One sister who was a nurse told my mother not to fret. March was a full month away. The infected cities had been sealed off, new hospitals were being built overnight, and unless you were essential personnel, no one was allowed to leave their house. Such rules were being enforced, you could be fined or arrested for being out without notice. You couldn’t even go to the bank without an official approval slip and someone coming to your door in a hazmat suit for a temperature check.
Their brother was the silent type, but he sent a daily ticker of total case counts and deaths.
Why had none of the siblings emigrated? I imagined not because they doubted the opportunities abroad but because there was no impetus to leave. When my parents returned to China, their families folded them naturally back in. When asked about their time in America, they framed it as neither a total failure or success.
Then there were some immigrants who had no desire to go back. Tami would leave the place of her birth with no intention to return. In my brother’s big-picture plan, I didn’t know which wave she was, the first or the second. Given that her parents had stayed behind, she technically belonged to the first, but she faced less resistance than my parents, her accent wasn’t an impediment, and material success had come quick. Tami left China in her early twenties, at least a decade earlier than my parents, who often complained of coming over too late and having to pīn mìng, or “fight for life” to catch up. Had they just left even five years earlier, their minds more malleable, bodies energized, they might have caught up and stayed.
How immigration is often described: a death, a rebirth. Or how my mother would describe it, starting back down at zero. To pīn can also mean to piece together, as you would a puzzle. So, to piece back together life.
I’d known that for years Tami had been trying to move her parents from Chongqing to Greenwich. I wasn’t in the main house to hear the call she’d apparently just had with them, but as my mother told it, Tami was saying that now might be the time to act, should borders truly close—if that were to happen indefinitely, when or how would families split overseas be able to see each other again?
As my mother was talking, details about Tami came back to me. During her master’s, she had gone, as did most international Chinese students, the entire two-year stint without flying back to see her family （doctorates went longer, sometimes five, six, nine years）。 The primary reason being cost, she couldn’t afford the round-trip airfare on the stipend. But even if she’d been able to, I doubt she would’ve gone. None of these international students wished to give the school that had sponsored them the impression that they were taking unnecessary time off.
Grad school burned Tami out. Or it was the years of schooling beforehand and maybe the fatigue of having been sent down a conveyor belt of achievement tasks to be exported as a commodity. Her parents had other plans for her, that after the master’s, she would continue on to the doctorate, then after the doctorate, import herself back to China to find that high-paying academic job. There was no doctorate but there was a wedding. And so quick after marrying my brother did she become the sister-in-law who shook her bejeweled wrist of status at me that I’d almost forgotten about the Tami who had arrived here status-less, on a student visa, and knew no one except an advisor and a school liaison who picked her up from JFK.
Tami’s parents remained unhappy with the outcome. They came for the wedding, and after the birth of each grandson, but stayed no more than a week. I knew that they’d made some blunt remarks to Tami. I knew they’d said, Why did you go to America just to be a mom? You could have done that in China, without all those years of education and the distance. Remembering this again, I saw Tami’s pursuit of motherhood in a new light. The critique was harsh, but for parents like those, much had been at stake, substantial sacrifice and pulling out of the heart. A daughter lost, in a way, to another place, and had they had a do-over, they might not have encouraged her to leave. Tami’s parents refused to move to America and have never wavered on that decision. A permanent move overseas at their age would be crippling. If they couldn’t read, write, or speak the language, then they regressed, relying heavily on Tami for everything that in China they could do on their own. China was their home, and there, they had good pensions, a spacious apartment, independence. The same things that my mother had there and wanted back. So why move to the land of the free to not be? Whatever mile radius Tami had envisioned for them was not what they wanted for themselves.