1
Chi Ku
Chi ku. In Mandarin, it means “to eat bitter”—to sacrifice and go through great hardships. My grandparents always added a second part: that one eats bitter in order to taste sweet.
I was born in Shanghai, China. My early memories were happy ones. I lived with my Nai Nai and Ye Ye, my grandmother and grandfather on my father’s side. They had a one-room apartment in the heart of the bustling Huangpu District that was the gathering place for all their grandchildren. I was the youngest and spent my days helping Nai Nai wrap delicate dumplings and watching Ye Ye read books until my cousins finished school and came home to play.
We lived in very tight quarters. My grandparents’ apartment barely fit a bed, a dresser, a small table, and a bamboo mat. Kitchen and washroom facilities were in the hallway and shared among a dozen families. When my parents first got married, they lived in the same room as Ye Ye and Nai Nai, their beds separated by only a curtain. When I was born, they moved out, to another apartment down the hall.
For most of my childhood in Shanghai, my mother lived away from home. She was a student at the same university where my Ye Ye taught, studying for a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree in English language and literature. Our neighbors spoke of my mother with awe. Going to college was exceptionally rare in those days. My mother had been in elementary school when the Cultural Revolution started and all schools ceased operation. Her mother—my other grandmother, Wai Po—smuggled books and taught my mother and her sister by candlelight.
It was a testament to Wai Po’s persistence that both of her daughters tested into university just after the Cultural Revolution ended, despite their having no formal schooling beyond elementary school. They each had to beat out millions of others who vied for a small number of coveted college openings.
It was expected that university students lived on campus. So I saw my mother every other weekend.
Once, she’d been away for longer. When she came home, I didn’t know what to say to her.
Nai Nai urged me to give her a hug. “Ask your mother how her studies are,” she whispered to me.
“How are your studies?” I said.
My mother was not one for hugs or small talk. She held me at arm’s length.
“Duo Duo’s hair is so long,” she said to Nai Nai, using my nickname, which was conceived out of irony. “Duo Duo” means “too many” and was a common moniker for children in families that had many offspring. I was born shortly after the start of China’s one-child policy, so I was destined to be the only child. “Duo Duo” didn’t mean that I was one too many, but that I was the only one to embody the many ambitions everyone had for me.
“I’m going to cut it tonight. She looks better with short hair.” My mother turned to me. I had a cold and was trying to suppress a cough. “Stop coughing. It will make your asthma flare up.”
That night, we were eating Nai Nai’s steamed fish when my chest started tightening. I started coughing and soon couldn’t catch my breath. Nai Nai grabbed my inhaler and told me to take two puffs. This was the routine. We tried the inhaler first, then she turned on a machine and put a mask over my face. If the attack was very bad, I’d swallow three pills, then put on the mask again.
“Isn’t that too much medication?” my mother called out. “Shouldn’t we go to the doctor?”
“No, we try this first,” Nai Nai said. “Most of the time, we don’t need to go.”
Nai Nai put the mask over my face. I took a few breaths, then pulled it off so that I could cough.
My mother was grabbing my hand. “She can’t breathe! We have to go get her help.”
“She’s fine!” Nai Nai insisted.
They both looked at me.
“I don’t want to go to the hospital,” I said. Tears were running down my face.
“Don’t cry,” my mother said. “The sniffing is not good for your asthma.”
“I’m not crying. It’s the mist from the breathing mask,” I said. Each word took a breath to get out, and I was panting. My chest felt tight. Any tighter, and I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to take the next breath.
I was terrified. I turned to Nai Nai.
“It’s OK,” she said. She took me into her arms and started singing the song from my preschool about monkeys and ducklings.
My breathing didn’t get better. With the next coughing spell, my mother began yelling that I was turning red and blue.
“Duo Duo is sick,” she said. “I have to take her to the hospital now.”
“I’ll go,” I said, “but I want to go with Nai Nai.”
There was a story Nai Nai would tell me that always gave me nightmares. It was about a beautiful woman who made many men fall in love with her. They would do anything for her. They all wanted to marry her and so bestowed her with flattery and gifts. What they didn’t know was that she was actually a monster who would kill them when she grew tired of them, which inevitably happened. When it became time, she would peel off her face, which was a mask all along, and reveal a horrific pale-faced ghoul.
Nai Nai told me the story so that I would be careful of strangers—they were not always who they said they were. Sometimes I had dreams about this woman being my mother, and I’d wake up soaked in sweat as I imagined her peeling off her face.
That night, when my mother stared at me, her face was as white as the pale-faced ghoul from Nai Nai’s stories. Nai Nai carried me in her arms, and my mother followed us out the door. Tears were running down my cheek, and also down hers.
* * *
IN THOSE DAYS, I DIDN’T understand why my mother and my father were gone all the time. Ye Ye and Nai Nai would tell me that it was chi ku: their lives were hard so that my life could be better.
Chi ku was the same answer my grandparents gave when I asked them about their early days. From my aunt and my cousins, I’d pieced together some details, though most of their story remained unclear. I know that they had grown up in a poor village near Guangzhou in southern China and got married in their teens. Somehow, Ye Ye was able to go to school and defied all the odds to attend university and become a renowned linguistics scholar in Shanghai.
During the Cultural Revolution, he and other academics were deemed elitists and targeted for persecution. Ye Ye was tied up and beaten in front of his students and then imprisoned. Nai Nai was forced to leave her children, who were sent to labor camps. Their home was burned and every possession confiscated by the government. My father, then in his twenties, ran away and became a revolutionary against the Communist regime. He was caught, jailed, and suffered innumerable abuses that I would only learn about many years later.
The one story that Nai Nai liked to tell was how my parents met. The Cultural Revolution had ended, and she and Ye Ye had rebuilt their lives in Shanghai. Nai Nai’s concern was her only surviving son, who was approaching forty and still didn’t have a wife or child.
She asked Ye Ye, who by then had been restored to his faculty position at the university, to set my father up with one of his students. In those days, unmarried men and women were not supposed to go out by themselves. This woman brought her roommate as a chaperone on their first date.
That roommate was my mother, and it was love at first sight for her and my father. My father was eleven years older, handsome, and a rebel. They were married within months.
People told different versions of their courtship. I knew that Wai Po didn’t approve of the relationship, but nobody explained why. Did they have a wedding? I was always told no, but then my aunt showed me a photo of my mother in a wedding dress. I asked Nai Nai about it. She immediately put the picture away and said that we shouldn’t talk about it anymore.
My father was absent for long periods of time. When he was home, he had many friends who came to visit. I didn’t know any of their names; I was told to call all of them “uncle.” One day I asked one of the uncles whether he was an engineer like my father. Nai Nai was so upset that she took me outside to the hallway and slapped me, the only time she’d ever hit me. “Never say anything to anyone about your father,” she said.
When he was at home, my father reentered our daily lives as if he were never gone. He went to work during the day and spent time with the family at night. Nai Nai and my aunts—his sisters—would fawn over him, and someone would always make his favorite meal of spare ribs and sticky rice.
One day, my father took me to the park. There was a lily pond, and I reached in to try to touch the fish. I lost my balance and fell in the water. It was winter and I was freezing. The pond was probably no more than a few feet deep, but I was terrified. The next thing I remember, my father was in the pond with me. He lifted me out and, as I proudly reported to Nai Nai and Ye Ye, he saved my life.
For months after that, every time Nai Nai would take me to the park, I’d peer into the lily pond in the hope that I would see my father’s reflection. Once, I deliberately stepped into the water, certain that my father would materialize and rescue me. I had either grown taller or the pond was shallower, because the water only came up to my chest. My father did not appear, and after a moment I climbed out, wet and disappointed.
* * *
I WAS SEVEN WHEN MY mother told me that she was leaving.
It was the first warm day of the new year. We were walking along the Huangpu River. I remember my mother buying two ice cream sandwiches from the sidewalk vendor. Mine was melting and my mother took out a tissue to wipe my hands. Hers had melted, too, and she also had ice cream all over her face. We pointed to each other and laughed.
“Duo Duo, now I’m going to tell something,” she said. “Ever since your father and I met, we’ve been looking for a way out of China.” She explained that because of my father’s rebellious activities during the Cultural Revolution, he was labeled a political dissident. Whenever foreign dignitaries came to visit, and whenever the government perceived an internal threat, he would be taken in for questioning. Sometimes he was imprisoned.
“He lives in constant fear. We all do,” she said. “You must have seen that our family has different circumstances than other people.”
I nodded. Virtually everyone in my parents’ and grandparents’ generations had experienced great suffering during the Cultural Revolution, but I saw that there was something unusual about my family. Although they behaved as if nothing was wrong when my father went away, they would never speak of him, and in their silence I would feel their anxiety. When he’d come back, he would always be thin and gaunt, with dark shadows under his eyes. Nai Nai and my aunts would fuss over him, but our neighbors stayed away. Classmates who would stop by after school to play would stop coming.
“I knew when I married your father that our lives will always be like this while we’re in China,” my mother went on. “This is not a good life for us, and it will not be a good future for you. One needs to look forward, not always behind, because one is always afraid of the shadows. That’s why I study so hard, so that I can get into an American university.”
Later, I’d learn that this was one of the few ways out of China at the time, and that this had been my parents’ plan from the time they first met. My mother must have known that this was what she had to do, and how much my father and our entire family were counting on her.
It took a year to apply, and another full year for my parents to borrow enough money from relatives to supplement their savings for the visa and plane fare. The plans were finally coming together. They had enough to buy her ticket (and tickets for my father and me to follow afterward), her visa was approved, and she was about to start a PhD program.
In fact, she’d been accepted to two PhD programs. One was at the University of Illinois in Chicago, to continue her work in English literature. The other was at Utah State University, in educational psychology. Her professors didn’t know much about Illinois, but someone had a colleague who knew someone who had studied in Utah. In addition, my mother thought that psychology was a more useful degree than English. “English is useful in China, but in America, who wants a Chinese person who specializes in English?”
So, Utah it was. In less than a week my mother would be leaving for a place called Logan.
“Duo Duo, we are going to America,” she said. “You are going to be an American.”
Soon, she was gone. No one could tell me when I’d see her again. My grandparents showed me a letter that said she had arrived safely. They acted as if it was just like when she went away to study at the Shanghai university, but I knew this was different. There was a plan that my father and I would join her, but no time line. It depended on when my father was home again, and whether our visas would come through.
The days went by as we waited, and the magnolia trees grew delicate blossoms and then turned a golden brown.
* * *
AS THE WEEKS STRETCHED INTO months, I became more and more convinced that I didn’t want to leave the life I knew. My girlfriends and I read sad poems aloud to each other about eternal friendship. We vowed that we would keep in touch. I told my cousins that I wanted to live with them. My journal entries from those days had long treatises on why I didn’t want to go to America.
I begged Ye Ye and Nai Nai to let me stay. Ye Ye tried to console me, but Nai Nai was unyielding.
“Do you know why your mother is in America?” she asked, her thick eyebrows furrowing as her lips pursed together. “She doesn’t know one person there. It is frightening for her, but she is doing it because she wants you to have a better life.” She handed me a dish towel. “Dry your tears and never speak of your selfish desire again. From now on, you are living for something bigger than yourself.”
If my parents were eating bitter for me, I needed to learn to eat bitter for them, too.
I have only two more memories of my life in China. One was in the hospital. I was being led to see my father. A nurse pulled back the curtain, and I didn’t recognize the man in the bed. His eyes were yellow and there were two tubes down his throat, one through his mouth and one through his nose. I watched the nurses change his sheets, and they were stained with black tar that smelled like week-old chicken liver. In my clinical work later, I’d recognize this distinct scent of gastrointestinal bleeding. Every time I smelled it, I’d see my father lying in that bed, prone and helpless, and me staring at him just as helplessly.
The second memory was of our last hours in China. The day after my father was released from the hospital, we headed to the airport. As we walked through the terminal, my father leaned on my aunt on one side and Nai Nai on the other.
It would soon be my job to watch out for him. In the months since my mother had left, Ye Ye had been trying to teach me basic English phrases. I didn’t learn nearly enough to communicate, so we came up with a plan. Ye Ye gave me twenty slips of paper. Each had Chinese on one side and English on the other.
“My father has a bleeding ulcer. He just had an operation and blood transfusions. Please call a doctor,” was one. I also had slips of paper to explain that we had visas and that my mother was waiting for us. Ye Ye and I practiced each situation, and he gave me his English-Chinese dictionary in case I needed to translate something that wasn’t on the paper.
At the gate, we said our goodbyes. Nai Nai had warned me not to cry. I lasted until I saw that she herself couldn’t hold back her tears. I hugged her and Ye Ye. We knew we might never see one another again.
Thankfully, I didn’t need to use the slips of paper during the flight. My father and I landed at Los Angeles International Airport on December 12, 1990, and went through immigration without incident. The immigration officer asked me for my name, and I told him “Linda”—Ye Ye and I had decided that it was the English name closest to my Chinese name, Linyan. The officer wrote down “Leana” and pronounced it as I do now, “Lee-na.” That was my new name. My father, Xiaolu, became “Louis.” My mother, previously Ying, was “Sandy.”
We still had one more flight, a much shorter one. When “Louis” and I arrived in Salt Lake City, there was a tall white man with my mother, whom she introduced as her professor. He was her thesis adviser and the person who had sponsored her visa. Only much later did I recognize how unusual it was for a professor to offer to drive nearly three hours each way, in heavy snow and sleet, to pick up the family of a student. This was the first of many acts of kindness we would experience in America.
* * *
OUR NEW HOME WAS IN the graduate student accommodations of Utah State University, on the second floor of a set of low-rise buildings. The one-bedroom apartment was easily five times the size of Ye Ye and Nai Nai’s room in Shanghai. My mother showed me how the kitchen and bathrooms were actually inside the apartment and that they were our own. Everyone kept their doors closed, and I didn’t hear the neighbors except when they came out into the courtyard area.
All I could think about was how cold it was! After the flights and visas, my parents had only forty American dollars. That was all they came to the United States with. It was a lot for them—it was what they had earned in China in a year. Heat was a luxury we could not afford. Because electricity was included but not heating or hot water, I helped my mother boil water on the electric stove and used that for everything: to cook, to wash our hands, and to fill the bathtub.
We washed our clothes by hand and hung them to dry on the balcony. The next day, there were icicles covering everything. When I tried to take down the clothes, my father’s shirt broke in my hand. To go out, I wore five layers of pants and even more sweaters. When I walked through the snow, my sneakers and pants quickly became soaked. At night, we slept huddled together to keep warm.
A week after we arrived, someone knocked on the door. There was no one there when we answered, but there was a huge brown bag just outside. In it were several pairs of boots, winter coats, mittens, hats, and a thick down blanket.
There was also a note: Welcome home.
Apparently, the local church had held a clothing drive for our family. This was the same church that would host us for every holiday meal, enlist volunteers to teach me English, and raise money for my father’s hospital stay when his ulcer bled again.
“Americans are so nice!” my parents said often. “We are so lucky.” My father speculated that Utahans must be kind to outsiders because they needed more people to live there. In comparison to Shanghai, a city of twenty-four million people, Logan was minuscule, with a population of thirty thousand who were nearly all white and Mormon. But there was just a handful of us immigrant families—all tied to the university—and welcoming us could not be the solution to increasing the population.
My mother thought it was because America is a land of immigrants, that everyone had relatives who were once strangers in a strange land. She also attributed the warm welcome we received to the church, which was a new experience for us. We were not allowed to have religion in China. Everyone around us went to church every Sunday, and I started going, too. The values I was taught, of tolerance, respect, and compassion, were the values exemplified by my mother’s professor, our neighbors, and everyone else in our community. I didn’t understand the intricacies of Mormonism versus other forms of Christianity (or other religions, for that matter), but I did appreciate the early grounding I received in a community of faith and fellowship.
* * *
A FEW WEEKS AFTER WE arrived, I started school at Hillcrest, the local public elementary school. I was entering the third grade midway through the school year. That morning, I practiced saying, “Hello, my name is Lee-Na” in front of the mirror, dressed in my newly donated winter coat over three sweaters and four pairs of pants.
My mother walked with me to my new school and introduced me to the teacher.
“Hello, my name is Lee-Na!” I said. I bowed to her. She said something to me that I didn’t understand. She saw my puzzled expression and said it again, slower, but I still didn’t understand.
This continued throughout the day. I wondered if the words Ye Ye taught me were really English. Everyone spoke at what seemed like fifty times the speed of what I’d learned. I also got very hot, and by the end of the day I was carrying around a pile of sweaters and pants.
I was also hungry. In my school in China, every student would get a bowl with rice and vegetables, sometimes some pork shavings, and we’d go to assigned tables. In America, I had no idea where to start once I walked into the cafeteria. Students looked like they were picking and choosing different foods, but they were all nothing I’d seen before.
I tried to mimic what others were getting. When I got to the line, I saw that there was a cash register. I didn’t have any money. I left my lunch on the counter and hid in the bathroom until the bell rang.
After two weeks of hungry afternoons, a teacher found me in the bathroom. She helped me sign up for a free lunch program and showed me how to put food on my tray. I learned that in America, people like to eat their food separately, green beans separated from the chicken and potatoes instead of all mixed together in one bowl. I learned that in America, milk came in a little paper container and that there was a way to peel it open without splashing the contents everywhere.
I also learned that in America, it wasn’t just adults who are kind. On my first day of eating school lunch, four students sat down next to me.
“Hello, my name is Becky,” one of them said. “Want to play together at recess?”
I wasn’t sure what that meant. She pantomimed skipping rope, something I loved. I nodded eagerly. “Oh! Yes!”
“That’s jump rope,” she said.
“I like jump rope!” And I was thrilled to be having my first conversation with real Americans.
Every recess, I played with Becky and her friends. She invited me to her home after school. Becky had several brothers and sisters, and they also brought over their friends. Her mother gave us cut-up apple slices and the occasional Oreo cookie. We’d sit on her bunk bed in the room she shared with her sister. From school and from my new friends, I picked up conversational English quickly and soon was able to talk to Becky about our families. I was fascinated by how her family could trace their roots to Joseph Smith and the mass exodus to Utah. She was just as transfixed by my stories of Ye Ye, Nai Nai, and a land that seemed so far away.
Just as I did in China, I enjoyed going to school in America. My teachers prepared extra homework for me, and I used Ye Ye’s dictionary to memorize twenty new words every night. I went to church with Becky’s family, and our Bible study teacher would stay after Sunday service to tutor me. Older children and adults would make a point of speaking to me and helping me learn English. Their efforts paid off. Within two years, I would win my grade’s spelling bee.
So many people helped me in those early days. As with my friends in China, I’ve long lost contact with Becky, our Bible study group, and my other teachers. I wish I could find them to tell them how much their generosity and kindness made all the difference in my life.
I also didn’t appreciate at the time how much my family relied on public services to help us in those difficult days. My mother went to a public university that granted her free tuition and subsidized our housing. I took part in a school lunch program and attended public schools from elementary school through college. We had Medicaid and relied on reduced-cost clinics for our health care. Later on, we would need food stamps and housing assistance during particularly difficult times.
For us, these public assistance programs were not “entitlements.” My parents weren’t using them to game the system; they were trying their best to make it on their own, and these programs ensured that our basic needs were met. My parents certainly had no plans to depend on the government in perpetuity. In fact, my mother spoke constantly about how she was ashamed to be “taking advantage.” In her mind, public assistance was reserved for the neediest, and since there was a finite amount of services, she strove to get us out of this category so that the services could be used by others.
“Always remember how good this country has been to us,” she’d tell me. “China may be where we were born, but America is where we have chosen to make our home. America is our country now, and we must give to our country and its citizens.” It was this spirit that would lead her, in time, to retrain as a public school teacher and to choose to work in some of the most challenging areas in Los Angeles.
Though my parents and I were now living together, I still almost never saw them. My mother was studying during the day and then went to her job of cleaning rooms in a guesthouse across town. I was usually asleep by the time she came home, and she was always gone by the time I got up to go to school.
My father, too, was laser-focused on getting work. Unlike my mother, who spoke fluent if heavily accented English, my father didn’t know the language and didn’t have the benefit I did of immersion at a young age. He was a very proud man who hated to admit that he had a major deficit that held him back in our new home. There were no “English as a second language” classes for him to take, and even if there were, I’m certain that he would have prioritized earning an income. He’d learned enough English to get his driver’s license, but he turned red when people addressed him. “Sorry, I don’t speak English,” he’d respond.
Every day my father would leave in the morning to look for work. There was nowhere that would make use of his engineering background, but he was quick with his hands and eager to do anything. He did some handyman work for our neighbors until the local plumber asked him to stop. A couple of downtown businesses gave him odd jobs like cleaning and restocking shelves. At some point, he went to another town to work in a cheese factory. He never talked about what happened there, but after a month or two, he came home and told us that he couldn’t set foot there again—and to this day, he cannot bear the smell of cheese.
There were many nights when I’d wake up to my parents’ raised voices as they argued over money and work. My father would talk about how unhappy he was and why he needed to move to another city so that he could make use of his skills and earn money. He had a friend from Shanghai living in Los Angeles, which is where he wanted to go because L.A. had many more opportunities. My mother would counter that she was doing fine in Logan and she needed to complete her degree. Also, our family had been apart for so long and was finally together. Stay for Duo Duo, she’d plead. Eat bitter for her.
One day, my father left for Los Angeles. I wrote in my diary that they must have had a fight, because we didn’t say goodbye—he just left. We had lived together for such a short time. I worried about him and when we’d see him again. We had no money for long-distance calls, so we communicated by mail. I’d send him updates about my school, and he’d write back to tell us about L.A. I pictured it to be just like Logan, only bigger. The people would be just as nice, only there would be more jobs for my parents.
When my mother finished her PhD, my father came back to pick us up. By now I was ten years old, and it was time for a new adventure. We packed all our belongings into a car and drove west, with a detour along the way to Yellowstone National Park.
Our stay at Yellowstone was brief—we spent two nights in a motel before the long drive south—but I associate it with some of our happiest times as a family. Someone took a photo of me feeding a squirrel. My right hand is raised as I watch the squirrel cautiously. My parents are standing behind me, just out of focus, holding hands and smiling. This is my lasting snapshot of our time at Yellowstone, the two of them enjoying each other’s company and mine.
It would be the first and only road trip, and the first and only vacation, that we ever took together.
* * *
LIFE IN L.A. WAS NOT at all what I expected. For the first couple of months, we stayed with my father’s friend. My father was delivering newspapers for a Chinese company, and my mother found work for a translation business that promised to sponsor her work visa. Soon, they saved up enough money and we moved into a two-bedroom duplex that housed three families.
It wasn’t long before we had to leave. My father’s van was stolen, and he got fired. The company my mother worked for closed so suddenly that one morning she went into work only to find that all the office furniture had been taken away. She couldn’t get the wages owed to her.
My mother tried to plead with the landlord that we needed a few more weeks. Couldn’t he spare us and give us more time to find the rent? He gave us a week but increased the rent. We couldn’t make the payment. Neither could one of the other families, who were evicted along with us.
This time, there was no one to help us when we were out of options. My father’s friend would have tried, but he and his family were going through hard times, too. There were no church communities, no kind professors, no school friends, and no acts of lenience and compassion. We weren’t in Logan anymore.
We found another place to stay. It was affordable for a reason: most of the other houses on the block were boarded up. In our apartment complex, there were condoms and needles in the staircases. It was right next to the railroad tracks, and every night we could feel the rumbling of the trains as we heard sirens all around us. One day, we had a break-in. We came home to find drawers emptied and belongings all over the ground. What cash we had was gone, and all the windows were smashed. The burglars left a note: Go away Chinks.
In those first several months in L.A., we would move at least four more times. It always had to do with money that we didn’t have.
At some point, my mother and I ended up in a shelter that only accommodated women and children. (My father found a place that housed migrant male workers.) My mother and I would look for a bed at this shelter every night. There was one day when my mother came back late, and we were told that our beds were no longer available. My mother pleaded with them, but they couldn’t make an exception.
We spent the last of our savings on a motel room. The owner, who was Vietnamese and had young kids herself, took pity on us and let us stay the rest of the month there. We paid her what we could. My mother did some cleaning and I helped out at the front desk.
We moved into our own place again when my mother found a job in a video store. It was a store that rented adult videos. I knew my mother was ashamed. She never told me what this video store did, but I heard my father shouting at her about how indecent it was. She’d yell back that at least she had work and it was supporting our family.
I also knew that my mother was suffering abuse from her boss. She’d often come home crying, and I’d see bruises around her wrists. She wouldn’t talk about exactly what he did, but I could feel her powerlessness and humiliation. I knew that she had to put up with it for us—for me.
The more tenuous our financial situation, the worse my parents fought. I’d curl up against the wall and pretend to be asleep while they shouted at each other. She blamed him for not being able to find a job because he didn’t know English; he asked what was the point of her years of education if she couldn’t find better work.
There was another worry that was just as existential as our financial problems: our immigration status. My parents talked about it constantly. Going back to China was not an option, but neither was overstaying our visa. The one thing my mother feared more than anything was the prospect of us losing our immigration status.
“We cannot ever become illegal,” she’d say virtually every day. We knew of so many families who had become undocumented, and it prevented their work opportunities and limited their children’s educational potential.
I was optimistic that my mother would figure out a situation through work. She had several employers who brought her on with the agreement that they would sponsor a work visa for her. Every time, though, they’d end up reneging once they saw how expensive and onerous the process was.
As always, my mother had a backup plan. One day, I came back from school to find her folding my clothes.
“You and I are moving to Canada,” she said.
Canada? This was the first I’d heard of it. My mother explained that Canada had more welcoming immigration policies than the United States, and they’d given my mother and me a visa to enter the country.
This was Plan B. Plan A was through my father, but it was much riskier and unlikely to succeed. Years ago, he had applied for political asylum. It was a long process. We hadn’t heard anything, and our visas were running out.
“If he gets it, then all of us can stay,” my mother told me. “But I don’t think it’s going to work. We don’t have enough time. Then we have to go with the other plan. Your father and I will get divorced. That way, he can marry someone who has visa status. It’s called a paper marriage, and people do this all the time.”
I could not fathom what she was saying. All I knew was that I couldn’t start all over again.
I started pleading with my mother. I told her that I missed Nai Nai and Ye Ye but had finally got used to America. That I missed my friends in Logan and was finally figuring it out in L.A. I was doing well in school again. “Why do you have to ruin my life?” I said.
“This is not just about you,” she replied. She finally turned to look at me. I saw from her face that she was going to tell me something very serious. “Duo Duo, can you keep a secret?”
“If I do, can I stay here?”
She sighed. She sat down on the bed and gestured for me to sit next to her. She took my hand and put it on her belly.
“This is my secret,” she said. “Meet your little sister. You cannot tell your father. If you tell him, he won’t go through with the plan. He won’t want to divorce or for us to be apart.”
I had no idea what to say.
“Look, Duo Duo, I don’t want to leave and start over, either,” she continued. “I’ve tried so hard to make a new life for us in this country. This is a setback, that’s all. Can you help me so we get through this together?”
That night, we packed up everything we could fit into four suitcases. My mother told me about our new home: Calgary, Alberta. I checked out a French dictionary from the library and began to drill myself in French vocabulary words, thinking that everyone in Canada spoke French. I started saying goodbye to my friends.
A few days before we were to board the plane to Canada, my father was called to his immigration hearing. At the last minute, a friend convinced him to bring a lawyer with him.
This turned out to be key. They were in with the immigration officer for under an hour when they were told that our asylum status was granted.
It’s over, I thought. We can stay in America. Our family can stay together. We don’t have to start all over again.
Most of that turned out to be true, but there was one outcome I could not have fathomed. In April 1994, my little sister was born. I was eleven and so excited to have a little companion. I’d picked her name, Angela, because to me, she was an angel, a gift from heaven. I had big plans for her. She wouldn’t have all the family around as I did growing up, so I had to make up for that with my own love and attention. And I needed to shield her from all the trouble I’d gone through so that she didn’t have to chi ku.
My parents had a different plan. They decided that it would be best for Angela to be raised in China by my grandparents. When she was just three weeks old, she was gone.
I was heartsick and furious. I couldn’t understand how my parents could send away our own flesh and blood. I wrote in my diary that my mother must not have wanted either of us. If she did, how could she stand to send my baby sister away?
It would take me many years to understand the difficulty of my parents’ choice and the depth of their sacrifice.
Copyright © 2021 by Leana Wen
