Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  “Can I come to you?” I asked.

  Pause.

  “You want to come here?” she finally managed.

  “Yes. I want to see your daughters. I have presents for them.”

  Another pause, this one too long.

  “My house is very poor,” she said in Chinese.

  “It’s okay.” I turned to my friend. “Please tell her I don’t care. I just want to see her and the kids. It would mean a lot to go to their house.”

  Through translation we pushed politely back and forth until, in a flustered defeat, Xiao Li relented.

  “Come in the morning, any time after nine,” she said. “I’ll send you the address.”

  But a few minutes later, she called back.

  “Can you come tonight?”

  I heard a man’s voice in the background.

  “Oh,” I said. “Of course.”

  I assumed her husband had changed the plan so he’d be home, and I was apprehensive. When interviewing women, husbands are frequent spoilers. This is a universal truth from Cleveland to Cairo: In the presence of husbands, women tend to speak less and defer to the man. As for the husband, he often assumes, no matter who or what is asked, that his opinion is the one you really want.

  I also thought there was a strong chance Xiao Li’s husband would put his foot down against the book—politely but definitely.

  But there was no time to worry. I made some panicked calls and managed to hire a Chinese journalist to translate. We took a taxi north as the sun faded away and the city dropped into a spring chill. The taste of recently melted snow mixed with diesel along the highway. Xiao Li sent an SMS: She was standing on the curb, where was I?

  We followed the address to a strip mall of shining metal and distressed wood and mellow light glowing from boutiques. Glancing out, I realized that Xiao Li must have chosen the most upscale spot within reasonable distance of her house, and I felt depressed.

  “This isn’t right.” The translator began to argue with the driver.

  “No.” I stopped her. “I think it’s here.”

  “It looks fancy,” the translator said indignantly.

  I agreed and my stomach was sinking, but I climbed out of the car.

  Xiao Li rushed fast from the darkness, a small girl clinging to her hand. A tidy-looking young man loped behind. I hugged Xiao Li and looked into her face. I’d forgotten the leonine sweep of her facial bones, the piping of her upper nose, her high hairline.

  We milled in a commotion of stunted handshakes and introductions. I greeted her husband and kneeled down to talk to her daughter, who grinned against her mother’s leg. I introduced the translator as a friend who’d come to help us communicate. Relief came into Xiao Li’s eyes. Then she, too, I noted, has been dreading an excruciating evening of decorous, slow-moving Chinglish.

  Then we all had to fuss and invite and protest about where to sit and talk. I knew that because I’d come to them and her husband was present there wasn’t even a small chance I’d get to pay. And this knowledge was distressing because I also knew they couldn’t afford these cafés. We wound up in a luxurious coffee shop with fireplaces, a wall of windows, and deep leather couches.

  “Coffee? Tea?” Xiao Li’s husband pressed.

  “Just hot water,” I said.

  Xiao Li giggled. “She loves coffee.”

  “If I drink coffee so late, I won’t sleep.”

  I watched Xiao Li’s husband slide off to the counter. He was not the rough-hewn laborer I’d imagined. The sleeves of his crisp button-down shirt were carefully rolled to show his watch, and his hair was tidily shorn into a crew cut.

  Xiao Li and I began the necessary ritual of mutual flattery.

  “We’ve never forgotten you,” I said through the translator. “You took such wonderful care of Max, and you were an important part of our lives. I’m so grateful to you.”

  “You were always very kind to me,” she replied. “I never wanted to leave your house, and I knew you didn’t want me to go, but I was too pregnant to work and I didn’t want to sit around taking a salary.”

  I was awash all this time with memories. I hadn’t anticipated that seeing Xiao Li would unleash intense, visceral flashbacks to early motherhood. The foods we ate, the smells of our rooms, the madness of those long, slipping-away, caffeine-drenched afternoons. That had all been real. Xiao Li’s face was proof. But in her face, too, I saw signs of the things that had happened to her since we’d been together.

  She’d recently dyed her hair burnt orange, but her bangs were still chopped in a long block across her brow. She still had a taste for flash: her velour blouse was printed with leopard spots, and metal spangles winked on her purse.

  “Where’s your other daughter?” I asked.

  “She’s back in Hebei. She had to start primary school.”

  “I’m sorry not to see her.”

  Xiao Li’s little girl sat on her mother’s lap, and I could hardly talk for staring. We’d been pregnant together, and now I had Patrick, and she had this bob-haired child in a frilly dress and thick tights. The girl watched our faces and fiddled with a small toy rabbit. Little white rabbit, Xiao Li used to sing to Max. I reached under the table and hauled out the presents.

  “Since your sister isn’t here, you get first choice.”

  Stuffed animals and Barbies from India, dolls in glittering saris, with slick hair that smelled of melting candy. Happily the child took the toys.

  Xiao Li’s husband was back with a mountain of ice cream and waffles and fruit. I took a few mouthfuls, gasped in pleasure, and—afraid the sugar on an empty stomach would make me vomit—muttered something about a diet. This was a mistake. He rushed back to the counter to drop more hard-earned yuan on a platter of fresh fruit.

  I swallowed a chunk of watermelon and straightened my back. The small talk was starting to feel itchy and onerous. I’d left my kids and crossed the continent to have one particular conversation with Xiao Li. As I shuffled the words in my mind, I realized that a looseness had come into my muscles and felt a gambler’s certainty that the discussion would fall my way.

  “I’m working on another book,” I began. “It’s about women and work. About writing at home and having babies and how women manage to look after their kids while working.”

  “Very good.” Xiao Li looked pleased.

  “But I don’t just want to write about myself,” I told her. “I want to write about you, too.”

  “Oh?” She giggled politely, as if I’d told a joke, then studied my face.

  “You’re a working mother, too,” I said. “More than I am. I could work because you came and looked after Max. But my question is, what about you?”

  “Okay.” She smiled a little, then smiled more. “Okay.”

  “So I’m hoping I can interview you. Not tonight,” I added quickly. “But maybe we can meet and I’ll take notes and we can talk about everything, about your life.”

  “Yes,” she said happily. “Anytime.”

  “Great.”

  “What I think,” her husband said, leaning forward. “I think it is very important for women to work. To reach their potential. I think they must be given all support so that they can work and also have children…”

  His voice droned earnestly. I kept stealing glances at Xiao Li to check her expression, and each time she was waiting to give a reassuring nod or small smile. I hear you. I see you. I understand.

  * * *

  ————

  The next morning Xiao Li and the translator visited the apartment where I was staying. From the living room we had a view across the broad courtyard and into our old apartment, but we were too far away to make out any details. I’d arranged raisin buns and berry muffins on a tray, but Xiao Li ate nothing. She sat very straight and looked at me expectantly.

 
; I opened my laptop. “Tell me about your childhood.”

  It was as if we’d never met. In a way, we hadn’t. Xiao Li described growing up in a village of farmers, a hamlet where all energy and strategy were poured into survival. Her family grew wheat, corn, and rice; tended a few apple and peach trees. Xiao Li went to school, which represented generational progress—her own mother couldn’t read or write. China’s infamous “one child policy” was in its heyday, but out of sentiment or stubbornness, Xiao Li’s parents were remorseless violators. They had four children.

  “My mother, I don’t know.” Xiao Li chuckled. “She just loved babies.”

  Party officials turned up and threatened to tear the house down. It wasn’t an idle threat—the neighbors’ home had been razed as punishment for having too many children.

  “They took our TV and fined us,” Xiao Li said. “We had this really small TV, but they took it. The fines were big, though. We had to borrow money to pay.”

  Xiao Li was the eldest child, and the only girl. Her schoolwork was spotty, but her younger brother was considered clever enough for university. Unfortunately, this education would cost more money than the family could coax from the dirt.

  “I was eighteen when I graduated from high school,” Xiao Li said. “I thought I should stop studying and go to work to earn money for him. I didn’t want to be a burden.”

  She said these words flatly—the next event in the story. I was distracted trying to imagine the moment when Xiao Li walked out of village life into the clanging, crashing sprawl of the city.

  “I want to say, clearly, that nobody in my family forced me to do this,” Xiao Li continued. “My father was working very hard, and I wanted to help. I felt responsible.”

  In her mind, I realized, she was testifying. She’d decided upon this language in advance. She wanted me to know that her life was rooted in personal choice. This much dignity, at least, was hers.

  I was still imagining the moment of contact with Beijing, this city perpetually erasing itself and smashing its past, throwing another spike toward the sky. Xiao Li had a toehold. Her father had come to Beijing to scavenge scraps of iron and steel from building sites and work odd construction jobs. It didn’t much matter what he did: any kind of work in Beijing earned more money than farming back home. Xiao Li stayed with her father until she was hired as a waitress in a hot-pot restaurant.

  “But wasn’t it hard, coming here?”

  “I was nervous, but I was also very excited.” She shrugged. “I had never seen such big buildings before, such a big city.”

  Xiao Li moved into a crowded dormitory for restaurant workers. Her hours were exhausting and the salary meager. She worked that job for four years.

  “That’s a long time,” I said.

  I imagined the blazing oils and eye-stinging smoke of hot pot, grueling shifts and nasty customers, a grimy cot in a depressing hostel.

  “I couldn’t afford to be picky.” Xiao Li read the distaste on my face. “I didn’t go to university, so I felt I couldn’t get a better job.”

  “And then?”

  “By then it was time to get married,” she said. “I went home.”

  She paused and then added: “I didn’t like it back home.”

  “Why?”

  “I wasn’t used to it anymore. I wanted to have a better life, to be able to buy myself little things if I liked.”

  I liked the way she put it. I recognized the delicious sensation of having a little bit of money for something you don’t need. She wanted that freedom so badly she dropped the idea of marriage and went back to work in Beijing. This time, she got a job as a saleslady.

  “What were you selling?”

  “You know, like, household products.”

  I imagined mops, dish soap, scissors.

  “Like, shoes.”

  One of those basement stores, then, the dingy too-bright corridors packed with things made so cheaply they didn’t seem real, plastics that smelled like engine fumes, brand-new clothes already falling to pieces.

  “I liked that job,” Xiao Li said, and so I decided to like it, too.

  Her brother once arranged an interview in the design firm where he worked, she said. “But when the day came, I didn’t go.”

  “Why?”

  “I got nervous. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do it. I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t brave enough. Maybe I didn’t want to challenge myself.”

  She paused.

  “I still think about that job sometimes.”

  We sat for a minute.

  “This is the same brother you helped send to university?”

  “Yes.”

  “So he finished school?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He’s here now.”

  “In Beijing?”

  “Yes.”

  “You see him?” This wasn’t what I wanted to ask—I was wondering whether he gave her money or had otherwise made her whole, or whether he simply took her labor as his birthright. I wanted to ask whether she resented him and, if not, how she managed to avoid hard feelings.

  “Yes,” she answered smoothly. “Sometimes I visit him on the weekends.”

  “That’s nice,” I said politely.

  I had never been so deferential and evasive during an interview. But, then again, I’d never been so painfully conscious of cradling a person’s ego in my hands, fragile as a thin glass bulb.

  “How did you end up getting married?”

  “My husband’s classmates set us up. We were both working in Beijing. We went back to my hometown for the wedding banquet, then came back to Beijing and went back to work.”

  “And then?”

  I knew, of course. Everyone knows what comes next, even children chanting nursery rhymes: First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes—

  “I got pregnant.”

  She was twenty-seven years old. She quit her job and went back to the village to give birth. A fortune-teller chose an auspicious name for the baby: Rui Jie, meaning “smart” and “clean.”

  “I wanted to leave the village right away after I finished breastfeeding,” Xiao Li said. “But my mother and my mother-in-law said no. They said, ‘Stay to bond with her.’ I stayed home for a year and a half.”

  “But then you left—”

  “Yes.”

  “And your daughter—Rui Jie—she stayed with her grandparents?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was that like?”

  “I was crying so much. It was so hard,” she said. “I hadn’t realized how hard it was going to be.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’d call her on the phone, and I could hear that she wasn’t recognizing me. The first time I went home to visit her, she didn’t recognize me.” Xiao Li took a breath, but she didn’t cry. She stayed calm and she kept talking. “And I didn’t know what to do.

  “She was under the care of my mother-in-law. I could see that she was tan, she’d been spending too much time in the sun, but I couldn’t complain. I didn’t have the right to say anything.”

  We sat quietly with her sadness between us.

  “When did you start doing domestic work?” I finally asked.

  “Then,” Xiao Li said. “When I came back to Beijing. My sister-in-law told me it would be easier.”

  “Was it?”

  “I liked it. Especially the babies.”

  “But isn’t that hard? Especially when—”

  She nodded, understanding.

  “Working with other people’s children—” She groped. “It’s very hard to process all those emotions. I really loved Max a lot, and the girl I took care of before him, too.”

  She paused.

  “Sometimes they reminded me of my own child.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not
everybody can handle it. I remember one ayi told me, ‘Every time I hold the baby I think of my own baby, and I just can’t do it.’ As for me, the only way I can handle it is to think, ‘This is my own child.’ I pretend it’s my baby.”

  I nodded quickly, squinted into the screen, pretending to study my notes.

  “How’s your daughter now?” I asked. “How’s her heart?”

  “It’s okay now,” Xiao Li said. “We were really worried then. It was a long, hard recovery.”

  “But she’s in school now?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’s the school? You like it?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know.” She paused. “I feel like I owe her a lot.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I thought about money and material things, I didn’t get a chance to be with her and bond with her,” she said. “She is basically a left-behind kid.”

  In truth, there was no “basically” about it. Xiao Li’s daughter was a perfect prototype of China’s left-behind kids. Thanks to strict laws denying children the right to schooling outside their home districts, a generation of children is being raised by grandparents while their parents work in faraway cities.

  “Even now, we’re not very close,” Xiao Li went on. “In the long run, I’m afraid it will have a negative effect on her. She kept asking me, ‘Why do the other kids have parents picking them up from school, why do I have grandparents?’ And then it got worse.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My in-laws died,” she said. “They took care of her since childhood, so my daughter suffered a lot when they died.”

  “What did you do?”

  At first, she said, Rui Jie came to live with her parents in Beijing. But that wasn’t going to work, because the girl couldn’t go to school in the capital. Next she went to live with Xiao Li’s parents, but that was no good, either. She wasn’t used to the extreme poverty, and Xiao Li’s illiterate mother couldn’t help with homework. Rui Jie complained bitterly until, at last, her parents enrolled her in a boarding school. Every eighteen days, the child leaves school for four days and stays with an aunt. The rest of the time, she’s incommunicado.

  “Now she doesn’t have a phone,” Xiao Li said. “It’s not allowed. If there’s an emergency we can contact the headmaster, but that’s it.”