Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Lee Lee
But she grew accustomed to other things—the way she accepted the flooding season in her hometown.
She accepted the icy winds that froze the skin on her face, the permanent drip that threatened to drop off the end of her nose.
She accepted the shocking gust of air that almost knocked her over as the subway raced beneath her.
She accepted the homeless men she saw warming themselves on top of the manholes that sometimes released a push of warm air in winter.
She accepted the way that people would look through her.
She accepted being spoken to loudly, slowly.
And she accepted not understanding what was going on around her.
She learned to walk fast among the people who rushed past her on the pavement.
She kept an eye on who was ahead of her when she entered a new neighborhood; sometimes there were clusters of men she knew she shouldn’t walk past. She was not pretty, or someone who drew attention to herself when she entered a room.
She was thankful for that when she wanted to be invisible to them.
Unlike in Chengdu, in Philadelphia she could cross the road with ease, the lights told her when to go, when to stop.
It was the first thing she noticed about America.
Signs everywhere, to tell you what you could and could not do.
No Parking. No Turns. No Loitering. No Dumping.
No Smoking. The green man flashed and screeched to tell you to walk.
There was no room for error. You had to do what the signs said. Especially somebody like her.
Smiling did not come naturally to Lee Lee, her demeanor was always strained, as though she were on the verge of having to fight something, someone.
The little softness she had within her heart hardened over the years.
She was healthy, her body was strong, there was a stubborn will in her that kept her moving forward.
But fate was not kind, it was so unkind, in fact, that when she was faced with periods of peace, she was overcome by foreboding.
Her father died in a mining accident when she was five.
She lost a cousin to the floods during the rainy season just seven years before.
She knew what it was to feel real hunger in her body, from days of cavernous emptiness in the pit of her stomach.
In Philadelphia she was alarmed to find a place that felt even less hospitable than the vast, growing metropolis of Chengdu.
A city full of strangers was unkind, but she was terrified in a city full of strangers speaking a language she didn’t understand.
At night she lay on a creaking bed in her allocated dormitory, where the snakehead gangsters who smuggled her through, who seemed even more sinister than the ones back home, had taken her on her first day.
She felt that familiar emptiness in her gut, and shivered as an unrelenting cold she had never known before loomed over her as night fell and bore into her bones.
In the same room were twelve other women who watched her with wary suspicion and kept to themselves.
She longed for kindness, even though she knew how to scramble in the earth to stand on her feet.
Back home, she always knew she could find comfort with her mother, who was everything to her.
They only had each other left, everyone else was gone.
Here she had no such source for warmth. She had never, according to anyone who knew her, been a person who made friends easily.
Even in her own language, in her hometown, she couldn’t break down the walls that needed dismantling to create human connection.
Instead, she stood on the periphery, waiting to be invited in.
Three months after Lee Lee had arrived in Philadelphia, she met the man she later agreed to marry.
He was a tall and wiry twenty-eight-year-old from Fujian province, named Daming.
And he had a green card, though she did not know this at the time.
He was the first person who spoke to her in the hallway outside her dormitory, waiting to use the bathroom one night.
He had a job at a chain restaurant in the shopping mall.
She was instantly impressed by his confidence and how he seemed to know everyone in the dormitory.
It was his fifth year in Philadelphia. He had started out in New Jersey, and now he finally felt like he was going to achieve the American dream, he told her.
As she came to know him better, she realized that Daming’s familiarity was offered freely with no discrimination to anyone he passed, even if people didn’t respond.
His air of confidence began to seem stuck on, with old tape and glue that had lost its stickiness, and would come apart the moment you looked too closely.
Lee Lee also realized that Daming, too, was longing for kindness, and understood then why it was providence that they found each other.
“Once we make enough money, we can bring our families here, buy a house out in the suburbs. We’ll have a garden with a fence around it.
Then we keep growing our fortune. Maybe we can make investments, Lee Lee.
We can grow an empire. Our little world.
This is the country where hard work pays off.
” He said this every night as he rubbed his feet on the creaky rocking chair he had claimed from the junkyard for his room.
The more he said it, the less believable it became, only Lee Lee kept that to herself.
But Lee Lee did dare to imagine the house that he was describing, and how she would look standing in the doorway of a place like that, with her own children running around.
“You are an optimist.” She laughed, but deep inside the darkest crevices of her soul, she allowed the shoots of hope grow a little. She realized when she was with Daming, she was a little bit of an optimist too.
She didn’t love him. Lee Lee didn’t know what it was to be in love with a man.
But she knew what it was to be lonely. Until he had greeted her, befriended her, it had been days, even weeks since anyone had spoken to her.
She lived in a dormitory full of women. She was surrounded by other people, but she had never felt so alone as she did every night when she heard the sighing, the whispering, the crying from the other girls.
Eventually they all started to form their friendships and bonds, and she watched as the Chinese girls created their own group, but there was no space for a strange, hard-faced woman from a tiny village in Szechuan.
The hours she had to spend in the dormitory stretched out before her; she hated being there.
And then, there was Daming, and suddenly she did not feel like an invisible shadow that took up a bed.
So she found herself following him, like a sad stray dog, abandoned on the side of the street, faced with momentary kindness from a stranger.
This might be someone for me , she thought to herself.
Daming was more affable than Lee Lee by nature, but once the initial greetings passed he was strange, awkward, and often said the wrong thing.
His ears and eyes were not attuned to the small openings people offered to create the bonds of a relationship.
But Lee Lee did not care, because she too was awkward and could not make friends.
What she was not prepared for, was the effect the news of her marriage would have on her mother at home.
“Finally you can start a family. Bring a child into the world. Now I understand why you had to go to America, your fortune was continuing our family name, this way our bloodline can keep going into the next generation. And think of all the opportunities this child will have there.”
“Mama, we are not even married yet, we’re not planning on a family right away,” she said, but in her usually empty stomach there was a cluster of butterflies flapping their wings at the thought of a child.
Daming was earning good money at the restaurant now and he had paid back his debts years before they met. So he supported Lee Lee in paying back her debts too, and they quickly moved out of the dormitory full of strangers who shouldn’t have been there.
“Once we’re all paid off, we’ll get married in City Hall. Ai-ya , we could not sound more American, could we? City Hall! And then we will get you the green card too. Legal, my sweet plum.” He said this after every payment they made.
Each day Daming woke before dawn and spent ninety minutes on three different SEPTA buses to reach the mall for work.
He spent the morning preparing his workstation, hunched over the counter chopping vegetables.
Then from eleven o’clock, he spent the rest of the day standing over an open flame and pan frying, deep frying, steaming.
The food was Pan-Asian, but everything was cooked in dirty oil and tasted the same, which was why he never brought it home, he told Lee Lee.
His ankles swelled from standing all day long.
At seven o’clock every night he would plunge his hands into the washer, then move to cleaning up, where he scrubbed the cooker with a sponge afterward, rubbing away at the oil that would not fade.
Then he would take the same buses home, which sometimes took two hours because of the canceled routes and diversions late at night.
Oh it’s good to be back, home is my castle , he said.
We taste the sweetness later. I promise you, my sweet plum.
Lee Lee always waited up for him, no matter how late his buses were.
She waited to hear the rusty turn of his key in the door before she would murmur good night and turn over and go to sleep.