Xi and his parents came to the US in the fall of 2000.
They came from a small coastal village named 潮生港 (Chaosheng Gang), meaning “the port where the tide rises.” It was around the Quanzhou area in Fujian province, with high, steep mountains on three sides, and the Pacific Ocean on the fourth. All buildings had no more than two floors, yellowish brick walls, and tile roofs. Red couplets were glued by melted rice to either side of the tilted wooden doors. A few pigs and a dozen chickens roamed in most houses’ yards. The only reminder that it was in modern-day China instead of some Tang Dynasty poetry, was the two-lane highway sneaking between where the southern and western mountains met, and the dark-blue glass-windows that allowed nearly no sunlight into people’s houses—they were trendy for a while during the 1980s.
Yi Fu and Lin Shen both hated those windows. They nearly never closed them, and even moved all their furniture away from their windows so they could leave them open even during stormy nights. They would wake up the next morning to find a two-square-yard swamp under the windowsills, but claim that it was worth it when the sunlight shone through. Two-year-old Xi used to lie in the puddles pretending that he was swimming, while Yi and Lin would be at the other side of the room, tending to their patients, filling the room with Ay Tsao herb smoke, Lin calling out “A-Ma!”, whereupon Lin’s mother would run to their room from the kitchen, and lift Xi out of his swimming pool.
Moving to America wasn’t a hard decision to make, since neither Yi nor Lin really liked what they were doing. Yi never enjoyed being a medicine man, but that was the only thing he was taught to do since he was four, so he didn’t wrap his head around the fact that he could be doing anything else until he was in his forties, by the time that Xi had inherited his Hospital in LA. Lin, on the other hand, preferred spending her time in books, gardens, and mountains, with herbs, fungi, and flowers, and would give up being a doctor as soon as she could.
Another big influence was money, which did not really make its way into their mountains until the mid ‘90s, so there was something new and attractive about the idea of being rich. Before Alan Wang showed up and presented the New World as a land of unclaimed money and exotic plants, Yi and Lin had already been talking about barely anything except ways of making more money for a long time.
Alan was Yi’s childhood friend, who’d started a human smuggling business after spending five years in the US. He came back to the village with a red Nike baseball cap—a brand that they’d only vaguely heard of—and a thick golden necklace around his neck, flipping a stack of dollars at his old friends’ faces, the green of the bills reflected in the friends’ eyes.
Upon returning to his hometown, Alan invited his friends to his hotel room, and talked about every detail of his life in America. He first had to explain where America was, and where LA was in America, since his friends had never heard of the place except for articles about the Cold War in newspapers, and a couple of white actors in Hong Kong TV shows who supposedly came from there.
Over American wine, Alan depicted the life he had in LA. He owned a three-floored house, with bright windows that went from floor to ceiling (his friends were confused how windows like that could be opened, and Alan had to explain how American houses were constructed to breathe themselves and he never opened his windows). The house had a garage where he had two cars, one black Audi for daily use and one red roadster for vacation (his friends didn’t know what either Audi or roadster was, and he showed them pictures tucked inside his leather wallet). The house included a garden just like the ones they saw on television, with rose bushes, a white stone fountain, and sculptures of little angels. He had a driver, two maids, and two gardeners. He went swimming in the ocean, with blonde American women waving at him on the golden beach. He had coffee in the mornings (coffee was this new Western tea that gave people so much energy that breakfast and lunch could be avoided). He had medium-rare steak for dinner every single day. His six-year-old son went to school in New York City and took a jet to school every morning (he had a picture of the jet as well, and of his son in the school uniform). He worked four days a week and skied on weekends.
His friends, who had never seen three-floored houses, angel sculptures, and coffee before in their lives, competed in inviting Alan to their house for dinner. Yi did not win that battle, but he went home and repeated to Lin every detail of Alan’s story, and it took them three days to agree on that being their future. Lin was a little hesitant at the part of blonde women waving at her husband, but Yi promised that he thought Chinese women were much prettier.
“When you get to the US, find me at this address. I’ll find you a job that pays six dollars an hour,”(1) said Alan, handing Yi a tiny piece of paper with an address on it written in Chinese. Alan saw the confused look on Yi’s face, and explained, with a roll of eyes at Yi’s ignorance: “Six dollars is about 48 RMB. The rate might rise after you actually get there, then that’d be over 50.”(2)
It sounded too good to be true. They were each earning about 35 yuan daily back then. They imagined working only two hours a day and spending the rest of the time on Mahjong or teaching Xi.
“Honestly though, I don’t think that you’ll need money at all. There’re unwanted fried chickens lying around everywhere in Los Angeles. You can get your stomachs stuffed just from those,”(3) Alan added, as an afterthought.
And it was with that idea of fried chicken that the parents sold LA to Xi.
Alan didn’t explain human smuggling to them all that much. He said that Americans didn’t like Chinese people because they were communist, so never tell anybody about how they made it into America, and never mention his name.
The family paid for the trip in cash. It was supposed to be 2500 yuan for each adult, and 1500 for children, but Yi pulled out the favor that Alan owed him since they were eight, and Lin was good at bargaining, so half an hour later, Alan reluctantly agreed on 6000 in total. That was about half the money that Yi and Lin had saved by that point. The other half Yi and Lin tugged into the bottom of their four enormous cotton-fabric bags, under fluffy quilts, Xi’s clothes, medication, ancient books, and uncooked rice.
The trip began 3am in the morning, with Yi dragging three bags behind him, and Lin carrying one bag and a sleeping three-year-old Xi. The family boarded the rotting bottom level of a cargo ship that constituted the first step of their journey.
They shared that space with 30 trunks of machinery parts and twenty-three other people. They shared hard breads, pies, and water, and pulled up quilts next to each other to go to sleep. There was barely any sunlight, with only small holes on the ceiling allowing streaks of it three hours a day. They had three electronic bulbs, one of them yellowish, one of them always jumping, impossible to conjure the façade of day. They used iron bins for their excrements, and took turns sneaking out during the dark hours to toss them into the sea. Somebody had a watch, which they used to time the days, but it stopped working on day 13, and once someone sneaked up to discover that it was still daylight. Although Alan—and every other smuggling businessman—promised that the crew members were already bought, they were still advised to keep themselves out of sight as much as possible. Some people starting trying to adjust their sleeping hours according to the new time zone’s daylight, while other stuck to their old schedules, until everybody was sleeping at a different hour, and everybody was cursing everybody for keeping the light on while they were trying to sleep.
It was impossible to breathe. A coughing fitness spread through the cargo on the fourth day of the voyage, and every family soon claimed a single light-allowing hole, where they’d occasionally stand up from the quavering floor to press their lips against those holes to breathe. Xi, in particular, was addicted to the taste of warm, fresh air that smelt of sun, salt, and soaked wood, which he was only able to get, he said, within the three hours of sunlight. Every now and then he’d claim that he tasted fish, bird, or rocks from the air as well, whereupon Yi would laugh and Lin would roll her eyes.
Xi did not do well on the boat. At first, he was always hiding himself in Lin’s arms and crying towards strangers, only to be quieted by the scent of Ay Tsao, since he was so used to smelling its smoke when he slept. However, the spark from the herb nearly set the cargo on fire once, and after that, the other passengers wouldn’t let Lin burn the Ay Tsao any more.
But the other passengers liked Xi. On one hand, he was the youngest kid in the room, for the smuggling business didn’t allow anyone under three. On the other, he was a bright, curious child who was always smiling, his big, round eyes glimmering back to everybody’s tired glances. He would tell every woman that they were beautiful, every man that they were strong. He addressed everyone as if they were his parents or siblings: there were Dad Bai and Mom Yin, Dad Wang and Mom Liang, Brother A-Jia and Sister Xiao-Tong… He would share with everybody his bread, and tell them endless stories about his life back in Chaosheng. In the end, they were also giving back to him: adults would give him snacks, and other children would share with him their toys. A-Xi, they called him back, look at what I’ve got for you today.
Among them were Jingbei and his parents, 白令言 (Lingyan Bai) and 殷色乔 (Seqiao Yin). Back then, the parents called Jingbei “A-jia.”(4)
Jingbei was six months older than Xi, and always gave Xi more candies and chocolates than Xi probably should eat. Jingbei had learnt the song “Let’s Row the Paddles”(5) before boarding the cargo, and was singing it the whole time through the voyage. Xi often danced to it, or rather Kungfu-ed to it, jumping between trunks kicking his feet and punching the air.
A storm hit on day 21 of the voyage. The lightning clashed into the ocean surface, the waves rose overboard, and the passengers held on tightly to their belongings, crawling around when they needed to go somewhere, because it was impossible to stand without falling. The children cried, unable to fall asleep. The adults held each other’s hand silently when they were not vomiting in the bins. A teenagers grabbed a filled bin to discard the excrements, and came back fully drenched, the bin washed away into the ocean, his legs shaking.
For a whole night nobody fell asleep. Xi dozed off for twenty minutes or so on his mother’s shoulder, but was shaken awake when the only good lightbulb crashed into the floor and shattered. He couldn’t yet understand why the floor was always wavering, or why everybody looked afraid. He just kept snacking on the candies that Jingbei gave him, and neither Yi nor Lin called him off that night. Soon he ran out, and crawled to Jingbei asking for more.
The floor stopped shaking early next morning, and streaks of light began piercing through the breathing holes on the ceilings. Nobody said a thing, no celebration for life, no complaints of exhaustion. They just held onto their belongings tighter, and buried their heads in their knees.
Jingbei alone seemed to think that this was another normal day on board, so he ate his share of breakfast bread, fully confused why others weren’t eating. He went to play with Xi after breakfast, singing “Let’s Row the Paddles” again, and Xi, who didn’t eat breakfast because he was so full from the candies the previous night, danced his Kungfu in the center of the room.
People turned their droopy heads to watch them: one kid dressed in shirt and pants as if going to a wedding, singing loudly and occasionally off-tune; the other kicking his legs like he wasn’t afraid of anything, with the seriousness of a master in Kungfu, but completely uncoordinated.
And somebody started crying.
It was unclear who it was. It might have been the mother of a nine-year-old girl, or the pregnant twenty-three-year-old who was traveling alone. It was a female voice, but it might also have been a child’s. Whoever it was, it was in far-from-door end of the cargo, behind a trunk of reaper parts. The sobbing began in a whisper, drowned in Jingbei’s singing, snuffed out by Xi’s punches against the walls, but slowly grew, until it was impossible for the cargo to ignore it. Someone turned their head first, and the rest followed, to the whimpering, hiccupping sound that was trying so hard to quiet itself, but could not, to the crying person’s attempt at burying themselves into their quilt so the others wouldn’t hear them, to the rapid intakes of breath that soon sounded like they were suffocating.
Jingbei stopped singing, and Xi stopped dancing. The crying person raised themselves behind the trunk, and rested their lips against that small hole about their head, coughing, breathing.
And that seemed to remind the cargo that they were having that same coughing fit together. A male voice from the door’s side of the cargo chimed in with a few of his own. Then a third person was coughing, then a fourth, until the room was echoing with people catching their breaths.
Soon, using the loud, restless coughs as their disguise, a few sobs escaped people’s throats, into the murky air. They were drowned out by coughs for a while, since a lot of crying people also coughed to profess that they were not crying, until five minutes later, when everyone in the cargo seemed to be crying instead of coughing, and it was pointless to pretend anymore.
There were a few weeping ones, a few wailing ones, especially after the collective heaving had woken up the children who just managed to fall asleep. But most of the people began crying silently, their tears wiped away before leaving tracks on their cheeks, or dripping onto their quilts, turning the flower embroidery a shade darker, or sinking through the crevices in the wooden floor.
Yi and Lin were crying too, but crying individually, not touching each other or sharing tears. Yi turned himself to face the wall so nobody could see him, like many men in the room did; while Lin wrapped her head in a blanket, which turned damp from her tears and never quite dried even to the end of the voyage. He turned back once, trying to lay a hand on her shoulder, but a wave of tears overcame him before he could, and he snapped himself back towards the wall.
Xi and Jingbei stood in the center of the room, horrified at what they were seeing.
Jingbei touched his lips with his fingers. He whispered to himself the lyrics of “Let’s Row the Paddles” under his breath, as if it was some kind of powerful spell that couldn’t be sung out loud now. He watched his parents crying for a while, but they weren’t looking back at him, so his turned his gaze towards Xi.
Xi looked like he had his life sucked out of him. His round, dark eyes were hollowed, turning frantically across the room, seeking for someone who wasn’t crying, but couldn’t. His hands and legs were shaking, his mouth dropped open, drooling without realizing it, and he was holding his breath so much that he ended up almost fainting.
That was, until he caught Jingbei’s terrified, but not crying, eyes, and life seemed to be restored to him suddenly. He started drawing deep breaths, and wrapped his hands together to stop them from further trembling. After he was sure he was stable, he grabbed Jingbei’s hand, and said: “Brother A-Jia, don’t cry.”(6)
“I don’t cry,”(7) said Jingbei.
Xi nodded firmly. Then he went up to Lin, and grabbed her hands, putting into her palms one of the chocolates that Jingbei gave him earlier today, but which had melted and was covered in the sweat of Xi’s hands: “Mom, don’t cry anymore.”(8)
Lin could not stop herself from bursting into laughter at the condition that the chocolate was in. She gave it back to Xi: “I’m OK A-Xi, Mom’s not crying anymore.”(9) And, to show that she was serious, she pulled the blanket off her head, and wiped the tears away from her face. She gave Xi a grin.
Xi stared back at her for a bit, until he was certain that she wasn’t going to cry the moment he let go of her hands, and marched to Yi next. He pulled Yi’s hand out of his facing-the-wall position, gave that same chocolate to Yi, and said: “Dad, don’t cry anymore.”(10)
Yi tried to draw that hand away, but Xi held it with all the strength he had, and Yi eventually didn’t. Yi turned his head away from Xi, but Xi freed a hand and used it to turn Yi’s head back to him. “Weepy is ok,”(11) he said, in a way of stating the obvious truth.
Yi met his eyes, and laughed, softly, at the determination in his son’s eyes. “OK. I’ll do what A-Xi tells me. Not crying anymore.”(12)
And that continued. Xi approached every single person in the room, offered them a candy, and told them to stop crying. He ran out of the sweets upon the 12th person, and Jingbei dug out more for him from the bottom of his little backpack. Some people came to their own endings for the crying before Xi reached them, but Xi still would touch their hand and give them a candy.
Finally, Xi came up to the spot behind the reaper-parts trunk, seeking the person who started it all, yet the place was empty: they had removed their belongings and migrated somewhere else while the whole room was watching Xi. Xi stood there, struck, for a moment, before he silently pulled out one more candy and left it on the floor, below the air opening. Its wrapper glimmered under the golden air that spilled through.
He returned to Jingbei’s side, who caught his shoulder: “When you told me not to cry, you didn’t give me a candy.”(13)
Xi looked confused for a moment, before he hastily grabbed all the candies that he had in his pockets and held out his arms to him. Jingbei cautiously picked a milk one, and told Xi to put the rest back into his pockets, which Xi did. Then Jingbei said that he wanted to show Xi his moto-car toy collection, so Xi followed him to his backpack again.
Footnotes:
(1) “等你到了美国，你来这个地址找我。我帮你找个工作，付六刀一个小时的，”
(2) “六刀差不多48人民币吧。而且说不定到时候汇率还涨，那就得有50多人民币了。”
(3) “不过你们估计都用不上钱，洛杉矶到处都有别人不要的炸鸡，光吃那个都吃撑了，”
(4) “阿家.”
(5) 《让我们荡起双桨》
(6) “阿家哥哥，你不许哭。”
(7) “我不哭，”
(8) “阿妈，不哭了。”
(9) “没事阿羲，阿妈不哭了。”
(10) “阿爸，你也不哭了。”
(11) “哭哭不羞，”
(12) “好。听阿羲的，不哭了。”
(13) “你刚才叫我不许哭的时候，没有给我糖。”