by Lisa Ko
We passed Elizabeth Street, Mulberry, Mott. Our steps were exaggerated and high, as if the snow had gummed our shoes. At a stall on Canal, I bought you a blue winter coat, haggled for a red hat and let you pick out a pair of boots with fuzzy lining.
Broadway. Sixth Avenue. “Watch.” I took a deep breath and exhaled, creating clouds of frost. You seemed impressed. I took another breath and you took one of your own, blowing in the cold. We descended the stairs to the subway, I swiped my card twice, and when the train arrived you took the seat by the window, bobbing back and forth as you watched the tunnel stretch out, counting off the stops as we rode uptown, one-four, three-four, four-two, five-nine. At 125th Street the train would burst above ground, tearing straight into the sunlight, and I couldn’t wait to see your face.
THE NAIL SALON WHERE Didi worked was hiring. “Don’t sleep on this, Polly, or you’ll be working at that factory until you’re an old lady,” she said. She brought home old bottles of polish and I practiced on our roommates, so when I went to Hello Gorgeous to meet Rocky, the manager, I knew exactly what to do.
I gave Rocky a mani-pedi and got the job. Twenty-five hours a week to start, no pay until the three-month training period ended, though I could keep my tips. Took out a loan to cover rent, food, the black pants and shirts I had to wear, the fees Rocky charged for training, though the training itself consisted of watching my co-workers and cleaning up after them. But it was different from sewing, and there was the promise of more money.
To celebrate, I bought you a set of Legos and helped you construct the plastic pieces into a spaceship, which you held up in the air as you ran around the room. “Crash landing!” you shouted, plunging the spaceship into a pillow. “Boom!”
I rescued the spaceship and waved my arms over it, mimicking the sound of hammers and drills. “They’ve made repairs. It’s ready to fly again.”
“I want a tiger,” you said.
“A tiger?”
Getting to know you was strange. You wanted video games, but I bought you a box of crayons, which you pressed on so hard they broke in two. And now, a tiger. I watched you run around the room, the spaceship swooping and soaring. We had come into a large clearing. It no longer seemed we would never leave this apartment. I wished I could call Yi Ba and tell him.
As you filled out into a new person, so did I, and I tucked the years without you away as another triumph, another thing I’d survived; saved Leon’s voice mails and replayed them on breaks, his messages brief and to-the-point, each word I coaxed out of him a victory or a challenge. Leaving for work soon. Call me tomorrow. I’ll be home by eight. The same went for you. Victory when you ran to join your classmates before school and brought home drawings, when we took the train and I watched you call off the stops. At the playground, you were the first kid in your class to do a flip on the metal bars, the one who made the highest, most daring leaps between benches.
Didi called you Little Piglet, listened when you told the same stories for the five-hundredth time, indulged you in your favorite game, the excruciating one where you’d snatch your hand away whenever I tried to high-five it. “Fooled you!” you’d say. “Watch me again!” If I yawned or looked away, even for a moment, you would screech, “Keep your eyes open, Mama, you have to keep them open!” But Didi could sit with you forever, unflagging in her response each time you took your hand away. “Wow!” she’d cry. “Little Piglet, you sure fooled me. Okay, let’s try again, I’ll high five you—oh, wow, you tricked me again!” As I watched you and her, I would hear Yi Ba saying I was selfish and spoiled. Perhaps there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have an infinite amount of patience for children’s games. Remorse, dormant and persistent, flapped up. I’d abandoned my father; I hadn’t mourned him enough.
Leon came to Chinatown from the Bronx, took us out to lunch on a street near the Manhattan Bridge. The cook knew him from his ship loading days back home, and the customers hunched over round metal tables that faced windows beaded with salty broth, steam eking onto the sidewalk. Three noodle shops on one short block, sweating and striving beneath the bridge’s tail, each shop with its own specialty, beef broth, chicken broth, pork broth, lamb. Here there was only one dish, noodle soup with lamb.
“Sst,” Leon said, and a man in an apron stood up from behind the counter, dough stretched between his arms. Leon held up three fingers and pulled out stools. Spilled soup splashed our toes. The waitress set our bowls down with plastic cups of tea, wiping the liquid on the table with a dishcloth, and we slurped, sucking soft chunks of meat between our teeth. Chewy and thick, the noodles were perfect; the soup tasted like a favorite memory. Your face shone with pleasure. Leon burped and put down money for the meal.
“Where are we going now?” you asked.
Leon looked at his phone and calculated the time left before his shift. “You like boats?”
“Yi Gong used to have a boat,” you said. “Are we going fishing? Yi Gong used to fish.”
“You don’t want to eat the fish in this river,” Leon said. “The fish here comes out with two heads.”
The snow was melting, its surviving remnants peppered with dirt beneath icy top crusts. “To the bottom of Manhattan,” Leon shouted. It was the Staten Island Ferry, a bright orange boat braying a hippopotamus honk. We stood on the deck as it shambled through the water, me with my arms around you, Leon with his arms around me.
Leon had been in America for nine years and his English still sucked. But the fees had been lower when he came over, so he had already paid off his debt. I kept asking myself if I should go for a guy who could get me a green card, or find one who liked to read newspapers and could help improve my English. It drove me crazy that Leon spat on the sidewalk, pushed onto subways as people were trying to get off, cut lines for cash registers like he was still in Fuzhou. But the way he strung his curses together in dialect, quick like running water, his striking familiarity, made me laugh and join in. He listened to me complain about work, and even if he didn’t have a lot of money, he bought me food, spent time with you. I saw how happy he made you. We walked around Central Park, Battery Park, Madison Square, and he liked seeing trees and water, had also grown up around fishermen and farmers. Yi Ba would’ve liked him; he’d never be mistaken for soft. And look at the man. Who else—besides you—had made me feel wanted, singular, different?
On the boat, Leon whispered so only I could hear. “What if you lived with me, Little Star? You and Deming?”
I wanted to remember this moment even as it was happening, to imagine it as already gone.
SPRING WAS NUDGING IN, the streets fuller, noisier, the city flung open with new colors and lights. We walked, hand in hand, after I picked you up from school.
“Can I have a plane?” you asked. “There’s a plane I saw, in a book.”
“You took a plane here, to New York. Did you like it?”
“I was sleeping.”
“One day, you’ll take another one.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere. Around the world.”
The bakery had lime green lamps shaped like helmets. We ordered bubble tea in fluorescent colors and pierced the tops of our cups with oversized straws. “Drink your tea,” I said. “Don’t blow bubbles.”
You made a farting sound with your lips. “I like tea.”
“Do you like New York?”
You sucked up more tea and eyed me across the table as you blew a soft, loose bubble. “Yes.”
“What do you like about it?”
“Subway.”
“Do you miss China?”
Shrug.
“Do you miss Yi Gong?”
“Yeah,” you said in English.
“Me, too.” I pushed my straw against the bottom of my cup. “Do you like Leon?”
“He plays with me.”
“You can call him Yi Ba. He says he won’t mind.”
You stared at me as if you were tasting the word, trying to figure out if you liked it or not.
/> “Next month, we’re going to move to a bigger apartment and live with Leon and his sister Vivian. It’s not far away, in a part of the city called Bronx. There will be another boy for you to play with, Leon’s nephew. His name is Michael.”
“How old is he?”
“Around your age. I think he’s five.”
You scowled. “I’m six.”
“I know you are.” Thick shocks of hair erupted around your face, as if in protest. I walked to the other side of the table and squeezed into your seat with you. “We’re going to move in with Leon, but we’ll always be a family, Kid, you and me.”
You blew bubbles into your tea, made another farting noise, and giggled. Your face became serious. “Is Auntie Didi coming, too?”
THE APARTMENT WAS TOO small for all of us. Me, you, Leon, Vivian, and Michael. Michael’s father, Leon said, had been a good-for-nothing Taiwanese with no papers who’d split on Vivian long ago.
My roommates had said the Bronx was dangerous and not enough Chinese people lived there, but when we arrived on an April morning and I looked at the signs in English and Spanish—not a single Chinese character anywhere, not even at the take-out spot down the block—I felt like I’d been in rehearsal all this time and this was the real thing. It had taken six years, and I was still in the same city, but finally, I had gone elsewhere. Another woman was already waiting to take my bunk on Rutgers Street.
Leon and I slept on one mattress in the bedroom, you and Michael on the other, Vivian on the couch. It cost a hundred dollars more a month to live with Leon than it did to live in the boardinghouse, but I could take on more hours at the salon, since when you came home from school, Vivian or Leon took care of you and Michael.
Opposite-world Leon, he woke with the moon. The city buses would screech and hump across the Bronx, Leon slouched on one of their back benches, riding to the edges of Hunts Point. For a living, he dealt with the dead. He deboned ribs, pigs shrinking from whole animals into separate parts: belly, shoulder, intestines, from pig to pork. Boots coated in blood, gloves slippery with innards, Leon sliced at slabs, cleaved bones from muscle. On the kill floor, swinging from giant hooks, the hogs were stunned with electric shocks, their necks severed, scraped clean. The disassembly line. Sometimes I saw these animals in my sleep. The frozen pig, dazed and muted, the hog heads with their gaping mouths, all those groaning ghosts. Leon swore off sausage, ham, bacon. What separates the pig from the person? In bed he’d name my parts and chops, trace my cuts of meat with his fingers—leg, loin, ribs, rump; the skin around my belly—until I squirmed. “Stop!”
We were all meat. Fat and gristle and tendon and bone. Cartilage and muscle, thighs and breasts. Leon had come over as a stowaway, washed ashore in New York on a garbage barge of old computers. The ship had sailed around the world, China to Thailand to Mexico, across the Pacific, but riding in the cargo Leon never saw ocean. Back when he came, you could enter without papers and customs would release you into the streets; there was nowhere for them to detain you. You’d get an order to appear in court and rip it up and throw it away when you hit the sidewalks, hail a cab to Fuzhounese Chinatown and fade sweetly into the crowd.
“Is it scary being with a man who kills?” Didi asked, and I said I supposed it would be, but Leon didn’t kill, and despite how broad his back was, how his shoulders and arms could choke you, he was a gentle person. When he came home from work he took long showers, crawled into bed and dampened the sheets, climbed over me and onto me, pressing his weight into mine. It soothed me. He talked in his sleep, mumble-spoke, and at first it had confused me. “No,” he would laugh, and I would say “Yes,” clear awake, translating his mumbles to the language I wanted to hear.
Between shifts, we lay together, half-dressed. He told me the few memories he had of his parents, who both died young. Once, as a small boy, he had skipped into his house with a ladybug, excited to show off the colorful insect, and his mother, scrubbing pots, had taken the bug and squished it between her fingers. It was a story not intended to be sad, only true, but it made me so damn sad I couldn’t find the right words to say, the comfort and sympathy that was supposed to come naturally to women. I wanted one memory, just one, of my own mother. I worried I couldn’t be a good mother without having known my own.
I told Leon about Haifeng, the riverbank and the factory, the day I walked into the ocean. Our legs were intertwined, his foot brushing the inside of mine, an evil tickle, the sun forming a triangular shadow on the sheets. “Do you ever wish you were with a woman who didn’t have a child?”
“Of course not. I don’t want to be with another woman.”
The more Leon comforted me, the less comforted I was. His solidity was so different from Haifeng’s fawning, but it felt dangerous, it could be a trick, and I had to be careful. I was disappointed at Leon for not being able to properly reassure me and annoyed at myself for needing him to do so. I told myself I didn’t want to be married, especially not to someone without papers. Told him I didn’t care for weddings.
He said, “I’d still like to marry you one day.”
Alarmed, I said, “Let’s wait and see.”
My old roommate Cindy had told me it was a waste to marry a person without papers. And Didi had hit the jackpot: Quan was American-born, so she had a good chance at getting a green card. I imagined being without papers for the rest of my life, unable to drive or leave the country, stuck in the worst jobs. No different than staying in the village. I didn’t want a small, resigned life, but I also craved certainty, safety. I considered suggesting to Leon that we marry other people, legal citizens, for the papers, and after a few years we could divorce our spouses and marry each other. But I didn’t want to marry anyone else, and I sure as hell didn’t want him to either.
If I left him now, it wouldn’t hurt as much as it would if I left him later. I lay beside him, watched him muttering in his sleep.
NAIL POLISH FUMES MADE me dizzy, made my nostrils burn and the skin on my fingers peel off in bright ribbons. When I returned to the salon after a day off, my breathing got shallow and my eyes stung, but after an hour, I no longer noticed it. The tips at the salon still weren’t enough to cover my expenses. If I did nail art, I could get higher tips, but Rocky said I had to put down a $200 deposit to learn. I tried my English out on the customers who talked to me, asked their names, what they did for a living, where they lived in the city. I got accustomed to the awkward intimacy of holding a stranger’s hand while trying to avoid each other’s eyes. All the nail technicians spoke to one another in Mandarin. Joey liked to bake, brought in butter cookies for us to eat, while Coco, who was tall and skinny with a sleek helmet of hair, studied fashion magazines and knew the brands and styles of her customers’ clothes and bags. “That’s a knock-off Balenciaga,” she’d say, “you can tell because of the straps.” She spoke in a monotone, and people called her rude, but I found her refreshing. “The women with the real bags that aren’t knock-offs? They tip crap. They spent all their money on bags.”
Someday I would have enough money to spend on useless things. I wanted a better job, managing a salon like Rocky. There was a woman who used to work at Hello Gorgeous and had quit to run her own business in Queens.
Hana, who had the best English out of all of us, read phrase books on her breaks. “You need to leverage the advantage of having a child who’s growing up here,” she said. “That’s free English lessons daily. I learned the most English from my kids. I had them share their textbooks with me.” At home, I started to try out English words with you, tried not to let my frustration show when you laughed at my pronunciation.
“Let’s look at this together,” I said to Leon, turning the volume down on the TV. Hana had given me one of her old books. “I’m trying to learn twenty new words a week. The book says in two months we can be speaking at a third-grade level.”
“Third grade? That’s for kids. Baby level.”
“If you don’t try you’ll be speaking at a fetus level. Silent.”
“Most of the people in the world are Chinese, but you don’t see Americans trying to learn our language. You don’t need English at my job.” Leon took the remote control and raised the volume again.
Then you’ll be in the slaughterhouse forever, I wanted to say. It was a young man’s job, and when Leon’s back pain got so bad he couldn’t work there anymore, what kind of work could he get? I wasn’t making enough to pay all the bills. When these thoughts kept me up at night I would smooth them over with color, the same way I could brighten a fingernail in a few short strokes. I’d think of Leon and me, talking in bed on a late morning as you and Michael laughed in the living room. You calling Leon “Yi Ba,” the five of us eating in the kitchen together. Our meals were never silent.
And I hoped Vivian would become an older sister to me, the two of us cracking jokes on Leon and taking care of each other’s kids. Short and round, Vivian favored bright clothing, hot pink T-shirts with cartoon characters, pants with silver rhinestones down the sides. She took overflow orders from a factory, and some weeks there was a lot of work, other weeks nothing.
My first morning in the apartment, I told Vivian I liked her pants. She was snipping threads at the kitchen table, the floor crooked, the walls embedded with the remnant odors of past tenants, deep-fried, soggy with cooking oil. A moldy smell arose from behind them, more pronounced in hot weather, and if I could knock the walls down I might find mosses and vines, a trickling stream. Vegetation. Salamanders.
“Thanks,” Vivian said. One hand pulled the thread, the other angled the blade. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I bought pork for tonight.”