Page 83 of I Hope This Doesn't Find
This kind of treatment always makes me uncomfortable in a way I can’t articulate, even when it’s not directed at me, but Ma just smiles at him through her sunglasses and slides gracefully into the front seat. Looking at her now, with her pale, unblemished skin and custom-made blazer and razor-sharp bob, you’d never guess she grew up fighting for scraps with six other siblings in a poor rural Chinese town.
The rest of us squeeze into the back of the car in our usual order: me and Ba beside the windows, and my nine-year-old little sister, Emily, squashed in the middle.
“To your school?” Li Shushu confirms in slow, enunciated Mandarin as he starts the engine, the smell of new leather and petrol fumes seeping into the enclosed space. He’s been around me long enough to know the extent of my Chinese skills.
“To the school,” I agree, doing my best to ignore the pinch in my gut. I hate going to Westbridge enough as it is, but whatever the school, parent-teacher interviews are always the worst. If it wasn’t for the fact that Emily goes to the same school as me and also has her interviews this evening, I’d have made up a brilliant excuse to keep us all home.
Too late to do anything now.
I lean back in my seat and press my cheek to the cool, flat glass, watching our apartment complex grow smaller and smaller until it disappears entirely, replaced by the onrush of the inner city scene.
Since we moved back here, I’ve spent most of our car rides plastered to the window like this, trying to take in the sharp rise and fall of the Beijing skyline, the maze of intersections and ring roads, the bright clusters of dumpling restaurants and packed grocery stores.
Trying to memorize it all—and trying to remember.
It kind of amazes me how misleading the photos you tend to see of Beijing are. They either depict the city as this smoggy postapocalyptic world packed full of weathered, stony-faced people in pollution masks, or they make it look like something straight out of a high-budget sci-fi movie, all sleek skyscrapers and dazzling lights and dripping luxury.
They rarely capture the true energy of the city, the forward momentum that runs beneath everything here like a wild undercurrent. Everyone seems to be hustling, reaching, striving for more, moving from one place to the next; whether it’s the delivery guy weaving through the traffic behind us with dozens of takeout boxes strapped to his bike, or the businesswoman texting someone frantically in the Mercedes on our left.
My attention shifts when a famous Chinese rapper’s song starts playing on the radio. In the rearview mirror, I see Ma remove her sunglasses and visibly wince.
“Why does he keep making thosesi-ge si-gesounds?” she demands after about three seconds. “Does he have something stuck in his throat?”
I choke on a laugh.
“It’s just how music sounds nowadays,” Ba says in Mandarin, ever the diplomat.
“I think it’s kind of nice,” I volunteer, bobbing my head to the beat.
Ma glances back at me with a half-hearted scowl. “Don’t bounce your head like that, Ai-Ai. You look like a chicken.”
“You mean like this?” I bob my head harder.
Ba hides a smile with the back of his hand while Ma clucks her tongue, and Emily, who I’m convinced is really an eighty-year-old grandma trapped inside a nine-year-old’s tiny body, lets out a long, dramatic sigh. “Teenagers,” she mutters.
I elbow her in the ribs, which makes her elbow me back, which sets off a whole new round of bickering that only ends when Ma threatens to feed us nothing but plain rice for dinner.
If I’m honest, though, it’s in these moments—with the music filling the car and the wind whipping past the windows, the late-afternoon sun flashing gold through the trees and my family close beside me—that I feel … lucky. Really, truly lucky, despite all the moving and leaving and adjusting. Despite everything.
The mood doesn’t last.
As soon as we pull up beside the Westbridge school buildings, I realize my mistake.
Everyone is dressed in casual clothes. Cute summer dresses. Crop tops and jean shorts. The teachers didn’t specify what to wear this evening, and I naively assumed it’d be standard uniform, because that’s what the expectations were at my previous school.
My family starts getting out of the car, and I push down a swell of panic. It’s not like I’ll getin troublefor wearing what I’m wearing—I just know I’ll look dumb and stand out. I’ll look like the Clueless New Kid, which is exactly what I am, but that doesn’t make it any easier to bear.
“Ai-Ai.” Ma taps the window. “Kuaidian.”Hurry.
I say a quick thanks to the driver and step outside. At least the weather’s nice; the wind’s quieted down to more of a gentle, silky breeze, a welcome reprieve from the heat. And the sky. The sky is beautiful, a blend of pastel blues and muted pinks.
I inhale. Exhale.
This is fine, I tell myself.Totally fine.
“Come on, Baba,” Emily is saying, already pulling Ba toward the primary school section of the campus, where all the walls are painted bright colors. Obnoxiously bright colors, if you ask me. “Youhaveto talk to Ms. Chloe. I told her how you were a poet, and you do signings and stuff at big bookstores, and she was soooo impressed. She didn’t believe me at first, I don’t think, but then I made her search your name, and then …”
Emily looksactuallyfine, because she is. No matter where we go, my little sister never has any trouble fitting or settling in. We could probably ship her off to Antarctica and find her just chilling with the penguins two weeks later.
