Love Can Look Like So Many Things
By: Angela Meng
Tags: Dogs, Immigration, China, This Is Us, Life Lessons

Love Can Look Like So Many Things

The dog that saved me, the dog I couldn’t save

Photo: Jena Ardell/Getty Images

When I was five, a kid from my neighborhood was bitten by a street dog, infected with rabies, and spent a month paralyzed in bed before he drowned from his saliva. His doting parents, who continued to share his meals despite his illness, contracted rabies through infected body fluids. They died a few weeks later, leaving his grandparents penniless, ostracized, and heartbroken.

At least, that’s how the well-rehearsed story goes. Rabies has the highest mortality rate — 99.9% — of any known disease. In the decade before my birth, almost 60,000 people died from rabies in China, nearly all from encounters with rabid dogs. When my parents were growing up, less than 1% of dogs in China were vaccinated. Street dogs, then, were at best farmhands, at worst pests, and to some, food. Only in 2020 did China’s Ministry of Agriculture officially designate dogs as “companion animals” instead of “livestock.”

So you can only imagine my mother’s shock when, a month after emigrating to the U.S., she felt a small, furry creature nuzzling at her ankle while taking out the trash. She let out a scream and scurried back inside. My father gave her a cursory look, “just don’t feed it, it’ll go away.”

File that under “obvious foreshadowing.” From the other side of the screen door, I saw a dark, long, wooly puppy with upright ears no more than 15 inches tall. It had made itself a home in the hollow among the garbage cans. It sat upright, straight-backed, head tilted, in curious defiance. I happened to be 11 years old and also treading the newly delicate balance between unquestioning obedience and calculated rebellion. So when my parents were getting ready for bed, I bolted to the fridge, grabbed a piece of leftover meat, and — being careful not to contract rabies — flung it out the back door.

That year, my mother and I had arrived on American soil to meet my father, the three of us crammed ourselves into a single-story home with two other migrant families in a low-income neighborhood. We rented the cheapest bedroom in the middle of the house, which meant sharing a front door with Family One, a back door with Family Two, and a bathroom with whichever family wasn’t using theirs. Family One, a trio we revered for their Green Cards and basic English language comprehension, occupied the fanciest and most picturesque part of the house — the front, which grew a single rose bush and some wild mint weeds. The mother of the family, a warehouse receptionist named Annie who did yoga, frequently granted us glimpses of real American ways through her pithy musings, which we gobbled up like popcorn. “Americans love pickup trucks, burgers, pizza,” she’d note casually, “when they do eat vegetables, they usually eat it raw, this is called salad.”

I was fascinated with her rendering of the American social hierarchy. The China I grew up in was made up of 1) the politically connected, hence wealthy and educated 2) the working class like my parents, much less wealthy and educated, and 3) lastly, comprising of ~65% of the population, the farming class: the uneducated and poor agricultural workers whom we literally called peasants.

Were we the new peasant class, then? I distinctly remember going to the supermarket with my mother and picking up a plastic container of precociously ripe strawberries. My mother looked at the price tag — $3.99 per pound — and apologized. She then gestured to a pile of Fuji apples, priced $0.69 per pound, and told me to grab some of those.

“No,” Annie corrected, her hands gesturing to signify the stratum of American society. Her voice was so serious, her scale so precise, that I pretended to pay deference to it by taking notes. “At the very top you have white people,” she began, then Native Americans, because “whites took their land and so they have special privileges like owning casinos,” then light Latinos, light Asians like Koreans, dark Latinos, dark Asians like Filipinos, Black people, recent immigrants, and illegal immigrants. “Weirdly, sometimes Americans treat animals better than humans,” she finished.

Family Two consisted of four illegal immigrants who occupied two bedrooms in the back of the house. Family One and my family looked down on Family Two, because the parents worked less-than-minimum-wage jobs at ungodly hours that were friendly to undocumented workers but detrimental to human health. The father at a construction site a three-hour drive away, and the mother as an assistant caretaker for the elderly. They were both illiterate farmers back in China.

I was deeply fond of Family Two, because they seemed unaffected by the cultural inferiority complex that Family One and my family keenly exhibited. With them there was no talk of class or social status, there was no envy nor condescension. Though they often came home covered in dust or smelling of sewage, they were warm instead of self-pitying, curious instead of preachy. They seemed to have the gift of accepting life. They had a pair of teenaged twins who were natural troublemakers and therefore, my natural heroes. The boy was called Kevin, and the girl was too enthralled with the prospect of having an English name to pick one. She called herself April, June, Olivia, this week she was Samantha, which she pronounced Sa-man-far.

“I have a secret,” Samantha told me one day. “I have been feeding the black puppy by the back door.” Elated that I had the prescience to follow my hero, I told her about my mother’s fear of rabies. Sam dismissed me with conviction, “No rabies in this country.”

From that moment on we openly defied our parents and fed the dog with impunity. Mickey Mouse was the only iconically American character we knew, so we named her Mickey, gender normativity be damned.

I am aware that there exists an uncanny psychological phenomenon in which, when asked to describe their pets, pet owners unconsciously choose to impose a limiting, narcissistic narrative onto them by describing themselves. “He’s the strongest dog in the pack,” says the bodybuilder. “She’s picky and independent,” says the activist. “She’s a princess — and if you can’t handle her at her worst, you sure as hell don’t deserve her best,” says the Karen, quoting Marilyn Monroe.

I shall attempt to circumvent this by describing everything Mickey was that I categorically was not. She was a natural athlete, with keen sense, quick movement, and a muscular build like a wolf. She was resilient, and endured cold and hunger like a bear. We couldn’t afford any dog food, so we just gave her leftovers; our house was too small so, even when it rained, she slept outside. She never made any complaint, as if, like a philosopher, she had learned that without hard work and suffering there would be no pleasure worth having. She was steadfast and measured, she wasn’t the type of dog who leaped onto furniture or rolled on her stomach for a belly rub. All of her movements were slow, deliberate, sphinx-like. She loved easily; it only took a couple of sausages thrown hastily from the back door for her to regard me as a friend. She was strong and confident and she had the foresight to stay — despite our reluctance — in our crowded and inhospitable home because she knew, somehow, she was here to change a life.

On my first day of middle school in the U.S., my mother dressed me in what, in China, were considered “cool kid clothes”: a bright turquoise sweater with the words “BABY SEXY DREAM” emblazoned across the chest and a fuchsia teddy bear below, a Louis Vuitton headband — never mind that Louis Vuitton didn’t make headbands — and these patchy blue pants that were too big around the waist and too short around the ankles. I was over five feet tall and 70 pounds floating in a sea of four foot five, normally built children, so I hunched constantly. I spent 99% of my time staring at my shoes, not smiling at anyone for fear it would not be returned. I had zero social skills. And I spoke a kind of farcically broken English — when asked why I did not want to climb the monkey bars, I replied, thinking the words indicated I am afraid of falling and hurting myself, “is very ouch.”

I hated the playground because I had never used my body for any reason other than to carry my mind around. On the playground I was ungainly, I was off-balance and uncoordinated; I’d never thrown a ball let alone catch one. During dodgeball — a sport I’m willing to bet is responsible for 99% of all elementary school PTSD — I either shuffled awkwardly or jerked my body backward, arms flailing about next to my athletic classmates — most of whom, having grown up in a multifaceted education system, had the agility of cheetahs and acrobatics of jungle monkeys.

The result of all of this is that my god-given lankiness and cringeworthy appearance immediately made me an object of derision and torment amongst my peers, who wasted no time with cruel epithets — skinny bone jones, bulimic bitch, jap, chink, gook, dumpling dumpster. I had been airlifted from the comfort of Chinese educational institutions which stressed academic excellence and only academic excellence, where respect is earned with perfect scores and mastery of the instruments, where no misbehavior was tolerated, where aggression was always exercised passively, and dropped into one which resembled anarchy, where students swore and threw spitballs back and forth, only to get away with nothing more than a perfunctory “quit it,” from the teacher, where everyone had an archetype and studious children were called nerds and losers, where respect seemed to be earned not in the classroom, but on the schoolyard in between classes, where physical aggression often dominated.

I was walking home one afternoon when three kids from my science class caught up to me. Hey you, the group leader called. I kept quiet and walked faster. A few hours earlier, as we huddled together under supervision, finishing a group project, they were cordial and civilized. But I could tell from their eyes that they had become barbarians again. Hey SKINNY-ASS BITCH, she yelled louder, her hand pulling the grab handle on my backpack, you think you’re better than us? My neck inched forward to offset her weight, but by then her sidekick had a fistful of my hair and was dragging me sideways; the other sidekick unzipped my backpack and was reaching for something inside. I held her arm and darted forward to shake them off, but any attempt to get away only made them more hostile. We engaged in this deranged tug-of-war for another full block before approaching my house, where my mother heard the commotion and stuck her head out the window.

If I learned anything from years of dealing with bullies, it is this: Nothing is more humiliating than the knowledge that your mother just found out you’re a loser at school. So I did the only sensible thing — I laughed. A deep, hearty laugh that everyone in the neighborhood could hear. And then, in the ditziest, perkiest voice I could muster, I whined, “haha. haha. Stop it, guys! Ha. Ha.” This seemed to confuse the mobsters but did not slacken their resolve for more degradation. They would not let go.

I closed my eyes and waited for a hole to open up in the ground so I could jump in and die in it, but all I heard were pitter-patters of tiny feet on asphalt. Mickey had come flying out the back door, hackles raised, eyes wild. She let out a low, guttural growl. Her entire body was a growl. Then she began barking loudly and didn’t stop, even when the mobsters desisted. “Forget her,” the leader rolled her eyes and walked off. I quickly patted my knotted hair and shot my mother a playful grin. In the perky voice, I explained, “This is how American kids play, they are crazy!” Must protect mother at all costs.

Later I would open my backpack and find a rancid piece of cotton with an odd fibrous tail covered in blood. Mobsters love leaving souvenirs. Luckily for me, Chinese women did not use tampons for fear of breaking their hymen before marriage, so I’d never heard of nor seen one. I figured someone with an abnormally large nostril had a nosebleed and threw the thing away.

I lingered on the steps of the house for a long time, staring into the abyss. For some odd reason, the human limbic system takes 10 times as long to process shame as other emotions. Mickey sat facing me, one of her chubby paws on my knee, holding the world together. She saved me on the days I arrived home bruised and humiliated. She kept me optimistic with her natural wit and wisdom, as if to say, this is how.

To my knowledge, no one from her family had ever come looking for her, and I never traced the lines of her ancestry. She was alone, too. We were so lonely together, her and I.

Half a year after Mickey head-tilted so beautifully into my life, she disappeared.

My mother was in the kitchen rinsing something in the sink. “Mom, where’s Mickey?”

She didn’t answer.

“Where’s the dog?”

Silence.

“Mom? Is she here?”

Silence. Silence on a frequency only perceptible to someone who came out of her womb.

Then, in an apathetic tone, she answered, her eyes still fixed on the sink, “What dog?”

???

I consider that I’m in a bizarrely realistic dream from which I’ve yet to wake up. “Mickey! Where is M — ”

“Why aren’t you doing your homework?” She stared up at me, her eyes icebound.

My heart leaped to my throat. “But, why are you ignoring my question?”

“Homework.” She walked off, slamming the door behind her.

I ran around the neighborhood screaming her name, but I knew it was futile. In the city I grew up in, people didn’t die or get divorced, they simply “went on a business trip” and never came back again. After they left on these business trips, adults would avoid their names around us like the plague. Like their government, the adulthood apparatus ran on the premise that the children must be protected, taken care of, controlled, but never trusted. It is for this reason that most kids growing up in China are either shrewd or resigned, it’s one or the other.

Inside the house, the other families were uncharacteristically mum, avoiding eye contact and changing the subject skillfully whenever her name came up. I understood what this meant: We were not friends. Their warmth was mercurial. They tried on voluble for size but it didn’t fit, not as well as the cold, pragmatic mentality they’d perfected. They were back in the Red Guards, watching me like a traitor who couldn’t be entrusted with a secret they hadn’t even shared.

I was initially resigned, then I became shrewd. I decided to squander my integrity for the truth. When the adults were out of the house, I cornered the twins and threatened to call the police and report four illegal immigrants lest they tell me what happened. They confessed. First, a couple leaks, then, a deluge of details:

The twins’ father came back from a long day at the construction site to find Mickey barking relentlessly. Desperate to make her stop, he kicked her and broke her leg.

Family One, gorgons who never missed a chance to brag about their knowledge of American virtues, warned Family Two that if anyone were to discover that their dad was responsible for breaking a dog’s leg, they would be arrested and/or deported. Family One kindly reminded them that they were still illegals and that in this country, animal lives were sometimes more valuable than human lives.

This sent Family Two into a frenzy. A haphazard plan was hatched to ditch the dog before I got home.

Mickey was too smart to be abandoned nearby, so they put her in their father’s truck, drove her three hours away to his construction site, and left her there.

Next, they needed to take care of the weakest link: me. A unanimous decision was reached to never speak about Mickey again. Surely, they thought, surely there are enough adults in the house to distort a 12-year-old’s sense of reality? The reality distortion field would be strong enough to protect me from any psychological scars. How can you be sad about an animal who never was? It was, to them, the perfect plan.

The twins’ assured me, repeatedly, that she is still alive. This is America, they said, remember? And Americans value the lives of animals, sometimes even more than human lives! Someone must’ve taken her home!

My parents, when confronted, lost themselves in a wasteland of justifications and recrimination. What were we supposed to do, Angela? Did you forget what we sacrificed for you to be educated here? The sweat and tears we shed? The family and friends we left behind? We don’t even have health insurance ourselves, how could we have paid for a “dog doctor”?

But I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about a piece of the twins’ story that broke me open: When their father returned to the construction site to resume his job, Mickey was waiting at the exact spot where he dropped her off, limping and wagging her tail. There she stayed — with unwavering faith for her humans — for a whole week before she disappeared.

Her wooly fur and chubby paws. The puzzling things she did to pique our curiosity. The way her mouth curved into a little smile when I scratched her ears. Every morsel of food she ate, every ounce of beauty she brought, every fragment of her undaunted spirit. I didn’t know what to do with the love I made for her.

When people casually ask me if I’ve ever had a dog before, I answer yes, some kind of German Shepherd mix, her name was Mickey, after the Disney character yes. I say that she passed away not long after I got her and nod when they offer me sympathies and commiserate over their own losses. I don’t tell them the truth: that we abused her trust, that I let them abandon her when she has never once abandoned me, that she saved me but I could not save her.

After I confronted my parents, I decided to stop speaking to them forever. I planned to take a vow of silence for the next few years, get a job, and emancipate myself. I would not invite them to my graduation or my wedding or if I died before they did, my funeral. I was determined not to show my submission, but to let them know in subtle but measured ways, when opportunities arose, that I was not affected one iota by their dictatorship. So I put on my backpack, checked my deadpan in the mirror, and left for school. My mother called me back inside. She didn’t say anything, but in her hand was a single crumpled $100 dollar bill. Back then a one-hundred-dollar bill was an urban money myth, I had never seen one before. She unzipped the side of my backpack and placed the bill inside. Zipping it back up, she put a hand on my head.

Love can look like so many things it’s not supposed to look like.

A hundred dollars, ¼ of our monthly rent. A hundred dollars from the woman who buys $0.69 fuji apples instead of $3.99 strawberries. I suppose that was her love language — and this is mine.