I examined Lauryann afterward. The protective adult-size glasses had fallen from her little face. Neither Home Depot, Ace, nor Orchard Hardware carried child-size protective glasses.
“Can I take the glasses off now?” Lauryann asked.
“Not yet,” I replied. “We have more to do and dust can get in your eyes.”
After we finished taping the drywall joints and spreading the compound over the tape, our legs and arms were so sore that it hurt to move. I took off my daughter’s shower cap, bent down, and kissed her little dust-coated face.
While we waited for the drywall compound to dry before painting the ceiling, I took Lauryann with me to shop for plumbing material. We got to know the salespeople at hardware stores. They were the best teachers. From them, I learned the tricks of the trade. For example, some plumbers would use a trick to avoid being called back. They would use both plumber’s tape and glue on valves, and it would hide a lousy job—for a while. In time the leak would return, but by then the warranty date would have passed.
We never knew the kind of problems we would run into. A new toilet we installed wouldn’t stop dripping water. Every few hours I would find a spoonful of water under the tank. Lauryann and I exchanged the toilet for a new one and reinstalled it. But there was another problem. Water seepage and moisture under the toilet. I was frustrated and knew that I couldn’t afford to ignore it. The slow dripping would lead to mold and over time attract termites. We took the toilet apart for the third time. I figured that the toilet tank had to be defective. We returned to Home Depot for another replacement.
Lauryann sat in the car and was doing her homework while I waited in line to talk to clerks at customer service. Hours passed and I was tired by the time I picked up the new toilet. We drove back to the unit. Lauryann had to put down her homework and help me lift the toilet and set it in place. She sat next to me on the floor finishing her homework as I caulked and sealed the bottom of the toilet.
Holding a large wrench in her right hand and a medium wrench in her left, Lauryann helped me replace a shower valve. The severe corrosion made the fixture hard to turn. My right arm was in pain trying to get the rusted cartridge to move. We struggled for hours, but the rusted parts wouldn’t budge. I had to be careful not to apply too much force. It could cause the pipe inside the wall to bend, crack, and leak. The angle where I stood was awkward. I stood inside the tub, my elbow against the wall, and I was not able to use a larger wrench. My clothes were soaked with sweat. Lauryann told me that she was worried about her math test the next day.
“Do you think I am having fun?” I said in frustration.
Tears filled Lauryann’s eyes.
“This is not a good time to play princess,” I said. “Go to the car and get me the WD-40.”
As Lauryann left, I felt my heart ache. I regretted taking out my frustration on her. When she returned, I apologized. “I was mad at the rusty valve and not you.”
Lauryann handed me tools like a nurse to a surgeon. I was under the sink replacing a broken faucet. Lauryann unplugged electric cords, cleaned the work site, and removed the clay deposits from the blade used to cut the tiles. When I set the tiles, Lauryann mixed the concrete in a bucket. I gave her a cooking utensil to make the job easier. We worked in complete harmony. I laid the tiles and she passed me the supplies.
“Mom, here, the corner piece.”
“Mom, watch out! There is a nail sticking out behind your left foot!”
“Mom, should I open another bag of concrete, or do you think this is enough?”
Jameeka, a heavyset pregnant lady who lived across the street, watched us work. She was keeping an eye on her three children playing in the street.
“Nice job!” Jameeka commented. “Is this unit for rent?”
“Are you interested?” I asked. “I guarantee the lowest price on the block.”
Sipping a Coke, Jameeka said the price was never her concern.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “I thought price was everybody’s main concern.”
“I can pay for any apartment I want.”
“You have a good job that pays well?”
“Kidding me? I can’t work with all these kids.”
“How do you get money then? From the father of your children?”
“Nope. My boyfriend don’t pay no child support.”
“I am a single mother too,” I said. “My ex-husband don’t pay child support either.”
“The government is responsible for the children’s welfare. I can go hungry, but my kids can’t, right?”
I learned that Jameeka collected $800 from the government for each of her children. Her total income was $3,200 a month. Jameeka offered to show me her apartment. “I love my place,” she said, glowing. “You should take a look at my bathroom tiling. It’ll give you some good ideas on picking more attractive tiles.”
“That’ll be nice!” I said.
The visit turned out to be a tipping point for Lauryann. As much as I had prepared my daughter, nothing was more powerful than a real-life demonstration. For her, the shock was subversive.
We followed Jameeka across the street into a showroom-quality three-bedroom apartment. I was surprised that it had white carpet, a fireplace, and designer furniture. The kitchen counter was made of marble.
“May I ask how much rent you pay for this fancy place?”
“Twenty-five hundred,” Jameeka replied. “Beauty has its price, I know.”
“Well … I guess it pays to have a lot of children in America.”
“Don’t you get misled,” she said. “Children can be real headaches.”
“What kind of headaches?”
“Like … you know … trying to keep your daughter off the drugs.”
“You mean your daughter?”
“Yep.”
“But she’s only … how old?”
“Fourteen. She keeps asking me for money. She says she needs the cash to pay off debts. Debts my ass!”
“Does she have debts?”
“She’s been threatened by the gang. She could be murdered if she doesn’t cough up the money. I have to help her. That’s why I’m broke. My gut tells me that she uses the money for drugs.”
I observed Lauryann. Her expression started to change as she followed Jameeka. Lauryann was making a comparison inside her head. Jameeka’s children had everything she wished to have. They each had a bedroom with designer beds and matching sheets. Their closets were full of lovely dresses and fashionable shoes. They had their own TV sets, video games, toy cars, bikes, and skateboards.
Back in the car, I tried to discuss the idea of “milking the system” with Lauryann.
“Mom, don’t start.” Lauryann’s voice was confrontational. “I don’t feel like having a discussion. Not right now.”
Since Lauryann’s birth, I had been preaching the philosophy that the only way to achieve the American dream was by hard work. Unfortunately, Lauryann had seen with her own eyes the opposite.
“I must know what is on your mind,” I said.
“You wouldn’t like it, Mom.”
“I must know.”
“It’s not the end of the world being poor—okay?”
“It’s supposed to be the end. And it is. The impression you have gotten here is … is … wrong. This is a peculiar and a particular case. Not all poor people live this way. I mean, not in a normal situation … You can’t tell from one spot that it is a leopard.”
“Mom, don’t try to fix … me or anybody else! I mean it!”
“I am afraid that you’re getting the wrong impression.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You are not seeing the whole truth, Lauryann.”
“You know what I see, Mom? I see the freedom Jameeka’s kids have. The true freedom! The freedom you came to America for. The freedom I don’t have. I see that Jameeka’s kids have a normal childhood. They don’t have to carry thirty-pound concrete bags day in and day out. They don’t have to clean othe
r people’s toilets and sewage, and end up getting a stink in their hair that even a bottle of shampoo can’t get rid of. Jameeka’s kids wear clean clothes, have weekends and friends, and are happy.” Lauryann broke down. “I don’t think what I am asking is too much. I really don’t!”
A strange phrase slowly entered my mind. It was a description by Marguerite Duras from her novel The Lover. “Cry out, to crack the ice in which the whole scene was fatally freezing. My mother turned her head …”
My mind was coping. It was responding in an awareness, strangely knowing its options, including my own confusion and the lack of strategies. Never before had I been so clear about the state of my mind. There was something unfamiliar, something exquisitely American taking place. I asked myself: Has Lauryann become a part of you that you can’t listen to? Have you been ignoring her feelings? What have the mixed cultural messages done to her? Is she haunted by my past? Am I making her into a maid because I myself wasn’t raised to believe that I was a princess? After all, the saying goes, “You are who you believe you are.” Is my damaged self-worth affecting Lauryann’s sense of self-worth? Am I passing her my virtue or my disease? Hard work to achieve the American dream—at what cost?
In the days to come, when I was myself again and so was Lauryann, we had a discussion. I described the homeless families I used to see growing up in China. The beggar kids’ exposed wounds covered by flies and chewed by maggots. I said, “Although America’s poor carry cell phones, and some live the lifestyle of Jameeka, their deprivation lies in the fact that they don’t know their options. You don’t know what you don’t know. Just like before I came to America. I had thought that I had no choice, but I did. I made bad decisions and did myself great disfavors. People like Jameeka are not in dissimilar situations. There is a difference in being poor and being ignorant. When children are not cultivating a sense of honor, they grow up shameless. And that is true deprivation.”
Lauryann tried her best to comprehend. It wasn’t until years later when I took her to see the movie Precious, produced by Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, that Lauryann was able to understand that to be deprived from understanding was true misfortune, the point I meant to explain to her all along. Lauryann realized how fortunate she was that she had learned the difference.
The ballet lessons were eight dollars an hour. They were not private but group lessons.
The day of her lesson, Lauryann finished her schoolwork as soon as she could. With glowing anticipation, she put on her shoes. She combed her hair and braided it into a bun. She kept looking at me, amazed that she was actually going to a ballet lesson instead of the construction site.
“Thanks, Mom,” she said. “I love you.”
“Have fun.” I smiled.
“I will!” She stretched out her arms, making dance motions while humming the theme of Swan Lake.
Lauryann treasured every minute that she was out of her paint-stained work clothes and memorized the dance moves a few classes later. She was first asked to demonstrate the moves to other children and then was made the lead dancer of her group. By the time the school showcased its annual performance of Swan Lake, Lauryann was given the lead spot for the group and danced the Black Swan. Handpicked by her teacher, Lauryann competed at Disneyland’s American Dance Competition and American Dance Championships. She won gold medals as a solo dancer in both the competitive and folk categories.
Watching my daughter performing onstage and receiving awards thrilled me. It helped me forget my troubles. I smiled when I recalled how Lauryann practiced her moves in a church parking lot wearing sneakers. “You don’t have to worry about the lack of space,” I said. “Also, the downstairs neighbors won’t complain about the noise you make.”
{ Chapter 29 }
I sat in my car crying because I had not been able to collect rent for several months. One after another, my tenants had stopped paying. By now they knew nothing would happen to them. They ignored my warning letters. They refused to move. I begged and promised to waive their unpaid rent.
Ruth said, “I don’t want to be the only one paying rent!”
It was as if the tenants had discovered a flaw in my defenses and ambushed me.
One tenant said, “I can report this filthy building to the state’s health organization, you know. And they will come and shut down the building.”
I knew she wanted me to stop pressuring her for the rent.
“I deserve a rent reduction for the inconvenience,” another tenant demanded. “The roach bomb you bought us didn’t work. We had to do it again ourselves. As a result, my son had to miss his football game.”
The pest exterminator told me that he had applied two treatments.
“But my tenants said there were still cockroaches,” I said.
“You’ve got pigs living here!” The exterminator pointed at the dog food, cat food, hamster food, and fish food scattered all over the unit. “It’s roach heaven!”
I was angry because I provided the tenants with the best service—something I could not afford—only to learn that most of the repairs and remodeling were destroyed in a few months. The unit became unrecognizable, with toilets pulled out of place, sinks cracked, pipes clogged, a dishwasher drainage hose punctured, holes in the closet doors, graffiti on the bedroom walls, cabinet hinges broken, and flooding in the basement.
When I asked the tenants what happened, every one of them gave the same reply: “I don’t know who did it. Not me.”
My tenants were experts at dealing with eviction notices. At that game, I was no match.
I could no longer sleep because I was behind on the mortgage payment. The bank had served me with a “final notice” and threatened to foreclose on my property. My stomach burned so badly that the painkillers were no longer effective.
I never expected that the moment I chased the wolf out of my front gate, a tiger would come in my back door. After I paid an eviction lawyer $6,000 and finally got rid of the worst tenant and the unit cleaned and ready, a well-dressed young couple, Brandi and Marc, responded to my for-rent advertisement. They came to the open house and told me that they “loved” the unit. They wanted to rent it as soon as possible. Brandi told me that she was college educated and worked as a leasing manager for an inner-city apartment complex. Her fiancé, Marc, was a department store stocking manager. The couple had a young son. Brandi mentioned that she majored in business communications in college. She said, “I would have pursued a career as a lawyer if I hadn’t had my son.”
We talked about America being the best place in the world for providing opportunities to its minorities.
“It took three generations to achieve where I am.” Brandi beamed.
The only thing that sounded unusual to me was what Brandi said when I asked for a reference.
“I can get you the best reference, because that’s what I do in my office.”
I noticed that the son was hyperactive. He first played with the stove knobs, then went to press the buttons on the dishwasher. His parents didn’t try to stop him. The father even tossed a basketball to the boy over the center island in the kitchen. Then they began to play by throwing the ball beneath the hanging ceiling light.
I became nervous when the son pulled on the floor-length vinyl blinds that covered the sliding glass door. Several of the slats snapped loose and fell and almost hit the boy on the head. I was aware of liability lawsuits in America. After the couple left, I wrote an e-mail to Brandi and Marc with my concerns. I told them that I liked them and wanted to rent to them, but we must come up with a solution regarding “child safety.” I told them that I was willing to replace the vertical blinds with cotton curtains.
Brandi e-mailed me back and said, “If you don’t wish to rent to us, would you please send an e-mail telling us in writing that we are denied?”
I showed Brandi’s e-mail to Lauryann, who was at the time eleven years old. “Am I not comprehending English correctly here?”
Lauryann said that she smelled “something f
ishy.” “Mom, don’t answer that e-mail!”
“Decency, Lauryann!” I replied. “Wouldn’t you appreciate a response if you were the applicant? Besides, I don’t see why I’d get myself in trouble for my concerns about a child’s safety.”
“Fine, do it your way.”
“Lauryann, be nice and kind to people, always. You hear me?”
“Yes, Mom.”
I sent an e-mail to Brandi. “As a landlord, I am concerned about the liability. I am willing to sign the lease as soon as the child-safety issue is resolved.” I let Brandi know that I would understand and wouldn’t mind if she felt that she could not wait and would like to move on.
What came next shocked me: Instead of an e-mail from Brandi, I received a letter from the Department of Fair Housing. It was a “Notice of Filing of Discrimination Complaint.”
“My family and I were denied rental of a two-bedroom condominium,” Brandi wrote on the complaint form. “There were approximately twenty units in the complex. We believe we were denied rental based on our familial status (minor child). This is a violation of Government Code, Section 12955, Subdivisions (a) and (c). Our belief is based on the following: The owner indicated in an e-mail that though she was impressed with our application, she was concerned about liability issues with having a small child in the unit and rented the unit to someone else.”
I did not own a twenty-unit complex! The unit was still vacant! If I had known that Brandi was an expert on “government violation codes,” I would have handled the issue with caution. I would have treated her the same way I would have my former Communist Party boss. I would have stayed on the safe side and would not have responded to her e-mails.
The officer’s name was Sonya. She was in charge of my case representing the Department of Fair Housing. Sonya asked me to pay Brandi $2,000 as “a gesture of agreeing to the conciliation process.” Ms. Sonya did not want to hear my side of the story. “Please send the check to Brandi through my office,” she instructed.