White Ivy(20)
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ON A SWELTERING Saturday in August, Sunrin drove Ivy to a very different part of Chongqing, full of crumbling gray and brown homes, where laundry fluttered over plastic wash bins on cement balconies. Aunt Hong came out to greet them, a broader, older version of Nan in a floral blouse and checkered slacks. “Thank you for taking our Jiyuan,” she said to Sunrin, bowing repeatedly. “I hope she wasn’t too much of a bother! Nan says she has a weak stomach, she’s always been a sickly child… and the trouble you’ve gone through to take her traveling…” Aunt Hong went on and on. After two weeks of listening to Sunrin’s mellifluous “proper” Mandarin, Aunt Hong’s coarse dialect jarred Ivy’s ears. Sunrin drove off in her gray German car after one last jaunty wave and throaty laugh, the fairy godmother back to her fairyland, and Ivy abandoned, back to the real world.
Everything about this new neighborhood repulsed her. Old men spitting on the sidewalks, little boys peeing on the street corners, rotting meat hanging from hooks along the stores, the pushing and shoving and random violence that seemed to occur on a regular basis: fistfights, knife fights, women pulling at each other’s hair while a circle of onlookers shouted their allegiances. The noises from the street vendors woke her up every morning, selling freshly butchered meat, farm-picked vegetables, dried herbs, teas, fresh fruit, dried fruit, nuts. It was a cacophony all day long until late evening, when the food vendors went home and then the entertainment vendors set up shop selling pirated American movies, cotton pajamas, plastic house slippers, cheap light-up toys. This was Meifeng’s China, the one she had sold her daughter to escape.
Aunt Hong’s older daughter, Yingying, was in her late twenties and engaged to a middle-aged man who owned a car repair shop. The younger daughter was named Wang Yan Jiu but everyone called her Jojo. She was only nine months older than Ivy but nevertheless called her meimei, an endearment given to younger sisters. Jojo was short and thickset, dressed most of the time in basketball shorts and tight, flashy T-shirts, her hair brushed into a fluffy bob. Her eyes were the same as Ivy’s—those beautiful lashes. Jojo always said what she thought, even if it got her in trouble, as it almost always did. Ivy recalled Nan’s old stories of Jojo’s delinquency: how she flunked all her exams, skipped class, how she got kicked out of school for fighting her classmates, how she smoked and drank and tattooed her bicep at age nine with the Chinese character for free, how she never listened to her mother and suffered beatings for her uncontrollable temper. Stories like this always ended with: “Poor Jojo. But then, she never had a father.” It wasn’t her fault, they said. She’d had no firm hand growing up.
Those first few days at Aunt Hong’s, Ivy was quiet, apathetic to all the foods and entertainment her aunt and cousin tried to engage her with; her complexion dulled. At the dinner table, the plastic tablecloth under Ivy’s elbows sticky with oil residue, Aunt Hong and Jojo would laugh at the television set as they ate, chewing with their mouths open, lips smacking, and Ivy would wonder in despair how it was possible she was related to these people. At night, she would press herself against the wall so her new pajamas, which still retained the faint perfume of the Oriental Plaza, wouldn’t brush against Jojo, who was squeezed beside her on the living room cot. There were still three weeks left in China. Ivy counted down each day until she returned to West Maplebury, to Grove, where, believing herself fundamentally changed through Sunrin’s influence, she anticipated her classmates’ heads turning as she walked down the hall with her new buttery lamb-leather satchel with the silver buckles, wearing the cognac penny loafers, slim at the toe with a little half-inch wooden heel so that her legs would appear as long and graceful as Violet and Nikki Satterfields’. The experience of wealth, if only secondhand, had left its indelible mark on her heart, so that long after the details of Sunrin’s house and car had faded from her mind, she would remember what it felt like when shopgirls swirled around her, their faces gleaming with respect and deference, and herself, fearless in the possession of something no one could take away from her.
Things gradually improved at Aunt Hong’s house. Mostly because her cousins and aunt constantly told her what a treasure she was. Her skin was as light and fine as an egg white, her figure was thin and stylish, her inner qìzhì was classy and refined, plus she liked to read books—“when’s the last time you read a book?” Aung Hong chastised Jojo. Plus, Ivy was American. Ivy had quickly realized that to be an American in China was almost as good as being royalty. She was of a superior nationality, and they all revered her English fluency, which her family made her show off to the neighbors at every occasion.
At first, Ivy treated these lavish praises with skeptical dismissal, priding herself on her indifference to the opinions of these lesser relations, but as these compliments were in line with what she believed about herself—she was different, she did read more books, her eyes were large and dazzling—her heart softened toward her relatives and she even imbued them with qualities like honesty, good sense, humility, so that their opinions would carry more weight and raise her esteem in her own eyes.
It wasn’t just her relatives. Waiting in line at the Ferris wheel, the operator whispered: You have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen; after eating at a noodle stall, the cashier asked for payment in the form of her scrunchie; playing DDR at an arcade, she was scouted by a “talent agent” for a hair commercial; on a rowboat in Changshou Lake, the neighboring rowboat full of teenage boys called out to her, “Hey, mei nü, over here, come on board!” Mei nü literally translated to “beautiful girl.”