by Alyse Zaftig
Fa shrugged. “I don’t even know what the definition of a mansion is. It’s just a house. It’s a place you live.”
Their driveway was a huge crescent that must have been over a mile long. They had fountains and carefully manicured gardens. I would have admired their flower beds more, but I needed to get inside of a house right now. I didn’t feel safe out here in the open, even outside of Beijing.
The chauffeur opened the door, and I slid out carefully. I was a little wobbly, and Kyle put his arm around my waist after he got out of the car.
“Come in.”
He helped me into the house. I felt drained, like I’d used all of my energy up.
“You’re crashing from the adrenaline. You need to eat something.”
“I’m fine.”
“Just eat,” Fa snarled.
I was tired. I weighed fighting Fa against eating a few bites of something, and I figured that eating was the easier option.
Kyle led me into a huge pantry. “Our housekeeper keeps our snacks here.” He pulled out a pack of Oreos. “I hope you like chocolate.”
“I love chocolate.” I opened the pack and took a bite. I offered it to him, and he took one, too. Fa was reaching in for some Nutter Butters.
“Why do you have American food? It’s so expensive to buy over here, because it’s imported.”
“Our mom thought it was a good idea for us to get accustomed to whatever American eat. It’s kind of disgusting sometimes, you know, with food that’s barely recognizable. She didn’t want us to starve in New York, ignoring the fact that we’ve been to New York at least a dozen times and never starved. She’s a bit anxious, you see. Dad keeps our car on standby around the back just in case she has a panic attack. She’s fine as long as nothing sets her off.” Kyle shrugged. “We humor her.”
I felt incredibly tired, like I was dead on my feet. “Could you point me to a bed or a couch? I think I’m going to fall asleep.”
Kyle and Fa had another one of those wordless moments of twin communication.
“Yeah, I think that I can help you with that.” The twins led me to an elevator. I was dimly surprised, but then I was surprised by my surprise. I’d seen elevators in houses before, and I was behaving like a plebeian in this incredible home. I had to shape up, but I had no energy for it.
They brought me into a red room decorated in a rose them. The walls had a huge mural of a blooming rose garden on them, and the sheets were red. It was a pretty four-poster bed with curtains.
“Our mom got carried away. This is the room that she made for the day when she had a girl. She only has us, though.”
“Don’t you have to pay extra when you have more than one kid?”
“It’s around $10,000 USD.” Fa shrugged. “It’s not that much.”
That sounded like a lot of money to me, but then I was a solidly middle class American. My parents’ salaries were a matter of public record; anybody could see how much they made. I wasn’t on the level of other civil servants, it seemed. They had the kind of money that CEOs and sports stars had.
I couldn't really take it all in.
"Could you let me sleep, please?"
"Yeah, of course. If you need clothes, Mom keeps last season's stuff in this room."
"Last season's?"
"Yeah. She normally throws clothing out, but sometimes she keeps some to give to charity or sneakily wear more than once."
I couldn't even imagine being able to treat clothing like toilet paper. I was way too tired. "Ok."
The twins left me in the beautiful red rose room. I didn't even try to find a toothbrush, cleanser, or mouthwash. I just let my body sink into the softness of the foam mattress, and I fell asleep almost immediately.
Nightmare
In my dream, I was back at the dinner. I needed to find my parents. They were here somewhere. They needed to know that I was safe. Where were they?
I was being crushed by all the people. The twins weren't there to provide a barrier to protect me. I was body slammed from all sides as people jostled to get through the main door. One particularly savage elbow caught me in exactly the wrong place. I face-planted on the floor, and there were what felt like thousands of people stampeding over me.
"MOM!" I screamed. "MOM!"
I was suffocating now, because my diaphragm couldn't draw in enough air with what felt like hundreds of people walking on top of me.
My body was shaking. Was it another bomb?
"Wake up!" I heard a British voice say. "Wake up!"
My eyes fluttered open. I was in a dark room with red tones.
Kyle was sitting on the side of my bed.
"Are you ok? I heard you shouting."
My arms were wrapped tightly around my middle. No wonder I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I loosened them a little bit.
"Yeah. I'm ok."
"That sounded pretty bad. Can I get you a cup of tea or something?"
What a sweetheart. ”I don't really drink tea. I know that it's a big thing over here, but I've never really gotten into it. My mom force fed me tons of tea when we lived in Korea. It smelled like Cheerios, and it did not taste as good. I don't drink it voluntarily now."
"What can I do, then?"
I hesitated. "Could you?" I felt my cheeks heat up. "Could you hold me for a while? I just don't think that I'm going to be able to go back to sleep now."
He didn't hesitate at all. "Of course. Turn."
He pushed my hip so that I was facing away from him, and he became the big spoon behind me. His warm, hard body felt good behind me. He smelled really good. His strong, muscular arm was draped across me. I felt so safe, as if he were taking care of me. I would never normally cuddle like this in a bed in a strange house with a virtual stranger, but this day was anything but ordinary. I’d been through a lot. He nuzzled my neck a little bit, and I felt myself relax and melt slowly into the bed, the tension leaving my body. The bed felt warm and comforting.
I still had an elevated heart rate from the nightmare.
“I can’t sleep.”
“That’s ok. If you want to, we can talk.”
“What should we talk about?”
“Anything you want.”
“I have no idea.”
“Tell me about you. About what you like, your parents, where you’re from. That sort of thing. Just whatever makes you happy.
“My parents are diplomats, as you know. As a tandem couple, they need to be careful about where they were stationed. Too many people wanted to go to Western Europe, so it was really hard to get a tandem tour there. I’d never been to the Eiffel Tower. As a result, my parents ended up in places that ‘would further their careers’ — also known as the boondocks.”
Kyle snorted, “Believe me, I know about that. Go on.”
“When I was a toddler, we were stationed in South Korea. My mom and dad are excellent at picking up languages, so they shot for the languages that were hard for other people to learn and would get them new career opportunities. Korean was one of them. The State Department classifies languages that have non-Latin alphabets as more difficult to learn.
It was really hard on me. The toilets were different from the United States, which were a challenge for someone who had been potty trained on American toilets. I hated the squat toilets, and my mother had a heck of a time getting me to aim.”
I could feel Kyle laughing silently behind me. “This is hilarious.”
Encouraged, I picked up speed. “I was a picky eater as a little kid, which was even worse. I only wanted to eat hot dogs and mac and cheese, both of which are expensive and hard to find in Korea, especially Korea in the 1990s.
They'd fed me rice and fish, plus Asian vegetables. To someone who was used to my grandmother's fantastic cooking — she was a blue-ribbon blueberry cobbler baker, and her Southern fried chicken was absurdly delicious and addictive — it was disgusting.”
“Honestly, I’ve never had blueberry cobbler or Southern fried chicken. Fish and rice are norma
l to me. Does KFC count? ”
“No.”
“I’ll have to try to find some in the United States, then.”
“I had to grow up, and it was in my best interest to learn how to eat foods that I had never seen before. So I got used to eating bulgogi, dolset bibimbap, and other foods. I learned to love spicy squid and fishcake. If I hadn't, I would've been a pretty skinny little kid.
That was not a problem that I had, though. Learning how to enjoy and eat every food as a young child meant that I loved food, all food.”
“I love food, believe me. If you want, I’ll take you to this incredible place for Korean barbecue when it’s safe for you to go out in public. It’s a hole in the wall, and they use traditional grilling techniques instead of the higher-tech electric grills that you get these days. There’s something awesome about the flavor of meat that has smoke in it.”
“That sounds really good.”
“It is. Keep telling me about your childhood.”
I sighed. “It was hard to go to school in so many different countries. When I was little, it was easy to make friends, and I didn't have too much trouble. However, when you get older, you tend to stick with the friends you have. So it was fairly lonely moving from country to country when my parents were done with their tours. The Foreign Service allows you to extend your tours, but the number of tours that you've done in different countries counts towards your qualification for the Senior Foreign Service, so my parents never had. They had an eye on moving upwards.”
“That sounds familiar.” Kyle kissed my hair. “I know what that’s like.”
“They both worked pretty long hours in the Foreign Service. My dad was in the management cone, which meant that he would be shouting into his cell phone at odd hours at Korean landlords who wanted to arbitrarily triple the rents of FS-rented apartments. He had a brief career in real estate before he decided to join the FS, and he was always put in charge of managing property wherever he went. It was probably because nobody else wanted to deal with the locals.
My mom was in the public policy cone, which meant that her major job was hobnobbing with whatever country's elite and cultivating sources. Sometimes that was sketchy for women, but my mom was married. When I was 6, some politician had tried to call my mom around 10 PM, telling her that he had something that she needed to know right away. He wouldn't tell her over the phone. He came into our house and pounced on my mom. My dad, who was in the study, heard her knock over a lamp and got the politician off of my mom. It's the kind of incident that never makes its way into a police report; one, because the politician was a citizen of their country and two, because it looks bad when diplomats are the bad guys.”
“I don’t know if that’s unique to diplomats. I think it’s just part of politics to have this delicate balance. When it comes to police reports and what not, whoever has the biggest bribe can win. It is part of the game.”
“Yeah, I guess it is. I guess I was shocked, because American sensibilities always try to help women, but that's not a universal truth. Being in that cone came with some risks, but Mom definitely had a lot of opportunities. She would go on trips with the presidents of some countries in their helicopters to scope out new opportunities and talk about restoration initiatives. When I was 10, we were on a tour in Colombia. She got called to go on a helicopter ride into the remote part of the Andes with the president and a bunch of other diplomats. They were talking about elevating the region by encouraging agriculture instead of coca cultivation.
Coca requires a certain elevation, and it's easy to grow in the Andes. The indigenous Colombians have been growing it for centuries. It's easy to take the hundreds of dollars per month that you can get from selling coca leaves to the narcotraficantes.”
“What’s a narcotraficante?”
“A drug trafficker.”
“Got it. Continue.”
“The United States was trying to curb the cocaine trade at the source, which is why there were unilateral trade agreements. Colombia definitely benefited from the favorable trade terms with the United States, but it was hard to force the farmers to comply. It was so easy to cultivate coca and so hard to cultivate other crops.
Another problem in the Andes was monoculture. Farmers tended to cultivate one crop and deplete the soil. Mom had continued a huge campaign to educate farmers in the benefits of growing other plants, like soybeans, in order to keep the soil arable. It was an uphill battle, and it took most of her time.”
“China has a lack of arable land. China is huge, but the population can’t be fed by the amount of arable land we have. That’s why we’ve been buying land in other countries.”
“I know. My parents talk about that sometimes. The Chinese own significant amounts of Australia and Africa. My parents were not the kind that fed me an after-school snack when I got home. Latchkey kid is an old term, but it's a pretty good one for the kind of childhood I had. My parents made sure that I was fed, clothed, and reasonably healthy. Beyond that, they didn't care. I kept my grades up, because I would attract their attention if I didn't, but they weren't very involved in my childhood.”
I put my hand on his large, warm hand. The warmth radiated. It felt comforting. “It was hard to move around so much. My cousins in Virginia got to stay in one spot, in one house, with the friends that they'd known since they were babies in Mommy and Me. I could never keep a friend for more than a few years, except for the other Foreign Service brats. We had our own forum, and so many of us were lonely that the Internet was the only way for us to keep in touch. Some of us went to international schools, and some of us went to schools with all the locals. It had been a shock the first time in Korea that a teacher paddled me for disrespect as a first grader. My mom had been shocked that anybody still used corporal punishment, and she'd spoken to the principal about the gap between American and Korean expectations. I was spared the paddle, but it was hard for me, looking different from all the Korean kids in my class.
I did not have skin the color of unblemished snow, which made me stand out a lot in a society where white skin is highly prized. A ton of Korean women buy skin-lightening cream to make their faces whiter, and they are terrified of any sunlight touching their faces. I stood out like a beacon in a classroom full of Asian kids with stick-straight hair.”
“I think you’re beautiful. It’s good that you’re not the same. What makes you different makes you beautiful. Isn’t that a song?”
I smiled, though he couldn’t see it. “It is. My grandmother was a wonderful, beautiful, warm, loving woman from Tappahannock. She took care of me when I was little and my parents were stationed in DC. Most people have good memories of baking cookies with their grandma when they are little, but my grandmother was more than that to me. I went to preschool part-time 3 days a week, because my parents thought that it was important to have me socialized and exposed to germs. Around lunch, my grandmother would come and pick me up. She'd feed me delicious food, and she'd play games with me. On the playground at the park, I was on my own, but she would push me on the swings or help me climb ladders. She was by far the best part of my childhood.
My grandmother died while we were stationed in Korea. We took bereavement leave, and we headed straight home. All of my aunts and uncles were there with all of my cousins. It was a zoo, really. My grandmother was the mainstay of our entire family, the glue that held us all together. When she died, it was like a hole had been torn through the fabric of my family. Nobody knew what to do.
With my parents out of the country anyway, we'd slowly sailed further and further away from that side of the family. My mom and dad talked to their siblings, but I barely knew my cousins. It was a hazard of the job. Even when we were sent back to the United States, my parents didn't have a lot of get-togethers with their families. People were used to us being gone, and we weren't part of their daily life. We lived in DC, too, to be close to the State Department, while everyone else lived outside of DC.
It was a strange, lonely, isolated childh
ood. Even in the United States, I was alone. I was exotic and a new toy when I first entered a new school, but when the new girl magic wore off, I was ignored. I preferred it that way. I didn't like drawing too much attention to myself anyway, learning the hard way that curiosity can turn into disgust over cultural differences. I'd picked up habits while abroad that made it hard to fit back into the kind of lives that my cousins led. Living in America included the kind of adjustments that I had to make to live in any new country. I might be an American citizen, and I had a beautiful black diplomatic passport to prove it, but I spent two-thirds of my life away from the United States.
In all the American movies, prom and senior year are amazing times. There are senior pranks, and it matters who the prom king and queen are. In Asia, they don't have American proms. My senior year at the International School of Beijing about a half hour away from home, next to the airport, was a nonevent. It was just the last year of school that I had to take before I flew back to the United States for college. I had never lived in one place for four years before, and I am looking forward to it. Not having to learn my way around a new country with a new language after 3 years in one place sounds like a lot of fun, and I want to know what it would be like. Heck, I might even go to graduate school in the same place.”
“That might be nice. It sounds like you would enjoy it.”
“I might be tired of moving at this point. At 19, I have seen a lot of the world. My parents have been stationed in Northern Africa, Western Latin America, and now Eastern Asia.
My dad has steadily moved up the ranks, and he is now in the Senior Foreign Service. The Command of Mission is the ambassador, who was a political appointee. Former Governor Key of Washington state was a major fundraiser for the current president, and the president paid his debt back in full. Governor Key was a good guy who was also good at the political game. He had captured the hearts of all the Chinese when a photo of him went viral on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.
It was a pretty simple picture. He was with his daughter, who was wearing a pink Hello Kitty backpack. He was wearing a simple black Targus backpack. They were waiting in line at Starbucks.
