"Assimilation Crimes"

The South Side of New Orleans in the 90s was a terrible place, so Olivia Jacques accepted her scholarship out of the city at the age of eighteen and suddenly found herself in with a briefcase and two sacks of Louisiana squash in Berkeley, California.

Her Creole mother cried at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport: “don’t lose who you are,” she said with a mixture of pride and disbelief.  Her daughter, from the French Quarter, was going to the Bay.

            Before she even set down her dorm bags at Berkeley, Olivia found herself recruited for a campus protest.  The issue, it didn’t matter.  The point, Olivia would come quickly to understand, was to protest.  Having grown up in a place of intense religious conservatism, mixed with the occasional quixotic voodoo practice, the irreligious, Marxist protests distasted her.  She joined the business school as an act of rebellion from the rebellious culture of Berkeley.  Olivia was a serious student in the business school; her professor complimented her on her tenacity and willingness to take risks.  “You should stay here in San Francisco after you’re done,” the professor recommended.  “Lots of opportunities for a woman of your character.”

            She decided to take his advice.  Enrolling in the existing computer science classes of the day, in which the best were here, naturally, Olivia found herself amidst a bird’s nest of hardworking, quiet, and genial white and (mostly) Chinese Americans, each learning, in the technological Wild West that was the 90s, how to build computers, install software, and play with the Internet, which was already a force, but only a nascent bud tip of what it would become.  She worked to keep up with these engineers, these marvels of computational logic.  It required long hours at night learning code.  Olivia slept on couches at the computer lab studying just to keep up with men whose names were two Mandarin syllables.  She could never break through to the crema of the crop – some of these imports were recruited straight from the best universities and sweatshops in the world – but she did just enough to stay in the direct middle of her tough class – the proudest “C” she ever earned.  Still, despite the sense of competition, and constant swimming in turgid waters, she respected them – knowing how much they too had to sacrifice to gain critical skills to keep up with the radically evolving and voracious tech industry.    

            As a junior in Berkeley’s computer lab, Olivia encountered a boy named Xuan Wen.  Xuan was a direct transfer student from Fudan University in Shanghai.  They met when Olivia was on the way back to the lab from the girls’ bathroom, seeing Xuan fumbling with some change at the vending machine.  He looked absolutely clueless.  Olivia decided to help.  “Do you need help with this machine?” she asked.  At twenty-seven years old, she had developed a lithe figure developed from, frankly, her own choices to avoid the comfort food in endless supply in the Dirty South and eat her mother’s okra and pinto beans instead.  She had smoothed out her features with a dabble of strong perfume and hairspray. 

            The boy looked at her.  “Oh… yes, yes thank you,” he said with a distinctive foreign lisp.  But he was so sheepish and half-embarrassed about it that Olivia couldn’t help but giggle.  She helped him insert the coins – each in their respective holes, quarters in quarter-holes, dimes in dime-holes – and watched as the machine whirred and dispensed a Snickers bar into the pocket where Xuan Wen picked it up.

            “Wow, thank you!”  Xuan Wen was looking at the candy bar like a boat refugee looked at a dead turkey, craving its delectableness. 

Olivia grinned.  “I’m Olivia, by the way.”

            “Xuan Wen,” he said.  He had jet-black hair neatly straight.  His English was clearly a second language, but in its own polished and intercultural way, it made him more sophisticated.  At least he tried!  While Americans were stuck in their islands of maleducation, Xuan Wen knew two languages.  Even his accent – derived from Hong Kong English for sure – matched the British English of the quickly ascendant Anglophilia sweeping the nation. 

            “How do you pronounce it?”  Olivia asked, matching his accent.

            “Shu-wan,” he said, dipping his tone in a way Americans could not recognize.  Mandarin was a tonal language, one of the few in the world that still exist.  Xuan was tall, dressed in prep-school clothes, extremely formal, as if he was trying out for the Oxford Union rather than the Cal Golden Bears.  He had no sense of irony, which required a sense of world to which he migrated.  He had tossed himself into a world of which he knew nothing, no cultural knowledge whatsoever!  Olivia laughed and began to blush.

            “Well Shu-wan Wen, I’m going to lab, you want to join me?”

            “Uh, sure,” Xuan Wen said, and the pair strolled out into the shimmering Northern California sunlight. 

            Olivia found out all about Xuan’s hometown in China, an inland “small town” (of about 4 million people) called Harbin, where most of the Chinese people were subsistence farmers and factory workers newly emancipated from the Cultural Revolution.  Xuan was one of the few – goaded by an authoritarian mother (whom he clarified “loved me very much”) to escape, via good test scores and entrance into one of the very few proper Chinese universities.  From there, he had received an invitation to apply to UC-Berkeley as a transfer mathematics student, and he upped and went – left everything behind, including his mother and a Communist Party membership.  Olivia thought it was the most inspiring story she had ever heard. 

            Olivia and Xuan quickly bonded.  They would eat hot dogs and mushroom coffee at hippie food trucks in San Francisco.  Olivia introduced him to punk-rock, Blink-182, and American politics; Xuan introduced her to the woodwinds of China.  They would go camping in the Redwood National Forest.  Beneath the heady hue of the moonlight, they talked about books, dreams, and finding their passions.  They sat on a log, shoulders nearing touching, looking at the campfire and then at the forest beyond.

            “That’s what I want,” Xuan said, eyes bright and fire crackling.  “I love America because you have freedom.”

            “But it’s about how you use it,” Olivia said.  “I think that it is beautiful how you came all the way over from China to here.  How you risked it all to live as a foreigner in this country.”

            “But I don’t feel like a foreigner,” Xuan said, and finally, he turned to her.  “I don’t feel like a foreigner because I am… being with… you.”  With every pause he leaned closer.

            They kissed.  It was a light rap of her amber lips and his thin scarlet beak, but the peck was more than enough to send her a rush of something she had never felt before.  Hope.  A sense of beautiful desire.  A sense of possibility in America.

            When they had sex in the tent that night, Olivia fell into a deep love and appreciation for the man before her.  “I love… that your name is Xuan,” Olivia said when his eyes were nearly closing.  “You are proud.  You are special.”

            Xuan muttered something under his breath.  Olivia leaned closer.  “It’s… my name,” he said.

            “It’s perfect,” Olivia responded, before they both fell asleep.

            That year, TIME Magazine had profiled a group of garage-band geeks running a company called Google out of Palo Alto, so Olivia decided to stay in the Bay Area seeking career advancement.  She graduated from Berkeley in 1997, took a job with a tech startup called PaperShaper.com which focused on delivering paper to companies, and moved to a community of suburban chimney-sweep houses in San Jose that would eventually represent the engineering innovations of the world-famous Silicon Valley.  It was as far away from the comically reactionary Deep South that she grew up in as Tatooine is from Naboo.

             Who lived with her in her modest, but not-nearly-as-overpriced single-family cottage in the harbinger days of Y2K?  Xuan Wen.  He was very clean.  Every day he wore one of three ties that he had left perched on a closet door.  He would attach it to the collar of an unctuously ironed, cotton-fiber white shirt, and then slip on a herringbone-patterned jacket with a rich tan color.  Olivia saw what rituals the young foreigner went through as he stepped outside to grab an interview with whatever hiring manager could afford to take Chinese foreigners.  She thought to herself: how romantic that he would work so hard in a country that doesn’t love him.  Xuan’s persistence, his willingness to challenge himself with the daily indignities of finding a job as an unloved minority in this country, made her cheer for him, love him even harder.  Meanwhile, he was practicing his English, getting through the stuttering and initial complications of learning how to hit r’s in his phonics, but when he succeeded his voice was not only pristine like crystal but carried a pleasant British accent. 

            Olivia respected Xuan with all her heart.  She, too, worked her way through Berkeley Computer Science and had landed a decent job as a typewriter for PaperShaper.com, but even though her partner was jobless, she knew he was trying his hardest to make things work for him to stay in this country.

            As Xuan labored for work that sponsored his immigration papers, Olivia tended to his other legal issues.  Xuan had to constantly reapply for temporary authorizations to stay in the United States while he was pursuing getting a job.  He had even considered returning to school, solely for the student visa to delay his entrance into the United States for another 2 or 3 years.  But they both knew it was only going to be a temporary solution. He had to get a job and employment sponsorship, or eventually the government will kick him out.  Even employment in this boom/bust tech climate was a tricky proposition.  If he got sponsorship, and the company went out of business, as many companies did, or if he was let go, he would be right back to this situation.  He had to prove to the government and a company that could sponsor him that he was a valuable worker and that he was here to stay.  Olivia realized that Xuan was fighting to survive. 

There was one other way out of this ongoing mess.

            Down by the blooming Stanford gardens, Xuan had put on his best suit.  They would take public transportation to meet each other after work on days where Xuan was in the city.  Xuan did not have a car; he didn’t even have a license.  Olivia had to ferry him around in her ’93 Jeep Wrangler when he had the occasional interview or networking chat with a harried tech founder.  Usually as soon as they found out about his need for sponsorship the founders’ faces would fall.  The conversations would sometimes end then and there.  But Xuan wasn’t giving up.  Nor was he giving up on the one relationship that truly mattered to him here.

            The Mediterranean corridors of Stanford were some of the most precious architectural feats on the West Coast.  When Olivia and Xuan would journey through them alone, the emptiness of the archway paths, the echo of their steps, made them feel at peace.  Today, however, Olivia could tell something was on Xuan’s mind.  She thought to ask as much.

            “Actually, yes, Olivia, I feel like I want to ask you something.”  Xuan’s English had gotten to a nearly flawless point; in fact, he sounded almost like a prince.

            “What do you want to ask, Xuan?”  Olivia said, gazing at him.  The echoey hallways carried her voice, but no one was around to catch it.

            “I was thinking – well, I do love you, and I do want to be a citizen.  I don’t want you to feel as if I am taking advantage of you, but I want to end the constant search.  Perhaps, if we get married, we could solve both of these problems, my problem of love, and my problem of status.  Perhaps if we get married you can ease me these calms.”

            Olivia was caught by surprise.  She had not considered that marriage would be the subject of today’s conversation.  But it felt natural.  It felt all right.  And she knew that everything Xuan dd, he’d carefully consider.  She loved him.  It was true.  And maybe that was all that they needed together.  Love and love once more. 

            “Yes Xuan,” she eventually said.  “I would love to marry you.  Because that’s what marriage is all about.  Tending to each other most of all.  Living outside yourself.  Championing your other half.”

            “I am so delighted,” Xuan said, before bursting to tears.  “I am truly delighted.”

            “I’m going to marry you, I’m going to marry you, Xuan Wen!”  Olivia collapsed in pure joy, spreading her arms around Xuan’s lithe body, and once again, with tears streaming down both of their eyes, they once again kissed.   

Beneath shady giants of Redwood National Forest in 2001, Olivia got married to Xuan Wen.  When he gazed in her eyes, she felt every emotion – bliss, fear, passion, exuberance – blossom from within her.  In his eyes, however, she felt only love.  The comfort of his touch as the minister blessed the marriage was all the assurance she needed.   In the small private ceremony only attended by Olivia’s family in New Orleans, plastic chairs and a makeshift stand replacing a steeple and pews, adorned with birds and squirrels, Olivia felt all she needed there.  The evening sun peeked out from the forest, and when it went down, she knew she hadn’t kissed a frog.

            “I love you, Olivia,” Xuan said earnestly, voice full of hope and desire.

            “I love you, Xuan Wen,” Olivia said breathlessly.  “I can’t wait to be your wife.”

            That night, on a crag overlooking the San Francisco Bay, on a park bench, Xuan confessed it all.  “I have a student visa which will expire in a year,” he said.  “I have no job.  I do not have any money.  How do I deserve you?”

            “You have me,” Olivia whispered.

            She led him to the edge of the rock overlooking the sea.  The wind whistled, and the skyline of San Francisco winked back at them from a distance.  All was peaceful.  All was quiet.  Olivia slowly, but surely, extended her feet to the rock beyond the railing.  “Come with me,” she said.

            Xuan followed her down the crag.  It was steep and dangerous, but slowly and sure they scaled down the rock face down to the beach at the bottom.  No one would normally have been here, even in the daytime.  Now, as tidal waves pressed against the embankment, it felt even more isolated. 

            Olivia unbuckled her dress, letting it crash against the sand.  Revealing gossamer-thin lingerie, she cupped Xuan’s face.  “You have all of me,” she said.

            They had sex that night on the shore.  When they woke up together, her straight black hair was messed up in his.  Her mouth stretched all over his body, and his hands were all over hers.  They didn’t even notice the sand.

***

            “I received an offer.”  Xuan gasped, letting the letter fall to the floor.  Olivia picked it up.  “What is… Internal Systems?”

            “It’s a microchip company,” Xuan said, holding the letter.  “I am going to be a software engineer!” 

            Together, husband and wife were nearly in tears as they read it.  They were nearly desperate in searching for a position that matched Xuan’s skills before his visa expired.  If it did they might have gotten an extension, but too many and it would have been to China they would go.   But Xuan tirelessly pursued opportunity after opportunity, stopping at several office doors and simply inquiring if they were looking.  Finally, after rejecting him, a nice secretary at one of the tech firms suggested Internal Systems might be hiring next door.  He stopped in and surely, they were.  And they were willing to offer visa sponsorship.

            As a reward for Xuan’s accomplishment, Olivia bought him a suit – and she made sure to get him a tailor for it.  As Xuan stepped out of the Olde English Tailor in the Mission District, he looked like a man.  “Ravishing,” she gleamed, kissing him in his new tie. 

“Am I James Bond?” he asked her dapperly, with that beautiful pseudo-British-Hong Kong accent he had perfected, just for her.

            “More like Morris Chestnut,” Olivia replied, ecstatic.

            The hours were long, but Xuan was a hard worker.  Day after day, he would chomp away at the computer, working with fellow engineers at Internal Systems sometimes until 8 or 9 pm.  Sometimes he would come out of long coding sessions, hacking in the day and night to program the microchips to the exact specifications that management wanted, with a grizzled face and glazed over eyes.  But as Internal Systems grew, so did he with the company.  The same work ethic, determination, and exuberance that brought him to this foreign land and caught the attention of now 27-year old Olivia had also caught the attention of his managers.  They elevated him and gave him a promotion.  Olivia had her own well-compensated job as a rising Human Resources Officer (with unique trade experience in tech).  But Xuan soon surpassed even her title and position, and they made enough to buy their own house closer to Menlo Park, Silicon Valley.

            But it was that same promotional track that started producing a change in Xuan.  He began to go out more with his software engineer friends from Internal Systems, and some nights he would only come home past midnight.  He became more restless, meaner to Olivia.  One time, Olivia needed Xuan to run a few grocery errands. He snapped back at her: “you run the errands.  That’s what you’re for.”  His wife, startled, couldn’t tell if those words were meant as chauvinistic or racist.  But she sought understanding.  “You’re working too hard.  Maybe we should go out and travel the world a little.  Or go back to China.”

            “I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to,” Xuan said flatly.

            Olivia forgave him.  But he didn’t take up her initiative to travel out of the country.  Work and more work piled up as the microchip industry boomed.  Moore’s Law was advancing – the processing power of computers was doubling every eighteen months, and Xuan’s progress on it was part of the reason why.  His research, from what Olivia gathered, however, wasn’t particularly innovative or exciting.  It mainly consisted of him repeat running trial runs of various tasks until he could get them most efficiently.  Olivia could tell Xuan was getting bored of his job, he went from innovating on the cutting edge to merely keeping the process – which was an innovation, five years earlier - afloat. 

She, on the other hand, was being promoted and offered more and better jobs in the tech industry, because of her unique experience and skillset in managing techies with low social skills.  Her managers said she was destined for greatness.  She even speculated to her husband that she could be the sole provider for the family to Xuan, but was forcefully rejected.  Xuan wanted to make it in America.  He wanted to be the breadwinning, American man he watched in the American movies.

            Furthermore, Olivia was now 30, and although they had discussed not having children in the early years of their marriage while Xuan was starting out, they were now at a point where they could afford to.  Olivia felt restless about her body, wishing maybe that Xuan would enter it with the love and care and potential fertility-making of someone who wanted it with her.  She thought to ask. 

            Xuan’s reaction was hostile: “not right now,” he said.

            “Don’t you want to be a father?”  Olivia argued back.

            But Xuan was stern with her.  Olivia grew sad.  Xuan would work later and later.  He would stay up with his friends longer and correspondingly when he came home there was no flame left for her.  She thought to confront him about it.

            “Look, Xuan, I know work is hard, and I know you want to spend time with your friends, but could you at least bring me along?  I want to be a part of your group.”

            “Oh,” Xuan said, then laughed derisively.  “I don’t believe that’s happening.”

            “What is that supposed to mean?”

            “I mean they wouldn’t like you.”  Xuan said, as if that was the final and definite answer. 

            What are you on?  Olivia wondered.

            Internal Systems changed its brand to reflect the tech-hungry times to Innovia, Inc. and moved its engineers to a spacious two-story office in Menlo Park.  They would serve the engineers lunch and dinner, a full-time workplace designed for overtime work, so Xuan barely even stayed over for Olivia’s cooking.  Olivia was a good cook.  New Orleans, Creole-style cooking had once appealed to Xuan’s half-starving brain and body.  But now he preferred the easy, accessible food on the conveyors of corporate.  The face that Xuan would rather dine in the company food hall, blocking her out of his mealtimes rather than take her food, hurt her seemingly more than any of the other indignities she suffered during this time.  She would eat alone at the kitchen table, listlessly forking her own broccoli, stirring her own pot and cleaning her own dishes rather than do it with him.  But somehow, she felt at a loss to fight back.  After all, this was Xuan’s dream – the dream they both fought for.  He had a job.  He had a visa.  He was going to become American.  So she hesitated to fight back.

            Until that day.

            When Xuan would come back home, he would go to his office, where a sprawling computer, complete with its large, beastly whirring fan, and plug into his headphones, drowning out her and her noise.  Tech companies were in a crunch; 9/11 had happened three months ago.  The Internet was a wild west.  Chat and email had just been invented, and forums for every subgroup and category available had popped up across the Web.

            It was a Wednesday, and Xuan was out at work.  Olivia would not normally enter Xuan’s designated “private” room in their spare bedroom at their house where he had set up a computer station, except today, feeling frustrated with him and the vacuuming duty she was on, she decided to check his carpet for spots and crumbs.  She entered the room where a computer monitor running Windows 2000 and its associated tower unit and fan was screaming.  She hated that loud noise.  It was like a constant invasion of their privacy.  As anticipated, Xuan had left hundreds of crumbs, from cereal and granola bars, scattered all over the floor.  Some were growing things on them.  Insulted by the putrid sight, Olivia yanked the vacuum into the computer room, soaking up the crumbs with her blaring, angry food-sucker.

As she crawled the vacuum around the corners of the room, however, Olivia’s hand ran into the desktop mouse, causing it to unravel from the mousepad and hang from the ledge on its wire, almost like catching a… mouse.  In response to the motion, the screen booted up from the Windows 2000.  The classic tone emerged from the speaker, followed by the computer’s classic green hill screensaver.  Olivia thought about leaving the computer alone, but something – perhaps the menacing belch of the fan or the fact that this contraption upended their lives together – caused her to take a second glance at it, almost like a man takes a second glance at a female jogger. 

Please enter the password.

Olivia may be estranged from Xuan emotionally, but in terms of his organizational secrets, she knew them all.  Living with someone for five years tends to do that.  Even though Xuan never personally told her his password to the computer, she knew it was written on an orange Post-it note slicked to the top of the bottom kitchen cabinet.  Olivia found it. 

2482765, she typed.  The screensaver disappeared and was replaced by an interesting screen.  Xuan had been perusing the world wide web, but his private trip wasn’t to a pornography website as Olivia feared, but a chat forum where he communicated with people mostly in Chinese.  He had English-to-Mandarin type on, so foreign characters read back to her.  He appeared to be chatting, however, with someone from China.

Olivia checked the watch.  It was still 2:30.  Xuan wasn’t due for another 3 hours, or, if he stayed out as she usually did, for another six.  She had time.  The house was clean. 

A Chinese-English dictionary would do it.  She had limited understanding of language, but she had enough intuition to be able to handle character translations.  She began to piecemeal translate the script, which had a timestamp of yesterday. 

Hi… you are cute… one chat to him read.  Are you from China?

I am from America… he had typed back.

America.  What is it like? 

Rich… he typed.

As Olivia translated, she started crying.  Long, angry tears spilled out like fireworks.  How long had he been on these “chats?”  These chats with foreign strangers?  For what purpose? 

The chats with Xuan grew more desperate.

You can always come back to China.  The chatter wrote.

Anything to escape these Americans, Xuan wrote back.

Send some money to me!  She wrote again.

I will keep chatting with you if you send some money to me!

Xuan Wen replied: I have to do it over Internet café.  My wife cannot know.  Do you have PayPal? 

You have a wife?

I have a wife.  But she is ugly and fat.  Like Americans.  Not like you.  I just need a friend.

Olivia cupped at her stomach.  She was hardly fat.  But somehow… in some way, her husband’s weight standards had gotten dangerously out of whack.  He was fantasizing over the rail-thin Chinese girl… who by the evidence could frankly be a 300-pound male for all he really knew.  She wondered if his company – with a group of sweaty, Chinese software engineers hired for the visa, just like him – had starved him of the socialization he needed.  Then she slapped herself for allowing herself to be so sympathetic.

Is your wife American?

Olivia stared at her notes, refusing to believe them.  But double checking and checking again, it was certain that was what they were typing.

Is your wife American?  The chatter asked again.

How much can I pay you?  Xuan had written back, declining to answer her question.

$300?

Done.

I will chat with you for another month if you email $300 to me!

Olivia’s head began to spin.

Xuan Wen wasn’t a drunk.  Even cheater was too honorific of a title for him. 

He was a loser.

An absolute loser.