Page 74 of Vera Wong's Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man)

The journey by sea took a very long time. Some of us got seasick. I was one of the ones who didn’t, so I spent my timerushing back and forth, fetching water for the poor kids and cleaning up their vomit. The crew didn’t seem to care very much at all about the sick kids.

Then at some point, we were taken from our rooms and marched into a shipping container. That was when the older kids started shouting. This teenaged boy named Ming struggled and fought, and one of the crew members hit Ming in the head so hard that he vomited. Most of us lost our fight then.

I don’t know how long we spent inside the shipping container. It felt like it was never going to end. I was in some kind of daze when the ship docked; I could hear horns and other noises and I sat up. Then there was this monstrous noise and the container jerked to one side suddenly. We screamed and fell. I was sure we were going to die then and there. I clung to the floor as the container swung one way, then it clanged to the ground. I guessed then that they had moved us off the ship and onto the dock. Hours crawled by and nothing happened. We called out, shouting, though to be honest, none of us had much energy by then. The container smelled so, so bad. There were no toilets in there, you know. I can still smell it even now, more than ten years later.

I was half asleep when the doors were finally opened. Flashlights shone at us, blinding me. I sat up, confused, and a pair of strong hands grabbed me under my armpits and lifted me bodily into the air. I screamed and kicked, and something was placed over my mouth and nose. It smelled sharp, and it hit immediately, like a thick fog had suddenly settled over my brain. Then my head dropped forward and all went black.

When I woke up, I found myself in what is now my current bedroom. Two people—a man and a woman—were looking down at me.

“Hello, Millie,” the man said. He had a kind voice. Reassuring.

I blinked up at them, my thoughts a blur. I knew some English then, enough to know that he was greeting me as Millie. The mistake actually gave me some comfort, because it proved that there had been some silly mistake, and once they knew I wasn’t Millie, then everything would be put right. I was very stupid. “My name is Penxi,” I said.

“That is very hard for Americans to pronounce,” the woman said. She had yellow hair, like in the movies. I thought she looked very pretty.

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling bad about having a hard-to-pronounce name.

“That’s all right, dear,” the woman said. “But we’ve come up with a new name for you that we’d like you to remember.”

“Millie,” the man said. “It suits you, don’t you think?”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“It’s okay,” the man said. “We’ll explain everything to you. We’re very good at explaining things.”

I just stared up at them, scared and confused and hungry and all sorts of other emotions swirling through me in a mess. “I want my mama,” I said, and began to cry.

“Oh, my sweet child, I’m here,” the woman said.

“No, I want my real mama.”

“That’s me, Millie. I’m your real mama. You must call me Mother from now on. And this right here is Father. We are your parents now.”

I started crying harder, and Mother’s face turned from gentle to something else. Something that scared me.

“Millie,” she said, “I don’t like the way you’re behaving. Please stop making a fuss.”

I tried to stop crying, I really did, but that only made me sob even more. And before I knew it, Mother had grabbed me by the arm and yanked me off the bed. Father caught my other arm, and together, they dragged me out of the room. We went down a long hallway—I dimly realized that we were in some kind of warehouse that had been converted into a living space of sorts. We passed by many rooms, all of them with the doors closed. Later, I would come to find out that these rooms were occupied by Father and Mother’s other “children.” People like me, who had been stolen from various countries and sold to Father and Mother. They became my brothers and sisters. They were from all over the world. I had an older sister Yara, who was from Russia, and an older brother Jeffrey from Nigeria, and there was Thomas, of course, who was from Indonesia, and now I have a younger sister from Cambodia. Mother and Father named her Mina, but I have just learned that her real name is Channary, which I think is really very beautiful. I wonder what Yara’s, Jeffrey’s, and Thomas’s real names were.

Anyway, I am digressing because I don’t want to revisit the memory of my first day here. But I will tell you, Vera, because you deserve to know the truth about how I became who I am now. You once said scammers are the lowest of bottom feeders, and I was so sad when you said that. I agree with you, Vera, I hate scammers too. But the truth is, I am a scam artist. Sowere Thomas and Yara, and Channary is well on her way to becoming one as well. I hate that this is what we do, but we don’t have a choice. Father and Mother made that very clear that first day when they held down my head in a bath full of water as I screamed and thrashed around. Water surged up my nose, down my mouth, choking me. I thought I was surely going to die. Then they pulled me up and said, “This is what happens to disobedient children. Do you understand?”

I could only gasp for air like a fish out of water, and Mother snapped, “Do you understand, you little bitch?”

“Yes!” I cried. “My name is,” I said slowly, “Millie.”

A smile spread across Mother’s face. She looked beautiful when she smiled like that. “Good girl.” She patted my cheek. “Good, sweet Millie.”

“Phew!” Father said cheerfully. “I could use some lunch after that. I bet you’re hungry too, huh, Mills?”

“We’ve got a nice treat for you today. A welcome-to-America feast,” Mother said. She raised her eyebrows. “McDonald’s!”

I liked McDonald’s. In my village back in Yunnan, there were no McDonald’s, but there were a few in Shanghai, and I’d had the good fortune of having chicken nuggets from there once. They were delicious. And this was how Mother and Father broke me. Over the next few weeks, they punished me severely if I ever forgot to respond to the name Millie, until the name buried itself so deeply within my bones that I forgot my real name. Even in my dreams, people would call me Millie. Then, when they were sure that my old name and identity had been completely scrubbed from my mind, they began the lessons.

The first, and most important, lesson was learning English. I enjoyed this, actually, because a big part of it was watching American TV shows. I would be put in a room with a few other kids, and there, we would watch hours of random old shows likeFriendsandThe Simpsons. It was the best part of my early days there. There were actual lessons too, of course, classes taught by Father where he went over the rules of grammar and tested us on our vocabulary and all sorts. He also glossed over a few other subjects like math and geography and history, because “You can’t be a scam artist if you’re an idiot.” We didn’t need to be scholars, but we had to know enough about American culture and history to be convincing.

The second lesson was with Mother, and this had to do with how to carry myself. “Young and vulnerable,” she trilled. “This is how we like our girls here.” She taught me how to stand, how to walk, even how to breathe.

The third lesson was about human interaction. “You’re salespeople,” Mother said. “You’re trying to sell a product to them. You need to know how to hook their interest, keep it, and use it to your advantage. Sell the product.”

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