ANGEL ISLAND

Xiaodan, they forced us into lines. They brought us off the boat and then forced us into lines, and they broke the Lu family apart into four, father mother daughter brother, like this was ancient times and they were executing the fifth punishment right in front of us. Mother clutched me to her breast as we stumbled forward for our turn, wide-eyed and ox-dumb and ready to fight if they tried to separate us, but a tall man with blond hair waved us through without even looking. Mother held me even tighter as we joined one of the lines headed towards the yellow-white building low in the distance. “Mama, your fingers,” I whispered as she dragged me along. “You are hurting me–” but she just held me harder and I began to squirm, tears welling up in my eyes, until she turned and slapped me and hissed: Be quiet – can’t you see – they are waiting for you to run.

I went limp at once and held a hand to my cheek as we moved forward, feeling the heat and tingle of the slap. Xiaodan, truth be told I was relieved. I was afraid if mother let me go they would separate us like they did the Lu family, and since I was a big girl I could not grab mother’s hand on my own. I let mother’s fingers bruise me, and together we were sandwiched between Lu daughter ahead of us and a woman behind us, too dark to be proper Chinese with bright, bright earrings, and I peered curiously over her at my shoulder until she caught me looking and began to stare back. Her eyes were large and fierce and though she did not speak I could tell she had not been struck ox-dumb like the rest of us, that she was tiger-ready and weakness-waiting and that the seawater had not gotten into her bones and left them empty of marrow. We went on staring until mother jerked me forward and I slipped and scraped my knee on the concrete, earning a silent scolding and several harsh tugs on my arm as punishment. When I glanced back the dark woman with the bright earrings was gazing elsewhere.

What did the lines of people look like when you came here, Xiaodan? Or did such a thought even cross your mind? I didn’t notice then, but now I gaze out my window at the new arrivals in their lines and from afar they are like snakes whose heads vanish into the yellow-white administrative building, their beheading sudden, or perhaps swallowed up by a greater predator. The tail of the snake still grows with immigrants that pile off the ships, thousands upon thousands, until individual figures blur and merge like scales. The scales of the snake made of men are black and gray from hats and wool coats, somber serious promises of responsibility and loyalty, a reliable work-hard minimum-wage force perfect for the construction of the New America. Once or twice the pale ivory moon-face of a boy peers out, hatless, expectant. I like to watch them and imagine they are you, Xiaodan, when you first arrived. Your first letters were so hopeful.

The scales of the snake made of women and children are more colorful. Headscarves and wraps, glints of jewels. A much shorter snake because cooking and cleaning in America is not much different than cooking and cleaning in Asia, except here conversations are only in broken English and new American names are chosen for proper assimilation. I can watch this snake for hours, Xiaodan, and I’ll often pick a mother and her child and imagine their lives, give them histories and emotions and affection, seeing how much I can fit in before they reach the head of the snake and they are swallowed too. Some lives are long and purposeful, mapped out by the black vulture hunch of a mother’s back, and some are short.

When I am tired of this game I sit back and watch the undulation of the snakes. Fresh off the boat and herded into lines, nobody has had time to acquire their land legs and people stagger and stumble like new-born goats, a ripple wave of movement that starts at the head and travels down the body to the tail as everyone moves forward after the person in front of them. Anja once said it was as if God had tapped the neck of the headless snake simply for the joy of watching it squirm, but it is more poetic than that, Xiaodan, more subtle.

But this all came later. In the line myself I thought none of this. By the time we reached the halfway point, Xiaodan, my knees were shaking badly and my throat was parched. I whispered to my mother I wanted water when I could no longer stand it, but she pinched me quiet without looking at me. “I thought you said there was clean water in America,” I hissed at her accusingly and she pinched me again, this time harder.

There were guards at intervals along the lines to keep us in check and the older ones moving. Occasionally somebody would find their feeble cricket voice and ask Where are we going, please tell us, or Where is my husband, I need my husband, or What is waiting for us ahead, but no man replied. I only asked one question on that walk, to another blond man with hair that shone straw-gold in the light – “How is your hair so yellow?” – but mother rushed me away before he could reply. I got another slap for it but the pain faded to nothing when I peered behind me. The guard was smiling faintly, the first human expression I had seen in America, and I knew he had understood me.

That smile would become my saving grace, Xiaodan, in the days to come. If I had known the only problem I faced in those lines was the shaking of my knees and the slowly heating concrete through my shoes, I would have prolonged my stay in that line for a lifetime. I’m sure you have heard the details, Xiaodan, so I will spare you, but once we were inside the yellow-white building we were stripped and probed and poked by men in white. Women were cowering, covering their most intimate places; the bright dark woman behind mother and I refused to undress and was led away into another room where the door closed and the lock clicked. My mother tried to prevent them from undressing me but I was too unshapely at the time, my hair too short, and I was forced to slide down my pants to provide the evidence they needed for their records.

Part of my mother wilted then, Xiaodan, no matter how high she kept her head and firm she kept her face, and as we were ordered to re-dress and herded into the barracks that would become our home I could see the flower bloom of her soul begin to fade. With every day that passed and every interrogation struggled through it faded more and more, until her drooping shoulders and tired eyes were all I could think about when they called me in to ask me about my childhood toys, the color of Ming Hao’s house, whether Meyli’s fur had been long or short. “I don’t know,” I finally said one day, repeating it over and over again in Mandarin, and then English, until finally they stopped asking anything. “I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.”

Mother was called in more after that, but I was not. We stayed longer than anybody from our ship, Xiaodan, nearly a year, but you know this. Supposedly we were detained because they were looking for somebody to corroborate our story, but the only name we could give them was yours, and when mother had to admit she did not know where you were or the English name you had assumed, we both knew it was all over even though we had passports with our pictures, even though she had paid for interrogation training before we left China. Her flower fully wilted. She did the only thing left for her then, Xiaodan, and she did it for me.

Consumption swallows you whole and leaves nothing behind, like the yellow-white building swallows the headless snake. They could not deport me afterwards. I was too young to return alone. They trained me in English instead and I self-taught myself Cantonese so I became invaluable. I set aside my humanity and became as cold as a Mohe winter, infallible to immigrant tears and necessary on the Board of Special Inquiry, but inside, Xiaodan, inside I am burning like I am the one with consumption until my fellow translators in the barracks see my anger and give me the name Ge Ming. Xiaodan, if you ever look for me, listen for this name on the wind and hunt for the scent of ashes in the air. Follow both until you find me, but be quick, because after all this time I am impatient with longing and I will not wait.

Tomorrow, Xiaodan, the Mohe winter thaws. The knees stop shaking, the ships stop arriving, and the snakes will burn to death in the summer sun.

Tomorrow, Xiaodan, it will be our people that smile.