Crying in Baumarkt

For my dear friend Flavia, thank you for being there for me in one of the most difficult moments in my life.

“Fuck, not now, not now, not now,” She tries to calm her breathing down and fight the tears that are edging to pour out. But it’s not working. She can feel the anxiety pouncing in her body, like a violent beast trapped inside, banging its thorny head against her chest, her abdomen, her throat, ripping her innards apart while desperately finding a way to come out. Eventually she stops fighting. She slowly lowers her body, squats down and buries her head into her lap. For a moment the world around her goes silent as she lets the beast take over. Devour me whole, she thinks. Finally, this is her life, almost 30, childless, jobless, and having a breakdown in a home improvement store in the middle of nowhere in Germany.  

Half an hour ago Jaya stood in the aisle of her local Baumarkt, staring blankly at the racks and racks of different kinds and sizes of screwdrivers. It was her first time there by herself. She’s been ignoring the wobbly handle of her favorite pot, and this morning it finally fell off—the morning she woke up with a giant headache and desperately needed a steamy bowl of instant ramen topped with a perfectly runny egg.

She held up a screwdriver and read the label. PH1. All the screwdrivers are labeled with letters and numbers, as if it’s a code spoken amongst only those whose well-organized adult lives warrant the adept knowledge of screwdriver taxonomy. People who got their lives together enough to have the time and energy to improve their homes.

She stood helplessly in the aisle, her huge hoodie pulled over her head, almost covering her eyes, socks mismatched, and hair loosely tied into a messy bun. Finally an employee pushing a cart full of boxes walked by. 

She hastily stopped him:“Entschuldigung, um, sorry, do you just have a standard screwdriver?” The man’s pale face looked perplexed: “Wie Bitte?” 

Her body tensed up and she felt her heart racing. It’s been almost two years in Germany but her chest still pounds when people can’t understand her German. She repeated the question but in a much quieter and more nervous tone. The man replied something too quickly for her to catch, then walked away. For a second she instinctively curled up her thumb against her ring finger, but what brought her comfort was no longer there and all that remains is a tan line where a ring used to be. 

That was when she felt the beast creeping up, lurking in the dark, waiting to pounce. 

The shop clerk’s perplexed pale face reminded her of the man who processed her immigration paperwork. The man would always speak directly at Dave without even looking at her. She always had to sit there uncomfortably and ask Dave to recount the important information afterwards. Over time she stopped asking him and just let him handle everything. She thought she would feel lighter since she shed off some responsibility using the language and cultural barrier as an excuse. But she felt heavier every day. 

She wasn’t always a timid person. She used to be the head of her class and the life of the party. Back in China, one of her friends used to call her little Miss Sunshine because her presence would always brighten up everyone’s day. But somehow, that version of her disappeared, just like all the sunlight the relentless German winter drains, leaving only a lingering memory of brighter days. Going back isn’t an option. She had given everything to move to Germany. Her parents threatened to cut ties if she ever moved abroad with Dave. It was already hard enough for them that she was dating a white man who didn’t speak their language. They could not handle the thought of losing her, or losing control over her, to a foreign man and a foreign land. 

She did it anyway, enticed by the promise of a fresh start and a home. Home, something that she always dreamed of. When she was a kid, every teacher-parent conference was a nightmare. She never knew if anyone would come. Later on when her parents split up, the notion of home became even further away. She could only witness it when she visited her dad’s new family. 

So she came to Germany. For love, she told herself. 

How romantic! Others would exclaim when they asked her why she moved. How could she explain why she wasn’t all that happy? How could she describe that quiet uneasiness of having one’s future attached only to the status of being someone’s wife? Like an itch in the throat you can’t scratch, this feeling gnaws away at your identity every day but remains undetected swept under the rug of love and commitment. So she could only smile and agree, Yes indeed, how romantic. 

The next day she wakes up, her head still dizzy from the sleeping pill she took last night. She sees a text from Dave and instantly sobers up. He’s coming back tomorrow. She hasn’t seen him in two months since their fight. Or she isn’t even sure if it can be called a fight. It’s a lot of screams and tears from her while Dave sits there repeating, “I’m sorry.” 

She doesn’t remember much of that day when he told her he was in love with someone else. What was she doing before, how he looked, where in the flat they were exactly, none of it. She only remembers him saying how much pain he was in at the thought of choosing between them, because he didn’t want to hurt either of them. Choosing between the two of them…Everything they’ve been through, brutal Covid lockdown in Shanghai, moving to Germany, four years of their love.  Somehow it all became fair game weighed against something that he had with someone he’s only known for a month.  

The next few days pass like a daze. The pure shock of seeing her whole future shuttering in front of her broke something in her and she’s not sure if she can ever repair.  After Dave left, at first she fought like a wounded animal, desperately sending him email after email pleading for their love, for their future, for growing old together. But the emails were always unread. She found out by logging into his email with the password saved on their iPad. 

Two weeks later she stopped. The boundary between day and night blurred as she lay in bed, endlessly ruminating over everything that had gone wrong. It must be her fault. After moving to Germany, life here made her feel invisible, she did not know what to do with that growing insecurity inside her and she channeled that rage into their relationship. Dave is a gentle man with a gentle heart who’d never hurt a soul. That was once something she loved about him, his gentleness wrapped around her like a warm protective layer of armour that fortified and comforted her. Now it was cutting her open like a sword.  

All around the flat there are reminders of their love. Hanging across the wall in their bedroom is a string of pictures documenting the first three months of their relationship. Now that couple smiling, embracing and kissing each other in the pictures seem so foreign to her. A sharp pain grips her heart and she feels like she can’t breathe. There’s no more energy left in her body to salvage this marriage right now. She has to go. 

Jaya takes a deep breath as soon as she steps on the train. The air thick with sweat and the smell of food doesn’t stop her from feeling a rare wave of relief. “Can’t talk right now, I’m on the train,” says the woman beside her on her phone. There’s a strange comfort in the transience of being in transit. Suddenly, everyone’s lives and all the problems that come with it are suspended. Like entering another dimension, neither here nor there, just in between. Much like being a migrant, she thinks, but still better. On a train, at least, neither the origin nor the destination is ever in doubt. 

When she was a child, her parents took her on one of the world's first Maglev trains, which started running in Shanghai in 2006. That was the last time she was with them as a whole family.  For those 30 minutes,  her parents held her in their laps, fed her her favorite snacks as they laughed and marveled at how fast the train was and how they were literally levitating in the air, held up by nothing but a magnetic field. The next day they told her they were getting divorced. She wished that train ride never ended. 

Flavia is already waiting for her at the station in Basel when she arrives, looking the same way as she always looked, dark brown curls gently falling down her cheeks, with a soft yet determined gaze piercing through her glasses. They embrace tightly on the platform while the train departs, sweeping up a gentle wind that dissipates the dark cloud casting over her heart in the last few months. As they step out of the train station, the first thing Jaya notices is that there isn’t any of the usual smell of piss and weed like in German train stations. The sun shines eagerly over the sidewalks lined with carefully gardened flowers, blooming a bit too brightly into her eyes. 

She follows Flavia onto the tram and listens intently as Flavia shares her new life. How her Swiss colleagues are rather aloof and it’s been difficult making friends. The 41-hour work week is taking her some time to get used to. And she had started to take Swiss German classes to be able to fit in better. Jaya giggles at the thought that Swiss German kind of sounds like when someone is trying to speak German but swallows half of the words because they’re piss drunk. She shares it with Flavia and they break down in laughter while other Swiss passengers throw them disapproving looks. 

Then Flavia asks her how she was doing.  She feels the dark cloud closing in on her again, she lowers her head and says not too good but she’ll save the gory details for later. Flavia squeezes her hand lightly and doesn't let go for the rest of the tram ride. 

When they get to Flavia’s apartment, she goes to take a shower to wash off sweat and the long train ride. After she comes out, Flavia has already prepared a delicious feast, ceviche with a tangy fragrant lime dressing, thinly sliced zucchini sauteed with olive oil, mint and lemon juice, and a poppy seed cake for dessert. As the sweetness from the cake slowly dissolves on her tongue, her eyes swell up with tears as warm as the feeling arising deep within her. Other than Dave, her only company in Germany was solitude and it’s been a long time since she shared a homemade meal like this with a friend. 

Bit by bit, she regurgitates the events that piece together the never-ending nightmare that was the last few months as Flavia sits and listens intently. Flavia was there all the way from the beginning when they fell in love. She knows Dave also as a kind, gentle, shy German man who never paid too much unnecessary attention to women. How could he suddenly do something like this, Flavia asks, bewildered. 

Was it so sudden? She also wonders to herself. To be honest, things have not been right for a while. She already felt the seams that sewed their lives loosely together were stretched so thin after the first year, after the excitement of building a new life wore off, after she failed again and again to find her footing in the German society, and the shiny overcoat hiding the insidious mundane details of the marriage was slowly coming apart. 

Then she tells Flavia something that she never told Dave, something that she tries not to think about too often herself. That she slept with a guy from her German class. After the fight, she felt like the despair and loneliness were consuming her and the only time when she felt like she was still alive was when her skin could feel the warmth of a stranger. In his embrace, she could temporarily forget that nobody could ever love her anymore, not after Dave. It’s OK, she would just settle for being wanted, just for a little while. 

Then afterwards the emptiness came back in full force, like a ghost looking for revenge, mercilessly swallowing her whole. The taste of disgust stuck in her throat and would not go away for days. The worst part was, she had been flirting with this guy for a while before the fight. Her anger at Dave was always toned down by her own complicity and guilt. She didn’t know which face to put on when Dave came home, the victim, the scorned woman or the co-conspirator equally responsible for the collapse of their marriage. 

Flavia gives her a tight long hug, then serves her another slice of cake with lemongrass and chamomile tea made from herbs that she dried herself. That night, teary and exhausted, she wraps herself tightly in the fresh sheets Flavia prepared for her, and for the first time in a long time, she sleeps through the night. 

The next day Flavia takes her hiking in the Swiss Alps. Before departure Jaya was filled with anxiety, worried that she might be too out of shape and slow Flavia down. That feeling that makes her want to crawl under the bed and hide away from all things shiny and bright still clings to her like a shadow. Flavia promises her that it wouldn’t be hard and she can take as long as she needs, they’d take the zip line all the way up and simply hike a bit on top of the mountains. Seeing how Flavia is as eager as a child wanting to share a precious new toy with her friend, she has no reason to refuse. 

As soon as they get there, she can’t help but gasp at the magnificent panorama laid out in front of her. The valley spreads with an endless generous shade of green below and the peaks with their snow-dusted crowns mingling with the clouds above. As the colors saturate her eyes, the faint chimes of cowbells drift lazily across the slope. An easy stroll it is not, the drastic peaks and valleys are still challenging for her. Between focusing on her steps one by one and occasionally being captured by the view, she has no time for that feeling that makes her want to shrink. The coils around her heart loosen, and for the first time in months, she can finally breathe, a breath that feels light and free. 

They settle down on a small hill facing the lake as Flavia unpacks their lunch – leftover poppy seed cake and goat cheese and salami sandwiched between baguettes that are perfectly crusty on the outside and soft on the inside. As they devour their lunch, an eagle soars through the sky circling above them as if checking out if they themselves are devourable lunches. Not far in view is a paraglider, swinging along the wind carelessly . She wonders how it must feel like to be on the paraglider, to surrender control and let the wind carry her into the unknown. 

If the bravest thing Jaya ever did was moving to Germany, then the bravest thing Flavia did was leave it.  Flavia had lived in Germany for ten years and married someone she once believed would be her partner for life. But as their relationship slowly fizzled, Flavia ended it, packed her things and moved abroad.  Unlike Jaya, Flavia didn’t just survive in Germany, she made Germany her own. She called herself Brazilian-German when they first met, and Jaya had assumed it was by ancestry. But no. Flavia claimed her German identity the hard way, mastering the language, wrestling with the endless layers of bureaucracy, and excelling in the rigid German job market.  Being the engineer that she is, Flavia shares her story with a matter-of-factness. But Jaya knows and sees how much courage and strength it must’ve taken her to leave a place where she built into a home for so long.

Faced with a similar choice, she asks Flavia if she ever regrets leaving her ex and everything they built behind. Flavia contemplates it for a while, and finally says she is happy now but sometimes wonders what life would have been like if she had stayed and tried to make it work. “If there’s still a thread of love left in your heart for Dave,” Flavia says, “and even a chance to work things out, you should try before it’s too late.” . 

Her head lowers, bitterness rising in her throat. There’s something itching to get out, a question that she wants to ask Flavia. The truth is the choice she is facing is not simply one of love and heartbreak. Beneath the sentimentality lies the practicality no one dares to name —- the elephant in the room, the elephant in her room, not Dave’s, rarely ever his.  If their marriage ends, so does her visa, and she would have no choice but to return to China. 

Stories of migration, especially when told to those who never have to think about the logistics of mobility, are often cloaked in the language of sacrifice, love, resilience, and tenacity. Even among migrants, conversations often center on survival tips in foreign lands or nostalgic memories of home, not the gritty details of how they got here. The type of visa one holds carries heavy connotations. A work visa signals worthiness, proof that you’ve “made it.” A student visa implies potential, a promise of a better future if you work hard enough. But a spouse visa, especially for an Asian woman married to a white man, evokes stereotypes of mail-order brides and transactional green card marriages. And those who arrive without visas live a completely different story, one that’s sometimes even met by the other visa-holders with the same kind of disdainful language that gets Trump or the AfD elected. 

There aren’t many people she could share this with, but if anyone would understand, it’s Flavia. As Flavia explains how she and her ex came to an agreement to stay separated but delay the divorce until she obtained her German citizenship, the shame she’s been carrying begins to dissipate. She never even knew this could’ve been a possibility. The decision isn’t just hers—it’s Dave’s too, if he’s willing to do her this courtesy, if they go down that path. 

For now, though, she sees the road ahead with a bit more clarity. Either they fight for it, work through the pain and damage they’ve caused each other, then let the wind of fate decide how their story continues. Or she lets go, walks a one-way street with no return, pushing through heartbreak and uncertainty to rewrite her own story. But whatever happens, she knows one thing: the choice is not entirely her own. 

For the next few days, when Flavia goes to work, she wanders around Basel mindlessly, hiding under the invisible cloak of being a tourist. She smiles at graffiti declaring Free Palestine, Reclaim the City, and Smash the Patriarchy. At the local library, she sits among retired old women nodding off over their newspapers and flips through books from the recommended shelf, grinning at their soft snores. When she grows tired, she picks any café she fancies and sits by the window, eavesdropping on English-speaking couples bickering about which sights to visit next one second and sharing kisses the next.  

She isn’t sure how much of Basel’s true essence she’s glimpsed, but day by day, she feels more awake. The quiet rhythm of being an observer reminds her that everywhere people fight for the same things: love, connection, and a life with dignity. Even this wealthy and picturesque Swiss city isn’t immune. All the while, the burning urge to text Dave simmers, but she lets it sit, unspoken, brewing in her chest. 

After Flavia gets off work, they buy ice cream, stroll through parks, or cook together in Flavia’s small and cosy kitchen. She teaches Flavia to make dumplings and wontons just like her mom taught her. Another night, she finds a Korean grocery store and surprises her with bibimbap. She times it perfectly so that when Flavia gets off work and volleyball practice, she’d come home to a steaming bowl of rice topped with an egg and colorful vegetables including eggplant, Flavia’s favorite. Flavia likes her eggs well-done, the yolks firm and solid, nothing like the runny, precarious eggs she prefers. 

One day, Flavia asks her to meet at Baumarkt. Flavia is building shelves and a coat hanger for the apartment and needs a few supplies. She trails behind as Flavia glides confidently through the aisles, checking items off her list with precision. Watching her, she realizes why Flavia reminds her so much of the good qualities in her parents: it’s the grit. The kind of grit that brought Flavia from a small town in Brazil to build a life in Germany, only to leave it behind and start again in another new country, chapter after chapter. Nail by nail, screw by screw, piece by piece, Flavia constructs a steady, solid life for herself, no matter how much pain it costs her or how much uncertainty lies ahead. 

Her parents had that grit too. Moving from a rural small town to start their business from scratch in the big city in the booming 90s when China was riding the fresh wind of economic development. After they split up, her mom was left with nothing but grit,  fighting tooth and nail to keep her fed and clothed, making a living as a small businesswoman when all odds were betting against her. It’s a grit she hasn’t yet found in herself.

Time slips away and soon Jaya is on the train back to Germany. As she waves a tearful goodbye to Flavia, she thinks about how the shelves are not finished yet and she would’ve loved to see Flavia finish them.  But she takes comfort in knowing that next time she comes, Flavia will have assembled them, nail by nail, screw by screw, piece by piece, until they stand sturdy and whole. 

She thinks about how for so long, she had worn Dave’s love like armor, so tightly bound to her that it became part of her skin. Stripping it away felt like peeling herself raw, leaving her in mere flesh and bones, exposed to the cold, hard world, each painful step leaving behind a trail of bloody footprints. But now, she begins to understand, like any wound, the body heals. Scabs and scratches later, a new layer of skin eventually grows. One day, she might walk this earth without any armor, just her own skin, fresh and whole, just like Flavia. 

She texts Dave, I’m on my way back and I’m ready to talk, can you meet me at the train station. Then she turns her phone off. 

For the next eight and a half hours, she exists once again as simply a passenger. Fellow travelers remain oblivious to her pain and sorrows, just as she is to theirs. Together, the train carries them forward through this suspended space, offering a fleeting reprieve as she gathers herself for what lies ahead. 

Her destination may still be uncertain, but she feels more ready to face it. Heading towards a collision of her past and her future, she carries nothing but a piece of nail pressed tightly in her palm, a small, solid promise to herself.

Nail by nail, screw by screw, piece by piece… 

Writing this piece was a true journey, one I could not have embarked upon and completed without the support of Zixin and Maya. I am deeply grateful for this experience at Sanmingzhi, which gave me so much confidence to continue to harness the power of words and stories. 

Joy

Originally from Guangzhou, Joy has lived in the US, UK, France, and Germany since the age of 15. She draws inspiration from stories of migration and resistance, particularly through an intersectional lens. Currently, she is exploring the journey of finding strength in fragility, hope in barrenness, and home and belonging within herself through writing (and therapy). Her favorite authors include Elif Shafak, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Bernardine Evaristo, Margaret Atwood, Sally Rooney, and Audre Lorde.