Chapter Twenty #2
“The undocumented thing…you always knew about it?” Eva asked.
Sabrina didn’t know whether to look at Eva Kim or not.
She felt shame wash over her. She shook her head and felt like the armor she had so carefully constructed around her would disintegrate into ash.
She was reminded of the time she saw a dead animal on the road. She wanted to look away from the mess.
Sabrina never asked herself if she had really believed that her mother had just forgotten to apply all those years ago.
It was a memory she had filed away with no intention of revisiting.
There had been no mention of the passport again until a few months ago, when Sabrina had talked about her summer trip to China. The trip that would never happen.
“No, I didn’t.” She shook her head. “I didn’t have a passport, but my mom never told me about the rest of it—a lot of Americans don’t have passports, right?”
“How? What I mean is, how could you not know? You didn’t have situations where you needed to travel and present your ID?”
Sabrina looked at Eva Kim and smiled faintly as the very same thoughts passed through her mind. Why did Lee Lee not simply tell her the truth?
“I guess because we didn’t have a lot. I rarely had to present any documentation. In fact, I don’t think I remember one time when I did. If that makes sense.”
“Driving?”
Sabrina shook her head.
“You take the bus?”
“Yeah. And we never traveled anywhere because we don’t have money to go on vacation. We don’t have insurance because we don’t have any money. I just figured everything came down to our financial situation.”
“But you wanted to travel to China. How were you planning on doing that this summer?”
“Mom told me she had already put my passport application through, that she had gone to the Chinese embassy. All of it. I don’t speak or read Chinese so I figured she had it all under control.”
Eva nodded. “Can I ask a question? It might make you uncomfortable…”
“Sure.”
“Do you think she was going to get you that passport legitimately at the Chinese embassy? Or was she getting creative and getting it through less traditional ways?”
“I really don’t know. She could have been getting it illegally, but maybe she just didn’t do anything. I think it would have scared her to do anything.”
Sabrina noticed her voice had quietened to almost a whisper, as though she didn’t want the walls to hear.
“How did you find out for sure? Or have you found out for sure?” Sabrina didn’t answer for a moment, because even she didn’t have proof. Not yet. But she knew that if she tried to find out, the truth would be there in plain sight and there would be no way to go back.
“If you suspect this to be the case, why did you plan to travel?” Eva asked.
“I guess I held on to a bit of hope that maybe she really had done this for me—applied for my passport. That’s what I’d hoped.” Sabrina surprised herself with the truth.
“How do you feel now that you know this? About your undocumented status?”
Sabrina didn’t answer Eva.
“Do you blame her?”
“No! God no.” She protested louder than she had meant to.
Eva Kim looked at Sabrina with surprise.
“A lot of kids your age wouldn’t be so forgiving.”
“I’m not saying I’m not upset. I am. But I guess I haven’t really looked at what this means for me yet. Things are a bit harder for me.”
“Things to do with your future?”
“Yes.”
After lunch, Sabrina ran her hand over her keyboard.
She pressed save on the research she had started to gather on vaccination rights for immigrants in Pennsylvania.
Sabrina wanted to impress Eva in the purest way possible: through diligence and proactivity.
These were qualities that she suspected (rightly) that Eva Kim valued.
Most adults Sabrina had met, and they were usually parents from her school, asked her questions that skirted around the very things that made her different from their children: the money she didn’t have, when her mother had come to the United States, and what life was like at home.
Sometimes she felt an insurmountable interest from adults about how Chinese it was, how different it really was in her household.
She could see people calculating the information they could extract: Were you born here, Sabrina?
How many jobs does your mother have? Your mother must be so proud of you and the opportunities you’ve created for yourself.
But Eva Kim didn’t do that. Eva Kim got straight to the point and asked the questions that would make everyone else uncomfortable. But they were the questions that mattered.
“So in your opinion, Chen. Do you feel like this new revelation leaves you completely fucked in terms of college and jobs?”
“I guess I do feel a bit like that, yes.”
“So we need to do something about that then, don’t we?”
Sabrina expected her to say more, but instead Eva simply looked down and started to type on her computer again.
···
A few days later , Eva stood in front of Sabrina’s desk.
“I’ve been thinking about your situation. Maybe we need to get some ideas together.” Eva waved a pink folder toward her.
The pink folder she waved around was Eva’s latest case for a Thai woman who was only four years older than Sabrina.
Achara had come to work for a family who had sponsored her visa.
But when the visa had run out, she didn’t return home as she should have, and instead took a job at a nail parlor.
She was fine until she found herself in the salon alone one night with a faulty circuit that caught fire after she had turned on the UV sanitization unit for the utensils.
Achara suffered from third-degree burns all over her arms, but with no papers, and no money, she had no access to health care.
So Achara found Eva. Until Sabrina had started her work with Eva Kim, she had not realized how desperate some people were.
That they barely had the basic things to live, let alone an education or a home.
It was only when Sabrina started to see what Eva did for each of her clients that she realized how terrifying life could be.
There were women who had been trafficked as sex workers, families who had been separated over their precarious immigration status.
And to Sabrina, some of their situations started to resemble Lee Lee’s, and even her own.
“You mean a plan? For me?” Sabrina ventured.
“You’re adorable for thinking I have a plan. How can I have a plan before I see the lay of the land. I never have a plan,” Eva added.
“Really?”
“You’re surprised to hear this?”
Sabrina looked around at the scattered folders and chaos in the office and smiled.
“I can’t always have a plan, kid. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my work, it’s that human beings are unpredictable, and we are ultimately just reacting to the actions of others, right? I mean, take your situation for example. I’m guessing you sure as shit didn’t plan for this?”
“No. I mean, I do try to plan for everything. My mother plans, well, day-to-day things, anyway. Even the time she leaves the house to get the exact bus to avoid the exact traffic and you know, the rest.”
“Maybe that makes her feel in control,” Eva suggested.
“Of what? I mean, given my latest revelation about my status and everything else, I now realize just how much she doesn’t have control. But I guess she tries to control some things…Me.” Sabrina laughed in a way that sounded hollow.
“Oh yeah? Tell me about that?”
Sabrina felt her shoulders closing in, her chin dipping down.
Eva waited until Sabrina was ready to speak—another thing that Sabrina wasn’t used to. Most people would take her silence to mean they could talk over her, their opinions mattered more than hers. Not Eva.
“I think she wants me to be a certain way, and I don’t know that I always live up to the ideal, you know?”
“What ideal is that, Chen?”
“The good Asian girl. You know, I get good grades, I don’t sleep around. I do as I’m told. I respect the family honor. But sometimes I say stuff that she deems disrespectful. I don’t always fall in line.”
“Honey, this is 2015, you are not fucking Mulan, and there is no honor to defend except how you honor yourself. Plus, you are a product of an American education. It’s different for you.”
“But that’s not really true, though, is it, growing up in our culture…”
“Listen, you have this one life, and you’re in a time now where you are trying to find your feet, and it’s going to take some time to find them, maybe years.
And now we have this new challenge ahead of us.
You know, with life, sometimes it’s good, sometimes it really fucking sucks.
But I’ll tell you one thing I’ve learned, and it’s something I always come back to, this whole living up to expectations and feeling invisible is also about who we are in our core.
We can change that to a point, because nothing stays the same, but it’s a matter of how much we’re willing to be controlled from the outside, and how invisible we are willing to be.
I wish when I was your age I’d known that everything passes.
You feel bad right now because you like a boy and you don’t know how he feels?
Or you feel bad right now because you don’t know which college you want to go to?
And in your case we have the great uncertainty of whether we can get you those precious papers, right?
Things change on a dime. Am I promising you that you’re going to go skipping into the sunset and live happily ever after while everyone accepts you with open arms?
That nobody ever makes you feel small because you’re different, or because you were brought up with less than some?
No, but I think you’ll find the people you want to be around, the people who inspire you, the places you feel accepted, and you’ll start to care a lot less.
You’re going to make it, Chen. Time will be your friend.
Everything is fucking temporary. The good and the bad, none of it is forever. And if nothing else, just wait.”
Sabrina said nothing. When she was around Eva Kim, she felt she could be patient with herself and allow herself to feel the things she had pressed down to the pits of her being but that were starting to bubble up.