Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-One
Mimi
A woman standing beside Mimi at the baggage carousel was talking loudly.
“This airport is a zoo. You should have seen the immigration lines. It was nuts, so many people, so much noise. I felt like a refugee, for Chrissake.”
Mimi had erased almost everything about America from her memory until this point.
She had waited three hours in the immigration line to be interrogated by the officer behind the desk.
She presented the officer with a dense folder containing form after form.
The woman didn’t smile. She peered at Mimi through the glass with suspicion, and Mimi was overcome with that familiar feeling of wanting to be invisible again.
“Welcome to America,” the officer said with the robotic tone of constant repetition.
“Thank you, Madame,” Mimi answered.
Newark airport was both entirely different and just the same as the Philadelphia airport. The smell of confined air and windows that did not open were just as suffocating as she remembered. A glass prison where nobody could enter or be free of without their papers.
The airport carpet was worn from luggage being dragged across it.
She watched as overtired children sat amid their parents’ disheveled hand luggage.
It struck Mimi that this would have been her and Ngan all those years ago.
Ngan, playing under her seat. Ngan, screeching for another snack, Ngan demanding to be held, Ngan’s hand holding on to her ankle. Ngan, gone.
She arrived in America this time, seventeen years later, with no belief that anything might go her way.
This time she was armed with knowing what the worst possible thing felt like.
Losing Ngan, having no means to fight to bring her back.
She had looked the nightmare in the face, and it had already happened to her.
Nothing could be worse than that. So she firmly believed that it was her providence to fight every battle from here on, because it would be easier than anything that had already happened.
And she might just find Ngan. Her child could be anywhere.
Yes, she could be in a different state, a different country by now.
But there was also a small possibility that she could be within arm’s reach, and Mimi found herself looking at every young woman at the baggage claim belt who was what would have been Ngan’s age now, eighteen.
She knew she’d recognize Ngan instantly.
She instinctively followed her, pulling her suitcase along behind her, trying to imagine what her Ngan would look like now.
Mimi stepped outside and was surprised to be met with a gust of hot summer air.
In her memory, America was cold. But today, outside the arrivals hall of Newark airport, she was hit by a wave of heat.
Her sweatshirt immediately felt heavy, and she wanted to take it off.
She stood still and looked around until she spotted Madame America, waving at her from beside a bright blue car.
Sir America sat behind the wheel, scrolling through his phone.
Madame America hugged Mimi, and she felt herself freeze in her employer’s embrace.
She didn’t want to get into the car yet.
Mimi wanted to get a sense of her bearings, to understand where she was in relation to where she might start looking for Ngan, but there was no time.
She sat quietly in the back of the car, running her hand over the fabric of the seats.
The air-conditioning chilled her face. She already missed Toan.
She looked out and watched families embrace—families that looked nothing like her own but had missed each other, loved each other.
She scanned their faces until they became blurs ahead of her, and she tried to imagine how it would feel and look if it were her and her daughter, Ngan, outside the airport embracing after so long away.
How would she feel to hold Ngan, her daughter all grown up, in her arms again?