The Cooked Seed (23 page)

An old Italian woman named Maria and her brother John, both in their late sixties, occupied the unit above Bruno and Helen. We stood in their clean kitchen but couldn’t understand a word they said. It wasn’t until Maria got down on the floor and began to imitate a bug crawling that we understood they were complaining about cockroaches.

Qigu and I didn’t know what to do besides offer to buy the cockroach poison. Maria shook her head violently. With the help of her brother, she got on a chair and reached toward the cupboard. She pulled out a plastic bag full of cockroach poison. John showed us that he wanted to open his windows, but was unable to because the window frames had rotted. Qigu said we’d fix their problems as soon as possible.

On the third floor lived two Mexican men, Alfonso and José, who spoke only a few words of English. They told us that a rent increase was not fair because they didn’t have families living with them, and that they used the unit only for sleeping after work.

Qigu and I told them that they were welcome to move if they thought our rent was unreasonable. We pointed out that even with the increase, our rent was still the cheapest on the block. Alfonso said he already knew that, and it was why they would not move. Alfonso told us that the building’s electric system was shot. “It makes popping sounds,” he said.

After the homeless men were gone, we began to move the trash they left behind out of the back building. As we cleared the closets and drawers, we discovered a stack of photo albums featuring generations of a white family. It was someone’s entire life story. There were over twenty albums meticulously framed, marked, and dated. I couldn’t understand why anyone would leave the albums behind when they moved.

Qigu and I took the albums and set them up as a display on boxes next to the trash cans. We hoped that the neighbors would see them and contact whoever had lived here. Days passed, and no one came to claim the albums. The city’s garbage truck came and went, leaving the boxes untouched. I felt awful when it started to rain. I couldn’t stand the idea that the albums would be ruined. Qigu and I put them back into the boxes and carried them inside. We took the boxes out again after the rain. It took us a while to realize that no one was interested in picking them up. It bothered me that we had to be the ones to make the decision to throw away these precious memories.

Qigu and I sat down on the floor and went through the albums one by one as if they were our own. I heard Qigu sigh as he flipped the pages. “Looks like the family was originally from Poland. Here is the great-grandpa and -grandma. They must have been the first-generation immigrants, just like us.”

“The way they dressed got better as the family grew.” I pointed out. “I can almost imagine how they built their lives in America.”

“Too bad a museum wouldn’t take the albums,” Qigu said. “It is real American history.”

Qigu and I notified our landlord on Parnell Street that we would move out the next month. The landlord asked us if we knew any other Chinese students who would rent the apartment. The landlord said that we had been excellent tenants, and he would miss us.

Qigu and I returned to our property after dinner. We had been discussing the cost of hiring a licensed electrician. We decided that we would have no choice but to spend the money. I said to Qigu, “Fire would be a serious hazard if we tried to fix the electrical problems ourselves …”

I couldn’t believe what I saw as the word
fire
rolled off my tongue—our property was on fire. Like in a disaster movie, our roof was in flames. The smoke was coming out of the back building where the two homeless men once lived.

Bruno ran out of his unit in his pajamas. Helen waved her arms and was shouting after her husband. I heard the sound of the fire truck coming from a distance.
It can’t be our property!
I yelled at Qigu.
We just bought it and without any insurance!

Qigu and I rechecked the house number and were shocked to realize that it was indeed ours.

We told the police officers that we were the new owners, and that there had been two homeless men living there without our permission. The police officer said that they had found no individuals in the building. There were no witnesses who could prove who had started the fire.

“What about the shopping carts left in the yard by the homeless men?” I asked.

“Sorry, ma’am, the carts would not be considered valid evidence.” The police officer told us that he regretted that there was nothing he could do to help.

Weeks later, one of the homeless men returned to visit Bruno. He and Bruno drank sitting side by side in the yard. They laughed together and tossed the empty beer cans into the shopping cart. Later, after a fight with her husband, Helen told me that the homeless man had admitted to Bruno that he had been the one who had set the fire.

Qigu and I worked on repairing the fire-damaged apartment for the entire year. We slept in the attic. We had no money to buy power tools and we couldn’t afford to hire help. We had to learn to do everything ourselves. To keep our legal status, we continued our schooling. We took independent-study courses to buy time.

Local lumberyards and hardware stores became our real-life classrooms. We learned everything about fixing an old house. We gutted the section of our roof where the fire had burnt through. Taking out walls and clearing the debris was much easier than dragging the eight-by-four, three-quarter-inch-thick sheets of plywood. The irony was that the labor camp in China had prepared me for this. I did the heavy carrying because Qigu hadn’t recovered from the neck injury he’d received in the car accident. The foam neck brace he wore turned gray with dirt.

I was afraid of falling when it came time to place the plywood over the roof frame. I told myself that Qigu couldn’t do it alone. It was a windy day. My knees kept shaking. I could see the narrow alley three stories below. I pictured myself falling and my body hitting the concrete. The roof pitch was steep. Qigu needed me to hold, slide, and push the sheets into place and hammer the nails.

Qigu suggested that I tie a cord around my waist for protection. I did, but the problem was the weight. I didn’t have enough strength to lift the large sheets. We experimented with several ways and failed. Finally, Qigu phoned a school friend who was a carpenter. The friend came to help. With two men working together on the roof, and I as their assistant, we were able to get the roof on before the first snowfall.

By December we finished stripping the burnt interior—the walls, windows, bathrooms, and the kitchen. I wore a mask, a shower cap, and gloves. My clothes were filthy. We joked about our nostrils being black, like two chimneys, even though we wore masks. Qigu’s hair was caked with dust.

One day, something got into my eyes. It hurt like hell and for days
my tears wouldn’t stop running. My right eye was bloodred and swollen. Rubbing made it worse. I carried on half blind.

At Chicago’s Maxwell Street flea market, we shopped for secondhand tools. We were able to find a used power saw and an electric drill. Afterward, Qigu and I headed to the lumberyard and loaded our car with building materials. There, at a small stand, we had Polish hot dogs for lunch. Qigu enjoyed grilled onions. He loved to say to the vendor, “Extra onions, please.” We had never tasted anything so delicious.

As I watched Qigu take a big bite of his Polish hot dog, I found myself falling into the joy that spread across his face.

I loved the feeling of us working together as a team. When it came time to tackle the plumbing, we became partners in the delicate work of soldering. As Qigu prepared the inside of the fitting with a round wire brush, I used steel wool to clean the outside of the pipe.

“Be careful with the sharp edges,” Qigu would say.

I waited for Qigu to measure and cut the pipe, then put the fittings together. After Qigu applied flux soldering paste, I would light the propane torch and pass it to him.

Meanwhile I quickly inserted an inch of solder into the joint. Qigu held the tip of the flame against the middle of the fitting. We would wait until the soldering paste began to sizzle.

We watched as the capillary action sucked the liquid solder into the joint. The moment Qigu said, “Now!” I wiped away the excess with a rag.

The moments when Qigu heated up the fittings with the propane torch, when we waited for the solder to sizzle, when the liquid solder sealed the copper joints, I felt my heart was at home.

I adored the way Qigu gazed intently at the flame. I found his concentration attractive and even seductive. Bundled in thick winter coats, we moved like two polar bears in a forest of copper pipes. The room’s frigid air made Qigu’s nose turn red. I remember thinking,
I can kiss him just now.
He might never be rich, but we would be wealthy in love. I began to see Qigu as my ideal peasant farmer who plowed his land tirelessly, and I wanted to be his wife.

The sixty-five-dollar Chevrolet had been serving us well, although the front and taillights no longer worked. Every time I drove, I had to place flashlights inside the light housings, and every time I returned home I took them out. One day I forgot to turn off the flashlights after parking and the batteries died. I received a ticket from the police. Before saving enough money to pay off the first fine, another ticket arrived. A neighbor reported to the city that we had been filling our trash cans with construction debris. We hadn’t known that this was illegal. I was depressed over the lost money. Qigu tried to cheer me up with the Chinese horseman story—the man’s horse ran off and he was distraught from the loss; but as he was moaning into the wind, the horse returned with a finely made new pack.

A period of rain was forecast just after the lumberyard truck dropped off a huge stack of eight-by-four drywall sheets in front of our yard. For three days, Qigu and I carried the drywall to the second floor. We were exhausted and frustrated by our ineffectiveness. My spine, injured at the labor camp, began to hurt. Qigu had to endure the pain from his injured neck. By the end of the day we could barely move. Yet we could not afford to quit because heavy rain was on its way.

We were so thankful when two strangers, two white men, passed by and offered to help. For a total of ninety dollars they promised to carry the rest of the drywall up the stairs. To show our gratitude, we offered each man a twenty-dollar tip as they finished. The next morning we were shocked to discover that our basement window had been broken into, and that all of our equipment was gone.

The exterior siding would have to be put up in the middle of winter. The snow on the ground was three feet deep. I could hear Christmas music from the neighbors’ house. As Qigu and I began the job, we each were on an aluminum ladder. The wind was strong. Because the space between the buildings was extremely narrow, the ladders leaned against the wall at almost 90 degrees. As Qigu and I carried the lengths of siding between us up the wall, my ladder kept sliding to the side. Qigu and I had to adjust our positions, like acrobatic actors, in order to keep the balance.

I clenched my teeth as I held on. Qigu had me hold the board as he
hammered the nails on his side, and then I would hammer the nails on my side. We worked without stopping. As the evening deepened, the wind grew stronger. It was difficult for me to remove a two-and-a-half-inch nail from my pocket, hold it between my lips, and climb up while juggling to stabilize the ladder. Once I secured my position, I pressed the board with one hand while reaching behind to grab my hammer.

I could feel the ladder under me begin to slide. It went fast. Before I could make a sound, the ladder fell, taking me with it. It was like a slow-motion film. I was falling from three stories while trying to let go of the board for fear that it would pull Qigu down with me.

I hit the ground. Fortunately, the three-foot-high snow cushioned my fall. For a moment I couldn’t move.

“Are you okay?” I heard Qigu’s cry. “Anchee, answer me! Please, are you alive?”

I knew I was not dead, because I could still hear the neighbors’ Christmas music, yet I was unable to speak. Qigu came down from his ladder and held me in his arms.

Strangely, I felt happy.

“How dare you smile!” Qigu yelled in Chinese. His facial expression twisted. “You scared the shit out of me!”

I returned to China to visit my family in the summer of 1989. Students had already begun to gather in Tiananmen Square by the thousands. They were calling for democracy and there was electricity in the air. I met with a former middle schoolmate, who was now one of the student leaders. He tried to convince me to join his organized hunger strike in Beijing. Sitting across from him, I found myself thinking that he had always been an opportunist. I was offended by his cunning. His interest in seeking international media attention at any cost repelled me.

“Democracy has a price!” he kept saying to me. “To wake up the masses, there must be bloodshed. We’ll not back down until we get what we want.”

What he wanted was power. I knew that with certainty because he had once been the leader of the Red Guards in my middle school. When he talked about blood and death, he did not mean his own.

As history played out, the movement was crushed. There was indeed blood and death. What bothered me the most was not the government firing on its own people, but the student leaders who fled to the West on preissued American and European visas: the fact that they left their fellow students to the slaughter.

My mother saw me but didn’t believe what her eyes told her. She had been leaning on the same window frame for years dreaming of my homecoming. I yelled at the top of my lungs, “Mama!”

Frozen in disbelief, my mother failed to respond. Another figure appeared behind her. It was my father. The old man lit up and waved. I heard him shout to my mother, “You are not dreaming! Anchee is here!” Instantly my mother dropped out of sight. She had collapsed to the floor in happiness.

It was not easy to explain to my parents the reason I had returned to China. After failing at every job application I’d tried in America, I realized that the only way I’d ever find a job was to create one myself.