Taking a Turn

Chapter 2: The Fish Sandwich

Changi was enormous, and cleaner than any building she had ever stood inside — glass and polished stone, trees growing somehow indoors, moving walkways gliding people past shopfronts brighter than anything in the arrivals hall back home. She had read it was one of the best airports in the world. Walking off the jet bridge, jet-lagged and a little dizzy, she believed it. I actually did it, she thought, and felt a small, surprised swell of pride, followed almost immediately by a colder thought right behind it: now what.

She hadn’t eaten on the plane. A tray had come and gone, rice going cold and untouched, her stomach too knotted with nerves to want any of it. Immigration turned out to be nothing at all — a glance, a stamp, a wave through — and she almost laughed with relief, after bracing the whole flight for questions she’d rehearsed answers to that nobody ever asked.

The address she’d been given got her a taxi, and the taxi got her, close to midnight, to a narrow building three flights up from a street already gone quiet. The landlady who let her in — awake, unbothered, in a housecoat — walked her through the rules in under a minute: rent due the first of the month, quiet after ten, no cooking, and no, there was nothing to eat in the house at this hour, the kitchen closed same as everywhere else. She said it wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t, really. She was too tired to be hungry in any way that could compete with how badly she wanted to lie down.

The room was small — a single bed, a wardrobe, a window onto the next building’s brick wall close enough to touch. She caught her own reflection for a second in the wardrobe’s mirrored door, still in her travel clothes, hair flat on one side from the plane seat, and barely recognized the tiredness in her own face. She set her suitcase down, decided unpacking could wait, and was asleep before she’d worked out whether the mattress was any good.

Someone knocked at six.

She had no idea who he was — a man from the agency she had paid for herself, in installments, out of two years of part-time jobs back home that nobody in her family had ever needed to know about, not the same one who’d walked her paperwork through at the airport back in Beijing, just whoever they’d sent that morning. He said her name, checked it against a clipboard, and told her they needed to leave now if they were going to make the seven o’clock appointment. Her student pass. They walked. Neither of them said much of anything the whole way. She didn’t have questions ready yet, and he didn’t seem like a man who offered more than he was asked for.

The appointment itself took no time at all. Getting to the appointment took the rest of the morning.

They sat. Rows of plastic chairs bolted to the floor, a number system, a clock that seemed to be running slow out of spite. Above the counter a television played a British comedy on some kind of loop — a man in a tweed jacket walking into the same glass door, over and over, mugging at a camera that never once cut away. Nobody in the room laughed at it. Nobody asked for it to be turned off either. By the fourth or fifth time the man hit the door, she found she could almost predict the exact moment of impact, and something about that struck her, hollowed-out and sleepless as she was, as the funniest thing she’d seen in weeks. She had to look down at her own hands to keep from laughing out loud in a room full of people who had clearly stopped finding it funny hours before she’d even arrived.

No food. No water, unless she counted the vending machine, which took coins she didn’t have in the right denomination. By the time her name was finally called it was one in the afternoon, and she was so hungry she felt almost hollow, a strange lightness behind her eyes. The paperwork itself was six minutes of signatures and a photograph against a white wall.

“You did good,” the agent said, folding the papers into an envelope — the first thing approaching warmth he’d offered all morning. “You hungry?”

She was, more than she’d let herself admit until he asked. They walked a few blocks to a McDonald’s, and she stood in front of the menu board for a long moment, doing nothing useful with the information on it. She had never eaten a hamburger in her life. She had no idea what half these words meant, and the photographs of the beef ones looked, frankly, awful, gray and flat under the lighting. She pointed at the one with the fish, mostly because the picture looked less alarming than the others.

It came wrapped in paper, too hot to hold properly, and she ate it standing at the counter in about four bites. It was, without exaggeration, one of the best things she had ever put in her mouth — salty and strange and exactly what her body had apparently been asking for since somewhere over the Pacific. She could have cried a little, actually, standing there. She didn’t. The agent watched her eat it with the mild, distant amusement of a man who had clearly done this exact handoff before, dropped off girls just like her at this same counter more times than he could count.

She never forgot that sandwich. Years later she could still call up the exact taste of it if she tried — the first good thing that had happened to her on her own account, in her own country of choice, paid for by no one she owed anything to.