PUERTO RICO IS NOT A STATE
Rong arrived in San Juan on a bright Saturday in the middle of December. Like other Saturdays throughout Puerto Rico’s unfailing tropical seasons, this one was marked by persistent sunshine that refused to quit, interrupted only occasionally by a gust of ocean. As the plane descended onto the landing strip, he tried to discern between the concrete and palms what America looked like, whether San Juan was like the Beijing he saw only once before he left, the one with the sculpted buildings and lights. He had never seen a postcard of California’s notorious coastline or heard a firsthand account of New York’s insomnia, but for reasons not entirely clear to him he knew that America was the place to go if you wanted to get somewhere, if you wanted to get things done.
He had spent the last 33 years in Nanking and was one of the lucky ones. When the Great Proletariat Revolution ended after a decade of anti-westernization and anti-intelligentsia, sweeping reforms that included shutting down every school and college campus, the whole country—or at least, everyone between the ages of fourteen and thirty—showed up to take the college entrance exam. At the end of the test, you had to put down your top three choices for university; if you did well enough, you’d get into the school whose secret criteria you fulfilled, and if you didn’t, you could go back to the rice fields or bakeries or labor camps, depending on the lot you got cast during the revolution. Rong put down Nanking University as his first choice and left the other two options blank; that was his idea of a gamble. He won, got in, was assigned the major of inorganic chemistry, and upon graduation, he was an apprentice to a mechanic. Even these days, he would pull the line, “I used to be a mechanic, you know,” whenever an old friend or new woman would bemoan car problems, though his wife always reminded everyone that being a mechanic was precisely the reason he left China and never returned. If that was the case, how good with cars could he possibly be?
He was starting graduate school the following week as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. His former classmate Li Li picked him up at the airport and offered to treat him to his first American meal. When they pulled into the city’s only McDonald’s, Rong said, “I’ve heard of these before.”
“They’re as American as can be,” Li Li assured him. He ordered two hamburgers and a medium fries to share, plus two small cokes. Rong took a long sip before his mouth registered the film of licorice meets carbonation coating his virgin throat. When Li Li saw the horror in his eyes, he only laughed. “You’ll get used to it,” he said. “They call it ‘acquired taste.’ Try it again, you’ll see.”
Rong took another sip. He could feel the metamorphosis.
***
Back at Nanking University, Rong was never a prodigy or a problem—he was neither dumb enough to draw the attention of professors nor smart enough to elicit disdain or awe from his classmates. He simply showed up, turned in his work chock full of minor arithmetic errors and missing decimal places, but then he would ace the final exam, which counted for everything. Perhaps therein lay his genius, because Li Li was the smartest, the most careful with his scientific notation, and yet the two of them ended up at the same place, just one year apart.
When they arrived on campus, Li Li apologized for having to take off; he had a long day of pipetting ahead on a new genomics study. “What will you do?” he asked Rong.
“Maybe I’ll just wander.”
Li Li sucked in his breath as if to prevent the judgment from leaving his mouth; the whole point of the immigrant endeavor was to work twice as hard as everybody else, not wander idly as if you’d already made it. “I suppose it’s worked for you this far,” he said after a beat. As he started to walk away backwards, he remembered to ask, “How’s Yuan? And your daughter?”
Rong looked surprised. He thought of the chunky, peach-cheeked three-year-old he had left behind and the tall woman who birthed her, the one he met through mutual friends two years prior. When he showed her the H-1B visa his faculty advisor sent him, she had raised both eyebrows and covered her mouth, laughing. It was unclear to him whether it was out of delight or nerves or something else altogether. Still, it did not matter, did not beg for introspection, because that was how things unfolded in their natural order. You studied day and night for school, and married after graduating with your Bachelor’s degree. After a year of marriage, you had your one and only child, and then you studied for the TOEFL English language test that would allow you to apply for American universities. If you got a decent enough score, you went to the library and took out an atlas and looked up all states in the U.S., wrote down their names, and then found a separate directory of Ph.D.-granting institutions. You copied down the addresses of every institution that belonged to an U.S. state. You sent your TOEFL scores, transcripts, and letters to schools in every state of the Union—some you had heard of (California, New York), and most you hadn’t (Missouri, North Dakota, Puerto Rico). You did not think twice about the last one (Puerto Rico) because you clearly remember seeing “U.S. Territory” in parenthesis under its name on the atlas. You left your wife and child behind and agreed that they would come find you in three years when you were done with your Ph.D. They would, and when your child is grown and attending her own university (a better one than the one you went to, surely), she would get the benefit of being called a “model minority,” one of those fancy Asians who had their shit together because they came via a Ph.D.-granting institution, even if it was in Puerto Rico, rather than via a nail salon or cargo box or boat.
“They’re fantastic,” Rong replied. Only when Li Li was far enough away did he add to himself, “I hope.”
***
The campus at Rio Piedras was wet and green. The women were consistently beautiful and prone to smiling, suggesting a degree of accessibility that he was unused to. He started walking. At dusk he noticed he was hungry again. At this point the campus had thinned out, with only a handful of cars roaming by. He spotted a man sitting alone on a bench and walked up to him.
“Pardon,” he said in English. “There anything to eat close?”
The man looked up and smiled. What was up with people smiling so much here? “Of course.” His dark, curly hair softened his carved features and made him look like a friend, a familiar face being beheld for the first time. “Come,” he said, “I’ll take you.”
“My name, Rong.”
“Hector.”
“Hector,” Rong repeated, for practice.
“You new here?” asked Hector.
“First day,” he said.
Hector stopped mid-step and put both palms on Rong’s shoulders, beaming. “Welcome.” Then, “Where you from?”
“Nanking.”
“Where’s that?”
“China.”
“I have just the place to take you,” Hector said. He walked up to a dusky red sedan and motioned for Rong to get inside.
When they pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot, Hector said, “I can’t believe it. I’m taking you to your first American meal. My treat.” Rong did not say anything. He ordered the same hamburger, coke, and fries from lunch and waited for the acquired taste part to settle in.
Hector said, “Years later, when you are old and rich and very americano, you’ll remember me.”
“I will?” asked Rong.
“Of course. People always remember their first.”
“I don’t understand,” Rong said. “What does ‘remember their first’ mean?”
“You know, first love, first kiss,” Hector explained.
“You kissed so many girls you forget the other ones?” Rong asked.
Hector laughed. “Well, not now. Now I have a fiancee’. You can meet her after this.”
“I can?” asked Rong.
Hector nodded.
***
At Hector’s house, the walls were the color of chiffon cake, inside and out. Hector pointed at the couch and disappeared into the kitchen. He returned with a woman with the same brown curly hair but a full, voluminous face and soft arms. She was carrying a round, gelatinous slab the color of loquats on a clear glass dish. She said something to Hector that Rong did not catch, then set the plate down before turning to her guest and giving him a hug.
“Do you want some?” she asked. “I’m Pilar.”
Rong nodded, unsure of what he was agreeing to, but full of confidence and trust in Americans, who made everything so accessible. Inside his mouth he tasted an edge of burnt sugar. Years later, he would bring his wife and daughter to Hector’s house to partake of the same dish, and the three of them would concede that it was the best thing they’ve ever eaten. Too embarrassed to ask what was in it, his wife would go home and try to recreate it with mashed bananas and flour and 2% milk over a stove. Only when his daughter was grown and in college did she recall this memory and realize on a Taco Tuesday that the mystery at hand was flan, simple flan. Some things take a generation to learn.
***
That night, Rong left Hector’s house and made plans to find him after the semester started. The following Monday he showed up at his advisor’s office in the Química building before class. Before he could introduce himself, she raised both of her small, spotty hands and cried, “Welcome! You must be hungry. I’m Muir.”
Rong hesitated, remembering. “Let me take you to your first American meal,” she said. Before she could get up, he replied, “I eat already.” He had gambled once and won; no point in trying his luck in a foreign land. Muir shrugged. For a faculty advisor, she was nonplussed and forgiving. With her tiny frame and brilliant orange hair, she looked like a friendly troll in a cluttered cave: two computers, six filing cabinets of different sizes, books peeking out of the tops of every surface, an apple as a paperweight, a glass bird in cerulean (also a paperweight?), a magnifying glass that looked strangely anachronistic next to the electron microscope. On the wall, she had a framed diploma from the University of Florida. She saw him looking and said, “This was my first faculty job after I graduated, and my advisor told me I was an idiot for coming here. It’s been 31 years and I haven’t regretted it yet. So we don’t know everything, see?”
Only when Rong showed up for class did he realize that things did not go according to plan. The professor spoke with a rolling tongue, using words he had never heard, at a speed that unnerved him. He couldn’t locate even a single pronoun he had learned in TOEFL class. Finally he turned to a girl next to him with hay-colored braids and a shiny nose. “This is English?” he asked.
“Es química.”
“What language professor is talking?”
“Spanish, silly.”
Rong walked out of the lecture hall and surveyed the scene. There was a placard with a geometric man and woman on a set of doors that said, “Baños.” Outside, the street signs advertised “Calle” this and “Avenida” that. He looked up these words in his pocket English-Chinese dictionary that he carried everywhere and did not find them. He walked back to Muir’s office.
“Where am I?” he asked.
“That’s a bit of an existential question,” she said.
“This is America?”
“Sure,” she replied. “Well, technically.”
“What does technically mean?”
Muir insisted that Puerto Rico was not all that different from the rest of the fifty U.S. states. She said, who knows, maybe one day it’ll be a full-fledged state. She said he still came to the right place. She reminded him about his scholarship, a full ride. She told him the textbooks were in English, and that chemistry was all formulas anyway, and math was the only language he needed to know.
Turns out, she was right. Rong graduated three years later with a Ph.D. in hand, after failing only one class—not because of the language or technical difficulties, but something else altogether (he forgot he registered for the course, and did not show up once). When Yuan and his daughter—now almost six—showed up at San Juan International Airport the day before commencement, he felt a panic that made him wonder if he would recognize them at all. But they were the only Asians that descended the plane; their straight, inky hair and translucent ankle socks and hand-crocheted sweaters made them easy to spot. Only when he tried to open his mouth did a loss so extreme swell in his throat it made him unable to see.
Decades later, in a bible study in Los Angeles, he heard about something similar happening to a man named Paul on the way to Damascus. He thought of Hector. He couldn’t help but feel an omission that verified his own blindness. Although the two of them stayed friends for the remainder of his time in Puerto Rico, Rong never asked Hector for his last name. The day he left for good, Hector said, “Don’t forget me.” Then added, “Especially when you are rich.” Rong laughed and promised he wouldn’t. But, as he bounced from nowhere to nowhere during his postdoc years, he forgot Hector’s number, and couldn’t remember the name of the street his friend lived on.
By the time news of Hurricane Maria made a brief cameo on China Daily’s homepage, Rong was living in his third estate: a Mediterranean style McMansion in a hilly southern California suburb overrun by Koreans. Having long left academia and becoming rich as a result, his lifestyle allowed him certain affordances, like the ability to remember old promises. He signed up for Facebook at the age of 52 for the sole purpose of typing in “Hector” in the search bar and hoping for an answer.
He showed up at the old Quimica building on the northwest side of campus. Walking along Calle Norzagaray, Rong looked for dusty red sedans parked in front of cake-colored houses. He could find one or the other, but not both simultaneously, puzzle pieces that refused to lock, as if in collusion. It was unlikely that Hector resembled his former self, given his penchant for McDonald’s and flan. Still, Rong could not help but mumble Hector’s name every time a gaggle of pedestrian men passed by, just in case. They peered back at him amicably but did not stop. Some things, once lost, can never be found.
***
Christine Ma-Kellams is an assistant professor of psychology at SJSU whose work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, Kenyon Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Wall Street Journal.
