Read: 2026-01-02
Recommend: 8/10
Julie’s experience with her cat is very sad. Her generation of immigrants differs significantly from mine. My cohort arrived legally—to study, then secure employment. Her family remained undocumented, clinging to hope through lottery tickets. I’m grateful that American institutions (free public schools, libraries) provided a foundation for their survival. I deeply appreciate the author’s courage in documenting her childhood experiences of hunger, loneliness, and confusion.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
For all those who remain in the shadows: May you one day have no reason to fear the light.
On July 29, 1994, I arrived at JFK Airport on a visa that would expire much too quickly. Five days prior, I had turned seven years old, the same age at which my father had begun his daily wrestle with shame. My parents and I would spend the next five years in the furtive shadows of New York City, pushing past hunger pangs to labor at menial jobs, with no rights, no access to medical care, no hope of legality. The Chinese refer to being undocumented colloquially as “hei”: being in the dark, being blacked out. And aptly so, because we spent those years shrouded in darkness while wrestling with hope and dignity. Memory is a fickle thing, but other than names and certain identifying details—which I have changed out of respect for others’ privacy—I have endeavored to document my family’s undocumented years as authentically and intimately as possible. I regret that I can do no justice to my father’s childhood, for it is pockmarked by more despair than I can ever know.
Most of all, though, I put these stories to paper for this country’s forgotten children, past and present, who grow up cloaked in fear, desolation, and the belief that their very existence is wrong, their very being illegal. I have been unfathomably lucky. But I dream of a day when being recognized as human requires no luck—when it is a right, not a privilege. And I dream of a day when each and every one of us will have no reason to fear stepping out of the shadows. Whenever things got really bad during my family’s dark years, I dreamed aloud that when I grew up, I would write our stories down so that others like us would know that they were not alone, that they could also survive. And my mother would then remind me that it was all temporary: With your writing, Qian Qian, you can do anything. One day, you will have enough to eat. One day, you will have everything. May that resilient hope light the way.
Ma Ma liked to say that a woman could be beautiful without being pretty, but that a woman could not be beautiful without having dignity. It would take me decades to unravel what that meant.
Ma Ma was good at everything. She cooked the best meals. In Zhong Guo, I had a little stool by the sink that I stood on, sometimes to help her wash dishes, sometimes just to watch her. She peeled apples magically, keeping the detached skin all connected in one long coil. I played with the coil and made it dance in the air, until I inevitably broke it in half and then laid it to rest in the trash can. Ma Ma made everything a game. The tomatoes talked and the cucumbers laughed, and washing them was not a chore but the joyous task of giving them a bath. Ma Ma didn’t know it, but she was the reason my imagination burned alive everywhere I went, the reason I saw love in all beings and things.
There was a Chinese idiom I came to know later because Ma Ma and Ba Ba would repeat it to me in those moments: “Purple comes from blue but is superior to blue.” It was inevitable, they seemed to believe, that I would one day outshine them in the best and worst ways.
“It’s okay, Qian. You will learn.” I had never had anyone call me “Qian” without a “Wang” before it or another “Qian” after it, but for the rest of the day, it was all Tang Lao Shi and Janie called me. Just like that, I had been reborn as a girl divorced from her family name, orphaned from her Chinese past.
Only later, after living many years in fear, would I understand that the risks were much lower than we believed at the time. But in the vacuum of anxiety that was undocumented life, fear was gaseous: it expanded to fill our entire world until it was all we could breathe.
I read until my loneliness dulled, and I felt myself to be in the good company of all my vibrantly colored, two-dimensional friends. I read until excitement replaced hopelessness. I marveled that I was teaching myself to read English—slowly, of course, but without an adult next to me. I was excited to meet the whole new worlds waiting for me on the bookshelves and tables. Each book had a place and a role. Even the ones meant for the boy who colored were among the most helpful guides in my journey through basic English, because I could press the large buttons that spoke words to me loudly. So it was that I felt my way around colors, shapes, and animals in our new country.
Hunger was a constant, reliable friend in Mei Guo. She came second only to loneliness. Hunger slept only when I did, and sometimes not even then. In China, all I needed to do was say that she was there, and Ma Ma would find food for me. In Mei Guo, I quickly learned that I could not voice her presence. It only hurt Ma Ma. Her face reflected the pangs in my stomach, and the few times when I ventured to ask for food, Ma Ma did something she had never done before: she told me that hunger was good, that it was fine to feel shaky and distracted, and that I should see if I could hold on until the cold sweat came, because that would mean that I was really growing and really getting stronger. If that was true, I must have grown extraordinarily strong that first year in Mei Guo, because I felt the cold sweat come on every time I walked past a grocery store or restaurant, and every time I saw someone my age slurping a melting ice-cream cone.
Actually, because we lived a long commute away and I never got enough sleep after our sweatshop evenings, I hadn’t mentioned it earlier because I never got to school early enough to eat the mythical free breakfasts I had only ever heard about. I didn’t say this, though. Instead, I apologized to Ma Ma for being greedy, and said that she would no longer need to feed me two meals at home. From then on, her face glowed a little bit brighter, and whenever she phoned home to Lao Lao, telling her of the beautiful home we did not live in, the overflowing, steaming bowls we only dreamed about, she also told her about how wonderful and generous Mei Guo was. Here, they fed kids for free twice a day!
The poor kids, we never looked one another in the eyes. We exchanged a few words whenever one cut another in line—no one wanted to be later to receive the congealed brown sludge that the lunch ladies, with their gray hair trapped under nets, slopped onto our disposable trays. But beyond that, acknowledging one another would bring into too much focus the fact that we each were just like the hungry, stinky kid standing next to us, with an itchy, flaky scalp and an itchier dry throat. Usually, by the time the line started moving, most of the rich kids were already finished eating and out at recess. The beginning of our lunch was the end of theirs. By then, I was often light-headed and dizzy, and I trudged through the line listlessly until I plopped down at one of the table-benches to swallow my entire lunch whole. It took just a few minutes for my stomach to bounce from the ache of emptiness to the ache of eating too much, too quickly. It took much longer before I registered with any satisfaction the new, temporary fullness. But by then, I was already downing the free carton of milk, eager to fill my stomach with something, anything. Out in the playground, rarely was I able to run or play. My stomach and bowels spent the afternoons in a civil war, wrestling with each other as the pockets of air that formed in the morning did a painful dance with the clumps of food and milk. I spent most afternoons with one hand on careful guard in front of my tummy, in case it betrayed gassy gurgles to my less tortured classmates. I trained my mind on controlling the sounds of my belly, and on the rice that awaited after school, at the sweatshop.
Ba Ba told me that years ago, Lao Bai had joined the Communist Party in Zhong Guo, pledging his allegiance to it, even though he had zero faith in the party or the government, and no intention of staying in the country. Ba Ba had refused to do the same, even though the pressure grew over time as each of his friends joined. When I asked why, Ba Ba’s face darkened and he said he would never forget what they did to him. He would happily eat America’s shit before feasting on China’s fruits.
But there was no fog between me and the giant piano now. It was right there, for me to play with and dance on, and all for free. I could hardly believe it. There were already several children stomping on it when I approached, most of them white. I hung back, afraid of intruding. I looked to Ma Ma, who stood by the landing. “Ni qu ya,” she urged me on. I walked forward, each step a little more sure than the last, and by the time I was on the keys, I had settled on my route: I hopped from one white plank to a black one and then back, the art of play coming back to me with the banging tones. It was a melody all my own, and when I closed my eyes, I traveled back to a time and place where it never occurred to me to question whether I belonged. I saw myself back in that courtyard, singing and dancing to a semicircle of captive audience, without worry or fear that I was singing out of tune, dancing out of step, or performing out of turn. That little stage had been mine, and now so was this one. When we left the store later that night, I did not ask Ma Ma if I could buy a toy. I had recovered a little piece of my previous life, my former self. My heart glowed as Ma Ma and I walked hand in hand, past the lights and back into the shadows.
From then on, there was no saving me. I lived and breathed books. Where else could I find such a steady supply of friends, comforts, and worlds, all free for the taking? And so portable, too—everywhere I went, there they were: on the subway, at recess, on the steps just outside of Ba Ba’s office. Unlike my teachers and classmates, they were reliable.
Cutting hair was not as glamorous as I had imagined. The customers who headed to the nail tables were mostly women, and they were either eager to chat with the staff or completely oblivious to them. But there were more men among the people who strolled in toward the hairstyling stations. They looked at Ma Ma and the other women strangely. They seemed to enjoy their scalp massage a little too much, and their hands had too many accidental brushes with the women intent on working on their hair. During breaks in the back room—a closet, really, with some stools and a mini fridge full of food labeled with names—I heard Ma Ma chatter with the other women about how gross and cheap they felt, how much they dreaded the shampooing and scalp massages. Ma Ma was the newest, so shampooing and massaging was all she did, again and again, throughout her ten-hour shift. It brought me back to the fish-processing plant, how she had had to dip her fingers into wet, gross stuff until they came out purple, shriveled. For the rest of my childhood, I carried in my heart the guilt of forcing Ma Ma into that job—not just through my existence and my need for food, but by simply giving her such bad advice.
James started talking to Ba Ba about China, how long we’d been here, how good his English was. It was the ritual dance Ba Ba was forced to do with every white person he met. But where Ba Ba would have been short with another Chinese person, he was always gracious with the lao wai. I couldn’t tell if it was because he respected them more, or thought they were dumber people who needed more coddling.
Before we left China, Lao Ye gave me a little keychain. It was not just any keychain. It had several tools in it that made me feel safer in America whenever I had it with me. The keychain was in the shape of a foot, and it had a metal center with a brown plastic shell. On one side, it had a small pocketknife, with the tiniest of blades. On the other was a small pair of scissors. Both folded into the metal center. Four characters were written on the foot in white font: Jiao ta shi di. Feet on solid ground. “What does it mean, Ma Ma?” I had asked after running to show her my new shiny possession. “It means taking it one step at a time, Qian Qian, being grounded and looking at just what’s in front you.” The message of Lao Ye’s keychain served me well in our life in America. I learned to focus on just what was right before me, and in this instance it was supporting Ma Ma in the only pursuit that had managed to inject hope into her face since we walked out of that JFK terminal. The hard questions, I saved them for myself.
In healthier days, Ma Ma had reminded me that worrying was a talisman to keep the worst from happening. “If you worry about something,” Ma Ma said, “it won’t happen. It’s the things we don’t worry about that are dangerous.” And so I knew: I had not worried enough to ward off Ma Ma’s sickness. I had not worried about whether she would be healthy enough to see her graduation and to see us living her dream—leaving this awful, beautiful country for a different place, a world where we were just as human as everyone else.
Eyes are the ultimate gauge of beauty in Chinese culture. The larger her eyes—the more they looked like white people’s—the more beautiful a woman. And it was true that Feng had eyes so small that I wondered if she and her mom were actually related. I would not realize until I was in college that Wu Ah Yi had gotten eyelid surgery, the same kind of surgery that the blueprint of her childhood destined Feng to undergo. It was almost as if she believed that by slicing the flesh of her monolids, she could dig out the insecurity that her mother had buried in her all those years.
For there was Ma Ma, also looking small, old, shriveled. As I had feared, she had many things plugged into her, tubes and screens, as if she were the power source for all of the dripping and beeping.
It was then that I realized I could be homesick for a place even though I no longer knew where home was.
Ba Ba did all of the cooking now, and we soon pushed up against the limits of his culinary knowledge. Ma Ma had refused to teach me to cook. Cooking well was a curse for women, she said, because it meant you would have to do it every day for the rest of your life.
The teachers gave many speeches about how wonderful and special we were, a message belied by the dullness in their eyes. They gave the same speeches year after year—this truth hung in the viscous air. I didn’t know why they needed to pretend, especially because many of the parents and children in the room, like Elaine’s family, had already attended identical ceremonies for older siblings, who had also been declared special and wonderful in the exact same ways.
The other change in Ma Ma was a fun one. She had always saved a dollar or two from our grocery budget to buy a lottery ticket. It was important, she said, to have hope. But after the surgery, she started putting even more money into the lottery.
I have only the Tamagotchi, who I by turns take doting care of, and by turns neglect and watch waste away in hunger. And each time a new little chick hatches, I cannot decide what I want for it: a full, joyous life or a quick, empty death.
My muscles lose a tightness I did not know they have been carrying, and against the backdrop of my truths I am at long last free to admit: I am tired. I am so very tired of running and hiding, but I have done it for so long, I don’t know how to stop. I don’t know how to do anything else. It is all I am: defining myself against illegality while stitching it into my veins. The judge’s words are my blanket nest, and in its snug embrace I rediscover a safety I knew once, long, long ago.