Beautiful Country: A Memoir

Ma Ma now came home late in the evenings after graduate school courses. Qian was spending more time with her father, and she felt guilty about having so much fun with him. Ba Ba only knew how to make one dish: stir-fried tomatoes with egg. Qian enjoyed watching her father cook and telling him about her adventures at school with her friends. Yet, Qian worried about “the devil in his eyes” (191), anxious that her father might become angry at any moment. Ma Ma complained often that her stomach hurt, and Qian made a point to save extra food for her, certain that the pain was coming from hunger. But Ma Ma did not eat the food Qian prepared for her; instead, she stayed up late at the kitchen table, studying and holding onto her stomach. 

Soon, Qian started to feel sick too. Nausea enveloped her, and she found herself vomiting throughout the day. On a free field trip, Qian listened to her new best friend Christine talk about her new shoes. Qian liked Christine because she was beautiful and also because she allowed Qian to speak to her roughly, the way Ma Ma and Ba Ba spoke to Qian. As they walked along the street, Qian saw her father in his nice clothes, leaving a government building. Qian felt the nausea come on, and she vomited, ruining her friend’s new shoes. Several of her peers also began to vomit, sickened by Qian’s illness.

This chapter is split in half. In the first part, Qian tried her hand at lying. She first told her classmates that her father was a cop. Later, she told them that she was half-white. Each time she was caught in a lie, she told her friends that she was testing them and they passed, but really each lie was a way for Qian to take on a new identity, particularly when she felt self-conscious about her current reality. Mr. Kane repeatedly made Qian feel small and embarrassed. He ridiculed her overalls and insisted that there was no way she could have written anything as good as the work she handed in. Mr. Kane made it a point to teach his students about the importance of recognizing their limitations and emphasizing how uneducated their immigrant parents were. When Qian found a stamp with one of her favorite PBS character’s names on it, Julie, she started calling herself Julie and stamping her papers with it. Mr. Kane told her she could not use both names and must pick one. She meekly stuck with the name Qian.

The second half is about Qian’s mother. One evening, when Qian returned home from school, Ma Ma was not in the kitchen. Supper was cooking, but Ma Ma was in bed with the curtain drawn, moaning. She told Qian to call 911—her stomach pain had become too unbearable. Qian called for the upstairs neighbors to come help while she dialed 911. The paramedics and Ba Ba arrived and took Qian’s mother away in an ambulance. Qian felt ashamed that she had not been able to protect Ma Ma. When Qian came home from school the next day, Ma Ma was still not home and Ba Ba said that she would be having surgery: Ma Ma had a large mass, and the doctors had to see if it was cancerous. Qian was full of questions that she knew her father could not answer.

The American hospital was very different from the hospitals Qian had visited in China, larger and smelling of chemicals. Visiting Ma Ma at St. Vincent’s went against everything Ba Ba had taught them about avoiding people in uniform. Each time they entered the building, they had to pass police officers and nurses. Ba Ba tightened his grip on Qian’s hand every time he saw them. Ma Ma was very sick, and Qian created a set of superstitions to help her cope with the situation. One of these had to do with an elderly woman Qian passed on the way to Ma Ma’s room; each day, Qian told herself that if the elderly woman was still there, Ma Ma would be okay. Ba Ba was filled with anxiety and stress, but he still tried to make Qian laugh. He even resumed singing Xi Mou Hou and dancing with his daughter in the evenings.

As Qian’s superstitions grew, she became clumsier and fell more. The more she tried to do things right for Ma Ma, the more she failed. During lunch recess, Qian tripped and landed on her hand and wrist. Her hand swelled and turned purple and blue, so she hid it in her large sweater. When she arrived at the hospital, Ma Ma had a bad day, her veins exhausted from IV use. When Ba Ba arrived, Qian continued to hide her hand.

While Ba Ba spent weekends at the hospital with Ma Ma, Qian went to stay with family friends. Ba Ba said that it wasn’t good for Qian to be at the hospital all the time. First, Qian stayed with Yang Ah Yi, whose food was burned and salty. After dinner, Yang Ah Yi explained that while her family was low-income, Qian’s family was “no-income” (220). Qian told her father that she did not want to stay with Yang Ah Yi anymore.

Ma Ma’s friend from graduate school watched Qian next. Her name was Wu Ah Yi, and she had a daughter two years younger than Qian. Wu Ah Yi was obsessed with beauty and talked all day about how beautiful she and her daughter Feng were. Wu Ah Yi also criticized Feng’s looks, reminding Qian of the way her parents criticized her at the dinner table. Feng’s eyes were not as big as Wu Ah Yi’s, which Qian later discovered was due to the eyelid surgery Wu Ah Yi had undergone. Feng followed Qian around like a puppy, even when Qian needed to use the restroom. 

Qian stayed next with Lin Ah Yi, another friend of Ma Ma’s from school. Lin Ah Yi lived in a basement apartment in a poor neighborhood. Her husband had a kind face, and her son mostly left Qian alone. After learning that Qian liked books, Lin Ah Yi took her son and Qian to the library, where Qian checked out a pile of Baby-Sitters Club books. At their home, Qian had her own room. She luxuriated in having space to read and do as she pleased. Lin Ah Yi was also a good cook, and Qian marveled at feeling full after dinner. She felt peaceful at Lin Ah Yi’s home, free of the stress of Ma Ma’s illness and Ba Ba’s worry. When she went back home, Qian found that Ba Ba had released their cat Marilyn into the streets. He had a number of excuses, but Qian felt the striking difference between the security she felt at Lin Ah Yi’s home and what she felt at home.

Finally, it was time for Ma Ma’s surgery. Ba Ba told Qian that they had to stay in the waiting room all day in case something happened, but Qian was not sure what he meant. They waited 11 hours. Qian’s hand appeared to be healing; she had been very careful to hide it all this time. Once, Lin Ah Yi caught sight of her hand, but Qian convinced her that it was always like that. Qian sat in the waiting room, reading a Baby-Sitters Club book. Wu Ah Yi and Lin Ah Yi came to visit at the hospital. Lin Ah Yi brought a bag of buns. When the doctor emerged from behind a door, he told Ba Ba and Qian that the surgery went well and that there was no cancer. They had removed Ma Ma’s gallbladder and part of her liver. Ba Ba was deferential to the surgeon and gave him a brown envelope with $500, carefully saved and counted, to thank him for performing the surgery. The doctor treated the envelope as if it was merely a sack of change.

When they found Ma Ma in her hospital room, she looked old and shriveled. She was hooked up to a number of machines. Two catheter bags hung from the bed, one for urine and one for menstrual blood. Ma Ma did not wake up when they visited, and the nurse curtly informed them that she was still under the effects of anesthesia. Ba Ba did not ask questions, and Qian wondered at the way living in the United States had silenced her father.