The Cooked Seed (19 page)

In my return letter, I begged for a chance to see her again. I mailed the letter enclosed with a check for four hundred dollars. Yan returned the check uncashed and left me with no word.

I went to the US Consulate in Shanghai to apply for my reentry visa. The crowd reminded me of how fortunate I had been. Inside, the visa officer asked me what I would do after graduation. I said that I didn’t know, but I was in Shanghai seeking a future job position. The officer granted me the visa without further questioning.

Two weeks later, I bade good-bye to my family.

Upon returning to Chicago, I responded to a listing for a tiny storage room on 4311 South Halstead Street next to a parking lot. Its only window was a foot-square glass pane that couldn’t be opened. There wasn’t enough space for a twin-size bed, so I slept on a little two-foot-wide sofa that took up half the room. Although there was no kitchen counter or stove, the landlord had installed a makeshift shower, a minisink, and a toilet. The rent was $150 a month including heat and utilities. It was the cheapest place I could find in Chicago.

I was thrilled with the privacy. For the first time in my life, I might have a place that I wouldn’t have to share, a place of my own. I had to beg the landlord to rent it to me because he was concerned about my safety. He had intended to rent the space to a single man who would use it only for sleeping. I convinced the landlord that I was no weakling. I told him that I had been riding the subway at night for years. I showed him my “scissor hand”—how I would hold each key on my key ring between my clenched fingers and punch if attacked.

The landlord warned me not to be frightened of the man next door who wore orange clothes. He was a retarded man named Nick whom the landlord looked after.

“Nick is harmless,” the landlord promised.

It took me a while to get used to Nick’s strange habits. Besides the orange hat and clothing, he talked loudly at night, perhaps to himself. I wasn’t prepared to deal with his stink, either. I hadn’t noticed until I moved in that the dividing wall between Nick and me was not fully closed. The two feet from the ceiling between Nick’s toilet room and my room was open. I had assumed that it was sealed with glass.

When I complained, the landlord said, “This is why the rent is cheap. It is a storage space.”

Lying awake at night, I asked myself the question, “Who are you, Anchee Min?” If I ever had a chance to learn what it meant to “stay positive,” it was now. I did not yet know the American I was becoming, but I was sure that I was no longer the same An-Qi from China. I, who was defeated, was refusing to accept the defeat. I was broken yet standing determinedly erect. I could be crushed, but I would not be conquered. And that, I concluded, was who I truly was. Who I would be.

I knew practically nothing about her, but from the first I was desperate for her friendship. Beneath our differences, I sensed that we had something in common. Margaret was her name. She caught my eye because she stood out from the crowd. She was a graduate student, an interior designer who owned her own business. She was shy and her face blushed as she spoke. When I asked her why she was taking the class, she said that she was “searching to explore and to rediscover.”

Unlike me, she didn’t seem self-conscious about being older. Most people in the class were half her age; being older was something that I was burdened by. I felt inadequate and embarrassed among all the young students. I knew too much and yet nothing at all.

In her late thirties, Margaret was a beautiful woman who had Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes, a lovely figure, and a gentle voice. She was good-natured and easygoing. She laughed like a child and made those around her feel comfortable and invited.

Looking back, I was amazed that I approached her so boldly. The class where we met and became friends was American Design Since 1945. She would usually arrive late, having come directly from work. Still dressed in her elegant work clothes, she would apologize for disturbing the class and slip into the seat I had saved for her. It was a convenient way to show my enthusiasm. By the time she had driven through downtown Chicago, parked her Volvo, entered the building, and reached our classroom, the slide show had already begun and all the good seats were taken.

Although I didn’t want to bother her, the professor’s vocabulary was beyond me. I spent most of my time looking up words in my dictionary. I asked Margaret for help when I missed the professor’s comment on a slide.

“Margaret, what does ‘eerie foreboding’ mean?”

Margaret turned and whispered into my ear.

But I still couldn’t spell it. I opened my dictionary and was unable to locate
eerie
. The struggle exhausted me.

I failed the midterm exam, while Margaret received an A. She was sympathetic. She asked why I would take a course that was beyond my reach. “Aren’t you here like the rest of the kids to express yourself?”

I told Margaret that I wished that I was here to express myself. I was miserable because my days in America were numbered. “I am fighting for my survival.”

She looked at me for a long moment, then turned her head back to the professor. From that moment on, without my asking, she would write down the words that she felt I would have trouble spelling into my notebook. I was able to focus on looking up the words in my dictionary and follow the class. Occasionally Margaret would also lean over my shoulder and explain the meaning of a difficult phrase the professor had just spoken.

I improved quickly. To negotiate with the professor for a passing grade, I produced a paper with illustrations entitled “Chinese Communist Design Since 1949,” for which I received an A minus. Margaret was happy for me.

One day we left school together after class. It was dark outside and I accompanied Margaret to where she parked her car in an underground parking lot. She was grateful and asked if I’d like a ride home. She looked alarmed when I told her my address. “South side at that number? You know how rough the area is?”

“The rent is very cheap.” I smiled.

Margaret shook her head as she started the car. I suggested that she drop me off at the Halstead bus stop. “Seven blocks down.”

“Why seven blocks down?” she said. “How about at the nearest downtown stop?”

I told her the stop seven blocks away would save me a quarter from the bus fare. “A dollar twenty-five is my budget,” I said. “I can save five dollars per month.”

When Margaret wanted company, she took me to her job at a client’s home on the north side of Chicago. During the ride Margaret would put an Aretha Franklin tape into the cassette player and begin to sing along. Over the years of our friendship, she would be my guide not
only to the best American pop music, but also to art, architecture, design, and fashion. In my eyes she was everything I wanted to be. In her company, I felt grateful and privileged.

Margaret never made me feel inadequate or small. If I made a mistake, she let me find out on my own. She earned my respect and trust for what she chose not to do. She understood my sensitivity and awkwardness as a new immigrant. Most Americans I encountered treated me with kindness and respect, but they generally didn’t have any interest in me either. Fried rice and fortune cookies were about as much as an average American knew, or was willing to know, about China. I had never met anyone like Margaret. She was sincerely interested in China. She loved Chinese culture, art, philosophy, and architecture. Her favorite book was Pearl S. Buck’s
The Good Earth
. Since childhood, she fancied that her former life was as a Chinese peasant.

Our friendship blossomed. One day I invited Margaret in after she dropped me off. I was glad that Nick hadn’t produced his stink that day. In her Armani suit, Margaret entered my little storage room. I heard her draw her breath. “Oh, you make me feel so guilty!”

I admired the fact that Margaret had no trouble speaking her mind. As a Jewish American, she believed that I was wrong to judge Jerome, the young man who had attempted to hang himself in class.

“Are you not flawed?” Margaret questioned me. “You call Jerome’s act selfish and foolish, but what do you know about him as an individual and his situation? Do you have any idea of his background? What kind of childhood he might have had? Were his parents abusive? Does he have mental problems that he fights to control? Shouldn’t you try to wear his shoes and walk his path before you criticize?”

I loved Margaret for these questions. Through her, I learned my own narrowness and smallness. One thing she said that stuck with me was, “You think you were deprived because you suffered under the Communist dictatorship, but you had your parents and their love. The real deprivation is being betrayed by your own parents. It’d destroy the core of a child if he was abandoned and abused by people he trusted the most. Can you imagine being raped by your mother’s boyfriend at a
young age, being blamed for it, and beaten by your mother? Can you imagine the devastation, hurt, and confusion?”

Margaret humbled me. She put seeds in my head and they sprouted inside me. Margaret was my enlightenment. I wanted to know more about her and learn from her. I concluded that until I met Margaret, I had been wasting money and time at the school.

Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Margaret had been adopted by a middle-class American family as an infant. She didn’t know her birth mother—who, as she found out later, was deaf and blind. Margaret would not have children for fear of passing on her damaged genes. When she met me, she had been married, divorced, engaged, and disengaged three times. She was an extremely attractive woman. She described herself as part of the “baby boomer generation.”

I asked what it meant when Margaret talked about “Woodstock.” I wanted to learn about the period, especially the “sex, drugs, and revolution.” Years later Margaret would recall that period as my “age of innocence.” She adored who I was then. “Bright-eyed and not yet corrupted.”

Through Margaret, I glimpsed an intimacy that I hadn’t experienced for a long time. I became more attentive to Margaret than ever and did everything I could to spend time with her. My loneliness had finally found a balm. I pursued Margaret as if she were my lover. I was fascinated by the way she attracted men, and I wanted to learn from her about that, and everything else.

I visited Margaret’s office. It was a small interior design firm. Margaret was surprised to see me. She was more surprised when I asked if I could help. “I’ll work for free. Just for the experience.” My real thinking was: This could be an opportunity—I had to start somewhere.

“If you like,” was Margaret’s response.

For the first week, I helped clean the office. I learned to use the coffeemaker. I ran errands in the downtown area. The second week, I became exhausted because I had to carry on with my other jobs and
schoolwork. The third week, Margaret began to feel bad and tried to get me to leave. Hoping to learn on the job, impress Margaret, and possibly get hired, I signed up for an interior-architecture course at the school. The professor threw me out because I was unable to follow.

“I need a trained draftsman,” Margaret said finally. “You are wasting your time here, Anchee.”

I begged her to let me stay. “I am good at improving myself.”

She shook her head and sighed. “I know you are after the H-1 visa. I’d help you if I could. The truth is that my firm is barely surviving. I have consulted an attorney. He told me that the H-1 visa requires a salary, and I don’t have the budget!”

I said good-bye to Margaret and promised that I would not bother her again. Margaret pleaded with me not to be upset. “It’s been hard for me to get clients,” she said.

I felt indebted to her. I would have done the same if I had been her. She had never promised me anything in the first place.

Deepening my distress, I was let go as a waitress at my Chinese restaurant. The owner had decided to comply with immigration law, which forbade the hiring of noncitizen workers.

I begged my boss at the school’s new student gallery for extra work hours. The gallery was located in the middle of the abandoned industrial area on Huron Street. “Neo-abstract Expressionism” had been the theme of most of the exhibitions. There were few visitors. I noticed that the artists had begun to incorporate paintings with installations. The works included a broken tire nailed with a worn shoe, or a bloody bed-sheet draped over a pile of trash. The artists devoted themselves to their projects with absolute dedication. I watched them labor tirelessly to install, deinstall, and reinstall.

Opening nights were what the artists lived for. People came for the party, the food and drinks. The rest of the time during the exhibitions, I was the only soul in the well-lit but empty space. A few times I switched off lights to save electricity.

Graduation approached and I was still without a job prospect. I
tried and failed repeatedly. In a handful of interviews I got—for example, for an art-teacher position in a district nicknamed Little Saigon—the employer wouldn’t consider paying an immigration lawyer fees to change my status to H-1 visa. I learned that my bachelor of fine arts degree counted for little in the job market. To maintain my legal status and gain time, I applied for the master’s of fine arts degree and became a graduate student. Although I was temporarily sheltered immigration-wise, I lived like an ant crawling on a hottening wok. Not a day went by that I did not envision the ultimate disgrace: returning to China empty-handed.

A new face appeared at the gallery one fine morning during the spring of 1988, ten minutes before the end of my shift. The visitor was a Chinese man in his late twenties. He was slender, of medium height, and had the classically handsome look of a Southern Chinese. He had a pair of bright single-lid eyes, and his skin was so fine and smooth that it gave him a touch of femininity. His silky black hair was combed toward the back of his head. Smiling like a rose, he introduced himself.

“My name is Qigu Jiang. It is nice to meet you. I arrived from Shanghai two days ago. I am here to take over the next shift.”