by Lisa Ko
Xuan, who was the prettiest girl in our dorm room, with thick hair and puffy lips, had a city lover, a man who was nearly thirty. Her boyfriend, who had stayed in their village for high school, didn’t know about the older man. I asked why she didn’t leave her boyfriend, and she said she had to keep her options open because her city lover already had a fiancée who also had urban hukou, and she didn’t want to marry him, anyway. He bought her sweaters and pointy shoes and gave her spending money she sent home to her younger siblings. I was impressed by how matter-of-fact she was.
“My boyfriend’s ba wa is long and skinny,” Xuan announced. We were hanging out in the dormitory bunks before bedtime. “And my city lover’s is shorter, but fatter.” She ran her hands through her hair and pulled it over her shoulder.
“Shorter and fatter is better than long and skinny.” Qing wrinkled her nose and shivered elaborately. Her eyes were set far apart, and she was a little chubby. She had an older cousin who lived with four roommates in an apartment near downtown Fuzhou, and one Sunday the three of us had visited, taking buses across the city. Afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about the apartment with its own flush toilet, the closet where the roommates kept their clothes and shoes. I wanted Yi Ba to visit me in my own apartment, remove a pair of guest slippers from my closet.
“My city lover has more experience,” Xuan said. “He likes to do it standing up.”
“Oh,” said Qing, exposing the crooked incisor she usually tried to hide. “That’s nice.”
Xuan turned to me. “What about you, Peilan? Which do you prefer?”
A checkered bedsheet hung over the edge of the top bunk. “Long and skinny, I guess.” I hadn’t had sex with Haifeng, but my friends didn’t know this.
“You need to compare. What if you say you like long and skinny and you’ve never had short and fat? You’ll never know which you’d truly like the best.” Xuan pursed her lips at the tragedy.
“Rural people don’t shop around,” Qing said, though she was from a village so small it didn’t even have a road. “Shop around more, sister.”
“You could get a city man if you had this.” Xuan removed a lace bra from a bag printed with the name of the store: LOVERS. The bra had two heart-shaped cutouts, and the panties had a heart printed on the crotch. “My city lover bought these for me.”
ONE NIGHT, WHEN I was late getting back to the dormitory, Qing and Xuan went to eat without me, and I listened to my other dorm mates talk about getting jobs at newer factories. The room was hot and stuffy. It had been so long since I’d smelled clear air or seen the sea.
I went downstairs and waited for the phone booth. After being passed to three people on the other end of the line, I reached Haifeng.
“Peilan.” It had been months since we had talked. “You called me.”
You called me. “Can you meet me next week?”
We went to a motel Xuan recommended. Lied about our ages and bribed the desk clerk with my money. My initial excitement shriveled when I felt Haifeng’s clammy fingers and saw, when he removed his clothes, that he was scrawnier than before. But I had already resolved to become a grown-up like Xuan.
The first time was over too quickly. We tried again.
“I missed you so much.” Haifeng kissed my cheeks and shoulders. “My sweetheart.” I smoked one of his cigarettes as he slept and looked out the smudgy window at the construction scaffolding of another building in progress. Then I left early and returned to the dorm.
My period didn’t come for two months in a row. How can I tell you how scared I was? My snipping grew sloppier, and Foreman Tung said he would fire me if I didn’t shape up. In the motel room, Haifeng had said things like “when we move back to the village” and “when we’re living together as husband and wife.” I lay awake at night, saw the long march through the village in a rent-by-the-hour wedding gown, seamy with sweat from the armpits of the last bride and the bride before that, the neighbors snickering about the upcoming wedding night. If I told Haifeng I was pregnant, he would act like marriage was inevitable. He would expect me to be happy, or worse, grateful. I saw it written to the end, all the years of my life: village, 3 Alley, babies, me and Haifeng hating each other to death.
Payday. I borrowed Qing’s Walkman and went to the music store, bought a tape with the money I was supposed to send to Yi Ba. I walked and walked and there was the highway. A bus came by and opened its doors and I climbed on. The driver asked where I was going and before the doors closed, I jumped off. Until now, I had done anything I wanted to, without repercussions. SHIT! I walked along the side of the highway. Trucks honked as they passed, kicking up clouds of dust. There were married women who brought their children to the factory with them, kids who napped in stacks of XXXL jeans awaiting shipment to American warehouses. But I wanted to go home to the village, have Yi Ba take care of me.
Sure, I’d been lonely, but I should have known better than to meet Haifeng at the motel. I knew we were taking a risk, but I hadn’t thought I would end up pregnant. What were the chances? But I had walked into a trap, proving my father right. Yi Ba thought anything bad that happened to a woman was her fault. It made me sick. If a woman was unmarried it was her fault for being ugly or independent; if a woman was too devoted to her husband it was her fault for being mushy and desperate; if a husband had a girl on the side it was the wife’s fault for driving him away and both the mistress and wife’s faults for letting themselves get taken advantage of. If I told Yi Ba, then he and the neighbors would be satisfied that this was whom I’d always been behind my bluster, a girl who would do exactly what was expected of her.
By the time I returned to the dormitory it was dark and my feet were aching. Qing was angry with me, thinking I had stolen her Walkman. And so I broke down and told my friends.
“Get the procedure,” Xuan said. “It’s not that bad. I did it once. It hurts, but you’ll only be out of work for a day. We’ll come with you.”
“There’s a hospital out on the highway,” Qing said.
Haifeng called the dormitory and asked for me. I didn’t call him back. I never spoke to him again.
AT THE HOSPITAL, A woman with oblong eyeglasses sat a desk obstructing the door to the examination rooms. “ID,” she said. Xuan and Qing hadn’t been able to get time off work, and I told them I would be fine going by myself. But I wished they had insisted on coming, even if they would miss out on a day’s pay. I would have done the same for them.
I handed over my ID and the woman frowned. “You’re not eligible for medical care here because you’re not registered as a city person. Your hukou is rural, so you can only go to a rural hospital. Go to the one in your village district.”
Back in the dorm, I slumped in my bunk and batted Qing’s orange teddy bear with my feet. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been alone, though every day felt lonelier than the one before. My stomach flip-flopped at the reek of too many sweaty bodies in too small a space. I was sluggish and spaced-out at the snippers’ table, like a window shade was being yanked over my eyes. I missed threads, cut accidental holes, letting the heaps of jeans grow larger, taller.
Then Foreman Tung fired me. Xuan and Qing were sure that if I took my ID to the rural hospital they couldn’t turn me away. I told them I would be back in the city next week to find another job, and on my last morning at the factory I snuck away to retrieve my bag while everyone else was working. In the empty dorm I slipped Xuan’s heart bra into my pocket, even though it was too small and my boobs would never fit inside those tiny hearts. I left my notebook of song lyrics, my small collection of cassette tapes. I didn’t have a tape player to listen to them.
I took a minibus straight to the rural hospital and flashed my ID. “I’m a rural resident.”
“Is your fiancé meeting you here today?”
“I don’t have a fiancé.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Sure . . . ”
“Your ID says you’re only eighteen. You can’t get a marriage p
ermit until you’re nineteen and your boyfriend is twenty-one. And once you’re married, you need to be twenty to get a birth permit.”
“Okay. Can I get the procedure done today?”
“Not without the father’s consent. And without the proper permits for pregnancy there are usually fines. But since you’re under the legal age for marriage—” The nurse glanced at the hallway and motioned to a door. “Please, take a seat inside this room. I’ll be back in a minute.”
I waited, but the nurse didn’t return. The more time passed, the more worried I got. I had seen the family planning cadre drag pregnant women to the hospital, the women coming home smaller and subdued, but with no babies. I had also heard of married couples being fined for unauthorized pregnancies, forced to pay the equivalent of five years’ worth of the average provincial salary. For an unmarried woman the fine would probably be steeper, though I had never heard of any woman in Minjiang declaring a pregnancy without a father involved. If I told Haifeng, I might as well get measured for a wedding gown.
I heard a telephone ringing, footsteps and voices, a running faucet. At the other end of the hallway, a pair of orderlies pushed a bed with a gasping figure strapped to it. I would step into the hallway and announce I had an out-of-quota pregnancy. They didn’t need to come to 3 Alley and force me to go to the hospital. Here I was! Yet the nurse had mentioned fines, and paying even a year’s worth of the average provincial salary would bankrupt me and Yi Ba. The only way to avoid the fees would be to apply for a marriage permit with Haifeng, even if we were underage. Or I could leave before the nurse got back.
The hallway was clear. I heaved myself off the chair and ran in the opposite direction of where the nurse had gone, down the stairs, out of the hospital, until I reached the bus stop. The sky was so clear and blue, so striking in its stillness that I wanted to cry.
AFTER TWO YEARS AWAY, the village was different. Mansions had spurted up, built with the money of those who’d gone farther than Fuzhou, gone all the way to places like New York and Los Angeles, mansions with scalloped rooftops and fountains with plaster statues of goldfish, gates like metal doilies, four-storied balconies, windows as big as a lake.
“Everyone’s gone to America,” Yi Ba said. I told him the factory had given me time off since we met our orders for the season. His eyes were more sunken, and his pants smelled, not faintly, of fish. Accustomed to eating in a room with one hundred people talking at once, I was no longer used to our quiet meals.
Three days passed. I cooked vegetables, gathered the chicken eggs, swept the floors, and scrubbed the laundry. I missed the city, especially during the sunny, unending afternoons, and knew I had to do something soon, but each morning I woke up frozen, overwhelmed. I could eat a spoonful of rat poison, but didn’t want to die; I could go to the hospital and take my chances on another nurse, but what if I got someone who was even less sympathetic, who fined me six years’ income or insisted on telling Yi Ba?
Minjiang was obsolete. The twisting alleyways, the fishing boats with their sagging nets, the peeling paint on the side of the houses, the faded green curtains hanging from our windows—like me, they were finished. On the wall of a building was a chalk drawing of one larger cat and two small kittens. I remembered a stray cat I had seen in the city, surrounded by a litter of blood-pink kittens, and how it had lay, defeated, accepting, as the kittens scrambled over one another in order to suck at its nipples.
I walked to one of the new mansions and pressed my face to the gate. The tiles smelled like rain and dirt. I backed away, a smear of dirt on my nose. At the river, I pushed a stick against the dirt, scratching an itch in the earth, trying to see what hid beneath the water’s surface. The undersides of dead leaves. Fish. I passed the docks where the fishermen tugged at their crotches and talked about the girls they claimed to have plowed. One elbowed his buddy as I walked by, said he liked his chicks with extra meat. His friend shushed him. “That’s Old Guo’s daughter, you idiot!” At the produce market, I saw Teacher Wu’s wife, the head of the family planning cadre, haggling with a vendor over a cabbage, and I hurried back to 3 Alley.
One week passed. I slept all the time. I’d fall asleep at the table or standing at the sink, wake with a loud snore or when my feet wobbled. Sleep took over, sleep wiped me out, but in the moments before I succumbed, dark truths arrived. I’m fucked. I’ll have to give in and marry Haifeng.
I awoke to the sound of Haifeng’s mother and Yi Ba talking outside in the alley.
“She must be tired from all that work,” said Haifeng’s mother. “Haifeng says they work eight, nine hours at the factory.”
“Eight? That’s nothing,” Yi Ba said. “The city’s too harsh for a young girl. But I knew she’d come home sooner or later. So many people are going abroad now, it’s good she’s come home.”
“She’s grown up. She knows where she belongs.”
“The factory was only a phase. Testing her freedom.”
Haifeng’s mother laughed. “You can be glad that’s over.”
I sat up in bed. Yi Ba had taken the money I sent home and never complained. I heard him say, “Should I call you sister-in-law soon?”
“Not so fast,” said Haifeng’s mother. “I want a big dowry.”
“Hey, who says my dowry isn’t big?”
Two weeks passed. An Incredible American returned to Minjiang and had a party. He hadn’t been born an Incredible American but a mere villager like the rest of us, but had become an American by taking a train to Kunming, walking through the Burmese mountains, flying from Thailand to America, where he landed a job in a restaurant in Los Angeles, married an American—she was Chinese but had legit papers—and gotten naturalized, saved enough to pay off his debt and finally come home for a visit. His family was throwing a party at the mansion he built for them. I told Yi Ba I would rather scoop chicken shit than go, but he said it would look bad if every family showed up but us.
In school, I had known this Incredible American as Jing, a bully of a boy who’d been tight with the rest of the cadre sons and liked to sneak up behind girls and give them wedgies. At the party he did a poor job of pretending to not recognize me and Yi Ba. We stood in his mother’s living room near a fake marble statue of a young boy petting a fawn, the statue rotating on a battery-operated disc painted gold. I saw his eyebrows go up, followed by a calculated removal of this expression of recognition, his features settling into a parody of blankness. “Oh, that’s right, Peilan! From primary school. Now I remember you!”
“How are you, Jing?”
“John. My name is John now.” He was only two years older than me but already had wrinkles around his mouth.
“How’s America?”
“Oh, it’s paradise. It’s another world.”
“How much debt do you have?” Yi Ba asked.
“Very little, now. Started as twenty-five thousand, though the going rate is more these days. But the travel is easier, quicker. If you’d like to know more, I can introduce you. She’s here today.”
Jing-John pointed at a woman with a faded caterpillar of hair on her upper lip, talking to some of the neighbors. Yi Ba had mentioned the lady with the mustache who arranged for people to travel abroad, and how she was responsible, indirectly, for the new mansions in the village. I said no thanks; didn’t want to give Jing-John the satisfaction. But Yi Ba accepted a slip of paper from him with the lady’s phone number.
Back at home, Yi Ba fell asleep. I noticed a hole in his socks, a pair he’d already mended several times. I walked around the room. Here were the bowls and chairs and pots from my childhood, which my mother had used before she died, the bowls now cracked, the pots burned on the bottom. I could stay here. Have the baby, take care of Yi Ba, have him take care of me.
Outside the window, I could see Haifeng’s house. There was a light inside, the shadow of Mrs. Li moving around in her own kitchen. I stepped away so she wouldn’t see me. Soon Haifeng would have to come home, too.
I saw myself in a new c
ountry, with my own apartment, like Qing’s cousin in Fuzhou. Xuan said in America, you could live anywhere you wanted to; it didn’t matter if you had rural or urban hukou. They wouldn’t care about things like pregnancy permits either.
Never mind the debt, so astronomical it was unreal, like the fake money burned graveside at Qingming holidays. Forget the grueling journey, which didn’t seem real either, the distances and destinations nothing but nonsense words to me. I’d go where Haifeng would never go.
When I told Yi Ba I was leaving, he let out a long sigh. “You too? Everyone’s leaving except me. By the time you come home, it’ll be for my funeral.”
“Don’t say that.”
I told him I would send him money, and when I got settled, he could join me.
He waved his hand dismissively. “I do well enough here.”
In the morning I made the phone call, and when the lady with the mustache asked if I was ready to leave at any time, I said yes.
It took me a few weeks to gather the money. At the riverbank I watched the lady count my down payment, the equivalent of three thousand American dollars, borrowed from relatives. They were sure that they’d receive an increase in status and income that came with having an American in the family. The rest, the forty-seven thousand, I borrowed from a loan shark. It would have taken me forty years, the rest of my working life, to earn fifty thousand American dollars in the village, but in New York, I hoped to pay it off in five or six.
A van drove me west on the highway to Guangxi. I took a train to Vietnam and another train to a packed apartment in Bangkok, where I received a fake Japanese passport that I would give back after getting to America. From Bangkok we flew on to Amsterdam, then Toronto, where I declared myself a refugee and followed two other women into a box in the back of a truck, which drove us to a house in New York. When they lifted the lid of the box, my pants were soaked with piss and my tongue raw from biting. I blinked at the lights and the shelves stocked with giant packages of toilet paper and bottled water, and the cars in the garage that were bigger than the biggest cars in Fuzhou, and the garage itself that was bigger than the main room in the house on 3 Alley, and I heard music playing and realized the words were in English. I tried to sit. “I’m here,” I shouted.