What Was Mine (9 page)

“Wake up,” he is saying, and tells me he heard something on the radio that can help me get a visa. He says it is my winning card, but that I must not reveal it until the interview is over. “The interview isn't over until it is over,” he says.

Later, I stood at an embassy window, nervously answering question after question, trying to hold myself upright during one answer, bowing my head at another. The man looked at my paperwork and then his hands reached for a big, red stamp. I knew red meant “refused.” And then I played the card Feng had given me.

I took a deep breath. “I congratulate you.”

The man looked up. He looked at me for the first time. “Why do you congratulate me?”

“Because your country has a space shuttle that succeeded in reaching the moon.”

This is what Feng had heard. The Americans' last moon shuttle had crashed but their next one had just succeeded in landing.

“Really?” The man turned to another man passing behind him. He spoke in English, but I knew he was asking if what I said was true.

When he turned back to me, his face had softened. The papers were between us and he pulled them back. When he pushed them toward me again, instead of a red stamp of refusal, I saw a black stamp of acceptance. I ran all the way home. Feng was waiting for me in the little park outside our housing complex. He knew by my face that his plan had succeeded. We began to cry, partly out of happiness but also because we knew this would mean I would go away, that I'd be separated from him and our son for a long time.

After my first excitement, I began to worry. I wondered if it would be worth the sacrifice to leave my family. When I confessed to friends my fears about going, they told me not to wish away my good luck. They said not to worry about Lin, my mother and Feng could raise him. But when they said these words, it felt like they were throwing stones at my sides.

The day I boarded the plane, I expected to feel excitement, but I felt only fear and great sadness. I sat by a window, waving to Feng and Lin, who stood in the airport window, waving until the plane pulled away. I tried not to cry. I wanted my son to see I was brave.

The cabin was warm and I went to the lavatory to take off the long underwear that Chinese wore then. It was only October, but I'd worn it to make room in my suitcase for the many gifts I was bringing my cousin. I stayed there a long time, crying quietly into the wool. I felt like I was separating myself from everything I knew, everything I loved.

W
hen I first came to America, I was shocked by how dirty it was. Even the floors of the modern airport were dirty. Also, the waste! In China, bones are saved to make soup, but in the restaurant in Chinatown,
we throw them away. Even though food is very expensive. A basket of eggs that cost pennies in China cost dollars in America. So I am surprised that here, rich people are thin and poor people are fat.

One thing I couldn't wait to see was Christmas. We'd heard about American Christmas in China. But Christmas wasn't a special day at the restaurant. Christmas was just like an ordinary day, only busier. Because families who don't celebrate Christmas come to eat at Chinese restaurants instead.

After two years, my cousin and his wife moved the restaurant to Queens. She stays home and we didn't need two ladies to take care of one baby. So now I must find another job. I must keep earning money to send home. I put up many signs in good neighborhoods, hoping a nice family would see this sign. This is how I met Lucy. At first, I cannot believe how much she will pay me for one hour. It is much more than I earned from my cousin's wife. And Lucy needs many hours, which is good for me. I don't have anything to do here but work.

I send money for Lin to go to a good school. I send money for his new clothes and new bike. I call home every week, but calling is so expensive that all we can afford is for everyone to say hi. I'd call at a certain time and they'd pass the phone from one to another: “Hi, this is Feng, I'm okay, are you?” “Hi, it's Mama, I'm okay, are you?” I'd go home every two years, bringing toys for Lin and English books that I'd read to him. We wrote many letters. I still have his to me. I'm sorry that Lin threw away the ones I wrote to him.

After two more years, when Lin was sixteen, Feng was also allowed to leave China. But officials wouldn't let him bring Lin, for fear that they would not return. So Feng comes by himself to this country, leaving Lin with my mother. I have my own apartment by now. With Feng getting dollars, too, I can soon go home and help Lin through the good high school that now we can afford. But the
only work Feng can find is dry-cleaning work. The smells are so bad, he says, it's for dogs to do. He is paid so little, he must walk forty blocks instead of taking the subway, or he earns no money. He can't find work like mine: high-paying and clean. So Feng goes home and our plan doesn't work. I work for Lucy until Mia is fifteen, going back to China only once a year. Then, my mother falls sick and I must go back to Shanghai to take care of her. But Lin is already grown up by now.

Every day I was with Mia, I loved that girl. But always in America, I missed my son who I love so much, enough to leave him.

T
he next day when she came to work, I asked what her name was. She had written it on a scrap of paper, but Mia had gotten hold of it and it was unreadable.

She didn't answer at first.

“What is your name?” I enunciated, more slowly, thinking she hadn't understood.

She startled me with “What do you want it to be?”

What kind of question was that?

She said she needed an American name. She'd started English lessons at a church in Chinatown and their homework this week was to come up with an American name.

She gazed at me hopefully and I couldn't explain my American resistance to taking away her good name and giving her another.

I asked what her Chinese name was. Wanling, she said. That name was beautiful, I told her. She didn't need another. But she said she wanted an American name. She thought it would help her be more American.

Mia squirmed in my arms and I thought of the baby-name books.

We looked up names that started with
W
. There weren't many. Winifred was awful. Wanda was worse. Winona? I said. Winsome? Wendy?
As soon as I said Wendy, she repeated it, as if tasting the word.

“Wendy.” She smiled, pointing to herself, and it was the first time I saw the Chinese way of pointing—putting forefinger to nose instead of to chest.

She pulled a clean, folded handkerchief from inside her sleeve and leaned toward Mia, gently wiping drool from her mouth.

“But you call me Ayi,” she said, gently lifting her from me. “Auntie,” she explained to me.

Mia grinned a two-tooth grin, already smitten. As was I.

I
did worry about putting someone in charge of my child who didn't have full command of the language. But while Wendy's English was lacking, she was beautifully versed in the language that mattered most to a six-month-old, the nonverbal language of taking care of a baby. She sat on the floor playing games with Mia, seeming never to tire of pushing blocks through a hole or building towers of plastic bricks. She'd sing songs in Chinese and read from board books and from colorful comic books she brought from Chinatown along with videotapes of the adventures of Monkey King, rewinding to scenes that made Mia laugh.

I was comforted by the fact that we lived in a first-floor apartment where a doorman was always just steps away. Nine-one-one services were particularly good in our neighborhood. We lived on a wide street.

I bought a beeper and devised an elaborate system by which Wendy could always communicate with me. (These were the days before cell phones.) “333” meant all was well and that the baby just wanted to hear the sound of my voice. “999” meant Wendy had a minor problem or question and I was to call as soon as it was convenient. “666” meant EMERGENCY—call home right away. Why had
I made the codes so similar? Several times I saw the beeper upside down and misread the 999 as 666 and my heart jumped and I couldn't reach fast enough for that little black square vibrating as if it was a heart, it was my heart, it was my lifeline to Mia. But as long as it was quiet, I could trust all was well.

N
o harm came to Mia when Wendy took care of her. The 666 never flashed on that screen. It was only in my care that Mia got hurt. Like the day I taught her to ride a bike. She fell on the sidewalk and there was so much blood from her knee, I scooped her up and ran with her to the doctor's office, three blocks away. She needed stitches and I held her hand and her face toward mine so she wouldn't have to look at the needle. He gave her three stitches. He advised six so there wouldn't be scarring, but I couldn't bear subjecting her to more trauma than necessary.

And before that, was a day I thought I had lost her. Wendy never lost her, but I did. That day, I discovered the magnitude of the wrong I'd done Marilyn, the brutality of the assault I had dealt her.

It happened in Bon Point—a fancy baby-goods store on Madison Avenue, gone now. Mia was still a baby, about one and a half. It was early Saturday morning. No other shopper was in the store. I'd rushed in with her to pick out a present for some baby shower we were on our way to.

As I was talking with a woman at the counter about various offerings under the glass, Mia was playing at my feet, or so I thought. I'd given her one of the plastic playthings Wendy kept in a net bag on her stroller. At a certain point, I glanced down, and Mia wasn't there.
I remember not being able to take my eyes from the place where she'd been, so certain that my eyes were playing a trick. It took a moment for my mind to take in that she must have crawled away. She wasn't anywhere I could see, but she couldn't have gone far. She couldn't walk yet. She was a late walker. “Where is my baby?” I shouted to the woman behind the counter, though she was standing just an arm's length away. Her eyes widened behind tortoiseshell readers and she promptly called out to the other saleswoman:
Shut the front door!
It was such an immediate reaction, I worried that they'd had this kind of trouble before. Why had they left the doors open? Store entrances were never left open on upper Madison then. Carnegie Hill, as the neighborhood was called, was not so gentrified as it is now.

The other woman hurried up the few steps to the entrance and pulled the doors shut. But I went after her, and flung them open again, emerging onto the broad sidewalk, looking down its length, for a figure making away with my baby. Madison Avenue looked deserted, the long pavements empty as in a ghost town and—though this is impossible—in my memory of that moment, tumbleweeds come at me, propelled by a whistling wind down the empty thoroughfare.

There was a station wagon parked directly in front of the store. Its windows were tinted. I lunged forward and pressed my forehead against the pane of the front passenger window, cupping my eyes with my hands to see through the glass. There were kids in the car, but none of them Mia. A middle-aged man behind the wheel looked up from his newspaper, startled. Without a word or gesture of apology to the man—which even in the moment, I registered as being uncharacteristic of me, raised to be unfailingly cordial—I turned and hurried back to the store. The woman at the front door opened it for me and asked my daughter's name and soon the store sang out with our chorus:
Mia! Mia? Mia!

Each call of her name was a blow to my chest and I realized that the pain I'd caused Marilyn was physical. I
made promises to the universe: if Mia was found, I'd set things right. I'd give her back. I'd figure out some way to do this without getting caught. I was highly paid to be a solver of problems. If I just put my mind to it, I'd come up with a way to solve this problem, too. If Mia was all right, if she wasn't harmed, or dead, I would do anything, anything wanted of me. All I could think of, saying it over and over again in my head, was a prayer, a mantra: please, please, please let Mia come back to me.

I continued calling out her name, imbuing the word alternately with beseechingness (
Mia?
), impatience (
Mia!
)
,
desperation (
MIA!
).

Soon, I thought, the cops would be brought in and I pictured myself breaking under their interrogations. I'd confess my secret, not caring about consequences. Consequences wouldn't matter if Mia were gone.

And then the air resonated with the words: “Here she is!” I hurried in the direction of the saleswoman's voice. There was Mia. She was quite safe, sitting in the middle of a circular rack of hanging clothes that the saleswoman had parted. She'd been hiding. Mia looked up at me, calm, unfazed. Her eyes had the glazed look of satisfaction she always had after she pooped—something she preferred to do in private, despite the fact that her diaper concealed the act. “Mia!” I cried, tears blurring my vision as I reached through merchandise to pull her toward me. The fumes coming from her seemed the sweetest scent I'd ever inhaled.

We didn't go to the baby shower. After changing her diaper in a dressing room—the saleswomen fell over themselves showing me into it—I took Mia home. In the cab, I sat holding her on my lap, my hands still shaking with gratitude for her.

It was fall. We drove through Central Park to the West Side, beneath
yellows and reds and golds glinting against a blue sky, past Rollerbladers, bikers, strollers, and runners, all moving in the same direction, as if an exodus were taking place.

Coming out of the park, we passed a sign for the Big Apple Circus. I made a mental note to buy tickets and realized that I wasn't going to keep my promise to the universe, after all.

M
ia was a big, fat baby, so carrying her is not easy for me. She didn't walk until she was more than one and a half. This is very late for a baby to walk. Lin took his first step before his Zhua Zhou party, the party for babies who turn one year old. It is the day we stop calling him his milk name, which is a name to fool the gods into thinking a boy is not worthy of attention, so they won't take him back. His milk name was MuMu, which means “wood.” My husband and I don't really believe this tradition, but we also don't want to risk our son's fate.