I should be grateful, but occasionally I am not. I try to remember how life is still better than how it used to be, but sometime I just get caught up attempting to be normal. This is because life was not always easy. There was a time when my biggest concerns were not getting good grades, or what the latest movies were, or even what the latest trends were, but whether or not I would be able to eat that day. I am not from the United States, and technically should not be here either. I was born in the sunbaked huts of Ji-hui near the southern rim of the Gobi Desert. The soil was barren and sometimes the village had almost no harvest at all. Father always had a vision in mind, a vision of prosperity. A wanderer once told him that America was the land of equal opportunity. This was why father worked as a desert guide for strangers who awaited a safe passage through the sandy wastelands. That is until he was stricken with dysentery when I was the age of four.
After my father’s death, mother and I moved to Shanghai where she was hired as a factory worker; she had adopted my father’s dreams. However, her meager earnings only gave us a tiny apartment in the Taozi District, also known as “The Ghetto”. It was a haven for violence, gangs, and prostitution. I made friends with the neighbors’ boy, Hong Myung. His family was like us except they were refugees from North Korea. We had fun creating creative games with our pauperized environment. Sadly, one day when the local ruling gang slaughtered him and his family. I never found out the reason why, nor did I care because survival was the most important thin on my mind.

Around the age of seven, my mother finally scrapped enough money together to buy our passage to America from the “Snakeheads”. The Snakeheads were a highly organized Chinese crime syndicate known globally for their trade of smuggling humans to wealthy countries like the United States. Upon payment, my mother received two tickets with images of biting snakes and instructions to report to the back of Ming’s Market carrying only a bag of clothing and necessities at four a. m. So as instructed, mother and I each packed a bag containing our clothes and toilettes. I also brought a wooden horse carved by father after hours of begging mother, because father needed to make the trip with us. As instructed we went to Ming’s Market in the hours before dawn. When we arrived, a couple men were loading a truck with cabbages.

“Ah, looking for opportunity, eh?” said an old man sitting on a plastic crate. He brought four water bottles and handed them to mother.
“Best not be late.” he said and pointed a crooked finger at the truck which the men had stopped loading to watch us. My mother instantly understood. She took my hand and we both climbed into the back of the truck. We spent three days with that cargo. The driver would sometimes stop and give us a bowl of lukewarm porridge to share amongst ourselves but our diet mainly consisted of cabbages, and more, you guessed it, cabbage.

“Get Out!” the driver yelled once we had reached our destination. He opened a map of the city in the Fujian Region and gave it to mother.

“We are here. You need to get to Dock 43 of the harbor by five in morning to catch your ship” he mumbled, and pointed to where we were, and then where we needed to go.

“But, that’s half across the city!” exclaimed mother.

“Not my problem, miss ship, no refund,” laughed the driver as he pulled away. The rest of the day, mother and I walked the winding streets of Fuzhou attempting to find our destination. We only stopped once to buy some food. The city of Fuzhou was completely foreign compared to Shanghai. The only thing that told us that we were still in China was the impenetrable haze of pollution and color faded Mandarin shop signs. The hot humid air made even breathing a challenge. Drenched in sweat, we finally reached the harbor at dusk. Since mother did not have enough money to rent a room, we decided to sleep on nearby pallets. I was cold and scared but sleeping next to mother gave me some sense of security.

The next morning despite being on time, we still found ourselves at the back of a very long line. What amazed me about it was the line was filled with various ethnicities all of Asian descent, from Afghani and Russian to the locals of the region. When we got to the front of the line, two big brutes in all black demanded our tickets, which mother promptly handed over. They checked off our names and let us through to the men searching through belongings. When it was our turn, the man roughly grabbed our bags and emptied it on a table. As he shuffled through the items, he found my wooden horse.

“No luxuries on board!” declared the snakehead as he turned to throw it into an industrialized shredder.

“No, Father!” I exclaimed as I lunged for my precious horse, but the man savagely slapped my face and his nails dug into my flesh leaving lacerations. I fell down with tears freshly flowing from my eyes. Mother shielded me and with her head down begged for forgiveness for my ‘insolence’. The brute grunted in response and told us to scram. Mother took my hand and quickly grabbed our clothes. She rushed me onto the ship before the man could change his mind. Once on the ship, we were assigned to a cargo container already carrying eight other families. The space was cramped and dimly lit. It contained the heavy odor of the past voyagers was trapped within its metal walls. After we were settled in a corner of the container, I cried. I cried for father who I was forced to leave behind, I cried for Hong who did nothing wrong, I cried for all the injustice that could never be corrected. Mother this time held me tight and cried too.

What I thought was two days later, I woke up in the middle of the night to a foot that had accidently kicked me. The man noticed me opening my eyes and before I could mutter a word, he clamped his hand over my mouth. In the dim light, I saw him hold a finger to his mouth demanding for silence and I nodded in understanding. He continued to creep among the sleeping bodies and headed towards the hatch. When he opened the hatch, moonlight softy invaded the container; he looked back and winked at me before jumping out. Over the week, I got to know the man even better. His name was Matthew Cho. The only thing I can remember about him was his gentle face that gave the warmest smiles. He occasionally would bring back food that he stole during his nightly excursions for mother and me. It was simple stuff like jerky or fruit but it felt like heaven compared to the daily ration of rice and gravy with a slice of slimy meat. Even mother started to get friendly with him; her first friend ever since leaving the village.

One day, I noticed Matthew was not in the hold. An alarm blared through the ship and men ripped open the cargo hatches and ordered everyone out. The blinding daylight seared my eyes after being in the dimly lit container for so long. The snakeheads made all of the passengers surround the center of the deck. A group of men dragged Matthew into the center as he curled into the fetal position. Not a single inch of his body was spared from the beating. His entire face was bruised and it looked like he was shedding tears of blood. A Snakehead officer, with a massive scar on his face, walked up to Matthew and kicked him in the stomach.

“This is what we do to spies. We found him trying to extract Intel about our operations from my office. We do not tolerate well with his kind” said the officer, who then nodded to his subordinate with the whip. With each crack of the whip, Matthew screamed like a goat falling prey to a tiger. Mother tried to cover my eyes as she trembled at the fate of our friend. After the twelfthth crackle, I looked through the crack between mother’s fingers as the criminals cut open Matthew’s throat to finish him off. It was a horrifying image that would haunt my conscious for the rest of my life. That was the day I was forced out of my childhood and into manhood.

“Since no one reported a spy in the midst, no food for two days.” the officer ordered before the Snakeheads locked us up again in our cargo containers. The rest of the trip invoked silence due to the lament for Matthew and the fear of the Snakeheads. I lost track of time, but around five or six days after the incident, the ship finally reached a port in America. We were docked in a little port an hour north of San Francisco. Upon leaving the ship, mother was handed 2 fake passports, new identities and $50 dollars. The pictures in the passports were not our own but they were close enough to be indistinguishable. My name according to the passport is Charlie Lin. The sun was rising in America; its rays were warm, and for the first time since Shanghai I smiled.
My mother eventually got a job as a housekeeper for a motel in San Francisco, and a year later she married the owner. Jim was also from China, but came here through legal means. He was a kind and hardworking man, and I am proud to call him my stepfather, but Jim will never know the truth. On the bus ride to San Francisco, mother and I fabricated a story to explain the years before coming to America. It was mostly happy; father was a well-to-do engineer in China but died in a car crash, and we decided to move to America to leave behind our grief. Usually, I just get choked up (which isn’t hard) and people quickly change the topic.
Life is exactly how father had imagined it to be if not better. My room is bigger than our entire dingy apartment in Shanghai, and the food seems delectable in America. It amazes me how carefree my friends and Jim live their lives when, at the same time, violence and cruelty occurs in many parts of the world. While it’s tempting to join them in their bliss, I will. Forgetting my past would mean denying those I have lost their right to existence. I live my life not just for myself but also for the ones that I lost.