by Lisa Ko
Now I owed forty-seven thousand to a loan shark in China, to be wired in twice-monthly installments if I wanted to avoid a higher interest rate. I knew what happened to those who didn’t pay enough, paid late, or didn’t pay at all. One threat, one knife-blade flash from the loan shark’s men, and it was pay now or disappear forever.
IN NEW YORK CITY, I changed. For one thing, I was no longer Peilan. One of the other girls in the Bangkok apartment had suggested Polly, an English name that sounded a little like Peilan. So it was Polly, not Peilan, who was doing thirteen-hour shifts in a garment factory, the same work Peilan had done in China except for eight times more money, and it was Polly who paid too much rent for a sleeping bag on the floor, the spot given to the roommate with the least seniority. I hadn’t thought I would live in a mansion like the one Jing-John built for his family, but I hadn’t expected to live in a shithole like the apartment on Rutgers Street, a cramped block with such an inferiority complex that things never smelled right, and the wind blew a steady stream of bags, cans, and plastic bottles down the sidewalk. The bedroom consisted of three bunk beds lined up so tight the women could only get out by crawling through the ends of their mattresses. I came home from work exhausted, ass throbbing from thirteen hours of sitting, and after a while I no longer noticed the jagged gaps in the walls or the floor tiles that had peeled away and exposed dirty crumbled plaster, or the cockroaches, or the drippy kitchen ceiling, and it didn’t bother me that I had to put my hand in the tank when I wanted to flush the toilet. Jing-John must have worked for years to buy that mansion and marble fawn.
I’d arrived at the tail end of a New York summer. At intersections I would play a game, walking in the direction of whichever light went green first, and in this way, I zigzagged my way around most of Manhattan. When I got lost I tried to remain lost for as long as possible, making turn after turn until the street ended at a highway or river, or until I asked the closest Chinese-looking person for directions. No matter how tired I was, I always felt more awake when I walked. How varied the people of New York were, how quickly they moved, inches apart, while avoiding physical contact. On payday I splurged and rode the subway, and the best part was when I went up the stairs to the street and got to the next-to-last step, anticipating what I would see when I reached the sidewalk, if this neighborhood would be full of tall brown buildings or small gray ones, what kind of people lived there, what the stores were like. I saw myself in this neighborhood, that apartment building, that car.
New York was noisier than Fuzhou, and the sounds were different, car alarms and rattling subways, people blasting music out the windows of their apartments. There were so many restaurants, serving food I’d never heard of. My roommates and I took turns cooking. One put peppers in her beef, another fried her vegetables but barely salted them. I made fish balls and although the ingredients weren’t as good as the ones back home, the taste made my chest hurt. My new life was unstable and unsure, but each new day was shot through with possibility.
Didi was the roommate I got along with the best. She was from a village near Xiamen, had been in New York for a little over a year. She introduced me to the best places to buy vegetables, fish, and meat, took me to a tea shop on Bayard that sold sweet black sesame soup with chewy dumplings, which we slurped sitting next to American-born Chinese kids who teased one another in loud, slangy English. Didi didn’t leave Chinatown unless she had to. “We’ve got all we need here,” she said, “so why are you taking the train to all those weird neighborhoods?”
All this time, you were with me. What I had hoped would work during the long hours in the box from Toronto had not. You were alive, stronger than ever, kicking harder. I was getting used to you, but I was so tired.
One of my roommates said to me, “Girl, when are you due? Tomorrow?”
Maybe cold weather makes for cold people. But when I saw my reflection in a store window it looked like I’d doubled in size. This body definitely did not belong to me.
It was Polly, not Peilan, who went to the free clinic uptown, where there was a woman doctor who was Chinese and spoke Mandarin.
“Do your parents know?” She handed me a paper shirt.
“I don’t have parents.”
The doctor’s hair was cut short, forming a trim arrowhead at the nape of her neck, and her eyes were dark and kind. “How old did you say you were, Miss Guo? Sixteen?”
I sat on a long metal table that was also lined with paper. My feet stuck out of the paper shirt and I stared at a ring of dirt on the floor. I’d told the doctor my name, address, and birthdate, which she scribbled on a form. “Why does it matter how old I am? I don’t need anyone’s permission to be here.”
“You’re right, you don’t.”
There was a plastic figure on the counter with what appeared to be organs inside, and I wanted to remove them and tap them against the doctor’s desk.
She looked at the form again. “Eighteen. Sorry, you look a lot younger. How did you get to New York?”
“I came by myself.”
“That must have been hard.”
“No big deal. I wasn’t scared.”
The doctor opened her mouth as if to talk, then closed it.
“Lay down. Scoot up a little,” she said. “That’s good.”
I was poked, first with fingers, then with a cold metal tongue. The doctor asked where I was from.
“Fujian. Where are you from?”
“Zhejiang.”
“And did your parents bring you here?” I asked her.
“I came here for university and stayed after medical school, to work.”
She ran a boxy device attached to a cord over my belly and pointed to a television screen with a black-and-white image of a shadowy blob. “Looking good.”
“I don’t want it,” I said, though I’d lived with you for so many months, it was hard to be entirely sure.
The doctor looked at the form again. “Oh, you hadn’t mentioned that.” She switched off the video screen. “You can sit up now.” She walked around to face me. “You’re over seven months pregnant.”
I counted backwards, trying to recall how many months it had been since the motel with Haifeng, but I could barely recall his face.
“Twenty-nine or thirty weeks.” The doctor’s face looked sad. “We can’t terminate after twenty-four weeks, or six months. I’m so sorry.”
“I’ll go to another clinic, then.”
“It’s the law. They won’t do it either.”
My thighs were clammy against the table, my stomach smeared with jelly. Slime dripped from between my legs.
“I can give you some resources. I’d like to refer you to another doctor, so you can get the proper care.”
“I have to have the baby?”
My belly grew cold. The doctor lowered her voice. “Listen, don’t be afraid. They have good hospitals here.” Her Mandarin accent was citified, polished. “I can also share information about adoption.”
“I didn’t say I was afraid.”
The doctor backed away. There was a spray of gray hairs on her temple, a gold wedding band on her finger. I sat very still in that big paper gown. The screen was blank again. I had traveled thousands of miles just to learn there was no difference between the provincial hospitals with their IDs and age requirements and marriage permits and this clinic in New York with its stupid rules on twenty-four versus twenty-eight. Four measly weeks.
“Are you okay?”
I nodded, looking at my lap. She gave me a sheet of phone numbers and several pamphlets in English and Chinese. I promised to return for another checkup and to buy vitamins.
I walked out of the clinic into a cloudy and cool afternoon, fell asleep on the subway and woke at the end of the line, in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood full of white people speaking some language that wasn’t English. I got off and heard seagulls and smelled salt water, and I walked to the edge of the city, removed my shoes, rolled up my jeans, and stepped into the ocean for the first time.
I stepped in farther. The cold water made me curl my toes and the waves lapped at my shins in a sharper, faster way than the dark blue of the river in the village, yet here the sea was cleaner, grayer, larger, more angry and thirsty and beautiful all at once, not unlike New York itself. I took another step. The water was up to my waist. My teeth chattered, but the cold felt good.
I had run out of choices; I was fucked. I had to have the baby. Or rather, Polly would have to have the baby.
I heard a voice calling from the shore. A man was waving at me and jumping up and down. A woman joined him. They yelled, their arms beckoning me to come back.
The water wasn’t that cold. “I’m not afraid,” I yelled in Mandarin.
Standing in the Atlantic, it grew into a challenge. For Polly, the girl who’d defy odds, the girl who could do anything. New York was a parallel gift of a life, and the unrealness of being here gave even the most frightening things a layer of surreal comedy. Peilan continued on in the village, feeding chickens and stray cats and washing cabbages, as Polly lived out a bonus existence abroad. Peilan would marry Haifeng or another village boy while Polly would walk the endless blocks of new cities. Polly could have a baby without being married. A baby might soothe the sharp edges of my loneliness, the loneliness that bubbled up when I saw couples and families and people laughing with their friends. I could raise my child to be smart and funny and strong.
I want you to know that you were wanted. I decided: I wanted you.
Yi Ba thought that only men could do what they wanted, but he was wrong. I stood with my toes in the ocean, euphoric at how far I had come, and two months later, when I gave birth to you, I would feel accomplished, tougher than any man.
I NAMED YOU DEMING. My roommates let me stay, despite their complaints that your crying kept them up at night, and in return I kicked in a little extra rent. I tried to hand you over to a stranger at a day care but I couldn’t, not yet, and instead I quit my job, called the loan shark, and took out an additional loan, one that enabled me to not work for six months.
No one had told me I could have such love for another person. When I thought of anything harmful happening to you the love burned a little, like a rash, but when I held you and you were calm, the love was beaming, like sunlight through the leaves of a tree. I was in love! I’d look down at you and get goo-goo-eyed and think, This is a human being I made. I no longer watched crime shows with my roommates; they made the world seem too dangerous.
Didi worked in a nail salon and said she’d try to get me a job there. She gave us her mattress and took over the sleeping bag. I don’t know if you remember Didi, but she had a squeaky voice and fluffy bangs, and when you fussed, she would hold you and you would quiet down, discharging bubbles of drool that she blotted, nonchalantly, with the bottom of her shirt. After weeks of only sleeping an hour or two at a time, I responded to your screaming on autopilot. I’d hear your cries even when I was sleeping.
But it was grueling, how much a baby needed, how you would tug my hair and grab my shirt and latch onto my body because you owned, it, too. Look how he wants his mama, my roommates would say, and a couple of them also got goo-goo-eyed, and a sliver of fear would present itself: what if I would always be required to offer myself up, ready and willing, constantly available? What had I done? And then: what was wrong with me? Didi loved kids, had grown up caring for younger siblings and nieces and nephews, and though she found it strange that I sometimes wanted to take off and walk around the neighborhood for an hour, smoking a cigarette—“By yourself? And to nowhere in particular? But why?”—she always offered to watch you.
“When I get married,” Didi would begin her sentences, “when I have kids . . . ”
“How many kids do you want?” I asked, as we prepared dinner one evening.
“Two or three. Do you want more?”
“One’s enough for now.”
“Only one?”
I told Didi about Haifeng. “I guess I wanted more than just staying with him.” I poured oil into the pan and turned the knob that produced a gas flame.
“You’re a free spirit, but practical. Like my sister in Boston. She’ll marry this guy for a green card. Me, I’m more traditional. I’ll marry someone I love.”
It pleased me, being called a free spirit.
ONCE A MONTH, I called Yi Ba. “How’s New York?” he asked.
“Wonderful. How’s Minjiang?”
“The same.” Then he’d tell me about a neighbor’s new house with rugs that tickled his toes.
“I’ll try to make more money so I can send you some,” I said.
“You need your money more than I do. I can take care of myself.”
Two of my roommates had given birth to children in New York and sent them to stay with relatives in China. “They don’t remember anything when they’re babies,” said Hetty, a hairdresser with a shaggy bob. She was folding her clothes and stacking them into a box that she kept under her bunk. “They don’t miss us. What do you remember when you were his age? Nothing, I bet.” Hetty had a three-year-old son whom she hadn’t seen in two and a half years, living with her parents in her village, her husband working in a place called Illinois. “I’ll bring my son here when he’s old enough to go to school. Two more years.”
Ming, a chain-smoking waitress, hadn’t seen her daughters for five years. They were living with her family near Nanping. “You’ll try to keep him with you, but you won’t be able to,” she said in her raspy voice. “I wanted to keep my daughters, too, but it’s impossible. Who’s going to look after them? We’re all working. If you hire a babysitter you won’t be able to pay your debt. You’ve got to concentrate on that, or you’ll be screwed. Trust me.” She picked grapes out of a plastic bag, chewing as she spoke. “Grapes?”
She held out the bag and I took several. “I don’t want to send him to the village.” I sat on Didi’s bunk, holding you as you sucked on a bottle. “It’s only my father there, I don’t have a mother to help out.”
Ming said, “Grandparents treat them better than they treated you. They know the babies are going to leave again. Old age softens people.”
“Send him back,” said Hetty. “It’s the only way.”
“Free babysitting,” said Ming.
The two women laughed, but their laughter was the kind with no core, only loose edges.
In the tiniest spaces of time between naps and feedings, I explored the city with you bundled against me. We wandered to the bottom of Manhattan, where the sun warmed the river. There was a fence there, no way to walk directly into the water. That’s because the city was insecure and wanted to contain itself, sticking up borders to keep its residents close. I didn’t buy it. I believed we could leave whenever we wanted. Winter was coming, yet the sunlight heated my scalp, and I sang “Ma-ma-ma” and my voice was as clear and sharp as morning birds. You squirmed against me. Love spun up like feathers.
Some days I would clean you, change your poopy diaper, put on your shoes and socks and hat and little jacket, haul you in the stroller down three flights of stairs, only to have you start howling the moment we turned the corner. Time to go back up with the stroller, three flights of stairs, change your diaper and clean you and put your clothes back on, and by then I would have lost any desire to go out. You poked me, wanting to show me the same thing for the tenth time, a roommate’s pink shirt, a coin you’d found; you’d wail as you banged a spoon against the kitchen floor. I had only been Polly for such a short time, and Polly was already slipping away. There was so much of the world I would never see.
Weeks, months, drifted by in a haze, blending into one long, soupy day in which I never got enough sleep. Ice formed on the windowpanes and the sun refused to fully come up. It was too cold to go on walks now, too much hassle to ride the subway with a baby, so we stayed inside for days, moved between bedroom and kitchen and bathroom and bedroom, confined to our pen. I sang silly songs about chickens and goldfish and told you stories of fishing boats and banyan tre
es and Teacher Wu. I watched television when my roommates were at work. My closest friends were the actors on a Spanish show who fought and made up like clockwork, tiny lean women stuffed into high heels and short dresses and shiny men in collared shirts and pressed pants. I wanted a bedroom to myself like the actors had, to spread out in a bed big enough for four. The apartment got smaller and smaller.
Then it was spring, and then it was summer, and I’d been in New York for almost a year. You grew longer and heavier, energetic and curious, and once you were crawling I had to watch you all the time or else you’d be dipping your hands into the toilet and into your mouth, finding a rotten food dropping in a corner to eat, offering up a dead roach to me like a twenty-dollar bill. My money was gone. I didn’t want to take out another loan, but if I returned to work, I would have to pay someone to watch you. My roommates were right. There was too much debt, and I was behind. I had yet to send Yi Ba any money. Yet Didi’s nail salon salary fed her whole family in her village. Even Jing-John had bought his mother a house.
Didi asked her boss if she’d hire another nail technician, and her boss said they didn’t need one, but maybe soon. I couldn’t hold out for that. Had to pay off my loans, and that would take another seven or eight years, less if I got a higher-paying job, preferably one that didn’t involve pulling on a ba wa. Waitressing was the best job, especially in a Japanese or Thai restaurant, which paid more than a Chinese restaurant, even though Chinese people ran all of them. But it was tough to get a waitressing job without the right connections.
I got a job at a factory with shorter shifts, sewing shirts for six hours a day, enough to meet the minimum payments to the loan shark. The interest had gone up, and I still owed so much. I’d fall asleep while giving you a bath, waiting until my roommates had used the bathroom first, days since I’d had a shower myself. I smelled like a foot. Except for Didi, there was no more cooing over baby toes. Now my roommates hurried out of the room when you began to cry.