I drew the picture. I remembered every detail. I was impassive and my boss approved. I got the message: See everything, say nothing, and write it all down. Move through the world that way. Silently I agreed.
A few weeks later Texas executed another man. That time, I went alone.
Then I started covering war, and lost count of the dead. Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, Lebanon. Bombardments from airplanes, suicide bombings, gun battles, extrajudicial executions. Bodies abandoned in cars and on roadsides.
It seems to me, now, that my father’s death was a gateway. I threw myself into work to numb the grief, but work kept pushing me back toward death.
But it wasn’t until I sat alone and fed my tiny baby, who looked just like my dead father, that the faces and smells came rushing back. Dead small bodies. Dying small children. Dying small children who moaned for parents who didn’t come because they were already dead. Caked with mud, crackling with dried blood, bodies jutting at unnatural angles—or simply frozen still, and absent from their flesh.
I had not been cavalier. I had felt those deaths, but I’d also suppressed them as fast as possible. I was counting bodies, scribbling quotes, finding somewhere to file, making the deadline, doing the edits, and going to sleep so I could wake up and do it all over again in the morning.
I’d known that dead children were a particular obscenity. On the other hand I considered all civilian deaths obscene and unforgivable.
Maybe breast-feeding was the first chance I’d had to sit quietly and think. Maybe I looked for the bodies and dug them up, driven by the superstitious fear that witnessing so many dead children would mean that I…couldn’t finish the thought.
So I sat in the dark and remembered. I remembered their homes and families and dolls and the clothes they wore the day they died. I sat in the dark and roamed back in my mind, down forgotten roads into morgues and hospitals and homes. I sat in the dark, milked by my baby, and cried heavy silent tears for children whose deaths I had covered and forgotten years earlier. I cried for their mothers and my father and myself and for my perfect unsullied baby who could only be ruined by this world.
* * *
————
In the bathroom, brushing my teeth, a scrap of song drifted through my mind: They can’t take that away from me.
Scrub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub. Whatever else happened—or didn’t happen—that day, I had polished my enamel. Rinse and spit; victory smacked of mint. Tooth brushing, once done, could not be undone.
The way you sing off-key…
Now. Where was I? Oh yes, my holdings. I had to take stock of my holdings.
My first book: Its day had dusked. Fast, fast it slipped into the past tense. Soon it would be as if it never were.
My second book: A mess of an unfinished manuscript.
Job: None.
Husband: Check.
Thanks to husband’s job: enough money, good health insurance, and a sun-washed apartment on the twenty-third floor of a skyscraper in Beijing’s business district.
No problems, right? Right, no problems.
Still it felt like I had a problem. The cold reality of my gender was dawning on me. I’d known enough, already, about harassment and domestic violence and pay differentials and the incessant, exhausting focus on how you look and laugh and talk. But it had all been basically manageable—not ideal, certainly, even enraging, but navigable—right up until the baby came.
It was motherhood that forced me to understand the timeless horror of our position. The obvious, hidden-in-plain-sight reason women had not written novels or commanded armies or banked or doctored or explored or painted at the same rate as men.
The cause was not, as I had been led to believe, that women had been prevented from working. Quite the opposite: we had been doing all of the work, around the clock, for centuries.
Somebody, after all, must wash and feed and train the kids and get the food and clean the house and care for the sick and elderly. That work is physically depleting, logistically daunting, and relentless. It is not a job, but a constant gaping demand for labor. It’s a ceaseless work that has gobbled up our energy and stamina, eroded our collective health, and starved our communal mind of oxygen for generations.
We did the work, taught our daughters to do the work (assuming we survived their births), and then we died. That was it. Domestic toil had ground us, one after the next, to dust. We had not been educated because then, naturally, we might balk at the work. We might have the audacity to point out that we were doing all the work. We might ask the men to do some of the work, themselves. And they didn’t want to do that work. Nobody wants to do the work, if they can escape it.
Still we go around thinking that our primary problem, the essence of our position, is that men explain things to us or that we make less money for the same job.
But, most basically, it’s the work—the work that we still, somehow, have not managed to escape. It is the work we pretend doesn’t exist.
Only after giving birth did I internalize the reality of having quit my job. I’d slaved and slashed and elbowed to maintain that job, but in the end I’d let it go like a balloon, rolling in my mouth the rare flavor of a bold gamble. Retirement it was not. I was pregnant and I was quitting, but in my mind it was the opposite of “opting out.” The time to finish my second book was coinciding with the arrival of a baby. I imagined long, silent afternoons in spotless rooms, typing clean lines of prose while the baby napped beatifically in a sunbeam.
Something like that. The assumptions I’d made, the foggy mental images of life with a newborn, were so idiotic I couldn’t conjure them anymore.
For one thing, there was Tom. In my imagination he was there, too, at every critical moment. I never thought about his job. I assumed that, to the extent that our lives would be exploded, the disruption would be evenly shared. That was the expectation of my generation; an equality we had been encouraged to anticipate even as our mothers—draped in legitimate amnesia or, perhaps, motivated by the loving desire to spare us the truth of our disruptive origins—consistently downplayed the physical and emotional rigors of bringing a child into the world. They gave no answer for that part. Their revolution was elsewhere. When it came to the children and the housework, they had no solution to suggest.
I hadn’t factored in the child himself, not in a realistic way. His emotions, my emotions, our symbiotic state. I had imagined a baby as a modification to an existing life, like an extra room built onto a house. Now I learned that babies wipe away all that preceded them, remaking the family with love and violence and the smug inarguability of biology.
I hadn’t factored in sleep deprivation, or my shredded psyche, or the primal cravings to be near the baby, to smell and hold him.
But most of all I had not understood that, once the baby comes, the house is full of work that must be faced.
In the United States, the average maternity leave lasts for three months. I’d assumed, therefore, that three months must be a magical milestone beyond which babies’ needs winnow down to accommodate a forty-hour workweek. American families coped. Women went back to work. Single mothers pulled it off. I never internalized the brutality of U.S. paternity policies until I was in China, trying to fathom how I would avoid insanity if I had to return to a job when my baby was three months old.
And yet. Maybe, I thought now, I’d quit too hastily.
A maternity leave would have ended—painfully but clearly—back at the office. It would have held my place in the working world, the world of deadlines and transactions and politics and money. The world of men.
Come to think of it, I’d been warned. They won’t fire you now that you’re pregnant, a few battle-hardened working mothers had counseled. And then you’re entitled to maternity leave.
You’re walking away from free money, a single mother had told me bluntly.
Calm down, I told myself now, peering gravely into my own eyes. You were done with that job, anyway.
It was true: I wanted to write books. I’d written one and I wanted to write more. I had an agent. My book had gotten good reviews and been a finalist for an important award. It was natural that I could, would, should write more.
Now things had gone crazy, that much was undeniable. Maybe I had gone crazy, too, and maybe I would get better, or maybe I wouldn’t. Either way, the days were sliding past. Time’s a-wasting, my mother always said. I had to get a grip and get back to work.
My manuscript malingered deep in my computer files. The baby turned in his crib. I wasn’t sure whether it was morning or afternoon.
But there was an obvious answer to all of this. I was an American in Beijing, remember, a woman of means in a city teeming with rural migrants who’d come to hustle for work as nannies and cooks and cleaners.
Help is affordable. That phrase rang in my ears.
It was a euphemistic phrase. It meant “Human beings are cheap here.” Foreigners said it all the time. I never heard a Chinese person say “help is affordable.”
Cleaning ladies were nothing new. I hadn’t cleaned my own home for years—I’d traveled so incessantly I hardly occupied whatever place I was renting at the time. When we’d lived in our courtyard home in old Beijing, a bespectacled grandmother biked to our gate every morning to brew a pot of coffee, cut a bowl of fruit, and slosh through the rooms with a mop. When we moved across the city—trading our picturesque-but-falling-apart cottage for the responsible conveniences of centralized heat and endless hot water—she’d politely declined to keep the job. The commute wasn’t worth her while.
We’d meant to hire a new ayi before the baby was born but hadn’t found one. And now here we were, living in disarray when, as any parent in China would have immediately understood, this was an unnecessary and self-imposed martyrdom. Help was all around. Ask and we would receive.
“You’re lucky you’ll have your baby here,” Beijing friends had enthused as my pregnancy swelled, “because help is so affordable.”
Help!
Chapter 3
I looked at her. She looked at her hands. The dining table stretched between us.
This person was not what I’d had in mind when I’d called the housekeeping agency. I’d envisioned a jolly grandmother, shabby and staid, a village old-timer in worn sweaters who’d brew noodle soups and know absolutely everything about babies.
This woman was young, perhaps too young—all sinew and spring; pointed chin; sharp elbows. Her black eyes flashed and fell beneath a stylish fringe of bang; the bones of her face were strong; thick hair swung almost to her waist. She was dressed in some sort of acid-washed denim and a T-shirt printed brightly with garbled English.
Fact: The best people I’ve found in life look all wrong at first glance.
“Do you have any children?” I asked.
A pause, her mouth popped open, and her eyes flew to the agent—was she allowed to answer? An almost invisible nod. She turned back to me.
“Yes.”
Soft, sweet voice. Too soft, too sweet. Oh no, that would drive me crazy. Thirty years old, and she couldn’t look me in the eye.
“One daughter,” interrupted Yulanda, the agent. “Three years,” she added before I could speak, tapping the sheet of paper she’d slid before me when the interview began.
Oh yes, right there, along with her province of origin (Hebei, a prized birthplace for Beijing nannies because the Mandarin is reputed to be pure there, and heaven forbid the babysitter should pollute the toddler with some bunk twist of Chinese), height (tiny), and weight (ditto).
I smiled at the agent, whose grin hadn’t quivered since she walked in the door. I worried her lipstick would soon crack and crumble like terra-cotta left to bake in the sun.
“Is your daughter—is her daughter—” I didn’t know who to address.
“With the grandparents,” Yulanda said firmly. “In Hebei.”
“You—she—are you—here with—”
“Husband.”
“And where does she live?”
[Unintelligible.]
“How long would the commute be?”
Almost two hours with a bus change, but she was willing to do it.
“I need help with the cleaning. With the cooking and laundry,” I explained, seized by a fluttery impulse to justify myself. “I don’t need help with the baby. Maybe when the baby’s older. When she and I have gotten to know each other better.” I spoke first toward the top of the younger woman’s head, then into the unchangingly amiable face of the agent.
Yulanda cracked out a few lines of Mandarin, then turned to me.
“Okay,” she announced.
“You understand?” I asked the younger woman.
“Okay,” she echoed meekly.
“Well—” I paused, unsure how to get them out of the house. “I need to check her references. Can I call…?”
Yulanda whispered to the candidate, who clattered up and chirped, “Thank you.” Scrambling her feet into sandals, she disappeared out the door.
“What you think?” Yulanda’s voice was all sugar, but the ayis cowered before her. Her teeth gleamed like a shield. The better to eat you with, my dear…
“Her English isn’t so good.”
“She understand. Try her.”
“Is there anybody else we can meet?”
“Now, no. Full time, no. Summer, always difficult.”
I was desperate. I would give this woman—what was her name again?—a chance.
To verify her references, I phoned a former employer who’d since moved to Singapore.
“She should be good enough,” said the faraway woman in a clipped accent that made me imagine enormous rooms bleached to immaculate white. “I trained her myself. I had her managing the whole place by the time we left.”
Struggling to envision the shrinking waif I’d met as a crack manager, I repeated this endorsement to Tom.
“Sounds good to me,” said my husband, eyes on his phone.
We told the agency to send her over.
* * *
————
The very next morning she marched into our house, put down her bag, and picked up a broom. By noon the floors shone, the kitchen reeked of fake lemons, and we could see our faces in the faucets.
She was businesslike and quick. Squat, stand, bang the doors, march down the hall, out with the trash, in with the towels. She scrubbed circles around me while I breast-fed the baby, lulled by the sensation of chaos righting itself with minimal demand on my body or brain. When our gazes crossed by accident, she smiled. She came every weekday, arriving at eight in the morning and staying until six at night. She’d come on Saturdays, too, for overtime. We paid her less than five hundred dollars a month.
Ayi, a catch-all designation for female domestic workers across China, literally means auntie—significantly, the sister of one’s mother. But this lady didn’t want to be my aunt.
“No, please,” she giggled. “This is for old woman.”
“What should we call you?”
“How about Xiao Li?” Little Li.
Typical: I’d gone looking for a grandmother, and ended up with a younger sister. Still, from that very first morning, I felt better when she was in the house. That’s the plainest truth: Xiao Li came and I felt better.
Well, anybody feels better in a clean room, especially if they haven’t slept. And there’s a terrible something I’ve noticed about houses—they always feel cleaner when somebody else has done the cleaning. Xiao Li couldn’t scrub away my existential dread, bu
t her presence somehow softened it. Anxiety and darkness still stretched perpetually beneath every moment with my baby and husband, and hung like a backdrop beyond my ambitions and ideas. It had become my subtext, the ground on which I stepped. It had been there ever since my baby was born. I felt it, but I didn’t know how to explain it. Not even to Tom, especially not to Tom.
“Maybe I have postpartum depression,” I said one day.
“I think you just need a good night’s sleep,” he replied.
He hummed along; he checked in. He advised sleep. He didn’t, however, offer any suggestions for how such a thing was to be gotten.
I hated the night. Tom tumbled into his flesh, leaving me alone in fitful consciousness. I dipped in and out of dreams with the cries of the baby. In my mind I swam deep midnight seas thick with snakes, or skirted a bleak and lightless landscape, stalked by grave robbers and wolves.
Morning brought light and coffee and sometimes it brought visitors, but, most important, it brought Xiao Li. She was sane and orderly and sweet. I was still tired and scared, but the terror wasn’t quite so sharp.
It took only a few days for me to realize her importance.
* * *
————
Xiao Li brought lunch in plastic boxes, hot water in a thermos. At noon she scarfed her food on a rigid, straight-backed wooden chair we’d shoved between the counter and the inlaid microwave in our tiny kitchen. Then she’d bend her neck into an improbable twist, rest her cheek on the countertop, and fall asleep.
The first time I saw this torturous resting place, I was appalled.
“Xiao Li.” I nudged her awake. “Please, lie down and rest on the couch. Or the guest bed.”
She blinked and blushed, but stayed put.
“I like it here,” she said simply.
Later, I tried to reason with her.
“You can’t sleep there,” I said. “It’s not comfortable. Why don’t you eat at the table and then take a nap on the couch?”
Women's Work Page 5
