If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother

by Julia Sweeney

  While I didn’t think Mulan was experiencing any racism, I did notice a kind of reverse racism. I cannot tell you how many times people have said, before knowing anything about Mulan other than the fact that she’s Chinese, that she must be really smart. This happens all the time. It puts me in this awkward position of replying, “Well, she’s kind of smart. I mean she’s average. She’s just an average person.”

  I tried to steer Mulan away from stereotypical Asian girl areas of specialization. When she was five she began to ask for a violin. A girl at her school had played “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and it had sparked something in Mulan. I got her a violin. Then she began to excel in gymnastics. Then she began to be very good at math.

  It embarrassed me when people asked Mulan what she liked to do and she would answer: “Violin, math, and gymnastics.” I would quickly add: “And other things, too: movies, TV, jumping rope, eating tortellini!” People would smile and say, “Of course you like violin, math, and gymnastics.” And then they would look at me like, “Why can’t you just accept your own daughter for who she is?”

  When Mulan was in second grade we went to Hawaii for a week. She and I got some plastic water toys and spent whole days in the water. Mulan’s skin immediately started to get very dark in the sun. She looked gorgeous, like her skin was drinking up the rays. After seven days she was at least as dark-skinned as many people who are black.

  One day soon after we returned I was on the playground, watching Mulan emerge from the class at the end of the day, talking and laughing with some friends before she headed over to me. As I watched her, a Korean mother came up to me and said, “You know, we don’t let our kids get that dark.”

  “What?” I sputtered. I began to talk uncontrollably and skittishly: “Uh . . . we were just in Hawaii, and you know I recently had a conversation with a dermatologist who was telling me how ridiculous it is for people who have darker skin tones to fear skin cancer, and that like—it’s only the people like me, who have this gross, pinky, white skin who have to worry about it and I didn’t let her get burned, she just played in the surf every day and her skin soaked it up, and anyway this dermatologist was saying that it’s out of a knee-jerk political correctness and the sunscreen manufacturers are using this to sell sunscreen to lots of people with darker skin who don’t need it and all just because we can’t talk about race and skin color frankly—”

  “I mean she looks like she’s black,” the Korean mother said, making a disgusted face, adding, “A Korean mother would not let that happen.” Unfortunately Mulan heard the last part of our conversation.

  “Why did that mom say that about my tan?” Mulan asked when we got into the car.

  I said, “I think it was because she felt I wasn’t protecting you enough because I am not Asian.”

  “Why?” Mulan asked.

  “Well, because—well, I’m not sure this mother meant this, but traditionally people don’t want their kids’ skin, especially their daughters’ skin, to be too dark because it would indicate that they worked out in the sun. Historically, darker skin would indicate a lower class of people.”

  “Why is working out in the sun bad? Roberto works out at the beach. Tom runs on the beach,” Mulan said. I realized that for her “working out” meant exercising. Oh my God, we were so bourgeois.

  “Not working out in the sun. Working, out in the sun. It was considered low status, because that was where the lower-paying jobs were. Are. Were.” Argh. I was floundering again.

  “Huh?” Mulan said. I was getting too complicated. I had to remember she was in second grade.

  “Okay, let me try to explain—”

  “Mom, I want to tell you about art class at school; we’re making posters and. . . .”

  She didn’t want to talk about it. And I don’t think it was because she was too sensitive or worried about it; I think it was just a boring topic.

  Here’s what surprised me. After these incidents and discussions, Mulan seemed to forget all about it. She went right back to describing friends who were black without referring to their race. This is another shocking thing about watching a child grow up. Unlike in movies or literature there aren’t many moments of irrevocable change in a child based on a new piece of information. Even though I’ve written about Mulan learning about sex like the event was a thunderbolt of revelation, soon afterward she forgot about it and had to relearn what sex was a little bit over and over again until it really sunk in. It’s still happening; she’s only twelve. And so it has been with this topic of race, too.

  For me, I’ve learned that both sex and race are loaded, subtle, and complicated concepts. Because of my job parenting Mulan, I’ve looked at our culture differently, watching how much information any young person must take in to get a handle on sexual norms, expectations, indications of attitudes about race, positive or negative, and how much she will need to pick up on nonverbal clues, visual or physical. Just teaching her enough about stereotypes to get some smarts in her is daunting.

  I began this chapter by telling you that Mulan’s interest in the subject of race was fleeting, and then undone with a child’s typical obliviousness and distractions. I think that may be my own way of dealing with awkward, difficult topics, too.

  On that note, I say we drift sideways and then up and away from this subject entirely.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Phone Bill

  Someone invented the telephone

  And interrupted a nation’s slumbers

  Ringing wrong but similar numbers.

  —Ogden Nash

  Last night before I went to bed, at around eleven-thirty, I decided to do one productive thing. I called AT&T to turn off my brother Bill’s cell phone, which I’d been paying for. As I was waiting for an operator to help me, I logged onto my account and saw that my phone bill was four hundred dollars. I was in shock and sputtering as I tried to find out how this could be true, just as the operator answered. He had a thick accent and he identified himself as Stephan. When Stephan logged into my account, he told me my bill was so high because I had a ninety-minute call to Japan, which accounted for $320 of the bill. It was true, I’d been talking to my sister Meg, who lives in Japan. I usually made sure I called from our landline, which is much less expensive. But in the discombobulated state I was in after Bill’s death, I wasn’t thinking about which phone to use. Stephan said I really should sign up for an international calling plan. I let him go on about this, and how much it would cost per month.

  “Can I retroactively sign up for an international calling plan?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry, but no,” Stephan replied.

  “Well, just forget about that,” I said. “What I’m really calling for is to turn off another cell phone line I pay for.” I gave him Bill’s cell phone number.

  The whole exchange made me feel weepy and on edge.

  “I’m sorry, I cannot,” Stephan said.

  “What do you mean, you cannot?” I asked, my defenses rising.

  “I can’t. He’s on a contract that doesn’t expire until February. I can suspend the account, but you’ll still have to pay the minimum monthly fee until February. If you cancel now, your fine will be larger than the monthly fee. It would be better to wait it out.”

  “What,” I began, gathering sad indignation, “if he’s dead?” The word dead came out a little louder than I wanted. Then I burst into tears. I told Stephan that my brother had died. There was silence. I looked around for some tissues. I could hear Stephan cough nervously. Then Stephan told me in a small, quiet voice that his brother had just died, too. I stopped in my tracks. I asked him where he was. He told me he was in Manila, in the Philippines. “What happened?” I asked him.

  He told me his brother died in a car accident. He and his brother had both moved to Manila; their mother lived outside the city. She was devastated. I told him that my mother was devastated, too, and then quickly told him about Bill’s alcohol addiction. I tried to keep it short.

  Sudden
ly this connection I was feeling to a person in the ether, this random individual with whom I was oddly associated, all because of my brother Bill, felt vaguely familiar. It had happened before.

  When Bill was in jail he would often call me. When you get a call from someone in a correctional facility, it’s always a collect call (they are not—or were not—allowed any other kind). When you first answer the phone call there is a long prerecorded announcement about how much it’s going to cost. And it costs a lot. The correctional institutions load on fees. Then there’s a little space, a little void if you will, where the inmate can say his or her name. Then the prerecorded announcement continues with how expensive this call is going to be.

  I always accepted Bill’s calls. As I said, Bill and I had great conversations when he was in jail. He was sober and he had lots of time to read. He called me so frequently that he would sometimes make a joke in that little space of time for the inmate to say his name. He’d say, “Who else could it be?” Or even sometimes, “If you’re in the middle of something, just don’t accept; it’s okay.”

  One night I got a call and I half-listened to the prerecording. Then I heard “Pick up, bitch!” I thought it must be Bill, joking around.

  I accepted the call and Bill asked, “What are you doing?” I went on to tell him in detail about a movie I’d just watched. Then I began to realize, too slowly, over maybe a whole minute or two, that I was not speaking with Bill. I was speaking with a different guy, one in the California prison system. He had randomly called my number! As soon as I realized that, I said to him, “I’m sorry, I was confused. I’m going to hang up now.” And I did.

  But then my prison inmate started calling me a lot. At night I would get phone calls from him, and in that little space he’d yell, “Say yes!” Or, “I have no one!” I began to look forward to his calls, to see how creative he could get with his small amount of time. He began to sing songs, or yell, “Baby, baby, baby!” Once he yelled, “Please, please, please!” just like James Brown. Finally he made his way to the phrase that would really get my attention. “I’ve got a good story for you. . . .”

  I accepted the call.

  To his credit, he instantly admitted that he did not in fact have a good story. But since I was paying for the call, I asked him why he was in jail. “I robbed a store because I wanted drug money. I didn’t hurt anyone. [Pause.] That badly.” The pause was exactly the right length. He had a sense of humor. I had no clue if he was really telling the truth.

  “Oh,” I said. “What’s it like in there?”

  And then he told me—he really, really told me. I began to feel like he was Charles Dickens getting a penny a word, only for him, every second he got me to stay on the phone was its own victory. I could hear it in his voice. He told me how cramped the prison was, how he was in a cell that was made for four, but there were seven guys in it. I tried to remain skeptical; after all, he was a convicted criminal. He told me about how he had a kid, but his kid’s mother was married to someone else. He told me he was from Sacramento. He told me he often had days where he didn’t get to go outside at all, and the fluorescent lights were making him go crazy.

  I commiserated, because I hated fluorescent lights, too. I told him about how when Joe #10 broke up with me, all I remembered were the horrible fluorescent lights. He said he couldn’t imagine anyone breaking up with me. I regretted telling him that. Then I laughed. This was seriously crazy! We talked for about thirty minutes.

  That’s when he really started calling and calling. He would scream, “I beg you!” with even more intensity. He would yell, “I have no one in my life but you!” I began to speak about him to my friends as “my-guy-in-prison-distinct-from-my-brother-in-prison.” My brother in prison got alarmed when I told him. “You can’t talk to some loser guy in prison!” Bill said, from prison. “Jesus, Jules, what are you doing?”

  I will admit that I accepted the call and talked to “my guy in prison” a couple more times. I was curious and felt strangely bonded with him, like he was a lost orphan at sea and he thought I might be his life raft. But finally I’d had enough. I had to break up with him. I accepted one last call and said, “I am only accepting this call to tell you I will absolutely never accept a call again. You can try and try, but I will not accept. I’m sorry. It’s been fun, it’s been meaningful, I wish you the best, but it’s over.” He began to cry. It was actually excruciating. Was I so hard up and so attracted to the strange that I had wound up with the perfect storm of complete wrongness? Or was I just a person with an ear for a good random situation?

  “Your brother told you to do this,” he said. Because, of course, now he knew about my brother in prison.

  “That’s bullshit!” Bill said when I told him what my other prison friend said. “He’s a big liar,” Bill added.

  “But you did tell me to stop talking to him,” I said.

  “No, I didn’t,” Bill said,

  “Yes, you did!” I argued.

  “No, I swear I did not!” Bill said.

  “You’re such a liar!” I said.

  “Jesus, Jules. I’m in prison, what do you expect?” Bill said. And we both laughed.

  Eventually my guy in prison stopped calling me. And after a time, I forgot all about him.

  But then, while I was talking with Stephan in the Philippines, I realized that Bill was affording me another wild connection with someone I would probably never otherwise have a conversation with. While I was wondering what had ever happened with “my guy in prison,” Stephan pulled me out of my reverie and said, “I’m taking that phone call off your bill.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “I can do that. I have the power to do that and I’m doing it, right . . . [I heard many clicks on a computer keyboard] now.” I was online looking at my bill, and in a moment, presto, my bill was eighty dollars.

  I thanked Stephan profusely. Suddenly I felt suspended with Stephan in space, hovering over the globe, somewhere over the North Pacific. Out of time. I had the same feeling about the guy in prison. I didn’t want the moment to end. I realized that when I hung up with the AT&T guy, I would be another stop further away from Bill. In a split second a heavy silence engulfed us. “Thank you so much,” I said.

  “No problem,” Stephan said.

  We hung up. It was now after midnight. As I got in bed, I was thinking that things had improved. The last random guy that my brother Bill caused me to get to know had cost me money, but this guy had just saved me $320. And then I thought about Stephan and his sad mother, halfway across the world. I thought about my mother, and all the sad mothers who’ve just lost sons. Who knows how many and how much grief. An ocean. The North Pacific.

  I tried to go to sleep, but accepted that I would probably be looking at the bedroom ceiling for much of the night. In a week my own family would be back at home. And yet, I felt it was me who’d left town.

  WEEK FOUR

  Dependence

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  My Nemesis

  All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, to whom, and why.

  —James Thurber

  Our home is right across the street from the post office and the library. This location was one of the big reasons I wanted to buy this house. It was like I had these twin little ladies—squat, middle-aged, spare, and sturdy, my post office and my library—there to greet me each morning when I went out to get the paper. “Here we are again!” they say in unison.

  The library: “We’ll always be here for you.”

  The post office: “Civilization.”

  Library: “We may be plain but we are two of the best things about civilization.”

  Post office: “The mail.”

  Library: “The books!”

  I went to the post office this morning because it was my last chance to send something to Mulan and get it to her before she leaves camp. I’m sending her a tank top from her own closet. I never know what to send her at camp. The
first two years she went I sent her junk (Origami paper! Pillowcases that can be signed with Sharpies by her cabin mates!) and this stuff would just eventually come home with her from camp only to be thrown out a few months later. Then I came up with this great idea that I would send her things that I know she already likes, random things I feel she could be wanting, her own stuff. Genius.

  Today the weather is turbulent. There’s thunder and there’s lightning. The heat broke, finally, and with it came a tempest. It was actually storming last night when I was on the phone with the AT&T guy, but I didn’t describe that then because I thought it would be too over-the-top. Now that it’s still stormy out, I’ll tell you. My bedroom flashed light and dark all night from the lightning. Arden cried from under the bed in the Grandma Room downstairs. My cat Val curled up under the sheets. I stared at the ceiling.

  The early morning was calm, but now the sky is stirred up again.

  I didn’t want to stand in line at the post office. I just wanted to get this package off quickly, so I went to the self-mailing machine. There is only one, and there was already a woman using it. I realized it was my Nemesis.

  She doesn’t know that she is my Nemesis, but she had assumed this position over two years ago.

  As I wrote earlier, I walk Arden to the beach nearly every day. Being at the beach for a moment is a great reward for me. I look forward to seeing what the lake is going to look like because, while it’s often a surprise—the color, the kind of waves—it always gives me a big wash of calm.

  One morning we got to the beach and there was another woman there, with her dog, who was not on a leash. This was a problem, because Arden is aggressive with other dogs. It’s the law—wait, “law” sounds too harsh; let’s say, the “rule”—the rule is that you have to have your dog on a leash in the park and on the beach. The woman’s dog ran up to Arden. When this happens I have no choice but to take him off his leash, because he will be less aggressive with another dog if he’s not restrained. I have learned this the hard way, because Arden once bit another dog.