The Leavers(50)

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.

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.