“Honey, are you coming to the table or not? Dinner is getting cold. And by the way, what is that in your hand?” asked my mother.
A period of silence. He glanced at us reluctantly for a while, and then rested his eyes on the yellow envelope, which was beginning to arouse curiosity from the rest of the family, including me.
“Please do eat first, I will have the leftovers.” That was what my mother managed to elicit from him. However, my father’s disposition betrayed his concern. Indeed, from the look of my mother’s eyes, she was not satisfied by the stolid response. Father quickly disappeared behind the shadows of his bedroom door, leaving us flabbergasted.
The next day my father told us that the company he had worked for fifteen years had recently outsourced his job to Shanghai. For the first time, I became frozen within my own thoughts – the notion of unemployment, homelessness revolved around my brain, firmly held in orbit by the ineffable feelings of anxiety. “Aunt Linda called me yesterday. She has arranged for us to immigrate to the U.S. under a working-visa title,” father continued and forced a half-smile. A quick scan around the table had extinguished the remaining optimism that was burning in me yesterday; the grim faces of my parents had skillfully affirmed yesterday’s premonition of troubles.
I had never thought of America in depth before except during media coverage of the September 11, 2001 attacks. I spent the next month arranging my possessions into several UPS boxes all postmarked for the United States. I wondered how I could live in the U.S. after having studied English for less than two years.
In June 2002, my father jubilantly walked out of the American Embassy. He had finally obtained our visas after meeting the Consulate General. To celebrate this occasion, my father brought us to a circus which was then touring Hong Kong. The most breathtaking part of the circus performance came when a lion was commanded to jump through a burning wooden ring. At first the lion hesitated, then in an instant, it stunned the audience and performed the stunt gracefully, liberated from its internal fears. The audience exploded in a thunder of clapping while we left quietly for our flight to Chicago.
At the airport, all of my friends that I had known since kindergarten amassed at the departure gate of the airport, hugging me and blessing me. Amid the emotional outburst from my relatives, out of the confusion I received an atlas of Hong Kong, with detailed geographical explanations inside. I decided to save it for the long journey ahead to Chicago on the airplane.
Ten hours into the journey and high above the Pacific Ocean, I spotted an atlas which my teacher had given me as a parting gift; I opened it to find a map of the world. My eyes were involuntarily following the red region along the Marianas and Aleutian Trenches; I stopped when from the accompanying text I discovered a meaning lost in the past weeks: “A Pacific Ring of Fire”. I too would leap through this ring to find fulfillment on the other side.
I quietly shut the atlas. Closing my eyes and reflecting upon events of recent months, the earlier feelings of anxiety vanished from my veins. In the end, I left Hong Kong the way I had lived in it for the past 13 years--cautiously optimistic for every new day’s arrival.
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