by Rob Schmitz
“But we can’t speak a word! We just got here from Fujian!” said the woman.
“It doesn’t matter. They start at A-B-C. Go downstairs and register,” urged Wang.
The women thought about it for a moment. “Nah, we’re too old,” one of them said.
Wang looked at them in utter confusion, a look that seemed to say: What kind of Chinese immigrant doesn’t want to learn English?
I broke the awkward silence. “Auntie, have you found work yet?”
“No, we’ve only been here a week. We don’t know where to look,” the woman said.
Wang took out a piece of paper and a pen and wrote an address for them in English with some directions in Chinese. “Go to this agency,” he said, handing over the paper to them. “You don’t need to speak English at all, and they’re always looking for workers. The pay’s not bad, either. They take care of old people.”
The women inspected the paper, looking skeptical.
“Don’t worry,” said Wang. “The old people you’ll take care of are all Chinese. They don’t speak English, either. Some of them even speak Fujianese.”
The women thanked him and walked away.
Wang had adjusted to life in America. After six years on the assembly line, he had quit and was now collecting unemployment benefits. Each month, the government sent him a check for seven hundred dollars, around the same amount he had been making at the factory. He told me it was more than enough. Surviving the worst famine in recorded history alongside his siblings and an unemployed mother had taught him frugality. Plus, now that he wasn’t working, he could spend more time taking classes at the library to improve his English and earn his GED.
When I asked him what his goal was, he removed an envelope from his bag. “This,” he said, withdrawing a neatly folded pink sheet of paper. It was a carbon copy of a multiple-choice exam he had taken a couple of days ago. On top of the paper was the logo for the New York City Transit Authority. Under that was written “Revenue Equipment Maintenance Exam.” Forty blanks were filled with letters written in Wang’s careful penmanship.
“You want to work for the MTA?” I asked.
“It’s an exam for a mechanical engineering job. Similar to what I did back in Shanghai,” he said. “If I pass, I’ll fix subway card machines. There are usually openings for this job. Just think about how many card machines are always broken. There’s a lot of work out there. And they pay you sixty thousand dollars a year!”
This was something Wang could relate to: taking an examination in the hopes of landing a stable government job. It was familiar to anyone from China, where people competed for civil service positions the same way. Rainwater from his jacket dripped onto the pink answer sheet as he held it out for me. He carefully wiped the sheet dry and returned it to the envelope.
Wang told me he was also taking classes in Manhattan to become an office assistant, “but my English has to improve before I have any hope of finding a job,” he said.
Wang wasn’t in a rush to find work. He had spent his childhood learning about the evils of capitalist America from his school textbooks, but when he arrived in New York, he discovered its capitalists treated their poor much better than the Communists did back home. The U.S. government gave Wang’s mother two hundred dollars’ worth of food stamps each month. Its Medicare program paid for a nurse to arrive each day at their home to take care of his mother while Wang attended his free GED classes at the public library. Wang told me that between his mother’s welfare payments and his unemployment benefits, they could afford rent while putting some money away each month. The way he saw it, you had to be pretty stupid to mess up an arrangement like this. “I was also eligible for thousands of dollars’ worth of food stamps each year,” he told me, “but I said no. I thought it would look bad.”
Wang’s favorite part of the day was the range of classes he took at the library. He smiled when he told me about studying world history from an American perspective and reading Shakespeare in the Bard’s native tongue. He spoke about his prospects with the excitement of a teenager. His parents had lived long lives, Wang told me, and he had learned there would be plenty of time left to start over in his adopted country. “In America, you’re never too old to begin again,” he said.
Wang’s mother was eighty-eight years old and in the late stages of Alzheimer’s. Mother Liu was confused more or less all the time now. Wang removed his wallet from his jacket pocket and showed me a black-and-white photo of her. After reading dozens of her letters, I had formed an image of Liu in my mind’s eye, and I was surprised to discover it was nearly identical to the woman I was looking at now. She was pretty—a long, thin face graced with high cheekbones. Like Wang, she had small, kind eyes. There was an anxiety in her gaze, like someone who was lost. “This picture is from last year,” Wang told me, “around the time she escaped from home.”
Wang was making breakfast for her one morning when he noticed she had left the house. He ran up and down the street shouting her name, but he couldn’t find her. He called the police. Officers brought dogs to sniff her pillow for a scent and then they followed them through the neighborhood, but they couldn’t locate her. That night, police dispatched a helicopter with a spotlight to search the surrounding neighborhood, but still there was no sign of her.
The police finally found Mother Liu at a local hospital where she was being treated for bruises on her face. She had likely fallen down a stairway somewhere. “The police in America are very good,” Wang said, impressed. “That search must have cost a lot of money. They would never go to those lengths in China.”
Wang took one last look at the photo of his mother in his hands, and then carefully slid it back into his wallet. “After she passes away, I’ll have more freedom,” he said with a sigh.
In six years of living in the United States, Wang had never left New York City. He told me that after he got his diploma, he planned to travel across the country in search of a better place to live. “Somewhere easy to find a job where the living costs aren’t so high,” he said. “I’d prefer somewhere quiet. I don’t know. Where do you think I should live?”
I thought for a moment.
“Well, I’m from Minnesota, in the Midwest. It’s a bit cold there, but life is good. It’s quiet, it’s safe, and it’s affordable. My wife is from Texas. The land is affordable there, compared to New York. And the climate there is much better—it’s more like Shanghai.”
Wang listened to me intently, repeating the names of the states in Chinese. “Ming Ni Su Da. De Ke Sa Si,” he said slowly. “I’d like to live in different cities for short periods of time while I travel around. In China, you can’t do that comfortably because of the hukou system, but the United States doesn’t have hukou. You’re free to move around wherever you want. It’s more convenient here.”
I nodded. I thought about Wang, free from the responsibility of caring for his mother, driving an affordable yet dependable car west out of New York City into the sunset. “It sounds like you’re pursuing the American dream,” I said.
Wang thought for a moment. “I don’t see it that way,” he said. “Life in Shanghai wasn’t bad, either. Before I left, we lived in a nice neighborhood and the food was cheap and good. A lot of people ask me why I came to the U.S. when China has so much opportunity now. I tell them the main reason is the water and the air are so much better in America. Plus, I had waited thirteen years for a visa, and my chance finally came, so I took it. But I’ve learned that, for me at least, there isn’t much of a difference between living in America or in Shanghai.”
China had come a long way since the years of his youth. In a city like Shanghai, jobs were plentiful, schools were good, the streets were relatively safe, and people’s lives had improved tremendously from a few decades ago. There was no reason for him to think life there wouldn’t continue to improve for years to come. Yet for Wang, neither the American dream nor the Chinese Dream rang true. Wang’s dreams were his own.
We had been talking f
or two hours. Outside, rain kept pelting the angled window in front of us, the din of millions of drops hitting the glass providing the perfect soundtrack for a library. I looked up at Wang. “I have copies of all those letters,” I said. “Would you like them?”
Wang shook his head. “Nobody in my family cares about those letters. We already know what happened.”
“But what about the younger generation—your nieces and nephews? Do they know?” I asked.
“They may not know, but they’re not interested in this type of history. They have no memory of the Cultural Revolution or the famine or any of that stuff. They don’t want to learn about it, either,” Wang said. “There was a reason we threw those letters away. We Chinese like to think ‘Let bygones be bygones.’ People of my generation, we remember very clearly what happened and we don’t want it to be repeated among the next generation in China.”
I thought to myself: But isn’t that precisely why they should have these letters? I had this conversation with other Chinese who had lived through trauma during the Mao years, and the answer was too often the same: “Hide it and it will stay hidden.”
“My father has passed. Everything will pass. There’s no reason to dwell on it,” he said, uneasy with my silence. “My father was not a great man. He was just a laobaixing, a normal person,” he told me.
In the distance, a cacophony of Mandarin dialects from a group of smiling Chinese seniors emerged from the stairway from their English classrooms below. Wang and I watched in silence. “Just talk to any Chinese who lived through that time,” he said, motioning to them. “We all have the same stories.”
Behind a white-tiled kitchen thick with the pungent, oily vapor of fried scallion pancakes, is a room filled with boxes. They’re stacked on both levels of a mattress-less bunk bed, heaped atop a hutch, and piled upon an armoire, puncturing a layer of cobwebs to the ceiling above. They’re filled with Auntie Fu’s work: Gatewang brochures, canisters of miracle tea, and packages of dried mushrooms, the clutter of products from various companies she’s invested in. They loom over a dank room that also houses a queen bed, a small dining table, and a chest of drawers, and they trigger frequent heated arguments between Auntie Fu and Uncle Feng about a shortage of space.
But it wasn’t the boxes I noticed when I first visited the couple’s home. It was the televisions. Two of them. The hulking machines were the only signs of technology inside the room and the sole items of value. They faced the bed atop the chest of drawers, perched side by side. When I saw them, I turned to Fu with an expression that asked: Why? She looked at me as if I had learned nothing about them in the past year. “We can’t agree on what to watch!”
I imagined the two of them in bed at night, exhausted from the day’s quarrels, each watching their own program on side-by-side televisions, volume at peak levels, letting the machines continue their ongoing yelling match.
It was late February 2013, the eighth day of the Year of the Horse. My bike ride down the Street of Eternal Happiness was cold, wet, and quiet—four days of freezing rain had kept the neighborhood shuttered indoors. The last time I saw Auntie Fu, she’d promised Gatewang would list on the London Stock Exchange by Chinese New Year. When she answered my knock on her door, I was too scared to ask. Instead, I handed her a crate of oranges and wished her a happy new year, condensed breath streaming from my mouth.
Inside, Uncle Feng dozed under layers of covers. We stepped around the bed and sat at the table. “It’s Spring Festival! Eat!” Auntie Fu said, scooping up raw walnuts and squeezing them together with both hands, crushing their shells, letting the fragments fall to the floor.
Auntie Fu had spent the holiday handing out copies of the story of the Ecuadorean girl who had toured heaven and hell with Jesus. She said most people took the pamphlet, looked at it, and then threw it in the garbage. “I told them throwing it away was sinful,” she said. “Some people told me they were Buddhists and I said this story has nothing to do with the sutras, but they could bring it home and decide which one makes more sense.”
Uncle Feng sat upright in bed and groaned in his wife’s direction. The two had been stuck inside for four days thanks to the rain. The air in the room was thick with the tense remnants of bickering matches, and they usually started this way: Auntie boasting about her good deeds, then Uncle pouncing on her for sounding self-righteous.
He shook his head, picked up a remote control, and aimed it at the pair of televisions three feet in front of him. The one on the left turned on. Uncle Feng shuffled through the channels: Sino-Japanese War docudrama, Qing dynasty–era soap opera, a documentary on Venus flytraps. He finally settled on an episode of Journey to the West, a popular show from the 1980s based on a Chinese classic novel about the adventures of a monk, a pig, and a warrior monkey on their quest to retrieve sacred Buddhist texts from India. It was my favorite program when I first came to China in the ’90s, because no language skills were required to appreciate it—all you had to do was sit back and enjoy the hyperviolent kung fu battles, cheesy special effects, and a story line that seemed to be riding an acid trip. When I finally understood the dialogue years later, I realized it didn’t matter. The show still didn’t make much sense, but it sure was fun to watch.
“The CCTV Gala was terrible this year,” Auntie Fu complained, shouting over a kung fu fight onscreen. “The worst I’ve seen!”
Watching the gala while making dumplings is a New Year’s Eve tradition for tens of millions of Chinese—the program attracts more viewers than the Super Bowl—but this year’s gala had been mired in controversy. Chinese rock musician Cui Jian had been invited to perform, but authorities withdrew the invitation when they learned he was only interested in playing one song: “Nothing to My Name,” an anthem of the 1989 Tian’anmen Square protests.
Auntie Fu offered me some dried apricots. “They’re from my sister in Xinjiang! They’re not like the sour ones here in Shanghai. Food in Xinjiang is so much better than the food here,” she said.
“Then why don’t you move back?” snapped Uncle Feng without diverting his gaze from the television.
Auntie rolled her eyes. Onscreen, the monkey had escaped from the clutches of a pair of bandits. The animal swung from a tree branch and landed on the back of one of the men, twisting his neck until blood spurted from his mouth. He then grabbed the first bandit’s saber and swung it at the second one, lopping his head off.
Auntie stuffed a dried apricot in her mouth and continued to reminisce. “Chinese New Year was much more festive in my hometown in Sichuan than it’s ever been here,” she told me. “We’d visit relatives and sit along the streets. We’d make dumplings, too.”
“She doesn’t know how to make dumplings. She’s as stupid as a pig,” Uncle snarled, turning to his wife. “If you liked it so much better back home, then why don’t you leave?”
“Because I’d rather stay here with you! You are so great!” Auntie Fu said sarcastically. “You’re so handsome! Are you the emperor? Are you that great? Why don’t you look at yourself in the mirror?”
Uncle slowly rocked back and forth on the edge of the bed, annoyed, bathed in the flickering blue light of the onscreen action. The monk and the pig were scrambling to heal the monkey, whose face was glowing red and changing shape. The monk laid his hands on the monkey’s forehead while reciting a Buddhist sutra, and the monkey returned to normal.
Auntie glared at her husband in disgust. “God teaches us not to hate people, but how can you not hate someone like him?”
In the couple of years I had known them, the only visits free of yelling matches were the rare instances when one of them was at home alone. When I first met the two, I suspected my presence heightened the abuse. But after spending time with each of them separately, I came to understand this was simply the only way they knew how to pass the time with each other, stubbornly trading barbs in a never-ending struggle session that had raged since the days of Mao.
Each thought the other was crazy. Uncle Feng thought his w
ife too lazy to find a job and hopelessly naïve with her get-rich-quick investments. Whenever he and I were alone in his kitchen, he complained about the money she had lost in investment scams, wondering when she would figure out there was no substitute to earning it through hard work. In turn, Auntie Fu saw her husband as a simpleton. She believed he was blind to the opportunities in twenty-first-century China. She thought he was a lousy businessman, unaware of the most basic negotiating tactics.
Auntie once told me about an apartment they bought for their son’s wedding. Their daughter-in-law wasn’t happy with the neighborhood—“too many migrants,” she complained—and the newlyweds promptly moved out. Uncle sold the apartment for the equivalent of around a hundred thousand U.S. dollars, half of what Auntie Fu thought it was worth.
After days of yelling at each other about the matter—with nightly intermissions of dueling televisions—Auntie told me there was only one way to get the money back. “I had to sue someone,” she told me over tea one day when Uncle Fu was gone. “So I sued the agency that represented the buyer. But the court ruled the agency did nothing wrong. The judge said the real issue was our domestic problems.”
That was one perceptive judge, I thought.
“So now I’m suing my husband,” Auntie Fu said. “The judge accepted the lawsuit. We’ve got a court date coming up soon.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. “Wait. You’re suing your own husband?” I asked.
“Yes! All of this was his fault. There’s something wrong with his head!”
“But what happens if you win? He pays you?” I asked.
“No, no, no,” she said. “I’m suing the property management company that helped him sell it, too. But his name needs to be on the lawsuit, because it was his decision to sell it. I’m suing both of them. If I win, he won’t have to pay me any money. It’ll just show he was wrong.”
Auntie could tell I was confused. She stood up and rummaged through a plastic grocery bag full of files, looking for the court documents.