“Slow Clap” was selected by Alexandra Kleeman as the winner of the 2022 Open Border Fiction Prize.

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If you went macro, like way macro, I guess you could blame my whole situation on censorship in China. This place is no place for artists like me. Sure, you can paint squiggly calligraphy lines, call them “avant garde Chinese art” and sell them to foreigners, but that’s not what I do. I embody people. I copy human consciousness. Six years old, during family dinners, I’d do impressions of Ma cooking; Ba ambling around half-awake in the morning, momentarily pausing to stare at the wooden floor with an almost mournful look, trying to summon his slippers. But then as I grew older, I started doing impressions of the teachers, and then I wanted to make fun of people higher than the teachers. I drew little cartoons of our principal crapping on the toilet and sent them to friends on WeChat. But then Ba got a call from his superior at the state grid and told me to stop, couldn’t I draw something else like nice sunflowers?

Lu will tell you that he told me about wanting to go to America first, but again, he’s a fucking red-faced liar! I told him about going to America first. I let him borrow my Friends DVDs that I burned myself, and we marveled at the apartments we were going to have someday. We marveled at the casual way the characters slept with each other, lost jobs, gained jobs, talked to their parents. Most of all, we marveled at the humor. We marveled at the things we could just carelessly say, words to toss in the air, loudly, with no wariness.

Lu. It’s important for you to know that when I first met him, I just rolled my eyes.

Bad teeth. Pretty fat. Wore his hair in that typical Canto-pop star way: side swept, gel-hardened spikes. On weekends, away from the dress code of our “international” school, his Lowu market slouchy jeans barely stayed on his ass. A wanna-be gangster.

Lu’s family had come into money fast. In 2007, his dad, on recommendation from Shubing’s dad, invested in two companies that manufactured semiconductors for graphics processing. So he walked into class everyday with the same nonchalant swagger that Xiao Fei (mobile technology) and Zhu Ge (construction in Kenya) did. He regularly bought snow crab dinners for his friends, hopped the line at the neighborhood massage place, and befriended Casper, a local heartthrob who’d soon become a minor K-pop celebrity. He flirted with the teachers–even Chen Lao Shi, who accepted his oolong tea set so fawningly that we never took him seriously again. We all found Lu incredibly annoying, but we were also incredibly jealous. I did a pretty good impression of Lu pressing his hands on two desks, raising his legs, and swinging with a look of absolute boredom on his face.

Meizi was the first to have a crush on him. He’d made fun of her recent live-streaming video, where she crushed packages of ramen noodles between her palms and then poured the contents in her mouth. She passed me a note in English class. There’s something about him. I think he’s kind of shuai.

Are you kidding? Have you actually looked at him? I passed back.

Meizi looked up and down at the board before writing back, to make it look like she was taking notes. Well he definitely looks at you a lot. Don’t turn around.

I didn’t, because I didn’t want to waste my time. Even as a young high schooler, I had a one year, three year, and five year plan: I wanted to ace the TOEFL, get out of Shenzhen and leave for the United States, where I was going to be surrounded by artists and become an actress and make people feel things. The CCTV soap operas bored me–there was never any subtlety, or movies that reflected the simple mysteries of life. It was all intense suffering–the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea! A whole family of six down to one last rice bowl! In America, I would watch all the movies I wanted, from French New Wave to Italian neorealism to American comedies, talk about them with people to understand and critique them, study the greats, learn how to be a great. There was no time for boys.

And yet. It was near the end of the semester, and our whole class was staying late after school, cramming for exams. The sloganned red banners by our school’s gates were changed to “WORK HARD STUDENTS FOR GREATER GOOD OF COUNTRY. ADD OIL!”

It frustrated me that even though I wanted to be an artist, I still had to do well in math and science to get into a good college. My mind always glazed over in math class, and I was easily distracted by Teacher Tim. We all knew he DJed Sunday brunches at the Westin Hotel, yet he spoke very softly and would often run his hands through his shoulder-length brown hair. I found his mannerisms fascinating. When I finally looked back at the board, the numbers had turned into mere curves and lines instead of integers with value, and I could only hope for a miracle for my exam.

Meanwhile, Lu had moved onto other conquests. He had a few rumored dalliances with senior girls. With his dad’s money, he’d set up entrepreneurial activities of his own, a mass-order bubble tea delivery system actually becoming so successful in our school that the principal shut it down “out of health concerns.”

One night, I was walking into the library after a particularly horrible math revision class, when I saw Lu standing above the photocopier in the library. It was late, and Lu never went to any of the revisions classes, so I did a double take. “What are you doing?”

Lu looked up at me. “Look what I found. Impressed?” They were answers to the math test.

“How did you find this?” I asked, horrified.

“Was chatting with Lin Lao Shi about the class outing,” he said. His eyes were giddy. “And she left her office door open.”

“You…you…”

Lu laughed. “Speechless, huh? I’m honored to have made Cora speechless for once.”

“What are you talking about?”

He waved his hand. Something in me lit a fuse.

“What are you going to do with these? Sell them, I bet? Make a huge profit and then buy your own way out of the exams?”

Lu’s smirk stayed even. “I’m not going to do all the selling, of course.” He pressed the ridge of the booklet down onto the glass. “Think about how many students are in our school! Think bigger, Cora. I’m going to hire three students to sell them for me, one per class. Pay them a percentage fee depending on how many they sell.”

Against my wishes I was impressed by this foresight. Here was someone else brazen and crazy like me. I wasn’t sure what to say, so it was better to leave. “Alright, well, some of us need to go study now.” I could feel his eyes on me as I walked away and was aware that I had just washed my hair that morning, that it was just the right amount of wavy and nicely scented.

Lu would’ve never admitted this, but he definitely got my entire class schedule so he could always be outside the classroom door when I left. He would still tease me a lot: your impression of me needs work. You can do better than that Cora, aim higher! But he started giving me things too. A whole basket of water honey peaches, to my home. Starbucks frappucino vouchers popping up on my WeChat app. After I bemoaned the lack of acting books in our bookstores, he shipped a bunch of them from Hong Kong. I knew he paid girls a lot of attention, and sent them gifts as well, but had he ever sent them books? Every time I breathlessly flipped through An Actor Prepares by Stanivilaski, the binding of the vintage hardcover slightly tattered and romantic, I thought of him.

There was the fact that underneath it, we actually got along very well. We both had a resistance streak in us, although it came out in different ways. Lu was always looking for the more efficient, more underground way of doing something, even if that meant working outside the system. I similarly questioned authority but was still too shy to operate against it, in its face. But we both knew we needed to leave Shenzhen after graduation, even though the city was fast changing and there was more and more money coming in. Lu’s dad was pressuring him to work for the family business, and I knew Shenzhen was never going to be the center of art and theater, but of microchips.

Everyone was really stepping it up as college exams neared. Meizi had stopped live-streaming on Douyu to focus on her essay writing–to the despair of her 200,000 male subscribers—and Tianze had memorized the entirety of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech for the provincial speech contest. Poor Xiao Fei had puked after getting a low score on our first practice test. While Lu was too much of a slacker to hand in homework on time, even he showed up to the SAT and TOEFL classes that foreigners ran everyday next to our school.

During class breaks, Lu and I met in the alleyway next to the study center, where a new Huawei building was being built. As the shiny glass panes went up, Lu and I ate sausages on a stick in the corner, reading aloud American newspaper articles that the foreigners had printed for us. I helped Lu with the longer words. E-stab-lish. Inter-vene. O-ri-gi-nal. He got frustrated by his slowness, that he couldn’t pronounce the round “r”. He said he was jealous of my pronunciation, that I actually sounded like a character on Friends.

One Saturday afternoon, he invited me and a few of his guy friends over to his home and told me, while the guys disappeared into the kitchen briefly: “You’re the only girl who’s seen my room.” I rolled my eyes but took in every detail of his room–every Kobe Bryant poster, every little teacup–with glee.

Lu got into Georgetown early. No one talked about how it was frankly impossible with his SAT score, no one mentioned it odd that the university announced a new Chen Center for Public Policy earlier that month. Lu invited everyone–Meizi, Xiao Fei, me, and the guys–out for karaoke. He booked the biggest room in Wanda Plaza, with a disco ball, two vintage microphones that dropped from the ceiling, and a dancing pole. Off two Tsingtaos, I got embarrassingly drunk. I had gotten waitlisted at Carnegie Mellon. I screamed the song “Love Story” by Taylor Swift while wriggling around the pole. Right as the room descended into a soupy haze of smoke and cumin-pork, Lu sang an old classic: “Jian Dai Ai” by Jay Chou. He looked right at me when he sang it. Just a simple love, just a simple love, with you. My stomach froze. To this day, I don’t think I’ve ever felt such captivation, like there was a new me forming in the moment, into a new ecstatic life, and there was no going back.

As the night wound down, the guys wanted to get massages, but Lu waved them off. “I’m going to get her home,” he said, pointing at me. I’d had a few glasses of water by now, and was not so much drunk but tired, head and heart pounding as I slipped in the back of the taxi with him. I was wearing a short skirt made of terry cloth material. Our legs touched. We had never been alone before, at night.

“I’m nervous for the class show,” I blurted out.

“What?” Lu said. His black Lacoste polo made him look older than he was, more refined, and as the Shenzhen skyline streamed by, yellow highway lights shuttered on his face. I somehow felt older too, much older than I’d been last week. “You’ve memorized all the lines. You know you can do it, silly.”

“Yes but, I’ve never shown this side of myself to everyone. This serious acting side.”

“Don’t think too much,” Lu said. “That’s your weakness. Don’t think, just do it. Just like Nike!”

My head felt like a brick and as I drifted off, his hand made contact with mine. He stroked my index finger very gently–so tenderly that I shivered and it woke me up– and then interlaced his fingers with mine. He squeezed. I pressed into the crevice of his knuckles.

“In America,” murmured Lu, “We can go on road trips. I’ll get my license this summer. I’ll pick you up, and we can drive to the Grand Canyon.”

One of my favorite Strasberg acting exercises is actually a worksheet. You analyze the monologue, then write down the objective and context of the character. What was the character doing right before that moment? What does she want? What is standing in her way?

If Lu had to fill out that worksheet, to explain why our relationship suddenly chilled after that day, what would he have written? Objective: to get out of feeling anything, to avoid feeling attached to someone? Context: that he was nervous to go to Georgetown, that he knew his English wasn’t good enough to do well there but he was too embarrassed to say so, and hid from everyone that he couldn’t lie to?

My F1 visa interview at the American consulate in Shenzhen:

“Why do you want to study in the USA?”

What I did not say: Because all the best performing arts are in the United States. I know exactly what life is like in America and I want that. I want to see Dear Evan Hansen, Cabaret, Hamilton. I want the freedom to write and act in my own plays, to have every inner musing become possibly a real thing. Also, my Nainai, who I’m very close to, wants me to leave too. She took me into my room after my parents and I had a long argument and told me, don’t worry, you’re doing the right thing, get out of this country. She lived through the Cultural Revolution, saw her dad get killed on the street and raised her little brother all by herself, taking him to class with her.

What I did say: “I want more exposure to the world, with a world-class American education, which will benefit me when I return to China.”

“Who are your sponsors?”

What I did not say: My parents. They are not happy about me going to the US for college and would rather me stay and take the gaokao next year. But no way in hell will I ever subject myself to that two-day massacre of a test.

What I did say: “My parents. They both work for the state grid, good stable jobs that let them save up a good amount for my college education, although they still had to borrow money from my uncle.”

“How long will you stay in the USA?”

What I did not say: I’m going to stay as long as I can.

What I did say: “Four years, and then I will return to China.”

“Why do you want to study at this university?”

What I did not say: Because it’s the only university I got into.

What I did say: “Boston University has one of the best undergraduate performing arts programs in the country. I also want to be in a city with lots of vibrant students. And I hear the snow is pretty there. I’ve never seen snow.”

I didn’t realize that snow, so delicate while falling, could also condense into a thick sheet, or be shoveled into three-foot walls on a field that had grass only weeks ago. The snow kept me inside, and from my door window, I watched the brave few venture out in head to toe gear with a shovel. Luckily, my roommate, Sina, a German girl studying chemistry, was friendly and constantly made us hot chocolate. And in our dormitory building was a library that I could bring my readings and scripts to.

Boston was colder and quieter than I expected. There was no life out on the streets: no underwear hanging out to dry, no elderly people playing mahjong or auntie selling fish ball skewers on the sidewalk. Everyone seemed to clam up in their own homes and just…sit there. But some streets were indeed picturesque, with their towering oak trees and pastel-colored houses, and my newly created Instagram account began to fill with selfies in front of the Harvard University gates, eating clam chowder at the Seaport, a cashmere sweater sale at J.Crew. During the international student orientation tour, we walked past the Paramount Theater, with a gleaming red and gold facade, the words PARAMOUNT running down vertically on a huge sign, and it sent such a spasm of excitement up my spine that I returned the next day to marvel at it.

There weren’t many Chinese people in my theater program, and for some reason this made the professors treat me especially kindly. During our Shakespere unit, Professor Yury worked with me on my Helena monologue for hours, and then told me that he was proud of me for working hard on it. I was confused because I had only worked the bare minimum.

I straddled an interesting line between the Chinese international students and the wider campus. Being an actress meant I had to constantly interact and play with other students. I observed and copied them: the casual “how are you?”, the ever present high five, how “I’m down for that” and “I’m up for it” meant the same thing. I swapped my chain-link cross body bag for a beige canvas tote from the local bookstore. I started wearing daily contact lens instead of glasses. But it was clear that no one really watched Friends anymore, and when people talked about a band called Phish or reminisced about a Nickelodeon show from their youth, I found myself silent and smiling politely.

Professor Yury forwarded me a theater club event for Asian American theatermakers and I was confused–why would Asian people try to separate themselves out? There was something I wasn’t understanding, and I never joined.

Besides, I was too busy with my own assignments. The reading rate was intense, and I worried about not being able to keep up with my classmates. The names of playwrights and directors, all with different ways of seeing the world, filled my notebooks. I copied them over and over: Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Miller, Stephen Adly Guirgis. From the library, I borrowed as many books as I could carry for term papers, reading late into the night with my dictionary app open. Subliminal. Improvisational. Tact. I knew I had to fully understand the meaning of the words to fully embody them, and I was sometimes frustrated at how slow it took me to get through a script. While my Chinese friends went out for hotpot, I’d be murmuring to myself in the library, writing the definitions of words at the top and then making up the English intonations, knowing this was necessary work before I could dive into the emotional underbelly of the script.

The Cuban playwright Maria Irene Fornes spoke to me. Let go, you jerk! You stink! You smell bad! So what! You’re disgusting! No kidding! Her plays filtered through human interactions into a simple language that was almost animalistic, so primal and urgent. I chose her for a class scene study, and when I rolled around the ground and threw my head up at the ceiling in anguish, I could feel the molecules in the room tighten.

“Wow,” a guy named Sean said to me, who had entered the classroom laughing but now his face was ashen and his eyes soft, “You killed that.” I had to ask a friend later to make sure that meant I did a good job, but once I knew, I felt powerful.

Lu didn’t text me until October, with a cursory how are you, and he didn’t reply to my answer: photos of me dancing in rehearsal. I checked his WeChat–no new photos except of a facade of a bronze dormitory gate. I asked Meizi if she’d heard from him. Oh, you don’t know? He’s probably busy because he’s a VPN dealer now.

I hadn’t told anyone about that night in the car, not even Meizi. I’m glad I didn’t because it would’ve made me sound so naive and stupid, to think I was any more special than all the other girls. But because it was a secret, so was the pain. How pathetic was I?

I saw Lu a year later, when I visited Meizi, who was studying at George Washington University. After the first year, he and I only interacted through the comments space to my Instagram and WeChat photos–he’d send a like, or a “nice!” I decided with Meizi there, though, there would be enough levity to evaporate any awkwardness.

When Lu walked into the restaurant, I did not recognize him. He was so skinny, and walked in almost shyly, slouched. He had lost a lot of weight and wore a sensible black windbreaker. His hair was neatly buzzed.

“Goodness, Lu, is that you?” Meizi said.

Lu sat next to me and I longed to be alone with him, to ask what happened to him. I want him to take off his jacket, and for us to sniff each other out, to be vulnerable and honest under all the layers. Instead, we just spent the dinner gossiping about other friends, complaining about our professors and the lack of good Chinese restaurants in our areas. Meizi told us about her Douyu account getting shut down, that she was switching majors again, to economics. Lu told us about the fraternities at Georgetown and that he wanted to be the first Chinese international student to join one. He said that he did not expect the English core classes in college to be so hard, that he wished he had studied more with us in high school. He was taking the class again, after failing the first semester.

“Failing?!” Meizi said.

“It’s not a big deal,” he said. “Really not a big deal.” I noticed, for the first time, how dark the area around his eyes was. America was stripping away his swagger.

When Meizi went to the bathroom, an unnatural silence fell between us. The burly waitress came right by between us to clear the chopsticks and plates. “We should have a nice long catch up,” Lu said. We were not looking at each other.

“Yes, sounds good.”

“I’ll call you next week?”

Maybe this was the second chapter of our story, I thought. This is where it began, right here in this overpriced dim sum restaurant. “Sure.”

During my second year at Boston University, I had the revelation that anyone could come over to my dorm. There was no piano placed awkwardly behind the sofa for lack of space, or gaudy art catalog pages taped on the walls to hide the holes. No Ma puttering about in an apron with dancing lemons on it, interrupting every thirty minutes with sliced fruit. My dorm was immaculate. That year, I decided on a beach theme.

When boys came over, I asked them to take off their sticky sneakers by the door, gesturing to the white shag rug. No one seemed to appreciate the seashells in mason jars, or the nautical rope netting on the wall. Weekend after weekend, they tossed the conch-shaped pillows onto the ground once our bodies traveled to the bed.

When Lu finally called four months later, I was in bed with a Puerto Rican guy who was visiting a fellow actor at our short film after-party. On top of my rumpled sheets, we lunged at each other, his mouth cool with a beer taste, my cheap lime green tights rubbing against his thighs. When Lu’s face illuminated my phone, something skipped my chest. Finally. But then, as I looked up at the ceiling a few seconds later, he suddenly seemed so much like a remnant of a past self, one where he held up the entire scaffold, but one I had zoomed by.

To become an American seemed to mean taking on everyone’s problems as your own. Every week, my email got flooded with invites: to an abortion protest, to a rally for a black man’s wrongful arrest, to a mass petition for Puerto Rican statehood. There were so many things to fight for, and it was completely normal for students not only to demand a meeting with the head provost, but to also demand a list of changes and actionable items coming out of the meeting. Junior year, when the funding for the Asian American mental health center shrunk, I was cajoled into joining the protest by my suitemate Nancy. To my shock, there was not only Chinese people there, but a smattering of white, black, and Spanish people there, holding signs among us. I was touched, and returned to another meeting to organize a second protest, with sign-making supplies that I was incredulous to learn was provided by the university budget.

But as time went on, some differences between the Americans and I became clear, more so than Americans’ obsession with paper towels, or how their “stir fry” mixed every possible random vegetable into a bowl with goopy sauce. When graduation rolled around, it was apparent that everyone else in the theater program thought going to auditions and crashing at home for a while was a given. Some talked about waitressing in New York City, or finding a part-time arts administration job. But I knew none of those jobs would be able to sponsor me a visa.

During Christmas of senior year, I freaked out to Meizi on the phone. “I should’ve done accounting like you,” I moaned. “Then I could’ve gotten a sponsor.”

“You know I hate accounting,” she said, her mouth full of food. “And I’m going back to Shenzhen after a year or two here, I think.”

“But you know me, Meizi, I can’t go back to Shenzhen. There are people who want to collaborate with in New York. New York! I have to find a way to stay.”

“You know who you should talk to? Lu,” Meizi said. “He has this side gig recruiting for a master’s program!”

I dawdled for a while, to see if there was any other way, but I knew I didn’t have enough time to get a strong MFA application together. The missed phone call two years ago, that for weeks had tugged on me as a source of anxiety, felt now like such a small blip, that I could possibly even feign shock if he brought it up, as if I had never gotten his call. So I picked up the phone, and messaged him on WeChat, pausing only once to read it over: Old friend. Meizi told me you’re working for a school now?

Lu was extremely excited when I called him. He sounded like his old self again—fast-talking, scheming, selling. “It’s called the University of Northern New Jersey,” he said. “They’re perfect for you. Just a train ride away from New York City. You can take half online classes, and half work for credit. I’m getting Suling and Xuecheng in this program too.”

“But do they have a performing arts masters?” I said.

“They don’t, but don’t worry about it! Just do the organizational leadership one. Works for anything. Trust me on this. I can even reduce your fee.”

“My fee?”

“I’m a recruiter, smarty! I get paid in these fees. Pretty nicely, I must say.”

“Huh. How long have you been doing this?”

“Half a year now. Okay, if you want to meet the deadline for next year, you got to get me your transcript and application ASAP.”

“I’ll work on it.”

“When is your graduation?”

I sighed. My parents had planned to come, but at the last minute Ma said tickets were too expensive, that they’d visit once I had a job and a nice place to myself they could crash at. “In a month.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Wait, really?”

The phone crackled a bit. I pressed it against my ear. “Yes, really you silly. I’ve missed you. I think we have a lot to catch up on.”

Springtime, Boston. Everywhere was the smell of cut grass, and lilacs. Big white tents provided shade for families milling about, holding champagne glasses. I wore a white sundress, Lu looked completely different again. Muscles, the newest Nikes, aviators. I made fun of him for this new physical transformation and he smiled and said, “I know you like it.”

After the ceremony, after the hugs and grins and obligatory pictures with my cohort and professors, Lu pulled me aside and handed me a gift bag. I unwrapped it and gasped. It’s a huge poster of Dear Evan Hansen, signed by the entire cast. “HOW!” I screamed. And then he kisses me. Right there. In broad daylight. I feel lightheaded, airless, floating.

That night, we ate hotpot in my dorm room, with Lu, Meizi, Suling, and Xuecheng. All only children, all new Chinese graduates of American universities, tiny points in the large wave. We ladled fish balls and duck tongue into each other’s bowls, we turned up the Canto-pop real loud. We feel victorious.

The University of Northern New Jersey’s acceptance letter came in a red manila envelope, with smiling students on the cover. “An exceptional educational experience! UNNJ promises a high quality American education to students from around the world. This education is based on a foundation of intense academics and real world business experiences set in beautiful Cranford, New Jersey and the surrounding northern New Jersey and New York areas.”

By August 15, I hadn’t received my class schedule. Lu, who was now staying over every weekend in my Brooklyn rental, told me not to worry, that online classes worked in a different timeline.

I emailed the Dean of Students, asking if it was okay that I only take online classes, to fulfill the new visa. I got a reply from someone who signed off as Mr. Regents, apologizing that classes were postponed but that I could work instead of going to class. “Are you sure this is okay?” I asked Lu. “I’m pretty sure I need to take a minimum course load of 20 hours to keep my visa.”

Lu kissed my nose and ruffled my hair. “Don’t worry, little smarty,” he said. He pulled up the UNNJ website and scrolled to the bottom. “Look, accredited by the New Jersey Education Department!”

Of course, I did my own research. It looked like UNNJ was going through a campus expansion and that’s why classes were postponed. Honestly, this worked to my benefit at the time. Most shows and acting classes in New York needed a daily rehearsal time commitment. So I let another few months go by.

In December, Xuecheng called me. “Look,” he said. “I know you and Lu are a thing. But doesn’t this university seem odd? How is that we haven’t started class yet?”

I sighed. “Well, did you get the email about the campus change?” I said.

“I did, but I mean…something feels off to me. I’m going to visit the campus to see it and get some answers. Do you want to come?”

“Sure!” I said. “I’ll bring Lu.”

“I don’t think you should bring Lu.”

Xuecheng was a couple years older than me, a philosophy student. He had a solemn demeanor and a small ponytail. We took the New Jersey Transit, and then we got into an Uber. It dropped us off near the highway, at a gray strip mall that looked half deserted. “This must be wrong,” Xuecheng said.

I looked at the address. “No, this is it.”

We walked around, dazed and confused. “Maybe this is just where they get their mail?” I said.

Xuecheng squinted his eyes and we walked by a Jamba Juice, a nail spa, and then to a little room with a directory on the side. “Office A: UNNJ” it said. We peered through the door, but no one was there. The carpet was speckled gray, and two potted cactuses sat on top of a cubicle divider, their yellow spikes almost comically bright. Xuecheng banged on the door and it made a loud rattling sound. “What the fuck,” he muttered.

We stood there silently, exchanging bewildered looks at each other and then at the door. Just as I was about to take out my phone, a middle aged white man emerged, wearing dark grey khakis and a maroon tie. “Hello!” he said gregariously, shaking hands with us. “I’m Dean Regents. Sorry, I wasn’t expecting students today.”

Xuecheng and I looked at each other. “Sorry, this is the university?” I said.

“Yep, you’re looking at it! Since we mostly do online classes, the actual physical classrooms are quite consolidated. I’m afraid you can’t go in there now because of construction, but here are some T-shirts!” He handed us two grey t-shirts with UNNJ emblazoned on them, smiling widely. He clearly was trying to get us to leave.

The train stopped and sputtered on the way back to the city. Xuecheng ranted about how much the transportation in America sucked, how most of his friends had moved back to China after not getting visas but then bragged to him about how livable it was now. “Maybe I should just go back,” he said. “You too, Cora. Let’s get out of this mess.”

I looked down at my fingernails. I’d painted them red in a fit of passion, after getting accepted to a six week actor’s conservatory. It suddenly seemed childish and foolish, like something only a person not used to success would do. “I don’t want to leave just yet,” I said. “And Lu is here.”

“Lu…” Xuecheng opened his mouth. “Since that incident at Georgetown, he’s been so…intense. In a way I don’t really understand.”

I looked up at him. “What happened in Georgetown?”

Xuecheng looked alarmed. “You don’t know?” he said. “He didn’t tell you about the hazing?”

I had heard about hazing in American TV shows, where the men were marched down a street blindfolded, or made to pee on a statue. “Oh, that,” I lied. “Yes, he told me.”

Xuecheng opened his mouth, and I steadied myself for something to come. But then he cleared his throat, nodded, and averted his eyes to the approaching New York skyline the rest of the ride.

It was four degrees below freezing when I confronted Lu. He had driven over from DC, where he was waiting to finish out the lease. The plan was to move in with me to Jersey City the following month. We’d picked out the place already: a new luxury building, with a gym inside and even a dog park. He’d always wanted a little dog. I was starting to print out photos to be framed: us in Miami, jumping in mid-air at the beach; a high school class photo that Ma had sent, him flashing bunny ears behind my head.

“Xuecheng is being totally ridiculous,” Lu said, throwing his keys on the counter. He sank next to me on the couch, the cold air off his coat chilling my arm. “I told him, I told him a million times, don’t go to campus, it’s not ready yet.”

“I just…”

“And why would you go with him? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because this is really starting to freak me out, ok? Meizi said this is not normal, and that immigration is very strict these days. There’s no reason why online classes haven’t started yet. If they ask for a transcript and see I don’t have classes on them.”

“You’re thinking too hard, smarty. What is a transcript? It is a piece of paper, with ink on it. We have a printer, I have the official school stamp.”

“What?” I slapped his arm. “What?”

Lu laughed. His face had no trace of nervousness, and it scared me. It was like he was sixteen again, sliding up to Chen Lao Shi with his pants slouched low, knowing he could get away with anything. “Just trust me, okay. This university is real, they say they deal with these campus expansions all the time and it’s not your fault you miss classes, so…they provide a transcript to make it look like you’re a student. And then you’ll make up the credits next semester.”

“Lu. Lu. This is not tenth grade math. This is bad…you’ve been forging transcripts?” I stood and started pacing.

He looked up at me fiercely. “Do you not trust me, Cora?” he said. “Do you think I’d really get us into a mess? I got you out of a mess, okay! What we’re doing is completely legal. There’s a full court of law to enjoy. Unlike at Georgetown.”

“What do you mean?” I said quickly. “What happened at Georgetown?”

Lu turned away and took out his phone. “Let’s get some burgers, I’m starving.”

ICE came on a late February morning, a little after 8am. They rang the doorbell and I answered, my hair wet. I didn’t even think. It was one black officer and one white, both wide-set, wearing black knit caps. They were polite at first, asking me my full name, if this was my home. For a few terrifying seconds I thought they were police officers, and that something had happened to Lu. But then they said they were here for me, that I had broken immigration law, that I needed to come to the station.

I started hyperventilating. I told them I needed to sit down. They said no, you need to come with us. I said, I need to put on more clothing. The black officer looked at the white officer, shrugged, and said OK. I went into my bedroom and dropped on the floor and cried. I grabbed at the tendrils of the white shag rag and twisted them. Was this the last time I was going to be in this room? I observed my hands moving to the closet and grabbing the first sweater. It was so soft. Was it thick enough for where I was going? Maybe I should grab a couple sweaters. A knock on the door. “Ma’m, we have to leave now.”

Was there a way I could get out of this? For a second I thought about making up a story, any story. Crying my eyes out and just refusing to leave. But then I opened the door, grabbed my keys, and let them lead me outside, their handcuffs dangling off their belts.

Lu was already in the backseat, hands gripping his knees. His face was taut, he was staring straight forward. His eyes were smaller–he had been crying. “I didn’t know,” he whimpered. “I swear, Cora, I didn’t.”

I wonder what acting exercises Mr. Regent, now known to me as Agent Ross, did to get into character as Dean of Students. Did he prefer the Meisner technique, or Uta Hagen, and dredge up memories and personal experiences? Did he look in the mirror every morning, stare at his sad bald head, and say: I am the Dean of UNNJ. I am here to make international students criminals. I am here to make their lives hell. Did he have separate clothes for his Dean look and his evil ICE look? Or were they the same outfit?

Did all the ICE agents do theater improv games together? I know a lot of good ones. I’m sure they did the one where you make someone a fake expert at something, and then pelt them with questions. To make a fake university believable, you needed to get the basics together. What majors does UNNJ have? What day is orientation? What are you going to say to the recruiters who keep asking you why classes haven’t started?

Even Xuecheng, who came to his senses and transferred out soon after our visit, is in this jail too. Apparently, just being enrolled for forty five days is enough to indict you of immigration fraud. From my cell, I imagine stripping that office of everything—the cubicles, the stupid plant, Agent Ross’ clothes—and daring them to look me in the eye and do it again.

I am telling you all this because I want you to know I’m actually not angry at Lu anymore. I’m testifying against him because, as the lawyer said, it’s the only card I have left now. The only thing that might alleviate my case and not get me banned from this country forever. He told me everything was going to be okay, and it’s not. This whole show we are in, we were cast without being told. But I’m going to decide what happens next. I’m still going to become an actress here, a place for artists like me, where I can take the stage and embody freaking human consciousness, to thunderous applause.