by Lisa Ko
Because I wasn’t really here. This was the life of another person I was watching in a movie, saying, What a pity, oh that poor woman, oh I’m so glad that isn’t me.
I pushed at the walls with my head. I’d crack them open so I could return to you. Keep you with me.
THEY BANDAGED MY SKULL, clucking at my head and scratched-up arms, and for days it felt like my brain was sprouting nails.
IN A ROOM WITH long rows of chairs and tables, I listened to a young man in a suit talk through wire mesh, his collar damp with sweat, his words muffled through the grating. I couldn’t tell what language he was speaking. The last person I had spoken to was a guard, the person before that a guard. The man in the suit said lawyer in Mandarin. As he spoke he gestured with his hands and I imagined them wrapped around my neck and I screamed.
I DON’T KNOW HOW many days later, I was in a van as it moved down a highway, and my eyes watered at the sudden sunlight. Then I was in a room with windows, the space so long I could sense myself falling. One by one, men in blue pants and shirts walked to the front of the room to speak to an older man who introduced himself as the judge. When it was my turn, the judge spoke to me, but he talked so fast, I couldn’t tell what he was saying.
A white woman was next to me in a brown suit, waiting for a reply. I dredged up one word and turned to the woman: why?
The judge slammed his hand on the podium. You don’t. Talk.
“What is your name?” the judge asked in English.
“Guo Peilan,” I said. “Polly Guo.”
He slammed his hand down again. The woman in the suit spoke in Mandarin. “You need to wait for my translation.”
“What is your name?” asked the judge again, and again I answered before the woman had spoken.
“You need to wait for my translation,” the woman repeated. “You can’t answer his question until I translate it.”
“But what am I doing here?”
“They want to deport you, but they need to get the right documents first.”
“They can’t do that. Where’s my lawyer? I have a son here, he’s an American citizen.”
The judge said something I couldn’t hear.
“Dismissed,” the woman said. “You spoke out of turn. He’s going to issue an order of deportation that says you didn’t show up today because you spoke out of turn.”
“But I showed up!”
The ride back to Ardsleyville was hot and shaky. A man in an officer’s uniform asked me to mark a paper printed with English words. I wrote my name on the line.
Back in my room, the walls dissolved and I stepped outside. I was becoming someone else again.
I REMEMBERED A SOLITARY light blinking on the tip of the plane’s wing, the man in the next seat jiggling his knees like he was about to jump out of his pants. It was night. I shivered, sweating, couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten, and then I leaned over and vomited on my shoes.
Two uniformed men ushered me off the plane with a twenty-yuan bill and a newly issued ID. There were people around me speaking in Mandarin, Fuzhounese.
“Where are we?” I asked one of the men in Mandarin.
“Fuzhou. Changle.”
“There’s no airport in Changle.”
“There is now.”
I found a door and pushed it open. I stood on the curb, nauseous, as mopeds and cars roared around me, the noise deafening, thunderous, and as I took a step forward a moped zoomed past, nearly knocking me over. The uniformed men had said I could go, but where? There could still be guards watching.
It was a cloudy morning in November, or January, and the air was packed with smells I recognized, memories of the village: burning wood and paper ashes, roast meat and salt, a brackish odor, swampy and thick with a tinge of rot. The scent of the riverbank. Was this was for real, or was it a trick? I needed to find you.
A minibus for Minjiang pulled up. The driver, a woman whose hair was arranged into long, curly ribbons, opened the door. I stared at her. She said, “You’re getting in, or what?”
I paid for a ticket with the twenty-yuan bill, sat by the window, and watched the road disappear behind me as we drove away from the airport. Nobody was following. For weeks, months, years, whenever I turned a new corner or opened a door, I’d expect to be ambushed by guards. Even now I can’t trust that they won’t come for me someday.
The entrance arches of the village were far wider than they’d been twenty years ago, extensions built onto the top and sides, and there were new street signs and lampposts. The dirt roads were all paved. I passed chickens and trucks and bicycles, plastic sheeting strung between poles, posters on the walls announcing new development projects. I searched the face of each person I saw, dreading the moment I’d recognize someone and wishing someone would recognize me, but although some people looked familiar, I couldn’t identify anyone I knew. After twenty years away, nobody looked the same.
At a newspaper stand I picked up the morning paper and saw the date on top. It was April, but the year was different. I had counted the days correctly. Fourteen months had disappeared while I was at Ardsleyville.
I felt faint. My head spun. I searched the newspaper vendor’s face, hoping for a sign of recognition, but none appeared.
On 3 Alley, the lane was cleanly swept and there was a fresh coat of paint on my old house. I tried to open the door, but it was locked. I knocked, and Mrs. Li answered, dressed in a lavender sweat suit printed with dark flowers.
“Peilan? What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing in my house?”
“We’ve been using it. My cousin and his family live here, though they went home to the countryside last week for the holiday. Are you back for the holiday?”
“What holiday?”
“Qingming.” Mrs. Li drew her words out slowly, eyeing my Ardsleyville uniform.
“You’re using my land? My house?”
“You were in America. We couldn’t contact you.”
“I didn’t give it to you.”
“You can stay if you want.”
“It’s not for you to decide.”
I pushed past her. The inside of the house had also been repainted. My old room was full of the belongings of Mrs. Li’s countryside cousin and his wife. Mr. Li had died eight years ago, and Haifeng and his wife had a son of their own, a five-year-old whose photographs Mrs. Li showed me. I was relieved to notice he didn’t resemble you.
Neighbors came by, though I couldn’t remember most of their names, and they looked shocked when they saw me. Had I changed so much? I told them I’d come home because there weren’t many jobs in New York, that you were staying with relatives until you finished school. To have been detained for over a year was embarrassing, like I’d been caught out of stupidity, and I couldn’t let anyone know.
Mrs. Li gave me a pink sweat suit to wear. I roamed the village without hitting a fence or a wall, swinging my arms and legs, gulping in the clean air. At the temple I saw my name next to Yi Ba’s on a plaque with the names of villagers who’d given money for repairs. Yi Ba must have donated with the money I sent home. I ate meat and rice and vegetables and not oatmeal, heard music and cars and people, walked for hours without guards ordering me inside. I tucked blades of grass between my toes and pressed my thumbs against leaves and bark. The dirt smelled sweet and the breeze was as soft and clean as freshly laundered sheets. But the house was no longer my house. Mrs. Li’s cousin had a little girl, and her books and clothes were strewn across the room downstairs. Yi Ba’s television was gone, a new one in its place. I found, hidden in a corner beneath the bed, one of your old shoes. I had bought them for you that first winter in New York, before sending you here. I held the tiny gray sneaker in my palm, remembered slipping it onto your little foot, pulling the laces tight. You must have been wearing it on the flight from New York. Dirt had settled into the creases, and the sole left my palm blackened with dust. I couldn’t find the other shoe.
That night, I slept in my house. T
he next morning, I took a bus to Fuzhou with five thousand yuan that Mrs. Li had given me for taking over my house. Later, I would learn that the house was worth at least fifteen thousand, even twenty, but by then it wouldn’t matter.
Downtown Fuzhou looked nothing like it had twenty years ago. Fountains spurted in a square, surrounded by statues of men and women with their arms raised, with faces that looked oddly European. People walked past me in business suits. In a telephone booth, I called the number for the loan shark, which I’d gotten from a neighbor on 3 Alley, and told the man who I was, my birthdate, how much I had paid off before leaving New York, that I was in China and wanted to know the balance.
“One moment,” he said. “Let me check.” I waited. Then the man got back on the phone and said, “Your debt has been paid. Your balance is now zero.”
I bit my fingers. Leon must have wired my payments, month after month, when I was in Ardsleyville.
I bought an international calling card and dialed Leon’s number, the one I thought I remembered. The phone rang twice and disconnected, no answer, no voice mail. I tried again and again and again and again. I stayed in the phone booth, attempting different combinations of phone numbers, all the numerical combinations that could possibly be Leon’s, but none of them was the right one. I even dialed my old cell, a number I did remember, which was answered by a teenage girl. I had never memorized the numbers for Didi or Hello Gorgeous. With each dead-end phone call, my optimism receded, until I was crying into the sleeve of Mrs. Li’s sweat suit. You were lost; my family was lost. Fourteen months had disappeared, and I didn’t even have a place to live.
It was hunger that finally drove me out of the phone booth and into a nearby food stall, where I ate until the shakiness retreated and my despair hardened into ambition. Mrs. Li had mentioned a nail salon, one of the first in Wuyi Square, and I found the address and introduced myself to the owner, a woman whose French manicure was flaking at the tips. “I worked in New York,” I told her. “Give me ten minutes and I can draw your face on your thumbnail.” By nightfall I had a job and a rented bed in a building full of Sichuanese workers.
Eighteen
A door slammed down the hotel hallway, followed by the sounds of footsteps. I stopped, mid-sentence, and heard two women talking, their voices fading as they walked toward the elevator, and felt like I had woken up from a trance. You’d asked me to tell you the truth, and now that I had, you looked like you wished I hadn’t.
“You couldn’t call me because I was already in Ridgeborough,” you said.
“I know that now. But back then, I was so worried.”
“But you found Leon. You even saw him. Didn’t he tell you I was adopted?”
I tried to figure out what I should say.
“You knew, and didn’t do anything?”
“I didn’t find him,” I said. “He found me.”
EVERY WEEK, ON MY one day off, I looked for Leon’s family. If I found them, they could put me in touch with him, and he would put me in touch with you. I had to keep believing this. So I took a minibus to Leon’s village and went to the homes of all the Zhengs in the phone book. Imagine how long that took. But nobody knew who he was.
To get to the district government office, I had to take two city buses followed by a minibus and then walk through a wasteland of parking lots. Then I waited outside a squat building in the humidity, sweating through my one clean outfit. The door was always closed, the blinds pulled tight. The silence was eerie and there was no shade, only sunlight on bare asphalt. Finally, the door would open and an official would walk out.
“Excuse me,” I would say, as they walked past me. I’d wait until they got back from their breaks. It could be five minutes, or two hours, and I had to intercept them fast, before they disappeared into the building. I learned to bring a bag of peanuts for lunch and a bottle of water, to speak politely yet forcefully, smiling to evoke both urgency and empathy. “I’m looking for the family of Leon Zheng. I’m his wife. We got separated. I need to find his family.”
After the first few visits the officials recognized me, and they’d flinch when they saw me waiting, avoiding my eyes. “Miss Guo,” one man said, “I told you last week that family registration records were classified. Unless you found your marriage certificate . . . ”
“I’ll come back again. I’ll call tomorrow.”
I went each week and called every day until a man said if I didn’t stop asking, they would arrest me.
For months, I only spoke if I had to, avoiding the other women at the boardinghouse, who treated me with suspicion and spoke to one another in Sichuanese. I had two outfits and washed each one in the sink at night after wearing it, hung it to dry on a rack I’d constructed out of dowels and rubber bands. I worked as much as I could, until I was too tired to be overrun by guilt, fury, and crushing sadness. Sometimes, painting a woman’s nails, I’d suddenly want to scream, and on breaks I’d go into the bathroom stall and do exactly that, stuffing my fingers into my mouth so no one could hear. The weeks melted by. Days off were the worst, because there’d be no work to distract me, and my mind was fresh enough to cough up memories of you and Leon and Ardsleyville. The hours spent waiting outside the government office were an opportunity to berate myself until I wished a bus would swerve off the street and flatten me. I started working seven days a week. I did a double take in the bathroom mirror when I saw the mournful, wounded expression on my face—like I’d been permanently punched—but it also seemed a fitting punishment.
One afternoon, after I had been in China for about six months, I was painting some lady’s toenails when I noticed a strange man in the salon. I returned to the toenails, but could sense him walking closer, and when I looked up I saw the gap between his front teeth and let a blob of polish fall on my knee.
“Little Star?” he said.
I finished the pedicure as fast as I could, asked a co-worker to take my next customer and led Leon outside and down the block. He said that one of the Zhengs in his home village, a man I’d left the salon’s address with, had run into him in Mawei.
We found an alleyway and put our arms around each other, and when I pressed my cheek to his, the smell of his skin was exactly the same. Musty and sweet, so beautiful, familiar. When was the last time anyone had held me? Too long ago. It had been Leon, before I’d been taken to Ardsleyville. I held him tighter, spoke into his neck. “Where’s Deming? Is he with you?”
“I need to tell you something.” Leon spoke at the wall. He told me how you had been adopted by a white couple, Americans in New York. Vivian had arranged it. She hadn’t known how to get in touch with me, and they’d thought I was never coming back.
“I should have never left,” he said. “If I hadn’t left, he would still be with me. It’s my fault. I don’t know how to get in touch with him.”
I heard Leon sniffle, and then the sound of my own crying. I yelled at him, blamed him, called him the worst names I could. For the past six months, I’d been alternating between holding out hope that I would find you and trying to accept that you were gone.
Leon drove me to the boardinghouse and I got my things. We went to a small apartment on the eastern edge of the city, which belonged to a friend who was out of town. I asked him why we weren’t going to his apartment, and he said, “I need to tell you something else.” And he did.
The first night we were together, I jolted awake. Fluorescent lights, a guard with a notepad—I felt a hand on my arm and shouted out loud.
“Little Star, Little Star.”
I saw Leon’s face. It was a repeating nightmare, the screaming in my sleep that my roommates complained about. The walls of the Hole, the weight of the handcuffs around my wrists and ankles.
Leon kissed me. “You’re here with me now.”
We only left the apartment for food, takeout meals we ate at the kitchen table naked, taking quick showers only to end up in bed again. Leon’s cell phone rang occasionally, but he rarely answered, and when he did, he was
considerate enough to take the call in another room. The third afternoon, he went out and came back with a bottle of pills, and that night my nightmares were blotted away, sleep reduced to a dark, blank square.
It was only five days, a fever dream, and by the end we were exhausted but still coming together, like two tired magnets that gravitated toward one another out of habit, or lack of choice. As long as we stayed in this room, time wouldn’t go on. We could pretend that two years hadn’t passed since we’d last seen each other, that we weren’t avoiding questions. That you weren’t missing.
You being gone like that, given over to another family like a stray dog, was too much to comprehend, and it hovered, like the rest of the world, just out of reach. I’d heard of a rural couple who had tried to get their daughter back from a family who had adopted her, but had gotten thrown in jail. I thought of taking all the pills at once, took them out of the bottle and counted them (there were thirty-five), and put them back inside. Maybe you could still find me.
As long as we stayed inside, your adoption would not be real. But Leon’s friend was coming home the next day and we would have to leave the apartment.
“I could come with you,” Leon said. We were eating breakfast in a bakery, had gone out to wash the sheets and towels. “We could be together again.” He held his arms across the table, his fingers wrapping around mine.
An ambulance drove past, and I jumped at the sound of the sirens. The past five days had been a delusion. He was asking me to stay with him because he thought it was what I wanted to hear, but he already had a family. I could see the relief in his face when I told him no.
Because being with Leon made your loss real. “Go home to your wife,” I told him. The first day we had been together I thought I could make him choose, but by the fifth day, I no longer wanted to. “Go home to your baby girl.”