China
I am exhausted by pulling the conversation back to the US so the next time I’m asked where I’m from I let myself be pushed back to China. They’ve painted the outside to look like a factory and the fumes it spews are so wretched I’m retching. Some of us Americans stand with big scoops near the entrance, clutching their noses but eager to collect the Chinese people who spill off the conveyor belt and pour them into molds for lower-level software engineers or exotic wives. Others wander in and come out with cheap business deals and qipao, and still others jab at fake buttons on fake walls shouting for the building to close as if it really is a factory (it’s not) and they command it. I must be a new kind of American because it never occurs to me to do any of those things, and instead I shout “STOP IT!” because I have seen the inside of China and it’s rainforest, knobbly road, broad street, verdant graveyard, not just smoke, and my people are crow’s-footed and liver-spotted in addition to hard-working and beautiful, but nobody listens to me. I am a real girl but somehow not the same as any human here, and the factory is imaginary but nonetheless still churning.
Patricia Gao is a happy girl. She lives in the mountains. You can find more of her work at nopatno.com.