Katherine Liu

I met Qiuhai on a fall day in a harbor city—a manner fitting for her name, although I wouldn’t have said this out loud. Names were flexible and wishful like that. You could create a beautiful memory out of any name. For Qiuhai, I chose to preserve where we met and the conditions of it: how our small classroom was framed by a specific time in the year and, further away where we couldn’t notice it, the sea.

I see her looking up from her textbook first, cropped gray hair pushed away from the face. Then Zhengjie sits in the desk at her right side, smiling easily and arched toward the book where the answers are, his smile moving back and forth between the other two of us in the room. I knew them together only—one unit.  

“Teacher, we are very happy to meet you at this time,” Qiuhai said in a low voice after I introduced myself in misshapen, childlike Mandarin Chinese and closed the classroom door on the first day. Her husband glanced at the window beside it to make sure no one else walked down the hall. “We’ve already been called for the test.” Her mouth was a short frown, and she pushed both sides of her hair away, two hands in the same quick gesture.

“The test?”

“Cit-zenship interview,” she sounded out in English.

Zhengjie wheeled his desk closer to mine. “Our friends”—he gestured with both hands toward the hallway—“told us it would take seven or eight months for the officials to send out the appointment notice. For those months we planned on coming here to prepare. But two months after we turned in the N-400, we already got the government notice. Her test,” he said, and at this point he whispered, palms upward on the table, “is at the end of October.” He glanced in her direction. “Then I’ll go two weeks after.”

“Teacher, you will help us, correct? We only have five weeks together.” Qiuhai’s hands were pressed together earnestly, one tangled in the other’s fingers.

I was a freshman in college teaching at a local community center in Chinatown for the first time. Immigrants, mostly elderly, came to learn English and prepare and practice for their naturalization exams. I wasn’t the only college student helping out: small groups of undergrads came from different schools around the area. We volunteered under an organization staffed by people who’d grown up in Chinatown, but most of us didn’t have connections to the neighborhood ourselves. Our parents were from the generations that had immigrated on student visas in the 80s and 90s, recently enough to be disconnected from the misfortunes of history.

Qiuhai was still watching, both hands clasped in her lap. I said that of course I’d help her, and I made the promise to myself too—if there was one thing I could do to remediate for any of my past lives, I would start here with this woman who was older than my own grandmother but scared and, for all I knew, kinder. “We’ll do the best we can.”

She smiled, and even her smile had the slightest shape of a frown. Then we ran through the citizenship exam for the first time. She struggled with English and made no effort to hide it, apologizing and pushing her hair out of her face. If she couldn’t understand the question I asked, she repeated it to herself under her breath with her mouth twisted slightly down, sounding out the same words, narrowing in on a segment or phrase, while staring a bit past my eyes. Sometimes the answer came out like that. Other times, she couldn’t hear the question I asked, and recited the answer to the one she thought she’d heard.

Zhengjie listened to the questions alongside her. When Qiuhai repeated questions to herself, I sometimes glanced his way—he looked up toward the ceiling to remember an answer and then checked the textbook with a smile. When he was confused, he put his hand against his head to think, flattening a patch of white hair.