I came of age during an infanticide epidemic too, the heyday of Dumpster babies, of tiny corpses found behind malls, behind dormitories, in the gym bathroom during prom.
The summer I was planning my wedding and contemplating motherhood, Andrea Yates’s descent into psychosis was the first sign that the world as I knew it was imploding. Three months later, the planes would crash into the Towers and the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania field. The next week, the news commentators advised me to buy duct tape and surgical masks, to protect myself from the powdered anthrax being mailed to U.S. senators down the road.
The next month, I would pass men in fatigues with automatic rifles in the security line to board my honeymoon flight to Paris. When we left Paris, an airlines agent unceremoniously dumped out the content of my luggage—my frothy honeymoon lingerie, evidence of the last pleasures I had left—onto a gray foldout table in front of our gate.
When we say mothers snap, it is tempting to think it really is that easy: one morning, one point of impact, one detonation, one genetic switch flicked ON.
I wish I’d finished reading that People magazine article back in 2001, instead of waiting until now. While People called Andrea Yates an “ordinary” mother and the drowning of her five children “unfathomable,” “unthinkable,” and “horrific,” the magazine also detailed her suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization, move to a new home, fifth pregnancy against a doctor’s orders, and suicidal relapse. The article notes that Yates was abruptly taken off her antipsychotic medication. Her brother is interviewed detailing her further decline into a near-catatonic state in the weeks before the killings.
Even in Eva’s lifetime, even in the backwoods, no mother suffering from puerperal insanity was left unsupervised with children. The act of attempting to harm one’s child was offered in court as proof of insanity.
Note that Andrea Yates was originally found sane and convicted of capital murder.
Note that, in our time, Andrea Yates could pass for ordinary.
On our walk back from the parish cemetery, we first pass a World War I cemetery, then a modern bus stop across from the church in the shade of some trees. Anna breaks away, hobbling, thrusting into the underbrush with her cane. At first it seems she is indignant about the bus stop itself (no, Alicja’s boyfriend realized, she is just mad about a bus being late once), but then we realize she is gesturing to a crumbling stone structure next to the bus stop.
As we step closer, it doesn’t appear to be much—a lump of small stones.
But Anna pokes the stones with her cane again and gives me a gummy smile, clearly pleased with herself. This was their old well, the Zanowiaks’ well, I am made to understand.
Anna asks a question and looks at me expectantly, eyes shining. Alicja translates: Maybe your Eva drown her baby here?
4. The Opportunity
What does it mean to speak of one’s mother country or motherland, when a mother’s borders are so permeable? Some things the folk tales got right: women are forever changed by pregnancy. Mother and fetus swap blood during pregnancy. They swap cells too, and this process is called microchimerism, after the mythological Chimera, an improbable amalgam of lion, goat, and snake. Maybe you’ve heard of people absorbing lost embryonic twins that later appear as tumors or cysts. In much the same way, fetal cells live on in a mother’s body, found in her brain, lungs, liver, kidneys, thyroid, even skin, sometimes decades after she gives birth. Even weirder, women inherit microchimeric cells not just from our children, but from our own mothers, and thus, our grandmothers, our crazy great-aunts. Scientists are not sure why. These cells may induce autoimmune diseases, or they may be protective, regenerative even.
Maybe it was these microchimeric cells. Or maybe it was the neurochemical cocktail of oxytocin and serotonin and pheromones that rendered me besotted. I still well up just staring at the hollow behind his knee, or the perfect curve of his bottom lip, or his particularly delicious earlobes.
Now, when we snuggle before bed, I snarl, You’re lucky that you’re cute. Know why? He replies: I’m lucky I’m so cute or else you’d EAT ME!, and I gather him to me and he shrieks as I pretend to nibble his arms, nosh on his head.
He intuits, in the way that children do, another folk tale, that of the dark mother, the witch in her bone home in the woods who consumes children, who bakes them in a casserole or simmers them into a stew. Mommies are chimera, impossible and incongruous creatures. And yet, he still pats my hand, kisses grape juice on my cheek.
The forest is thick, but it is not silent, as I first wrote. Mountains feed the streams, streams feed the trees. Trees talk via an electrochemical thread, an underground fungal network that transfers nutrients or antibodies, taps out alarms. Threaded with these trees’ murmurings, the zmitca wailing, the rusalki’s teeth chattering. Here, villagers once recited spells, charms, and signs of the cross, carried garlic and wormwood, left gifts of scarves and soup.
In the onion-domed church I lit a candle for my firstborn. Among the hornbeams and white birches, the beech and fir, the spruce and mountain pine, I said a prayer for Eva’s daughter.
There is no record of Eva past her childhood in Rychwald. One neighboring parish burnt down during the First World War. Another library was bombed during the second. Any remaining records have been moved to Austria, to Hungary, to Poland, no, to Ukraine. No one knows where the records are. Or everyone knows where the records are but accessing them requires this form, and this form, and a native-born lawyer or an EU passport.
There are possible Evas, probable Evas—glimpses in a port, then a tenement, a warehouse, a factory. Still, finding Eva and her daughter may be like looking at the sun, something I can only attempt slant, through folklore and court records, through genetic tests and midwifery texts. But I know that I have to try.
ELIZABETH LINDSEY ROGERS
One Person Means Alone
FROM The Missouri Review
Before Taigu, people warned me: China was a fiercely social country. After I arrived, I rarely went anywhere unaccompanied. I was ushered into crowded noodle stalls and into corner stores stuffed with plum juice, chicken feet, and hot-water thermoses. I often needed help at the post office, with its hundreds of strict regulations and wisp-thin envelopes you sealed with a depressor and paste. Students took me to the White Pagoda and the courtyard of H. H. Kung, the only historical sites in town that hadn’t been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Eventually, I’d be invited into my Chinese colleagues’ small apartments, where several generations of the family often lived together. I’d be generously served five kinds of dumplings, the bowl full again before I had the chance to set down my chopsticks.
In the unheated, Soviet-feeling building where I taught university English, I waited in line with other women to use toilets without doors or stalls. At first, I tried to turn my face away from the others, demurring. But there was no use trying to hide anything about our bodies here: whose stomach was upset, or who was crying, or who was on her period that day. We saw it all. We offered stacks of tissues when someone had run out of their own supply.
I lived in a tiny brick house, the tiles on my roof painted with evil eyes to ward off badness. I’d often wake to the arguing of an unknown college couple, shouting their insults right in front of my window, just a few feet away from where I had been sleeping. I’d stumble into the kitchen, startled to find a stranger outside the back door, shaking my (was it mine?) jujube tree and picking up the fruits from the ground.
Like most teachers at the agricultural university, I lived on campus, and I wasn’t hard to find. My thoughtful students showed up on my front stoop, bearing jars of weird floating grains and fermented vegetables sent by their grandmothers. “If you eat this for six days,” they’d say, “you will be well.”
The word was out: I was sick a lot. It was my first time living abroad, and the new microbes were hard on my body. In Taigu, there was delicious street food as well as contaminated cooking oil, air, and groundwater. Shanxi prov
ince, even by Chinese standards, was an environmental disaster. The coal plants were next to the grain fields, pink and green smoke rising out of the stacks. On a good day, you could see the mountains that surrounded campus. Most of the time, they were hidden by pollution. Particulate matter caked the windowsills in my house.
People were curious about me. I was asked daily by strangers in the market square what country I was from and why I had come to Shanxi province—sort of the West Virginia of China, except that it was on the edge of the desert—as opposed to the more glamorous Shanghai or Beijing. They also asked how old I was, how much money I made teaching at the university, if I’d eaten that day yet, and, if so, what had I eaten? And why was I “a little bit fat,” they said, but not as fat as some Americans? How often did I need to color and perm my hair? (It was reddish and was curly on its own, I said.) Was that American living in the other half of my duplex my boyfriend? (He was not.) Well, did I at least have a boyfriend in the States? (Sarah, my girlfriend from college, was teaching in Indonesia, but I didn’t explain her, for obvious reasons.) And, occasionally, from students and younger friends: What did I think of the movie American Pie Presents: Beta House? Was it an accurate portrayal of American university life?
Eventually, I borrowed my friend Zhao Xin’s laptop so I could watch the pirated version with Chinese subtitles. I was horrified. One of the thankfully forgotten sequels of the original American Pie, it made me squeamish during scenes of a fraternity’s hazing ritual, something about attaching a bucket of beer to some guy’s genitalia. There was also one exaggerated fire-hose moment, a sorority sister experiencing female ejaculation for the first time. As for the question of whether this resembled university life in the United States, I told them, in all honesty, I wasn’t sure. I had just graduated from a small, studious college in the Midwest. Despite its sex-positive atmosphere, things were, all in all, pretty quiet there, with some nerdily themed parties but no Greek life at all.
In truth, I’d had plenty of sex in college, but that had to be my own business. More specifically, I didn’t reveal my lesbian identity to anyone in China, at least at first. I responded to boyfriend questions with a simple “No.” I didn’t know what the consequences of coming out might be, and I couldn’t take the risk. Keeping this a secret, I’d come to realize later, was part of what made me feel so isolated that first year in China, even though other people surrounded me.
As a student in America, my life had been pretty communal. Still, like a number of Generation Y, middle-class, considerably selfish Americans, I thought I was fiercely independent and staged myself as the protagonist in my own life story. Very little prepared me for the level of social responsibility and interconnectedness that came with moving to Taigu. One of the first words I learned was guanxi, which can be roughly translated as “social connections,” or maybe “relationships.” If you had guanxi with others, you could count on them for most everything, and they could count on you; if you failed to foster a sense of guanxi, people would resent you or think of you as selfish, even though they might not say it out loud. Guanxi emphasized—or mandated—the whole you were a part of rather than the part you played alone.
I embraced this idea the best I knew how. My American co-fellow, Ben, and I mounted a disco ball in our living room and started hosting weekly dance parties for our Chinese friends: social activity for the greater good, something students reported as scarce on our small-town, farm-school campus. At these parties, at first, we’d awkwardly stand in a circle. But then the sorghum-alcohol punch we provided began to take effect, and our loopy, arrhythmic movements took over the room. Over time, we perfected our playlist: a mix of American ’80s and ’90s hits and cheesy Chinese pop songs. By our second year in China, our living room floor was beginning to split from people’s dancing enthusiasm.
The Americans got a wild reputation on campus. Our parties were on Thursday nights, but then we got a noise complaint from the university’s vice president, who happened to live in a house just thirty feet from our front door. When we showed up on his porch the morning after, with a giant fruit bowl and profuse apologies, he smiled and invited us in, as if nothing bad had happened. Our guanxi, the neighborhood harmony, seemed to be restored.
Overall, however, I was not the best at fostering guanxi. I often found myself hungry for space between others and myself: a necessary measure to quiet the buzz in my dislocated brain. I’d draw the curtains and hole up in my side of my foreign-teacher duplex, the door to my half closed. This action was usually perceived as hostile or a symptom of possible depression.
“Why is she not coming out here?” I heard someone ask Ben on the other side of my door. “Is she sad about something? Why is she alone?”
The word alone in Mandarin can be translated in various ways. The expression I heard on the other side of my door, traveling by myself on a train, or walking down the street solo was yi ge ren. Yi is “one”; ge is a kind of counting word, placed between a number and an object. And ren means “person” or “people.” The expression “Are you yi ge ren?” when translated literally is “Are you one person?” In context, though, I began to understand this as a way of asking, “Are you on your own? Are you alone?”
Of course, I was rarely 100 percent alone, unless you counted when I was asleep or in the single-person bathroom in my apartment. I had come to Taigu paired with Ben, another recent college graduate, and there were two more Americans living in the house next door to us, doing their second year of the same teaching fellowship we’d all received. Most of our life outside of class involved a mixed group of American fellows and Chinese graduate students, with a few older Chinese undergraduates mixed in. We ate dinner together most nights at the hot-pot place, just outside the campus gate, or at one of the noodle stalls at school.
Every once in a while, though, I’d find myself walking alone in public. I was not afraid: not near my house, not on the other side of campus, not even in the bleak brick-and-mud Taigu village alleys scattered with trash and piles of used coal pellets. There were terrible stories, real or imagined, of people getting snatched up around here and having their organs harvested. There was a line of massage parlors, a sort of red-light district, the neon signs flickering on and off.
When I passed another person, I’d see what I came to know as the Look: not threatening but a look more of curiosity or even shock, mostly due to my obvious non-Han appearance. Sometimes they’d ask me where I was from. Some would say nothing. Some would even ask me if I was okay, if I had eaten, and where I was going.
I don’t know whether it was the fact that we lived in the ultramilitarized People’s Republic or just that Taigu men are not the type to catcall, but I always maintain that China felt like the safest place I’d ever lived. Perhaps my outsider status as a Westerner protected me. Years later, when I returned to the United States, finding myself living in a host of smaller towns, as well as cities like Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans, I was shocked at how often some stranger on the street would whoop at me or stare for too long or start to walk too close. In my own homeland, strangely, I felt the most unsafe being by myself.
In a country of a billion people, personal space isn’t just something that’s frowned upon; it’s often impossible to find. Even a small town like Taigu—just 40,000 people—was no exception. If you wanted to be alone in the daytime, you could ride your bicycle past the grain fields and the coal- and bauxite-processing plants to the even smaller village at the edge of the mountains, where there were several temples in the outcroppings.
In China, university dorms are not named after famous educators or benefactors but are instead referred to by serial numbers: “26 building,” “27 building,” and so on. I soon discovered that the undergraduates were living eight to a room: four sets of bunk beds pressed against the walls, one shared table in the barely existent center of the room. The graduate students, thought to be deserving of a bit more space, were also in dorms but housed in groups of four. The first time I entered
a dorm room at the agricultural university, it was as if I were entering a unit in a warehouse. I saw schoolbooks, clothes, shoes, packages of dry noodles, and clothes-washing bowls crammed beneath the lowest bunks and around the perimeter. The room’s one narrow window was strung with several drying lines for shirts and underwear. It was the middle of the day, so the students were elsewhere.
My friend Wang Yue, a twenty-year-old English major, pointed disapprovingly to one of the lower bunks and told me that a pair of her roommates—two nineteen-year-olds who preferred to be called by their self-selected English names, Sky King and Toni—always slept side by side in this single bed. They were obviously in the early stages of a romance. “It’s like they wish the rest of us weren’t here,” Wang Yue told me, rolling her eyes.
It was unclear to me where her disdain came from. Was it just homophobia? Was she annoyed because these women had upset the guanxi and balance of the group, prioritizing their personal interests over the harmony of the whole? Or was it because they were two women, finding a loophole in the single-gender dorm, the thing that was supposed to keep students focused on school, not on sex?
Everyone on campus was struggling for intimate space. The foreign teachers’ houses were adjacent to a small circular garden where the willow and birch trees created a shadowy canopy over a few park benches. This was hardly a hidden place, but it was more secluded than the rest of campus. If I passed by at nightfall, I’d see the flash of someone’s limbs wrapped around another body, and then another couple on the next bench, just a few feet away. This was the official campus hook-up area, a kind of twenty-first-century drive-in theater. The students called it the qingren shulin, or “Lovers’ Forest.”
Even the privacy in my half-a-duplex was not a thing I could always count on. My girlfriend, Sarah—who also had a teaching fellowship, but in Indonesia—managed to visit China the first fall I was there, during her Ramadan break from school. We’d spent a large part of our senior year in college in bed together, but coming to teach in Asia, as well as our physical separation, had resulted in an almost celibate life for both of us. Desperate, we tried to cram as many sessions as possible into those two weeks of her visit.
The Best American Travel Writing 2017 Page 27
