Trade Me (Cyclone #1)(10)

My heart sinks. “What happened?” I try to sound calm. “Is Dad okay? Did something happen to him?” I can remember the last time Dad’s leg acted up. It’s a painful, visceral memory—of Mom working two jobs while trying to keep her other projects afloat, of my father refusing to go to the doctor because he couldn’t afford the visit. Of the infection that followed and a late night trip to the emergency room when his fever wouldn’t break. They’re still paying down that debt.

“No, not your father,” my mother says. “It’s Jack Sheng. You know Jack, right?”

I smile involuntarily. “I don’t know Jack.”

The idiom sails over Mom’s head. “That’s right. You never practice anymore.”

I make a noise in the back of my throat.

“No, no,” my mother says, “this is not a guilt trip. I promised you, no more guilt trips.”

I pull back from my phone slightly and look at it askance. She did promise me there would be no more guilt trips, but let’s face it, if it were possible to make a living running a guilt travel agency, Mom would be rich. She can send me on a round-the-world guilt cruise on two minutes’ notice. If I complain, she’ll tell me that it isn’t a guilt trip; it’s a guilt journey. I should know the difference; I’m in college now.

“About Jack Sheng,” she says. “His petition was denied. The IJ said his testimony was not credible. Why is Jack Sheng not credible?”

Listening to my mother talk always used to confuse my childhood friends. She speaks English with a thick accent. After my parents’ petition for asylum was granted, allowing us to stay in the US, she devoted all her spare time to helping friends navigate the immigration system. And Mom has many, many friends. Those friends also have friends, and both Mom and her many friends are on the internet, which raises the enterprise to a whole new level of acquaintanceship.

After years of helping others, her vocabulary is larger than most people would expect. It’s also peculiarly specialized.

Long experience allows me to translate my mother’s immigration shorthand. One of my mother’s many, many friends/distant acquaintances/internet message board buddies from her Falun Gong practice also tried to get asylum in the United States. The immigration judge—that’s the IJ my mother refers to; she’s picked up all the immigration lingo—didn’t believe that her friend had actually been persecuted by the Chinese government for practicing Falun Gong, and so denied his request for asylum. So Jack Sheng is going back to China.

“I don’t know why Jack Sheng is not credible,” I say, which is the simple truth. I stand up, pushing away from the frozen video of smiling child Blake, and cross the room to lean against the wall.

“Of course you don’t know. I don’t know, either. There is no legitimate answer.” I can imagine my mother waving her arms, tucking the phone between her chin and face. “This is the question we must ask. Why is Jack Sheng not credible? We have to raise money for an appeal.”

I pull my arms around myself. “Mom…” It’s not so much a protest. I have forty-three dollars and twenty cents in my checking account right now, and that has to last until my next paycheck, nine days away.

“I know, I know,” Ma says. “You’re a student. You don’t have so much. I’m not asking for your help.”

I nod, even though she can’t hear that.

“But I gave your check to Jack Sheng. So don’t be surprised if you see his name on the back.”

I swallow hard, leaning against the wall. Even with that support, my legs have all the strength of a rapidly falling soufflé. I slowly sink to the floor. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. And—I remind myself—I can’t scream at my own mother.

“This month,” my mom says, “Mabel can just try harder.”

God, it hurt so much to send that thirty dollars. That thirty bucks I sent means I can never take the easy way out and order pizza when I’m too exhausted to cook. It means that on Saturday nights, when my friends are taking time off to recharge, I’m the one frantically trying to get a head start on my homework for the coming week, because God knows I won’t have the time on weekdays. That thirty bucks means I never, ever get to take a break.

It was also supposed to mean that Mabel would get the meds she needs.

“Mom.” My voice is thick. “I didn’t give you that money for Jack Sheng. I gave it to you for Mabel.”

“But Jack Sheng practices Falun Gong,” my mother says, as if that’s the end of the conversation. And for her, it is.

“Yes, but I don’t,” I snap out.

I can hear the silence on the other end of the phone.

“Oh?” my mother asks.

I don’t say anything.

“It’s true,” she concedes. “When your father was in prison in China, you were not practicing Falun Gong.”

There is no response I can give to that.

“When our neighbors hid us so that I would not be taken away and tortured, too, you were not practicing Falun Gong.”

I shake my head. I was six. I remember almost nothing—nothing except a thick blanket of guilt, a dark wave of feeling that this was all somehow my fault.

“Falun Gong practitioners raised the money to bribe the authorities, smuggle us out of China, and fly us to America. You don’t practice Falun Gong. You don’t need to; they just saved your life, that’s all. But it’s okay if it’s not so convenient for you to remember that any more.”