Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading

by Maureen Corrigan

  Sometimes I took what I consider risks in pursuing my love of reading: applying to Ivy League Ph.D. programs in English and then suffering through the trial of being a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania; steeling myself to send book-review clips and then make “cold calls” to strange newspaper editors. (When I sent a bunch of clips from The Village Voice to Fresh Air’s executive producer, Danny Miller, he courageously took the initiative of calling me and saying “No thanks. We think you’re too academic for the show.” Fatefully, he changed his mind after I wrote a ribald exposé of my stint as a grader for the Educational Testing Service for the Voice.) The goal of all these exploits, however, always involved a chair and a book.

  I do think my weekly deadlines for Fresh Air constitute an intellectual subset of the extreme adventure. As a comfort hound, I hate rousing myself from bed at 4 A.M., but I do so at least once a week to write my reviews. Physical discomfort aside, I like writing on deadline. My brain usually snaps to attention under pressure, and I get some of my best ideas when I’m concentrating against the clock. I also like immediate gratification. There’s a rush that comes when I’ve found the right phrase to capture a complex point about a book, and I e-mail in the finished piece, and it’s filed—boom!—on time. Sometimes, given the hectic schedule of Fresh Air, I finish reading a book at night, write the review before dawn, edit it with my producer, Phyllis Myers, early that morning, record it a little later, and hear it air that afternoon. Life on the edge, right?

  Occasionally, though, this whirlwind pace knocks me flat on my face. Like my mother, I tend to mangle names. I’ve recorded reviews in which I’ve referred to a book, even a book that I love, by two different titles or I’ve committed dumb grammar mistakes—and the gaffe has slipped through the batlike ears of Phyllis, but not those of the listeners of National Public Radio. The worst on-air mistake I ever made was when I confused my old Jewish literary leftists, referring to Irving Howe when I meant to refer to Alfred Kazin. Oy vey, the listener mail on that one was nasty.

  But back to China and the traditional extreme-adventure plot I was living out. As we rode that fateful day from Guangzhou to Yangchun in the gathering darkness along rutted lanes that seemed barely wide enough for a pair of water buffaloes, our young Chinese driver would stop every twenty minutes or so, take out his map, and consult anxiously with our translator, a shy, efficient, and altogether lovely woman whose English name was Nicole. Nicole had made this trip at least a few times before, but even she seemed confused by the random geography of abrupt forks in the road and crumbling twenty-block cities whose pavements ended in rice paddies. Once we found Yangchun and settled in with our daughters, our group meals featured grasslike steamed vegetables and mystery meat—one variety of which turned out to be a dish called, roughly, “snake on a stick.” “Tastes like chicken,” pronounced the intrepid Rich as I fantasized about a latte. Despite the Cokes, bottled waters, and beers we steadily chugalugged in lieu of drinking the contaminated tap water throughout China, he and I sweated off about six pounds each in the nearly two weeks we spent there. On our second full day in Yangchun, Mrs. Yu took three families, ours included, to the local hospital. Two of the baby girls had fevers, and Molly had stubbornly refused to eat or drink anything since the night she had been placed in our arms. (What a trauma that must have been for her. We didn’t look or sound or smell like anyone she had ever met, and we had probably not yet conveyed to her confidently enough that we were now the two most important people in her life. As someone from our adoption agency said to us before we left, “You may have been waiting for your daughter for a long time, but she has not been waiting for you.”) The reigning theory was that maybe she, too, was coming down with a bug.

  To Western eyes, the hospital was a run-down place; all of its windows were open to the stifling heat and the omnipresent mosquitoes. A doctor entered the room where our group was gathered and approached Molly, who was now crying. As Nicole translated her symptoms, the doctor made a stern hand gesture to Molly that instantly translated into the order “Be strong.” Then he took a tongue depressor out of his pocket, looked down her throat, and tossed the used depressor out the window. I looked out the window and saw a random dumping ground of depressors, bandages, and paper. We were given some medicine for Molly in case a fever developed, and the two other screaming babies were given IVs in their foreheads to reduce their temperatures. The decision to allow the doctor to insert those IVs was excruciating for those parents, for we all had been forewarned of the Chinese practice of reusing needles. But the babies had high fevers and Nicole assured their parents it was okay, and so they went ahead.

  At the height of this anxious procedure, one of the fathers—who must have weighed more than three hundred pounds and who had been attracting crowds of starers since we arrived in Yangchun—began pacing out in the corridor and stepped on a floor tile, which cracked, loudly. All the hospital personnel came running to point their fingers and laugh at the poor guy, who, fortunately, had a gracious sense of humor. The crack broke the tension, the babies’ fevers broke, and on day four, Molly began eating as we left Yangchun on the now even more jam-packed van. At last, after a flight from China filled with crying, pooping babies and punctuated by a four-hour delay in Detroit, Rich, Molly, and I arrived home, extreme adventure ended.

  As journalist and fellow adoptive mother Karin Evans comments in her substantive and moving book, The Lost Daughters of China, many Americans who’ve adopted their children from China have come to believe in the idea of a “red thread”—the Chinese notion that, from birth, all of us are connected to those we will love by an invisible red thread. That’s certainly how Rich and I feel about Molly, the daughter of our hearts and souls who came to us in a way we never could have imagined a decade ago. One of the many slogans prospective adoptive parents learn at information meetings is that adoption, for most of us, is a “second choice,” not “second-best.” That’s one feel-good slogan that’s absolutely true. It’s also true that most of the time adoption isn’t on our minds as a family; it’s a word that describes how our family was formed, not how we relate to one another. But inevitably people make comments, particularly about transracial families like ours or, as a friend of mine who’s the white mother of three African American children calls us all, “rainbow families.” One autumn afternoon I was carrying one-year-old Molly past the bleachers of a neighborhood softball field while a game was in progress. A man’s voice rang out: “Hey! Is she from China?” I unthinkingly answered, “Yes!” and looked up. A bleacherful of white faces stared down at us, but no one identified himself as the questioner. I felt as though Molly and I had been turned into curiosities by that bored crowd. I wish I had had the presence of mind to shout back, “Where are you all from?”

  “Is she adopted?” asked a waitress in a café where four-year-old Molly and I were eating. “Yes,” I answered, and she demanded of Molly, “Do you love your mother?” Would she have asked that of a biological child? A friend of mine, also Caucasian and the mother of two girls born in China, had a particularly bizarre experience in the women’s changing room of a hotel swimming pool here in Washington, D.C. As this friend, Elizabeth, described the incident to me, she and her older daughter, Isabel, who’d just turned four, were stripping out of their bathing suits when a very large naked woman planted herself before them and demanded, “Are her parents dead?” Elizabeth tried to move Isabel into the shower, but the woman followed, barking the question over and over. Finally, just to shut this person up and protect Isabel as best she could, Elizabeth muttered, “We don’t know.” It’s futile to point out to such people that, in fact, the adoptive child has two sets of “real” parents. Like the conservative Indian family Nell Freudenberger writes about in the title story of her recent debut short-story collection, Lucky Girls, many of the people who stare at or question “rainbow families” such as mine are folks who “believe that people, like the drapes and the sofa, should match.”37 The best Dorothy Parker–l
ike riposte to nosy questions about adoption was uttered by a friend of a friend of mine on a New York City bus. This white mother and her Chinese baby daughter were riding up Madison Avenue when an older woman got on, sat down across from them, and barked out: “Is her father Chinese?” “I don’t know,” the mother replied. “It was dark.”

  I’ve been out of New York too long: I’ve lost some of my speed as a comeback artist. Anyway, writing, not speaking, has always been my medium. But I’m trying to get better, to not be so Catholic-girl accommodating, to protect my daughter from the idle inquiries and offensive remarks of strangers. And I try to focus on the wonderful encounters we’ve had with strangers who approach us to tell me about their grown-up adopted kids or with people who are just happy to see us together. When Molly was still a baby, we were approached by a man cleaning tables in McDonald’s, and he summed up our situation: “You are beautiful!” he said, waving his hands around us and speaking in a strong Hispanic accent. “You wanted to be mother and she needed mother. You are beautiful.” Some days more beautiful than others, perhaps, but that generous stranger was right. We found each other, and that’s a miracle I will never get over.

  Maybe I worry too much about protecting Molly. She’s already survived one female extreme adventure in her life—anybody who knows anything about the situation of abandoned infant girls in China will know that. And her ordeal was preceded by the unknown sufferings of her Chinese parents. Molly also made it through those first few days with Rich and me, when we didn’t know how to feed her or change her properly or make her relax with us enough to eat or drink. She’s got a strong innate sense of self and a good sense of humor; she’ll probably make her way just fine in the world. Already though, I’m trying to give her the talisman of some good books, good stories to help her forge her way through life. “Read, read, read,” Molly chants as she sits beside me in bed; I’m reading whatever I’m reviewing that week; she’s “reading” the pictures in Curious George. For a long time, one of her favorite books was Emily by Michael Bedard, a magical story about a young girl’s visit to Emily Dickinson. There we are in bed, two peas in a pod, “reading” together. Who says there’s no such thing as fate?

  Fate and effort and will. Oftentimes, women’s extreme-adventure tales have put forward an approved “cover story” that emphasizes their heroines’ deliverance from solitude or disaster through an act of chance or charity by others. Think of that supernatural voice that calls out to Jane and “saves” her from the folly of a marriage to the glacial St. John Rivers. The version of my own grandmother’s coming-to-America story, which was passed down to me as a sort of cautionary tale, illustrates this self-deprecating mode of presenting women’s adventures.

  At the age of seventeen, in, as close as I can estimate, 1905, my mother’s mother, Helen Mrosz, boarded a boat all by herself and sailed from Poland to New York. (Where in Poland? My mother isn’t sure. My mother doesn’t even know the first name of her mother’s mother. As the late great Village Voice writer Paul Cowan beautifully put it in his extended-family autobiography, An Orphan in History, “Millions of immigrant families . . . left the economically and culturally confining Old World towns where they were raised, and paid for the freedom and prosperity this country offered with their pasts.”38) Grandma Helen sailed across in steerage, where, as the story goes, everybody was vomiting, constantly. Grandma spoke only Polish, and she was supposed to have been met on the New York docks by some relatives from Yonkers. But, for a reason never explained, those relatives never showed up. I imagine my teenaged grandmother waiting at the docks, her back to the ocean. She’s survived the ordeal of the passage and the Ellis Island examiners; now the whole inscrutable country stretches out before her. “Imagine what could have happened to her,” my mother always says with a sigh at this point in the story. But what actually did happen was that Grandma had attracted the notice of a nice Jewish doctor and his wife (Jewish! The melting pot was already at work!). They had come across on the same boat and, seeing her stranded on the dock, they asked if she would come and keep house for them in New Rochelle. I’m told she learned to make good potato latkes and chicken soup. She never saw her parents or siblings again; sometimes she would have nightmares about a dog baring its teeth, nightmares that would always precede the arrival of a letter from Poland, announcing someone’s death. Grandma Helen herself died when I was seven, so I mostly remember her as a nice old lady who, much to my wondering eyes, put her teeth in a glass of water every night.

  My grandmother, it seems, was rescued by a twist of fate—just as Rochester’s voice “rescues” Jane. Around the time I began thinking of women’s adventure tales, I began to revise Grandma’s adventure story for myself and make it into one more respectful of the strength she surely possessed—even if she herself didn’t know she did. Grandma got on that boat alone—another solo female adventurer. She left her mother, an unspecified number of brothers, and one sister behind, but she made herself do it. She was sick to her stomach throughout the entire passage, but she held on. When she landed in New York, she was terrified, but she had enough sense—and, yes, luck—to go with people who looked as though they wouldn’t mistreat her. Then she outlived one abusive husband and, for the rest of her active life, cared for a second invalided by heart disease, as she raised her two daughters and largely supported the family by cleaning offices and houses day and night. That’s the alternative, more celebratory female adventure narrative lurking under the authorized, anxiety-ridden coming-to-America cover story. I think that many traditional female adventure narratives are cloaked by this overlay of fear beneath which lies a less sanctioned story about female desire, courage, and, often, qualified triumph. Maybe, together, they constitute the “true” story. I’m sure Grandma Helen would never have viewed her own life this way; by all accounts, she was a shy woman with a kind heart.

  She was also one of the hundreds of thousands of immigrant women, from the end of the last century to the present, who began working the instant they arrived in this country and, thus, never learned how to read. The distance that stretches between the world she knew and mine— filled with books—is so vast that to me it’s like Grandma Helen’s first glimpse of the New York skyline. Incomprehensible.

  “Books, what a jolly company they are

  The line is from Siegfried Sassoon’s great 1918 poem, “Repression of War Experience,” and it’s meant to be taken, at best, ambivalently. The poem is written in the form of a dramatic monologue, and its narrator is a World War I vet suffering from shell shock. He’s been shipped away to a rest home in the English countryside, but judging from his off-kilter observations, his prognosis looks bleak. The vet sees ghosts out in the wet darkness of the nearby forest and hears the thud of the big guns, booming, booming in the distance. Presumably, he’s sitting in a library as he speaks, because he turns for comfort to the shelves of books nearby. Unfortunately, their black, white, brown, and green spines remind him of his once straight-backed comrades marching off to their deaths. Shaken, the narrator tries to get a grip on his nerves by reassuring himself that “all the wisdom of the world / Is waiting for you on those shelves,” but it’s a claim that rings hollow. Book learning didn’t save a generation of young Oxbridge students from dying in the trenches, along with their shabbily educated working-class countrymen. Indeed, some of those books—filled with tales of chivalric adventure and noble sacrifice— misled their impressionable readers into their wartime deaths.

  I can’t imagine living in rooms without books, but like Sassoon’s narrator, I also think the comfort books offer is qualified. All those voices, all those thoughts, all those reminders of how much there is to read and how little time there is to read it. Mentally and physically, books can be oppressive, even hazardous. Three years ago, my mildly hypochondriacal husband stuck a couple of heavy medical texts he’d been consulting on top of a row of books in a bookcase, rather than expending the effort to reshelve them. Later that evening, I bumped into that bookcase and
the textbooks fell on top of my right foot—snap!—thus providing a dramatization of the literary term “irony.” X rays have been taken, and nothing appears to be broken, but my big toe aches and I sometimes experience shooting pains in my arch when I walk barefoot. Question 10 on the medical-insurance reimbursement forms I have to fill out asks: “Cause of injury?” I could truthfully answer, “Assault by books.”

  When I was in graduate school, I lived in a succession of tiny apartments where the major furnishing motif was books. Piles of coffee-table books on nineteenth-century art and architecture literally formed the coffee table; paperback novels on hanging shelves gave color to the drab off-white walls; and solid anthologies of Victorian prose and poetry bolstered the mattress of my daybed. It was reassuring when I was living alone to have all those familiar presences in the room with me; it was also a little scary. Maybe I was turning into an eccentric whose apartment had become a macrocosmic metaphor for her own fevered mind. I know a fair number of people—some friends or acquaintances, some relatives—who would have wrinkled their noses at those cramped apartments smelling of paper. These people—let’s call them the Bounderbys—see books only as commodities. (A refresher: Mr. Bounderby is the “eyes on the bottom line” businessman whom Dickens lampoons in Hard Times. One advantage of a grad-school degree in English is that you can insult people more elegantly.) “I like bigger books because you get more for your money,” a Bounderby once half jokingly confided in me. “I read ’em and I toss ’em,” another Bounderby announced when I was visiting her book-free home. Books just don’t register with this crowd. They think I lack common sense; I think they lack a part of their souls.