(This piece won the Second-Place award in 2007 Jack London Writers Contest/Nonfiction of California Writers Club, my very first, therefore very special, American writing award.)
I love living in beautiful America for so many reasons.
I can drink water directly out of the water faucet whenever I’m thirsty. Oh, that crystal clear water. I don’t have to boil it first before I can drink it. I can do my laundry any time of the day. That precious clear water is always ready to flow out of the water faucet. I appreciate America’s abundant clean water with my deepest gratitude because I came from a place with a severe water shortage. Three times a day, half an hour each time, water trickles out for each family. The rest of the day for all your cooking, washing and toilet flushing needs? You’re on your own.
In beautiful America, there is no unannounced constant power cut offs. It was such a painful memory watching my young daughter cry over her favorite Donald Duck suddenly vanishing into the blank TV screen.
I love America’s well paved sidewalks, too. If you have ever walked in the dark on the muddy alley streets full of sewage filth and pot holes you’ll know what I mean by that. I count my blessings for the simple things like the clean bottom of my shoes free of spit, dirt or sewage mud. (Well, occasionally stepping on the dog doo-doo is exceptional.) I count my blessings for no longer getting pitch-black nostrils every day from breathing the air outside.
Every time I use a public toilet in beautiful America, I thank my new home country for its generous free supply of the snow-white soft toilet tissues.
I feel so at home in America also because my “giant not so feminine” feet are welcomed as only a medium size of 9! Here in America my 5’7” body height is not “too tall”. Nor is my
neck “too long”! What a heavenly feeling it is to drown myself in the sea of choices in the department stores! I love hosting and showing off to my friends with my gourmet cooking from scratch in my beautiful new American penthouse condo home with granite counter, marble and hardwood floor.
By becoming an America citizen, I created for my family a secure future with abundant opportunities. How my heart is content and at peace I’ve helped my daughter escape from the vicious cycle of girl bashing Chinese culture. The birth of a male child is said to add gold value to the family, whereas the birth of a girl, is only worth that of a piece of roof tile.
My paternal grandmother once tossed her own newborn baby daughter like a used diaper into a toilet full of urine. She couldn’t forgive herself for giving birth to yet another “cheap flat piece” girl.
My coming to this world as a girl greatly disappointed my Li family. My parents left me behind to grow up with my dirt-poor peasant grandparents in their village. At age eight, I was for the first time in my life brought back to my parents’ city home to be a servant to my two younger brothers and a little housemaid to my parents. Despite my all-time excelling in school, my father told me I was too dumb to never amount to anything in life, esp. to become a teacher.
I went on to China’s best foreign language university in Beijing and became the No.1 high school English language teacher during 1979 – 89 in the city of Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, Northern China for my students’ all-time achievements of above 90% national percentile on their college entrance examinations
“Well, just don’t think too much of yourself,” my mother said to me.
“If only you were a boy, you’d have brought real glory of pride to my Li family name,” my father sighed.
In 2002, my American honor roll students had me published in Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers.
I so proudly hail to my American citizenship, for I have earned it through tears, hardship, and by “biting the bullet”. To create a bright future for my family, I made my heart aching Sophie’s choice.
On September 26, 1989 with two suitcases of clothes in my hands and $20 in my pocket as my whole worldly possessions, I left my family for America as a graduate student. I was over one month late for the first semester. By the end of the second semester, on May 20, 1990, less than eight months later, I proudly walked on stage and received the honor of my master’s degree with a GPA of over 3.6.
Those busy study days and nights were filled with my tears and punctuated by the crying of my aching heart from missing my 8-year-old daughter, whom I couldn’t see until she was almost 13 years old.
For five years living alone in America, I did not have the heart to touch one bite of ice cream because it was my daughter’s favorite. Every time I saw a young girl of my daughter’s age, my heart would start trembling with pain. I’d fix my teary eyes on the young girl till she went out of my sight.
For my family’s bright future, I played the “no pain, no gain” golden rules. But I had no words to make my young daughter understand the meaning of “pain”, or the guilty feelings of her mother.
“I don’t agree with you that it should be a woman’s place to leave her family behind and try to make it,” one of my American friends one day told me her honest disapproval of me.
I did not know how to explain to my well-intentioned American friend that opportunities rarely existed for commoners like me who don’t belong to the elite ruling class. But if we are once in a while lucky enough to be granted one chance, we’d better jump up to grab it at all cost before it passed us by forever. In the land of the billions, the essence of life is but fierce competition.
I had to be the absolute No.1 winner out of the hundreds of my high school teacher colleagues by taking a series of rigorous academic tests just to be in America. My hard-earned and once-in-my-life-time opportunity was just too precious to let go and wasted. I needed to escape the land, where once I had to spend one third of my entire monthly salary to buy a watermelon for my daughter’s sore throat.
My first job after I earned my master’s degree in Oklahoma, America, was to be a nurse’s aide in a children’s convalescent home at $5 per hour. Bathing, weighing, suctioning and diapering those bedridden stiff children, I seemed tireless. For three months in a row, I tried to work double shifts 16 hours a day, seven days a week.
“You are either broke, or you don’t have a life,” one of my coworkers said to me.
“Both,” I said quietly. I told no one how much I actually appreciated the working
privilege. I was thrilled going over and over in my head the fortune of $80 earned from just one double shift working day. It was all worth my lost sleep!
Working hard was the only way for me to make it from scratch in America. After work, I’d ride my bicycle a church friend gave me to buy my groceries. I’d make my own sandwiches to work for lunch every day, so I didn’t have to spend any unnecessarily extra money for lunch. The tomatoes would make my sandwich soggy. But I loved eating my soggy sandwiches in between those long double shift hours.
November 1990, I took a Greyhound bus to San Francisco.
To celebrate my renewed work permit, I walked to the McDonald’s in San Francisco’s Chinatown. I had an order of small French fries and coke. My feast. I skipped the hamburger. I needed to save that extra dollar this time. I’d wait for my daughter to come and enjoy this remaining luxury together.
To save every penny possible, I cooked all my meals from scratch. Growing up to be a Chinese Cinderella to my two brothers turned out to be a blessing in disguise. My stir-fried fresh vegetable dishes could very well beat those often over-cooked and over-priced restaurant vegetable dishes. My handmade macaroni pasta from scratch with fresh tomato sauce with fresh garlic was much better than the machine-made pasta in stores. I also made a bowl of Ramen noodles tasty and nutritious by adding a Vitamin C rich fresh tomato, a pinch of fresh chopped green onions and cilantro. I enjoyed doing the mental math while walking along the Polk Street
to and from work as to how many 7-for-$1 Ramen noodles I needed for a month.
For the first two years of living in San Francisco, I walked one mile to take the BART to work and another mile after BART. The $32 MUNI bus pass was just too much money to waste on unnecessary comfort and convenience for myself.
My penny-pinching living style quickly made me realize that it wasn’t even up to the standard of the homeless street beggars.
One evening, as I was walking out of the grocery store at the corner of the Bush Street at Larkin, a ragged looking old homeless man walked up to me pushing a shopping cart. He stretched his hand out in front of me. Having been dearly loved by my dirt-poor peasant grandpa in my early childhood, I always have sympathy for elderly men who live a hard luck life. So I put into his hand all I had, three pennies I had just saved from walking the four extra blocks to buy the gallon of milk. But I felt bad right away to see the old man staring at the three pennies frowning. Shaking his head in disbelief, the beggar then walked away mumbling. I blushed and murmured my apology, “Sorry, it’s not much.”
On another day, I was walking by a man in his 20’s. Standing against the wall outside the XXX-rated building on O’Farrel at Polk Street, the young man was leaning on a crutch with a bandaged left foot. “Spare some change?” he called out to me. I couldn’t help but amazed by his relaxed manner and self-assurance. He didn’t sound embarrassed at all for being a street beggar at such a prime working age! Other than his bandaged left foot, the young man seemed to be well-fed, glowing with good health. He was also dressed clean and neat. It was the crutch under
his arm and his bandaged left foot that called for my sympathy. So I stopped to take out of my
pocket the little clear grocery bag I kept my coins in. I was embarrassed for taking too long to tackle the tight knot on it. I finally fished out a quarter and proudly placed it into the young man’s open palm. “It’s OK,” the young man said quietly, looking away.
From 1990 – 93, I earned my starting salary of $12,000 – $16,400 as a preschool teacher in West Oakland. That was my sole source for all my living expenses, paying off of the $2,800 lawyer fee and sending $50 a month back to my husband and daughter in China.
After paying $270 a month for my room with communal bathroom of showers and toilets shared with dozen other residents on the second floor, I set a strict budget of $20 for my weekly spending. Food, clothes, whatever. No going out to eat. No movies. No shopping in the department stores. For the first three years of my life in San Francisco, I bought almost all my clothes from the Salvation Army store right across my window.
“Have you ever utilized any public assistance?” one of the INS forms says.
“Have I? I do take the public transportation. Does that count?” I was confused.
“No, they mean the welfare service”, my Immigration lawyer cleared it up for me. No, I never even thought about asking for help or borrowed a penny from anyone.
“Aren’t you scared of living in a place like this?” one friend wasn’t impressed with the chaotic disorder and noises from the unkempt looking people on the sidewalks under my studio apartment window.
“Well, take it or leave it,” one of the two police officers snapped at me for being
hysterical from getting obscene phone calls. “Just like nobody asked you to come to live in San
Francisco, you can also move out on your own if you can’t handle it.”
From the way the officers were sizing up my tiny studio, I realized how embarrassingly shabby it was. The thin worn out green blanket I bought for $2.50 covered the caved-in queen sized mattress. A worn-out armchair was the only other furniture by the small iron stand against the wall. My tiny frying pan I bought for 25 cents was sitting on the stove, where a few daring cockroaches were scurrying around. The pretty dark blue plastic drinking cup I bought for 50 cents was the only centerpiece on the scrawny little table in the corner of the room by the narrow closet door.
“You rice gobbler, go back to your rice patty!” a man in dirty clothes and dirty hair sitting on a sidewalk bench on Market Street was yelling at me. It was a late afternoon. I just got off BART at the Civic Center. The hatred in the man’s voice made me shudder with fear. As I pretended not to hear him and walked on by silently, the crazy man showered me with another string of profanities.
The hardest part during those four years of living alone on Polk Street was missing my daughter. Watching those preschool kids napping and eating made me miserable. I was wondering all day everyday how my own flesh and blood daughter was doing on the other side of the world while attending to other mothers’ children. Crying my eyes out by the end of the day alone was the only thing I could do.
Telephone calls to China were expensive, several dollars a minute. My husband did not
have a phone at home back in China. He had to walk a mile with my daughter to his office or
bother the next-door neighbor. My daughter was forming her pre-adolescent years with her mother being the chocolate candy packages from the post office and a trembling weeping voice crying her name over and over on the phone.
“Just when are you going to get the green card? I can’t stand people laughing to my face that my wife is more capable than me!” my husband sounded like he needed more comfort than I did.
In 1993, I was finally granted my green card based on my master’s degree and my employment as a preschool teacher.
In 1994, I achieved my dream to have my family join me in my paradise America.
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