USHI's POV
About Jack Sheng," she says. "His petition was denied. The IJ said his testimony was not credible. Why is Jack Sheng not credible?"
Listening to my mother talk always used to confuse my childhood friends. She speaks English with a thick accent. After my parents' petition for asylum was granted, allowing us to stay in the US, she devoted all her spare time to helping friends navigate the immigration system. And Mom has many, many friends. Those friends also have friends, and both Mom and her many friends are on the internet, which raises the enterprise to a whole new level of acquaintanceship.
br /> After years of helping others, her vocabulary is larger than most people would expect. It's also peculiarly specialized.
Long experience allows me to translate my mother's immigration shorthand. One of my mother's many, many friends/distant acquaintances/internet message board buddies from her Falun Gong practice also tried to get asylum in the United States. The immigration judge—that's the IJ my mother refers to; she's picked up all the immigration lingo—didn't believe that her friend had actually been persecuted by the Chinese government for practicing Falun Gong, and so denied his request for asylum. So Jack Sheng is going back to China.
"I don't know why Jack Sheng is not credible," I say, which is the simple truth. I stand up, pushing away from the frozen video of smiling child Christian, and cross the room to lean against the wall.
"Of course you don't know. I don't know, either. There is no legitimate answer." I can imagine my mother waving her arms, tucking the phone between her chin and face. "This is the question we must ask. Why is Jack Sheng not credible? We have to raise money for an appeal."
I pull my arms around myself. "Mom..." It's not so much a protest. I have forty-three dollars and twenty cents in my checking account right now, and that has to last until my next paycheck, nine days away.
"I know, I know," Ma says. "You're a student. You don't have so much. I'm not asking for your help."
I nod, even though she can't hear that.
"But I gave your check to Jack Sheng. So don't be surprised if you see his name on the back."
I swallow hard, leaning against the wall. Even with that support, my legs have all the strength of a rapidly falling soufflé. I slowly sink to the floor. I can't breathe. I can't think. And—I remind myself—I can't scream at my own mother.
"This month," my mom says, "Mabel can just try harder."
God, it hurt so much to send that thirty dollars. That thirty bucks I sent means I can never take the easy way out and order pizza when I'm too exhausted to cook. It means that on Saturday nights, when my friends are taking time off to recharge, I'm the one frantically trying to get a head start on my homework for the coming week, because God knows I won't have the time on weekdays. That thirty bucks means I never, ever get to take a break.
It was also supposed to mean that Mabel would get the meds she needs.
"Mom." My voice is thick. "I didn't give you that money for Jack Sheng. I gave it to you for Mabel."
"But Jack Sheng practices Falun Gong," my mother says, as if that's the end of the conversation. And for her, it is.
"Yes, but I don't," I snap out.
I can hear the silence on the other end of the phone.
"Oh?" my mother asks.
I don't say anything.
"It's true," she concedes. "When your father was in prison in China, you were not practicing Falun Gong."
There is no response I can give to that.
"When our neighbors hid us so that I would not be taken away and tortured, too, you were not practicing Falun Gong."
I shake my head. I was six. I remember almost nothing—nothing except a thick blanket of guilt, a dark wave of feeling that this was all somehow my fault.
"Falun Gong practitioners raised the money to bribe the authorities, smuggle us out of China, and fly us to America. You don't practice Falun Gong. You don't need to; they just saved your life, that's all. But it's okay if it's not so convenient for you to remember that any more."
"You said you wouldn't guilt trip me," I manage to choke out.
"That," my mother says quietly, "was only the truth. Any guilt comes from you, not me."
I don't know how to answer. So far, I've managed to get everything right, even working as much as I do. This year, though, my classes have reached a new level of hard. I thought Organic was hard, but physical chemistry is that much worse. And if I thought introductory programming classes were difficult, now I'm drowning. Instead of turning in assignments that search and sort lists of numbers, we're designing our own programming languages. There aren't enough minutes in the day, and I'm not sure I can maintain the grades I need to make everything come together.
I can feel my entire future slipping from my fingers.
I don't know Jack Sheng, but right now, I hate him. I hate him so much for needing my money. I hate him because I've heard his story a hundred times before—tortured because he practiced Falun Gong in China, escaped to the US, and is now being sent back home.
This is what Christian Stirling will never understand: that when he and his father give money to charities, it never hurts them. To them, it's just a check. It makes them feel good. It's a pat on the back. He will never understand what it means to hate someone over thirty dollars. He probably spends more than thirty dollars on his jeans. Fuck. I don't know what rich people spend on jeans. He would probably scoff at the idea that you could get a pair of jeans for thirty bucks.
"Mom," I say. "You have to get Mabel her medication."
"Next month, maybe."
"No." I swallow. "It's not fair to her to skip around like that." When you have as little as I do, you know it to the last dollar. I had thought about splurging, about getting my sweater dry-cleaned. But this is it; I can't afford my superstition any longer.
"I can send you a little more," I say. "But you have to promise you'll get her meds. Okay?"
I can manage twenty dollars. That should be enough. It'll leave me with twenty-three bucks for nine days. That's not that bad. I still have most of a twenty-five pound bag of rice. I'm practically rich, as long as nothing comes up.
There's a long pause. From that, I gather that Mom didn't just sign over my check to Jack Sheng's appeal account. She's given more than my parents can really afford. I'm not going to be the only one figuring out how to eat on dollars a day.
"Please," I say. "It's really important."
People say that money doesn't buy love, and maybe they're right. I don't need money to love my parents or my sister. I love them so fiercely and so much that it hurts sometimes. I love them so much that I think of them every time I want to give up, which is practically every day. If I play my cards right, if I don't mess everything up, by the time Mabel is in college I can make sure that she never has to feel like this. I won't have to worry about my parents' nonexistent savings. I won't lie awake at night wondering if they accidentally forgot to pay their health insurance premiums this month. I'll just be able to take care of it all.
Money may not buy love, but it buys something like it. Not having any money makes love complicated. No matter how much I love Mabel, I can't quash the part of me that resents her existence. Part of me remembers that in China, she wouldn't even have been born. And while I would never want that—while I would take on anyone who tried to hurt my little sister—sometimes I think of a world without anyone who needed me. I imagine being able to breathe, being able to rest. I imagine being able to get pizza with my friends after class instead of making polite excuses. I imagine getting coffee with Christian Stirling.
