by Jean Kwok
When Aunt Paula returned to the house that first morning in America, she suggested that Ma and I join her at the kitchen table.
“So, Kimberly,” Aunt Paula said, tapping her fingers on the vinyl tablecloth. She smelled of perfume and had a mole on her upper lip. “I’ve heard about what a bright child you are.” Ma smiled and nodded; I’d always been at the head of my class in Hong Kong. “You will be such a great help to your mother here,” Aunt Paula went on. “And I’m sure Nelson can learn so much from your example.”
“Nelson is a smart boy too,” Ma said.
“Yes, yes, he is doing quite well in school, and his teacher told me he would make a wonderful lawyer someday, he’s so good at arguing. But now he will really have a reason to work hard, won’t he? To keep up with his brilliant cousin?”
“You are putting the tall hat of flattery on her head, older sister! It will not be easy for her here. Ah-Kim hardly speaks any English at all.”
“Yes, that is a problem. Nelson’s Chinese needs help as well—those American-born kids! But little sister, you should call her by her American name now: Kimberly. It’s very important to have a name that is as American as possible. Otherwise, they might think you were fresh off the boat!” Aunt Paula laughed.
“You’re always thinking of us,” Ma said politely. “We want to start helping you too, as soon as we can. Should I start Nelson’s Chinese lessons soon?”
Aunt Paula hesitated. “Well, that’s what I wanted to talk about. It’s not actually necessary any longer.”
Ma raised her eyebrows. “I thought you wanted Nelson to learn better Chinese? What about taking care of little Godfrey and picking Nelson up from school? You said their babysitter was so expensive, and careless too. Will you be staying home to take care of them yourself?” Ma was bumbling in her confusion. I wished she’d just let Aunt Paula speak.
“No, no.” Aunt Paula scratched the side of her neck, something I’d seen her doing before. “I wish I could. I’m so busy now with all my responsibilities. The factory, all of Mr. N.’s buildings. I have a lot of head pains.” Aunt Paula had already let us know that she was very important, managing the clothing factory and a number of buildings for a distant relative of Uncle Bob’s, a businessman in Taiwan she called “Mr. N.”
Ma nodded. “You must take care of your health.” Her tone was searching. I too wondered where this was leading.
Aunt Paula spread her hands wide. “Everybody wants more money, everything has to make a profit. Every single building, every shipment . . .” She looked at Ma, and I could not make out her expression. “I imagined that bringing you here would help with the children. But then you had a few problems.”
Ma had been diagnosed with tuberculosis about a year earlier, after all of the paperwork to bring us here had already been finalized. She’d had to choke down huge pills for months. I remembered her lying in bed in Hong Kong, flushed with fever, but at least the antibiotics had put an end to the coughing and handkerchiefs tinged with blood. The date for our journey to America had been postponed twice before she got clearance from the doctors and the immigration department.
“I’m cured now,” Ma said.
“Of course. I am so glad you are well again, little sister. We must be certain that you do not relapse. Taking care of two active boys like Nelson and Godfrey, that will be too much for you. Boys are not like girls.”
“I am sure I can manage,” Ma said. She gave me an affectionate look. “Ah-Kim was also a monkey.”
“I’m sure. But we wouldn’t want the boys to catch anything either. Their health has always been delicate.”
I was trying hard to truly understand Chinese now, like Ma was teaching me. In the awkward silence that followed, I understood this was not about illness. For whatever reason, Aunt Paula was not comfortable with Ma caring for her children.
“We are grateful you brought us over anyway,” Ma finally said, breaking the tension. “But we cannot be a burden to you. I must work.”
Aunt Paula’s posture relaxed, as if she’d stepped into a new role. “You are my family!” She laughed. “Did you not think I could provide for you?” She stood up, walked over to me and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “I’ve gone to great lengths and gotten you a job at the clothing factory. I even fired the old worker to make space for you. You see? Your older sister will take care of you. The job is picking up a dead chicken, you’ll see.” Aunt Paula was saying that she’d gotten Ma a sweet deal, like a free chicken dinner.
Ma swallowed, taking it in. “I will try my hardest, big sister, but nothing ever comes out straight when I sew. I’ll practice.”
Aunt Paula was still smiling. “I remember!” Her eyes flicked across my homemade shirt with its uneven red trimming. “I always laughed at those little dresses you tried to make. You could practice ten thousand years and never be fast enough. That’s why I’ve given you a job hanging dresses—doing the finishing work. You don’t need any skills for that, just to work hard.”
Ma’s face was pale and strained, but she said, “Thank you, older sister.”
After that, Ma seemed lost in her own thoughts and she didn’t play her violin at all, not even once. A few times Aunt Paula took her out without me to show Ma the factory and subway system. When Ma and I were alone, we mostly watched television in color, which was exciting even if we couldn’t follow it. Once, though, Ma wrapped her arms around me and held me tight throughout an episode of I Love Lucy, as if she was the one seeking comfort from me, and I wished harder than ever that Pa were here to help.
Pa had died of a stroke when I was three, and now we had left him behind in Hong Kong. I didn’t remember him at all but I missed him just the same. He’d been the principal of the elementary school where Ma taught music. Even though she had been supposed to marry an American Chinese like Aunt Paula had, and even though Pa had been sixteen years older than Ma, they had fallen in love and gotten married.
Pa, I thought hard, Pa. There was so much I wanted here in America and so much I was afraid of, I had no other words left. I willed his spirit to travel from Hong Kong, where he lay, to cross the ocean to join us here.
Ma and I spent several days cleaning that apartment in Brooklyn. We sealed the windows in the kitchen with garbage bags so that we had a bit more protection from the elements, even though this meant that the kitchen was always dark. When the wind gusted, the bags inflated and struggled against the industrial tape that held them in place. According to feng shui principles, the door to the bathroom cast a ray of unclean energy into the kitchen. We moved the stove a few inches, as far away from the bathroom’s pathway as possible.
The second day into our cleaning we needed more supplies and roach spray, and Ma decided to make the trip to the convenience store a bit of a celebration, for all the work we had accomplished. From the affectionate way she ruffled my hair, I could tell she wanted to do something extra nice for me. We would buy some ice cream, she announced, a rare treat.
Inside, the store was tiny and crowded, and we stood on line with supplies until we got to the front, where there was a dingy glass display behind the counter.
“What does it say?” Ma asked me, nodding at one of the cartons. I could make out a picture of strawberries and the words “Made with real fruit” and another word, beginning with a “yo,” that I didn’t know.
The man behind the counter said in English, “I ask got all day. You gonna buy something or not?” His tone was aggressive enough that Ma understood what he meant without translation.
“Sorry, sir,” Ma said in English. “Very sorry.” That was about the limit of her English, so then she glanced at me.
“That,” I said, pointing to the strawberry cartons. “Two.”
“About time,” he said. When he rang up the price, it was three times more than it said on the carton. I saw Ma glance at the price tag, but she averted her gaze quickly. I didn’t know if I should speak up or how you complained about prices in English, so I kept silent as well. Ma
paid without looking at the man or me, and we left. The ice cream tasted terrible: thin and sour, and it wasn’t until we got to the bottom that we found the fruit, jellified and in one lump.
On the way home from the store, I didn’t see any other Chinese people on the street, only blacks and a very few whites. It was quite busy, with some mothers and working people, but mostly groups of young men who swaggered as they walked. I overheard one of them calling a young woman on the street a “box.” The girl didn’t seem so boxlike to me. Ma kept her eyes averted and pulled me closer. Garbage was strewn everywhere: broken glass by doorways, old newspapers floating down the sidewalk, carried by the wind. The painted English writing was illegible and looked like swirls of pure anger and frenzy. It covered almost everything, even the cars parked on the street. There were a few large industrial buildings on the next block.
We saw an older black man sitting on a lawn chair in front of the used-furniture store beside our building. His face was turned up to the sun and his eyes were closed. His hair was a silver poof around his head. I gazed at him, thinking that no Chinese person I knew from home would deliberately try to make themselves tanner in the sun, especially if they were already as dark as this man was.
Suddenly, he leaped up in front of us and sprang into a one-legged martial arts pose with his arms outstretched. “Hi-yah!” he yelled.
Ma and I both screamed.
He burst into laughter, then started speaking English. “I got cha moves, don’t I? I’m sorry forscaring you ladies. I just love kung fu. My name is Al.”
Ma, who hadn’t understood a word he’d said, grabbed my jacket and said to me in Chinese, “This is a crazy person. Don’t speak to him, we’ll just tiptoe away.”
“Hey, that’s Chinese, right? You have anthn you can teach me?” he asked.
I had recovered enough to nod.
“So, there’s this very fat guy who comes into my store. What can I call him—he’s a real whale?”
“Whale,” I said in Cantonese. Now Ma looked at me like I had gone insane.
“Kung yu,” he repeated, with the tones all wrong.
“Whale,” I said again.
“King yu,” he said. He was really trying. Still gibberish but it was closer.
“That is better,” I said in English.
Ma actually giggled. I think she had never heard a non-Chinese person trying to speak our language before. “May your business be good,” she said in Chinese.
“Ho sang yee,” he repeated. “What does that mean?”
I told him in English, “It is to wish your store much money.”
His face broke out in the biggest, whitest smile I had ever seen. “Now I need that. Thank you.”
“You welcome,” Ma said in English.
Aside from Mr. Al’s store, many of the storefronts we could see were empty. We lived across the street from a huge lot filled with trash and rubble. There was a leaning apartment building sunken into the back of the lot, as if someone had forgotten to demolish it. I had seen black children clambering in the rubble, searching out bits and pieces of old toys and bottles to play with. I knew Ma would never let me join them.
On our side of the street, a few shops were open: a store with hair combs and incense in the window, a hardware store.
Even with the spray, the roaches were impossible to exterminate. We sprayed all the cracks and corners with roach spray, scattered mothballs through all our clothes and in a thick ring around our mattress. Still, the brown heads with wiggling antennae appeared out of every crack. As soon as we left an area or became too quiet, they approached. We were the only source of food in the entire building.
It was impossible to get used to them. I’d seen them in Hong Kong, of course, but not in our apartment. We’d had a nice simple place. Like most people in Hong Kong then, we didn’t have luxuries like a refrigerator, but Ma had kept our leftovers in a steel-mesh cage underneath the table and cooked every meal with fresh meat and vegetables just bought at the street market. I missed our neat little living room with its red couch and piano, on which Ma used to give lessons to kids after school. The piano had been a gift from Pa when they got married. We’d had to sell it when we came here.
Now I was learning to do everything noisily, thumping around in hopes of keeping them away. Ma often hurried to the rescue, clutching a bit of toilet paper to kill the roaches near me, but I screamed when I looked down at the sweater I was wearing and found a big one clinging to my chest. I don’t like to think about what happened when we slept.
I know that that was when the mice and rats came. Our first night I’d been aware of something running over me in my sleep and quickly developed the habit of sleeping burrowed deep in the covers. I wasn’t as afraid of rodents as I was of roaches, because mice are at least warm-blooded. I understood they were small living things. Ma was terrified of them. In Hong Kong, she’d refused to have a cat because she was afraid that they would bring her offerings of their prey. It didn’t matter that a cat actually reduced the number of live rodents. None was allowed in our house. After that night I told Ma I should sleep on the side of the mattress away from the wall because I needed to pee sometimes. I wanted to protect her from having to sleep closer to where the mice and rats were likely to be active. These were the small graces we bestowed upon each other then. They were all we had to give.
We set out a handful of mousetraps and quickly caught a few. Ma shrank back when she saw the limp bodies, and I wished desperately that Pa were alive so I wouldn’t have to do this. I knew I should have removed the dead mice and reused the mousetraps, but I couldn’t handle touching the dull flesh, and Ma made no complaint when I used a pair of chopsticks to pick up the traps, an act I immediately recognized as extremely unhygienic. I threw the traps, mice and chopsticks away, and after that, we put out no more mousetraps. That was Ma and me: two squeamish Buddhists in the apartment from hell.
We put the Tong Sing, the Chinese Almanac, at the head of the mattress. There are many phu in these books, words of power written by ancient masters that can pin a white bone demon under a mountain or repel wild fox spirits. In Brooklyn, we hoped they would keep any thieves away. I slept badly in that apartment and was jolted out of sleep by cars rumbling over potholes in the street. Ma whispered, “It’s all right.” Then she tweaked my ears to bring my sleeping soul back to my body and brushed my forehead three times with her left hand to ward off evil spirits.
Finally, my hands no longer came away covered with dust when I touched the walls. When we knew the apartment was as clean as we could get it, we set up five altars in the kitchen: to the earth god, the ancestors, the heavens, the kitchen god and Kuan Yin. Kuan Yin is the goddess of compassion who cares for all of us. We lit incense and poured tea and rice wine before the altars. We prayed to the local earth god of the building and apartment to grant us permission to live there in peace, to the ancestors and heavens to keep away troubles and evil people, to the kitchen god to keep us from starving and to Kuan Yin to bring us our hearts’ desires.
The next day, I would start school. Ma would begin her job at the factory. That evening, she sat down with me on the mattress.
“Ah-Kim, I have been thinking about something since visiting the factory, and I realize I have no choice,” Ma said.
“What is it?”
“After you get out of school, I want you to come join me at the factory. I don’t want you here in this apartment by yourself, waiting for me every afternoon and evening. And I’m worried I won’t be able to do the finishing at the factory alone. The last woman who had my job had two sons who came to work with her. I have to ask you to come to the factory with me after school and help me there.”
“Of course, Ma. I always help you.” I put my hand on hers and smiled. In Hong Kong, I’d always dried the dishes and folded our laundry.
To my surprise, Ma’s face flushed, as if she were about to cry. “I know,” she said. “But this is something different. I’ve been to the factory.” She t
ook me in her arms and squeezed so hard that I gasped, but by the time she pulled away, she had recovered control. She spoke softly, as if to herself. “The road we could follow in Hong Kong was a dead one. The only future I could see for us, for you, was here, where you could become whatever you wanted. Even though this isn’t what we’d imagined back home, we will be all right.”
“Mother and cub.”
Ma smiled. She started tucking the thin cotton blanket we’d brought from Hong Kong around me. Then she laid both of our jackets and her sweater over the blanket to keep me warm.
“Ma? Are we going to stay in this apartment?”
“I’ll talk to Aunt Paula tomorrow.” Ma got up and brought her violin case over to the mattress. She stood in the middle of that darkened living room with the cracked walls behind her, lifted her violin to her chin and began to play a Chinese lullaby.
I sighed. It seemed so long since I had heard Ma play, even though we’d been in America for only a week and a half. In Hong Kong, I’d heard her teaching music at school or giving private violin or piano lessons in our apartment, but she was usually too tired to play in the evenings when I went to bed. Now Ma was here and her music was just for me.
TWO
In that third week of November, I started school. Ma and I had a hard time finding it because it was many blocks away, beyond the area we had explored so far. This new neighborhood was cleaner than the vacant lots and empty storefronts that I had seen closer to our apartment. Aunt Paula had explained with pride that my official address would be different from the one where I actually lived. I should use this other address whenever anyone asked me.
“Why?” I’d asked.
“This is another of Mr. N.’s buildings. It’s one you wouldn’t be able to afford to live in, but using this address will allow you to go to a better school. Don’t you want that?”
