Paper Boy
BY ROSIE HONG
2024 Adroit Prize for Prose Recipient
Selected by Kaveh Akbar
“Paper Boy is a marvelous example of a story translating a political reality into granular, somatic narrative—not rote historical facts on a page, but actual individuals with inner lives as vital and complex as our own.”
During the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Supreme Court restricted Chinese immigration, ruling an exception that children of US citizens could legally immigrate. The Chinese took advantage of this loophole by creating paper families. They built kinships with US citizens by forging paperwork and splitting apart families. When inspectors caught on, they interrogated and dug into these immigrants’ livelihoods. Chinese immigrants pushed for their false identity until they blurred their own truths with lies.
*
Two summers ago, Jiejie and I ran out to the fields every night and picked a few of Ma’s peaches off her tree. We flattened the crabgrass growing under, nestled our back against the trunk, split overripe peaches with our thumbs. “And Ma says she’ll candy them for winter,” Jiejie nudged me one night and pointed above. The peach tree was barren only after a week of our secret trips, its branches fanned out like veins, bleeding into the naked sky.
“Just tell her it was the birds,” I laughed, digging thumb-sized holes near the tree trunk. When we first took peaches from Ma’s tree, I had to tell Jiejie to stop worrying the whole way back. Just plant all the ones we stole. I bet at least one of them will grow. “And if it does,” I reminded her, nestling the pit in the dirt. “I bet we’ll repay her with twice the amount of peaches.” This was the only story Ba would tell me before he left: how planting peach pits was like moving to America—some molded while others sprouted. He wasn’t the best with metaphors, but at least they made us feel less guilty stealing Ma’s peaches.
“And when will that happen?” Jiejie shook her head at the familiar excuse and threw her peach pit into the tall grass.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “Maybe next year? Maybe we can do this next summer, Jiejie.”
Moonlight spilled over Jiejie’s face, sticky from the juice dribbling down her cheek. She curled her body and cracked a thin smile. “Maybe,” Jiejie said, her syllables curdled from mouthfuls of fruit. “Maybe if the peaches grow back.”
*
Jiejie’s warnings of my overly ambitious peach pit plan were right all along. The next morning after that night, Ma found out about our crimes. I confessed on the porch with my hands splayed out, sticky and raw from the remains of her obliterated fruit. I promised her that all the pits I planted in her barren tree’s place would repay her with bucketfuls of peaches, yellow-bellied and ripe. But those lies were fruitless because two summers later, none of the pits sprouted, and Ma’s tree stopped bearing fruit.
“You’re lucky I had enough savings,” Ma spat at her half empty shelves of candied fruit. She dug into the wooden drawer and pulled out a stack of crinkled yuan. “Was for your Ba.” It was the same stack of yuan Ba refused before he left, pushing it away and stuffing documents in his duffel bag. “This for him, that for him. Always for him, for you,” Ma slammed the yuan on the desk. “That’s what your Ba would say. Last thing he said.”
Ever since Ba was swept up by sea a decade ago, I often heard his name in rumors among the neighboring ayi. I was five at that time, clinging onto the hem of Ma’s blouse, counting baskets of white chrysanthemums littered on the doorstep, watching the ayi crowd around Ma. Ma refused to tell me about their bickerings, but a few weeks later, I found newspapers crumpled around those dried chrysanthemums. I was unfamiliar with most of the characters, only searching for Ba’s whereabouts by carving my nail around the same word: Ship. Ship. Ship—sunk.
“An overturned boat,” Ma heard from the ayi. Despite his rumored death, Ma maintained that Ba was the first in our village to successfully immigrate to America. With his fishmonger spirit, he followed the path of a friend he often met out at sea fishing. A few months after the rumors died down, Ma received a letter from that friend in America who took pity and made room to take me into his family if Ma paid for the documentation. At that time, I was too young to deny anything, so Ma secretly racked up all the money she saved from selling stone fruit at the market to buy papers and documents. “Your paper Ba. His name is Char-wols Yang,” Ma whispered when she had first revealed her plans. She described how this crime was every mother’s dream—how all the ayi she knew risked their lives with forged documents and sacrificed their motherhood to watch their sons thin to paper. “America,” she interrupted every time I argued that it was a waste of money, “is a place where the supermarkets have roofs, and you can buy all the fruit you want in refrigerated carts.” She heard this from the neighboring ayi who always bragged about sending their prosperous sons to America, paper sons who abandoned their homeland to watch crinkled yuan harden to gold.
“And these,” Ma handed over an album of her and Ba before I was born. “In case you forget his face and you see him there.” Most of them were photos of Ba by the fruit stand, but a few were his boat trips with Ma when there were newlyweds. “He always bragged about how chubby he was to the other fishmongers. He said it meant he could put enough fish on the table,” Ma joked. Her stories about her early days with Ba strung into a lullaby. “But Char-wols first.” She stopped humming. “Memorize those photos I paid half our savings for.”
That night, Ma unfolded another photo of a man who looked nothing like Jiejie and I’s chubby-faced Ba. His teeth were straight and pearly-white, hair parted and combed and gelled, cheekbones digging into his expressionless face. “Your paper Ba,” Ma nudged me. “Char-wols Yang.” She unwound a manila folder with more information of Charles—his birth date, daughters who were my paper sisters, wife who was my paper mother, deceased brother who was my paper uncle. “I think it was by the harbor. His village,” Ma told me, and she handed me a new pile of envelopes. “Before you leave, memorize the map. Two houses right from the entrance of the harbor. This layout. Describe it. How the beds were arranged. The view on each window.” She tucked crinkled yuan in my pocket. “Exchange this when you cross the border.”
Ma always added the word “paper” to everything, as if to remind me that even across oceans, I was always her son—conceived by the fruit stand when I kicked and turned until Ma’s belly swelled red and raw like a peach. That her motherhood could not be stripped across oceans. That our bloodline was thicker than the loose-leafed papers we forged. That night, I sat next to Jiejie, and we taped the man’s photo beside photos of Ba and invented all the things we thought we knew about this man named Charles—his family, his village, or anything I could use to weave into a lie.
From then on, I became the son of a man named Charles Yang. I spent every night reciting his name. “Char-wols,” I mouthed, stretching the syllables until my lips cracked. “Char-wols. Char-wols.” My tongue hardened with every call. What if he looks like Ba? What if he is Ba? What would I say? I would redraw the man’s face in my dreams, trying to connect them to Ba’s photos and the stories of his passing the ayi always gossiped about. How Ba’s boat was caught in a wave, salt-slicked waters swallowing everything whole. I imagined Ba reemerging out of the waters and Americanizing into the man named Charles Yang. I imagined all the things I would say to him if we reunited—all the water-gurgling shouts and choking debris I would swallow to see him again.
Every dream ends with me sitting across a woman with Ma’s voice, her face morphed into pictures of Americans I ripped out of the weekly newspapers. The woman spoke unaccented English, with lips coated in thick, crimson lipstick. She shuffled through the same documents in Ma’s manila folder, pointing at pictures of the man named Charles. Who is this? She pointed at pictures of his daughters. Where is this? She flipped through the pictures taken of the interior of Charles’s old village.
In my head, I recited the same facts that lulled me to sleep—the exact layout I practiced countless times with Jiejie. How the two daughters who were my paper sisters who were almost exactly one year apart and two and three years older than me. I thought about the harbor written in the envelopes, how Charles went out every evening with my paper sisters to fish on the pier. But then I remembered home with Jiejie and Ma, how Ma trudged the same mud path every day to the market, how she prayed her overripe stone fruit could last another day. I remembered Jiejie, our palms cracked from playing in the fields and jagged cuts across our cheeks from the tall grass. Then I remembered that maybe Jiejie was by the harbor instead of the peach tree. Then I mixed up my paper sisters’ age with Jiejie—that maybe the two paper daughters were two and three years younger than me. I imagined Charles standing on the other side of the wall, holding documents of me in his hands, signing me off and taking me to a one-story house I saw on those newspaper advertisements. I imagined the woman opening the door for Charles. A man enters, faceless, and I would wake up with my voice reduced to gasps of—
“Are you Ba? Are you Ba? Are you Ba? Are you really Ba?”
*
What Ma hated more than unsold, rotting peaches were liars, but she said that if she ever gave birth to a son who was a liar, he’d better be a good one. “Ayi,” she reminded me. “Not Ma. Ayi, not Jiejie.” In public, I lived as the son of a man named Charles Yang, and Jiejie and Ma became my ayi, or what I would call aunties, or what I would call strangers. “Jiejie” and “Ma” became names I mouthed at night like a sin to remember, secrets I tucked under my tongue, separated from all the things I memorized about the man named Charles Yang—his name, face, the village he lived before he immigrated.
That night, I rested under Ma’s peach tree, which was now withered into a skeleton, its trunk twisting and cracking under my weight. Jiejie handed me a nectarine Ma bought from the market. I asked her about all the things she likes, about all the places I would wait to visit with her in America. She told me that she would keep all the things I left behind and would trade them back if she ever makes it to America. “Only if you don’t look too much like that Charles. Then I won’t be able to find you,” she laughed. We chewed in silence, and Jiejie dug a hole to bury the pits, only to find one peeking out of the dirt, sprouting mold.
*
In this dream, I was next to Jiejie, and everything was alright. In this dream, it was that summer before Ma’s peach tree stopped bearing fruit, where Ma was back from the market and the three of us were sitting under the tree, gorging on peaches we were supposed to candy. Above, the tree’s branches fanned out like veins, bleeding into the naked sky. Ahead of me, two figures blended into the tall grass. Ma! I called out of instinct. Jiejie! But my mouth molded into the same syllables every time. Ayi! Ayi!
Both figures turned around, their faces smeared into a shadow. And I could not differentiate who was who.
So your father is outside, the shadow said. Charles?
Charles Yang, I told him. Yes, my father, I thought. Ba. Have you seen him? Did he ever make it?
The man at the interrogation center nodded and flipped through the documents. I want to know more about your relationship with your father. Tell me, what was your village…like? Your home? How were the beds arranged? Who did you share rooms with? Your siblings? What were they like?
In my pocket was the yuan Ma gave me, stashed with documents about Charles, shuffled with photos of Ba. I unfolded one and slid it over to the man, recounting the stories I memorized about Charles.
In the beginning of one story, a man slouched beside me under the peach tree, kicking peach pits to the edge of the fields, dust filming the soles of his sandals. This is where I folded myself into the story, asking him if he’d have to leave for America—why we couldn’t just go together, why he wouldn’t come back. He told me in America that there were peach orchards, that he’d never have to punt peach pits in hopes one would sprout, that this wasn’t a metaphor. My home, he said, which is what I told the man at the interrogation center,
My home is—
*
Over there! Do you see it? Jiejie shouted.
In this dream that was no longer mine, Jiejie tugged my shirt and pointed at the gnarled peach tree ahead. We ran to the edge of the field, pushing away the tall grass. The yuan Ma gave me was still crumpled in my pocket. I stopped and pulled it out. I waved the yuan at Jiejie, who was now far from my sight.
Jiejie! I yelled. Want to sneak into the market for nectarines? Ahead, Jiejie reappeared with Ma under the peach tree. Half of their faces were smeared from the sunlight’s glare, the other half from shadow. Jiejie! Ma! I called again. I ran towards them. Jiejie was biting a peach, her cheeks dribbling in juice. Ma’s sun-spotted face cracked into a toothless smile, and she held out an overripe peach. The fruit softened in my palms. Above, the branches drooped from all the weight, peach underbellies so round and yellowed I almost mistook it for gold.
