Except there was Xiao Li, making it—making me—weird all over again.
As I began to exclude her from the photographic record, I realized that most of the families I knew seemed to do the same: my former colleagues, my neighbors, the parents I befriended through our apartment’s baby group—none of them showed off pictures of the nannies.
They all said things like “Xi Ayi is like a member of our family.” That sounded cozy and loving, as if the ayis were not laborers, but blood relatives or volunteers. But pictures don’t lie. If you want to see the ambivalence that pervades domestic labor, check the photographic record.
Check it on both sides, too. Because there’s something else I’ve realized: the nannies exclude their bosses right back.
* * *
————
Xiao Li and the other neighborhood ayis liked to take their charges to the indoor playground across the street. This was one bit of childcare I was delighted to outsource. I hated the cocktail of boogers and hand sanitizer and drool slicked over contraptions of plastic and rubber, the wild screech of lisping nursery rhymes from mounted speakers, and the pressure to act nonchalant when some hulking seven-year-old clawed Max’s face or pushed him off the slide for sport.
Xiao Li at least pretended to enjoy the experience. Max was sincerely pleased by the place. And I certainly relished the empty apartment. Everybody won.
Upon their return Xiao Li would proudly pull out her phone and flash through the photos: Max belly-down on a water bed, studying fake fish through translucent plastic. Max, who could not yet jump, perched in puzzlement upon a trampoline. Max laughing helplessly as balloons flew around his head.
She couldn’t send the pictures to me. She didn’t have email, and I didn’t have a smartphone. But she carried them around with her, this growing dossier that documented my son’s days. These were memories snapped out in the world and away from me—or at home, when Tom and I were gone.
I never knew why she took so many pictures of Max. Did she look at his picture at night or on the weekends? Surely not. I mean, surely not, right? Maybe she was just playing or passing the time, or giving herself some insurance in case she was asked to justify the hours or prove her devotion to the child.
I wondered whether she showed the pictures to her daughter or husband, or displayed them to her family when she traveled home to Hebei. These questions were idle and unanswerable. Every nanny I’ve known has taken endless pictures of the children she tends and the rooms where she works. Whenever I’m handed a phone to look at a picture of my child, I realize it’s one of hundreds in a long chain stretching off in both directions.
Other pictures are clearly not intended for the boss’s eyes. I’ve seen selfies of nannies posing in their employers’ bedrooms; throwing parties in their bosses’ homes during vacations; borrowing their clothing—posing, always posing. The employers themselves are perpetually absent from the pictures.
We take pictures of everything except for one another.
I guess there is fantasy on both sides. The nannies pretend they live in these comfortable homes and mother these plump babies. Perhaps they sometimes allow themselves to play dress-up—not only with the clothes and the rooms, but with the children.
We employers pretend our polished existences are the natural result of our work and excellence—not the fruit of another woman’s labor. The rooms are clean because somebody else cleaned them; the kids thrive because there’s an extra adult around the house. It takes a village, and damn it, we’ve hired one. But nobody wants to say that, not straight out like that.
We all want to pretend it’s not a job, it’s not about labor and cash and schedules. The employment relationship is the only reason we coexist in these rooms, and yet we treat it like an inconvenient, even nasty, truth—the first thing we’d like to crop from the picture.
I was leaving Xiao Li outside the frames, but I didn’t feel good about that, either. I didn’t like pretending that she didn’t exist. Her stories and songs and smiles are planted in my child’s mind forever—how could I bleach her physical self out of existence?
How could I lament my own disappearance—only to erase another woman?
* * *
————
All the while, I was uncomfortably conscious that I’m not the sort of person who is supposed to have these kinds of dilemmas. These are rarified problems of the ethereal elite, and by breeding and temperament I’m a peasant. I have a posh British friend (at least, I understand she’s posh because other British people always use that word behind her back) who once tried to explain to me how, in England, class has nothing to do with money but is easily recognized by such clues as schools and the way one treats servers and staff. Well, first, it seems to me that schools and staff have everything to do with money, and second, she was unable to coherently describe the difference in how people talk to servants, and I’ve been wishing for specifics ever since.
As for me, I’m an American crossbreed of servants and supervisors. Status is a question of who may command and who must obey; who barges through and who steps aside. But my family is white, and so that difference was not carried in our American genes. Status is a circumstance external to ourselves, a thing we gained and lost from one generation to the next. We white Americans are superstitiously and secretly preoccupied with its getting and keeping. I believe that’s why we are so tiresomely obsessed with our “experience” as customers; why we tip with the seriousness of penitents sacrificing on the temple of a fickle god; why we insist upon a veneer of egalitarian friendliness at all times. Maybe, too, that is why we’ve fought so bitterly against any suggestion of equality with black Americans—we are afraid to accept as part of our national identity a blood that historically mandated the fate of lower—or nonexistent—status. We say, Our nation was built by immigrants. We don’t like to say the truth: Our nation was built by immigrants and slaves.
I mean to say that the events in my household are not new, nor are they specific to me and Xiao Li, or to Asia, or to this moment in time. Between Xiao Li and me seethed an ocean of difference so vast we couldn’t perceive each other clearly, even when we were in the same room. And yet it was always in the back of my mind that I come from people who did the same work as Xiao Li. I could trace the reversals of fortune that elevated and abased generations of women in my family. I knew these changes were tied to movement, to uprooting oneself and crossing seas. And we had done that. Xiao Li and I existed together in rooms that we’d traveled to reach. So maybe anything could happen. Maybe Xiao Li or her descendants will end up rich in the United States. Maybe I will end up poor.
My great-grandmother was a Hungarian teenager brought along—imported, in a way—to the New World as somebody’s servant. She was a nanny who crossed the Atlantic taking care of an opera singer’s child. She reached America and kept going: jobs and reinventions and peregrinations around the Midwest; a wedding to a fellow immigrant; the birth of American children.
And then—just like that, within one generation—her daughter was back in Europe, having married a man who rose through the ranks of the U.S. Army in World War II. That daughter, my grandmother, oversaw a showpiece household in bomb-chewed Vienna while her husband sorted out the fates of the “displaced persons,” which is a sanitized way to describe the survivors of concentration camps.
Daughter of a village girl, daughter of a servant, daughter of an immigrant. But she was the lady of the house now, replete with nannies and cooks and maids, pearls on her throat, and one pregnancy after another. It must have seemed to her, then, like a perfect completion of her destiny. It must have seemed so good. But life was just getting started.
There are various points to all this, and here is one: I am not the first woman in my family to fight about the housework.
Eventually, of course, my grandmother found herself back in America with a big house in the
D.C. suburbs and five children—but no more hired help. She pressed the kids into service in the house, but gradually they got busy and grew up and moved out. My grandfather hired a maid; my grandmother fired her in a pique. Disgusted by an increasingly disordered home, consumed by his extraordinary success as a lobbyist, my grandfather spent less and less time at home.
My grandmother lost herself in charity work and music—playing the organ at church, teaching piano, writing an opera—while her house slid into filth and, eventually, her marriage collapsed.
Having gotten divorced, my grandfather was free to date younger women and play golf and hobnob around Washington. As for my grandmother, she spent the rest of her life playing music in public and destroying her home in private. She never accepted the divorce. She murdered the house by suffocation. Rooms were filled to the ceiling with stuff until they became impassable and were effectively erased from the geography of the building. A bathroom was given over to the many cats who twined and mewled through the detritus—layer after layer of soiled newspaper, a sickly tower that skewed up toward the ceiling.
I want to say the destruction of the family home was a metaphor, a sort of proto-feminist protest, a final fuck you. I want to believe that my grandmother elaborately disrespected the house because it was the only way to explain her fate: domestic life had been a trap and a dead end. I believe there is truth in that.
But the house was filthy and sad and I know that, when you peel away the metaphors, my grandmother’s illness has a name: She was a hoarder.
These stories hang over me. They were always there, but now I consider them anew. Having disappeared into my own household, I meditate on the fates of the women who begat me, on the unknowable alchemy of chores and cleanliness and husbands and sanity.
My own mother would not be bogged down. She said good-bye to all that, and she married a man who was nothing like her father, and they moved together to a forest-side house in New England that was old and ramshackle and drafty. The clanking radiators couldn’t keep the place warm in the winter, and in the summer the walls sweated and I stuffed my cheeks with ice cubes to sleep. But there were broad trees overhead, and vegetable and flower gardens, a strawberry patch, raspberry bushes, an apple tree—and the woods, fragrant and shadowed and crawling with life.
My mother was an activist with the League of Women Voters, using the hand-cranked mimeograph in our basement to print manifestos in wet, acrid streaks of black ink. She bought us, her daughters, T-shirts: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Barbie dolls were banned lest they spoil our body image.
Before marriage she was a news reporter who successfully sued her bosses for paying her less than they paid men who did the same job. As we grew up, she ran for town council and became a reporter at the town’s weekly newspaper. She was a force to be reckoned with and, eventually, she took over as editor in chief.
At home she taught my sister and me how to do all kinds of things. How to sew and iron clothes; bake cakes and boil up homemade cranberry sauce; knit and crochet and embroider and quilt; polish silver and set tables to Emily Post standards.
My brother was largely exempt from the traditionally feminine domestic arts. He was not expected to cook. His chores were different: lawn mowing, snow shoveling, leaf raking. We girls had cross-stitch kits; he had model airplanes.
My mother’s feminism didn’t have a private sphere. Behind closed doors, in the house, things went along as ever they had. Maybe, for her, it wasn’t very important. My father’s housework contributions compare favorably to most young fathers I know today, which can either—depending upon how you want to look at it—serve as an indictment of our lack of progress or a laurel on the memory of my father.
My mother educated me impeccably to make my way in the world. When I read Lean In I was mostly confused: Who were these women who didn’t speak at meetings or take their seats at the table? It never even crossed my mind that I should keep my thoughts to myself or hover at the edge of the action. And that is because my parents never gave me even a shadow of suggestion in that direction. They didn’t even introduce the possibility to dismiss it.
But now I was dabbling in a realm for which I had not been prepared. Now I was waging the only battle I’d been warned to avoid. When I got married, my mother flatly advised me against squabbling over chores.
“You have to ask yourself,” she said, “ ‘Is this the hill I want to die on?’ ”
* * *
————
“My husband wants another baby,” Xiao Li said one day. “He is talking about it all the time.”
So was she. Family planning was on her mind, and I could see that she sought a more fulsome reply than the blandishments I’d murmured so far.
“It’s illegal.” I stalled.
That was true. China’s infamous one-child policy still, at that time, limited births to one baby per family. (It has since been abolished.)
“That doesn’t matter,” she said.
“What do you mean, it doesn’t matter?”
She shrugged.
“Do you want another baby?” I pressed.
“No,” she said. “I don’t want.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged again. “It’s too hard.”
I couldn’t guess whether she was speaking frankly or telling me what she thought I wanted to hear.
“You mean—”
“The pregnancy. The small baby. It’s so hard.”
“That’s true,” I sighed. “But still,” I added gamely, “I think you would be glad afterward.”
This was not sincere. I had no idea whether she’d be glad or not. I was talking out of embarrassment. I hated the thought of our house without Xiao Li. And I didn’t want her to think I was involving myself in her family planning; I could hardly manage my own.
For her part, Xiao Li was not so shy.
“You should have another baby,” she told me.
“Not right now.”
“This time, girl,” she said, guileless as a child asking for a doll.
I laughed nervously. “I don’t know.”
“Yes,” she said and giggled. “Babies are so cute. I love babies.”
* * *
————
“Do you have a picture of your daughter?” I asked Xiao Li one afternoon.
“Here.”
Mischievous eyes, round cheeks, body twisting with legs splayed. Two fingers for the camera: peace and victory. Mouth screwed into an insouciant half smile.
“She’s beautiful,” I said lightly.
Xiao Li wrinkled her nose and shrugged.
“She’s ugly. Like my husband.”
“No!” I was sincerely shocked.
“Yes,” she insisted. “She looks like my husband.”
“Well.” My Western etiquette floundered stupidly in the face of a mother who glibly declared her daughter ugly. “I think she’s cute.”
Xiao Li made a small noise in her throat, twisted her mouth, and flipped to the next picture. This one showed the girl inside a small bedroom that contained practically nothing. A window in the background, a mattress on the floor. The girl perched on the low bed, grinning proudly into the camera.
“This is Beijing?” I asked.
“Yes, here.”
This must be Xiao Li’s room, then. The place where she and her husband slept. I scrolled through more pictures of the little girl, then stopped again. I recognized the brick pathways and pruned hedges of our apartment’s courtyard.
“This is Xin Cheng Guoji?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You brought her here?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” I tried to pass off my confusion as regret. “You should have told me. I would like to meet her.”
&nbs
p; I tried to imagine introducing this small girl, this child-stranger, to the foreign boy who greedily soaked up her mother’s time and work and love. I pictured myself trying awkwardly to communicate. I should have a present for her, if such a meeting were to happen. But what would she think, and what would I say? Your mother leaves your house to make mine nicer. She leaves you and spends the days with my child while I am also here.
And Tom—what if Tom were home? I wasn’t sure I could forgive him if he behaved toward this small child with anything other than immaculate warmth and kindness. If he grunted into his phone or walked out of the room abruptly or committed any other small rudeness, I would be enraged.
I pushed the phone back, like it was dangerous; like it might burn my hand if I held on to it too long.
Chapter 7
The table was spread with cold eggplant, spiced noodles, and duck cooked in tobacco. Iced beer bubbled in squat glasses. I’d come by bike to the restaurant, swinging free through the sun to meet a friend and her family for lunch. She was a Malaysian writer of detective stories—sharp and fast and funny—and she was traveling with her husband and adolescent kids. We were drinking, laughing, the lunch was rolling along…
The phone squalled. I glanced down to silence the ring, and saw the name of the caller: Xiao Li.
This could be nothing but bad news. Xiao Li never called.
In the frantic gap between accepting the call and raising the phone to my ear I could hear, muffled but unmistakable, the hysterical howl of a wounded baby.
My wounded baby.
Xiao Li was crying, too—crying so furiously I couldn’t understand her words.
“What? Slow down.” I jammed my finger into my free ear. “What?”
Women's Work Page 10
