would bump. She prodded him with an elbow and he looked at her.

  Tongkuai.

  Is that good?

  Yes. Tongkuai is warm. We are very warm here. She gestured at the purple-walled basement surrounded by the cold black night outside the window.

  The insignia on their uniforms said Ah Genuine and there were two kinds of people working there. There were the twin register girls, Angela and Kay, who had been to high school in New York and who spoke a hybrid slang, in which DG meant to masturbate. Immigrants were called fleas or fence jumpers, boat people, or saiwooks—cargo—a reference to how many of them died in trucks crossing the border. The register girls’ parents had come here legally. They would defiantly admit they couldn’t read Chinese for real. When they texted, they used a mix of Cantonese ideograms and English acronyms. They wore fishnet tights and bras to emphasize their chests.

  Sassoon, who was older, had been here fifteen years already, having arrived when Asians were still a minority on the streets, at the beginning of the current wave of immigration, around the time of the First Gulf War. Black people had made fun of her for how she spoke English. She lived around them and called them jiekwans when she spoke to other people like herself, people who understood her Cantonese, who had green cards.

  Back in Guangdong, she had unacknowledged relatives living in Wide Net and Watergrass, where they went barefoot with their faded pants rolled up to the knees, laboring with water buffalo in the wet fields, their peasant faces seamed and puckered from man-years in the sun. The fields were fertilized with human feces. She carried hepatitis, but she had family in Hong Kong as well, and she applied Beauty White to her face. Even in winter, she would shield her face from the sun with her copy of the Sing Tao. In the summer, she carried an umbrella. And she went to the beauty parlor and had her hair highlighted red and had her skin massaged with cream and had ovarian rejuvenation.

  She was si
ngle, having been married to a husband she did not like, who had gone back to China. Her brother had his own business installing windows with another man, a cousin. Once a week, she cooked them fish in brown sauce with the bones in and left it for them in the refrigerator in a blue and white bowl covered by a dish.

  She did not like talking to people who didn’t understand her, because then she would have to rely on Mandarin or English, which she did not speak well, which meant she wasn’t educated. But she didn’t resist any opportunity to be addressed by Polo, who sat alone at a table in the food court, reading his paper with his headlines facing out, the paper held in his large, healthy, well-oiled hands.

  When they got their break, Sassoon and the register girls would go and sit at Polo’s table. They helped themselves to food off the serving line, taking the same food the customers ate. Angela was picky. She said meat was disgusting. Sassoon was on a soup diet for her figure. The cook, Rambo, would sit with the boss as well, eating hot piles of rice. Rambo had a gold chain and a shaved head and doughy muscular forearms with purple burns all over them. He had a couple gold teeth and a tattoo of a dragon on his forearm. There were one or two other men in some way involved with the counter and they would either eat with Rambo or by themselves.

  These other men, who were from a selection of places in the northeast of China where the coal mines were, were paying off mortgages on properties in Queens. One of them had a background in private security for a coal mine. They spoke of going back to China, where it was now possible to make a fortune, and, in fact, they did go back and forth regularly, as did Polo, for business.

  Polo demonstrated his English with them, and Sassoon, chewing with her mouth open, her face glistening and reflective from skin-whitener, gazed at him. Rambo didn’t speak except to men. Polo spoke to various people in different languages depending on who they were. He crossed his legs and positioned himself at an angle, speaking at an angle to them, explaining. He was rational and informed, speaking just above their heads. Then he would laugh with understanding. You will learn. It takes time. Ability comes slowly.

  Or he opened the paper and read it and the entire table would be silent.

  This was the first kind of people at the restaurant and they were in charge. The second kind of people, a subordinate class, did not eat at Polo’s table. In the cacophony of the kitchen, one of them would look at the time and holler: jie bun! and a group of them would fetch their bowls. They ate in shifts. They would go out into the food court, one of them carrying a family-style pot of bean sprouts that they would share out of. They were all allotted rice from the twenty-gallon rice cooker. A member of this second, subordinate class, Zou Lei would eat when it was her turn. All of them were illegal women. They ate hunched over, heads down, at a table by the exit.

  Two Mexican men who had deeply tanned faces and arms even in wintertime would come out from the kitchen where they had been cutting vegetables and share their meal with them from time to time. They wore their old red baseball hats backwards. Or they would go sit at another table, also by the exits, and talk in very quiet Mixtecan.

  The women were older, or they simply looked older, and were small, because of poor infant nutrition. Some had big rough rural voices. What they had in common was that they did not have working papers. Most were from the south, Zou Lei being the exception.

  A woman who washed dishes in a head-rag said:

  You don’t understand me because I’m from Mineral Spring Prefecture, very country. Soil-dirt. Soil-dirt. We were dirt and we lived in the dirt and it gave us our lives. We used to have fields. Used to have food to eat without end. It was country there. Then they destroyed the fields and put buildings up everywhere. There are no fields to plant anymore. They put up factories and nothing grows. The life gets pressed down. There’s no work to do. People fish, if they can. The factories, you can’t get work there either. The jobs get given to minorities, to Dai people and Wey people in their turbans, to what-do-you-call-it’s.

  What what-do-you-call-it’s?

  Uighur people.

  What’s a Uighur?

  Out-of-towners. Backward people. Grab food with the hand, without chopsticks, eat it wa-la-wa-la. They carry knives. The government lets them have all the children they want. We can have one, they can have many. Then they give them jobs in the factories because they’ll do it for nothing. Presses down the standard for everyone.

  They wear turbans like so.

  No, they don’t, Zou Lei said.

  Yes, they do. Osama bin Laden-style, they wear turbans. I’ve seen them in Buddha Hill at the factory there, a great big foreign factory there, a big one with two big buildings, foreign bosses, big money men from Taiwan. Big wrists. They let off poison all over the field. We couldn’t live, and we ordinary people held them up with a protest. Their Uighurs had turbans this big, and three-four times a day, they had to shut down the whole thing for them so they could pray to Mecca—hooligooli-hooligooli superstition. No money got made and it ruined the whole thing, no economy.

  No, they don’t.

  And how do you know so much? Look at you, the way you look, like you’ve got something you’re not saying—doesn’t she? You know something, don’t you? I bet you’re a Uighur! Oh, you are? See, I knew it!

  What’s a Uighur?

  You tell them. Teach your new coworkers. You’re the expert.

  The imam wears a turban. The men wear a doppa. The women wear a scarf.

  Are they foreigners?

  They’re from Afghanistan over thataway, but they belong to our China. Tell them! So, where’s your scarf?

  Why do I have to wear a scarf?

  You probably don’t want people to know who you are.

  I’m half Han.

  See, you’re very tricky. Just like them. You’re half Han now. I bet you’re saying that because you’re scared all of us will discriminate you.

  But most of them couldn’t remember what she was. They did not see that she ran when others walked, that she got there early and left late, that she pretended she was in the army. What they noticed about her, what got around was that she was different: she was a northern minority, didn’t speak Cantonese. They put it down that she was a Mongolian or Russian—whatever might explain the difference in the way she looked and talked. The main thing they saw about her was that she was built differently from the Chinese girls. One day Polo reviewed the women on the line and said Zou Lei is different. She is healthy. American style! He laughed hahaha. He told the register girl she looked skinny. Why you don’t do Jack LaLanne? And the Cantonese women made foul faces.

  They gave her a box of cellophane baggies and had her fill each one with one packet of duck sauce, one packet of soy sauce, a napkin, and a plastic fork. See how fast you can do five hundred. Like this—you blow and pop the baggie open. Time to stop. You can do that later. She hauled the dishes in. They were chopping cabbage.

  I try, she said.

  No, said Rambo, You are dishes, garbage, dumplings, mop.

  She filled in for Sunnie on the line, a ladle in her hand, on the balls of her toes, looking out past the lights at the kids wearing their hats sideways, bigger than their parents, hearing them talking: He my nigga, he my homeboy. Zou Lei watched them going by—she watched them as they watched her, examined her, checked her out, and talked about her, staring at her until she looked someplace else.

  They talking about you. They say they seen you doing some exercise in the parking lot. Like was that you? No way. She’s the new employee. It was her. I gotta tell someone.

  The register girl began to text her sister.

  Like, what kind of exercise? Oral exercise?

  Gymnastic, Zou Lei said.

  The register girl let out a piercing laugh at something she was reading on her phone.

  16

  THEIR CANTONESE WAS HARD to understand, it echoed off the tile. They had their backs to her. Her back was to the sink. Get the gwat, they said—she thought they said. It was like hearing som
eone talk through a prism. The dialect came in different versions, depending on whether they were from inland or the coast. Sunnie went around the corner. They were pulling boxes out from under the metal table legs. Sassoon’s hand went inside and came out with the organs from a chicken, sliding in her fingers. Take the jewels. I cook the jewels, they said, and peeled the membrane off. Take the silk, they said. No need to waste. Take the hand of Buddha. Give me the way. A hand with fat greased over it picked up a knife. She heard something getting cut in coins and thought they called it gwat but it was carrot. What are we doing? We make the hairy crab, wealth of the entire family. Way is very dull. Sunnie came back with bowls and set them on the table. The one is here to put the fat, the jewel, tendon, lotus, umbrella, jewel, fetus chicken. They pointed with the knife at Sunnie, you don’t count arithmetic. She said, I’ll get another one. Three more one! See? She don’t count arithmetic! Sunnie said okay and left again. One times three was three. She realized they meant a bowl. The women kept handling the meat. A monthly smell. I smell you having monthly tension, they said, wearing little bits of yellow gold, small eyes. They went into the dirty boxes on the floor and took out a radish, coined it with the knife. Gills stuck to the metal surface from the mushrooms they were cutting, mud clinging to a root. The lotus, when cut, resembled the cross-section of a pig’s sinuses. Dirt is on it still. Better make it neat or you embrace the Buddha’s feet. She used the cardboard as a dustpan for sweeping underfoot. Dirt clings to it like a country girl.

  He say you mess his order up. The order come in stringy beef, chicken, pork, and oyster. Turkey separate. When order, whether the combination plate, that’s a question. You can have the combination of the congee or the rice. If meat, you ask the sauce. The oyster only has the combination with the rice. If they want the chicken with oyster, you tell Rambo so he add it in the back. When she say order, she say the order first and the combination second. If it combine with noodle, she say beef and noodle. To save the time, she say only pork. She say a hundred time a day, don’t say again, everyone go crazy. Just one word, that’s it, everybody know. Simple! Congee another one. If they want the vermicelli, if they want the tendon, don’t keep the secret. You tell in back.