by Gish Jen
I opened a Thermos to mix some formula, just glad that there were raised markings on the baby bottle so I could tell how many ounces of water I was pouring. Was I right to try the soy-based powder first? So many Chinese babies were lactose-intolerant. Milk-based formula, though, was closer to what they were used to, people said, and less constipating. I had brought both, in any case, and a selection of nipples—traditional and natural with both cross-cut and regular openings—all of which fit the special no-air-bubble bottle. The moment of truth. Wendy took a suck, then spat the nipple. Did it taste funny? Did she not like that nipple? I was considering adjustments when, funny-tasting or not, she tried again and began to drink. Happy, I watched her gulp. I stroked her fat legs.
— Good for you! I cooed; then began to piece together the picture, somehow, beginning with the cigarette butt. Apparently it had hit someone, who had hurled a retaliatory melon at the car. The car had slowed; a crowd had formed. It was in an effort to get past them that the driver had hit this man. This something or another, he had apparently said. Perhaps he had called the man a turtle’s egg or one of the other odd things the Chinese found so offensive.
Of course, we had not had our headlights on. Even in the dead of night, the drivers drove without lights then, to save the bulbs.
Was the man hurt? It was hard to see past all the faces pressed against our window. Carnegie, too, had disappeared from view. Kneeling down, I guessed. Then he stood, sure enough—there he was, for an instant. How substantial he looked beside the other men, even in the near dark. How tall, how well fed, how well clothed. Commanding a spot of his own—people stood back from him a little. Of course, he was the same race as they were, but he seemed a different race; if I had been walking by, I might have thought him white. In the hotel, his button-down shirt had looked less than fresh. Out in the street, though, he looked crisp, rich, young, lucky. American. He stood with authority, hands on his hips. Gestured, then took off his beautiful shirt.
With no particular flourish—not bothering with the buttons. Carnegie simply grabbed the back of the collar and pulled his shirt off over his head in a motion as familiar to me as the feel of his back. Now he was naked to the waist—a pale, smooth expanse of shock. Many people stared; others continued to yell. What did those men want? There were more of them now—a hundred of them, maybe. Or maybe more—a mob. No women. The accident had become a man’s business—possibly because of Carnegie’s naked chest? As most of the men wore those thin undershirts, with deep armholes, I could make out their sharp ribs heaving as they shouted, pointed, glowered. I made out their scrawny necks and wiry arms.
CARNEGIE / — Could we not at least give the man a ride to the hospital? I asked. Having run him over, after all.
But it was no go. Mr. Qian and the driver, suddenly a team, adamantly opposed even this basic humanitarian action, never mind that the man’s leg was bleeding badly. I had no choice but to remove my shirt to serve as a tourniquet.
BLONDIE / — Should I go see what’s going on? I asked the air. Try to help translate?
Giving out a reassuring air, I rummaged coolly through the diaper bag again, this time for a cloth diaper so I could burp Wendy. Wendy could hold her head up easily. All the same, I supported her neck with my left hand.
The engine was still running—galumphing unhealthily, sending a message about itself that the driver or Carnegie could receive, but that I could not. Fan belt? Engine mounts?
— Lizzy, I said. Do me a favor and climb into the front seat again, would you?
— Why are these people staring at us? Why are they yelling?
— I want you to turn the engine off, please. Now.
— Aren’t you going to say I shouldn’t say ‘these people’?
— Now.
Lizzy grumbled but dove into the front seat a second time, her skinny legs midair, one sandal dangling. She kicked over the bag into which we’d stuffed Wendy’s orphanage clothes.
Wendy burped—a loud, solid, whole-body burp.
— Good girl! I told her, feeling the warm wet through the diaper on my shoulder.
It had been a long time since I’d burped a baby; I’d forgotten what a satisfaction it was. I’d forgotten too how surprised the baby always seemed, and yet how instantly ready for whatever the next moment might bring.
She began to cry again. Should we have left her with the foster mother? What were we doing?
How the car stank of cigarette smoke! It was in the fabric of the seats.
— Which way do you turn it, anyway? Lizzy asked.
I settled Wendy back down for another few ounces of formula, stuffing her orphanage clothes back into their bag. Those precious clothes, after all. I knew how much they would mean to her one day.
Unfortunately, as Lizzy pushed away from the steering wheel, levering her body over the seat back, she hit the horn. A long beep, unbelievably loud. Wendy startled just at the point she might have fallen asleep, and began to cry yet again. People pressed even closer to the glass now—faces, body parts. The car began to rock. Not so much because anyone was pushing it, exactly—it was more the sea motion of the mob. Or so it seemed. Where was Carnegie? Someone banged on the roof.
— This car is a tin can, I told Wendy, offering her the bottle again.
She was too upset, though, to take it. Long past the newborn whimper stage, she had a good strong wail.
— What is going on anyway? demanded Lizzy, banging some more on the window.
The car stopped rocking, then began again. Luan. I remembered a professor lecturing at the front of a classroom. Chaos. Luan.
That smoke smell.
If only we had not turned off the engine! The running engine had kept people back, I now realized.
The formula sloshed. Wendy was still crying.
— Dad! Lizzy called, starting to cry, too. — Dad!
For there was bare-chested Carnegie, waving his arms, engulfed. I held on to our wailing Wendy, trying not to panic. The car was rocked so hard that it heeled like a sailboat, the seat tilting at a thirty-degree angle; I braced myself with one hand in order to avoid sliding into Lizzy.
— This is like sailing, I said calmly. We ought to hike out.
— Are we going to tip over? Lizzy sounded terrified. — I don’t know how to sail.
The car thudded back to the ground, bouncing. Where was Carnegie?
— I can’t see Daddy, yelled Lizzy. And will that baby ever shut up?
— In this family, we do not use the phrase ‘that baby,’ I said.
— That baby! That baby!
I tried the bottle yet again. Wendy, thankfully, took it. Quieted.
— They’re hurting Dad! shouted Lizzy. I know it. We have to go help Dad!
— Lizzy. You cannot get out of the car. Do you hear me?
The car began to rock again. We were set back down and heaved back up, set back down and heaved back up. The pitch was so steep now we could not keep from sliding.
Still Wendy, amazingly, drank.
— We’re going to go over! shrieked Lizzy. We’re going to tip over!
Was she right?
The wildness in the theater, that boy who almost fell out of the balcony.
— Calm down, I said. Then: — Lizzy!
I grabbed her forearm just as the whole car really did tip over.
The baby!
The car landed on its side, so that Wendy and I were heaped on top of Lizzy, who screamed. Our belongings avalanched down on us; Wendy’s head hit the glass. I dropped the bottle. Bodies thumped against the window glass above us—much yelling. We appeared to be at the bottom of a pile of people.
— My arm! Lizzy cried.
Wendy shrieked, her whole body clenched.
— Are you all right? It’s all right, it’s all right, I cooed at Wendy, trying to right myself.
— You’re stepping on my hair! cried Lizzy.
I managed a kind of half crouch, standing on a side window, which cracked but, to my surprise,
held. Wendy by a miracle was still on my arm. One of my feet was on the diaper bag; the other on the panda. Was Lizzy hurt? Dampness—Wendy needed a new diaper.
— Lizzy. Lizzy. Can you straighten up? Here, try to sit up.
CARNEGIE / Lizzy sat up only, apparently, to see calm Blondie keel over. I slogged my way through the crowd to find Lizzy popped up through a window as if from the hatch of a submarine, cradling the baby with her good arm.
— She’s making my arm hot! she cried.
For her part, Wendy, astoundingly, had fallen asleep. Her hair bow was askew but still affixed to her fuzzy head.
The police dispersed the crowd, wielding their sticks with the delicacy of mad apes.
Meanwhile, Mr. Qian, reinforced now by a Chinese Frankenstein, continued to insist that we foreigners be removed from the scene immediately. Before the injured man was seen to; before the injured man—who had lost a lot of blood but was conscious enough to swear—was taken anywhere.
And so it was that by the time Blondie came to, we were being grandly escorted in a brand-new, air-conditioned Toyota van to the hotel, where we could at last let Blondie lie down; see about Lizzy’s swollen arm (a sprain); and liberate the baby from her distinctly gooey diaper.
BLONDIE / There was poop on everything.
Wendy cried all night.
Her orphanage clothes were lost.
CARNEGIE / As for myself, I had been shoved a few times but, lo and behold, had escaped with my life, I reported. Though of course my shirt was history.
Later we discovered that—just our luck—a local textile factory had shut its fair doors that very afternoon. One of those gloriously inefficient, state-run enterprises, this was, to which one could only say good riddance in the long run. But in the short run, how were people supposed to live? And what about their pensions? Et cetera. In the process of closing, the factory leaders had conveniently blamed American quotas for what was happening. Never mind their fantastic mismanagement, they kept anger at bay with rumors: that America set quotas because it could not compete with China. That America was afraid of China. That America was determined to keep China weak.
Or so we understood via a chance dinner, once we got back, with Peanut Butter Clark, as we called him. Who, it turned out, was in textiles himself, and had, what’s more, learned much from the Belgian professors. Over peach cobbler he argued that the mob was about nationalistic resentment.
Did the crowd even realize we were American, though? we wondered as we did the dishes. Maybe any car, any sign of privilege, would have drawn ire.
How lucky, in any case, that we’d lived to analyze the tale.
BLONDIE / I wanted to report the incident, but Carnegie just wanted to get home. We’d been in China too long already, he said, and what good would it do? The man was okay, or at least that’s what the guide said. In fact, we would never know.
— Do you realize we’ve been gone for five weeks? he said.
And: — Please remember they haven’t signed off on the adoption yet.
CARNEGIE / Shots—poor Wendy. Papers papers papers.
BLONDIE / What artwork we brought back!
— Look at the workmanship, I said. The detail. The colors.
My sisters framed every last paper cutting. My brothers wore their fur-lined vests all winter.
CARNEGIE / Making fine use of gravity, Doc Bailey parked Chinese boxes on every available horizontal surface. I.e., his home desk, his work desk, the cocktail table, the hall table. Anywhere there wasn’t a box, there was a bowl. He dusted his cork carving with the puffer cleaner for his camera lens.
Still Lizzy insisted she was never ever going back to China. Nothing traumatic could be recounted without Lizzy putting in, You think that’s bad, you won’t believe what happened in China. At least the memory was sometimes comforting: the day she fell out of a tree and broke her arm, for example, she did tell the doctor, It wasn’t as scary as what happened to me in China.
BLONDIE / Of course, we did not respond to these comments. Naturally.
This infuriated her.
— Why don’t you ever say anything when I talk about what happened in China? she demanded.
— The accident was upsetting, I said sometimes, when Lizzy brought it up.
Other times, I said: — You know, what happened to us was very unusual. Most people go to China and have a perfectly nice time. Think how you would feel if we’d left after the Great Wall.
But Lizzy began to elaborate on what was the matter with the trip, in addition to the accident.
— It was really crowded, she would say. All these people pushing. And it was so hot! Like an oven! Only hotter. And the mosquitoes—once I got fifty bites in one day. I am never ever going back there.
Later the conventional wisdom held that it was important to bring children to China before they were nine—that after nine they sometimes developed negativity. Lizzy was six. It should have worked out.
do you really want to shut down lizzy’s real self, that’s the question, e-mailed Gabriela. do you really want her to grow up saying the nice thing until she herself doesn’t know what she thinks?
Of course not, I wrote back. But what am I going to do?
have you tried aromatherapy? i know it sounds flaky. but you might try lavender spray. lavender is calming.
CARNEGIE / Whose house was this? Smelling like a country-home outlet store. I was half afraid, walking in, that I was about to behold a trunk show of faux naïvery, the sort of folk junk with which corporate America has thoughtfully sought to homeify our mobile society. Heart and goose dish towels, picket-fence napkin holders. Items meant to stop us mid–rat race, that we might pay homage to the stencil.
What a relief to find Blondie laboring with Lizzy instead, on a photo album of good memories. Freeing the birds! The Great Wall! First days with Wendy! (After the accident, that was.) Sprawled on the great-room rug, obscuring at least six of its cabbage roses, Blondie and Lizzy were ringed by acid-free mounting supplies. (Thanks to her art-restorer mother, Blondie had a horror of the non-archival.) That Lizzy might help write the captions, Blondie was giving her a choice of markers. The passion purple? The flamingo pink? Lest I fail to recognize this as a mother-daughter moment, the sun obligingly backlit them, gently suffusing the scene with something peachy rosy. The exact color you would imagine called Sunset.
But already in school Lizzy had learned that there could be many different versions of a fairy tale. Using the legend of the gingerbread man, for example, she had done exercises where she filled in the parts of the story that seemed to be missing in a particular version. Now she brilliantly applied what she had learned to the China photo album. She wrote:
What you don’t see in this story is how crowded it was, and how people pushed, and how hot it was, like an oven.
Blondie frowned at her pen assortment.
BLONDIE / Any mother would have been dismayed, yet I was particularly so. How had I ended up an outsider in my own family? The person who could never admit how hard she herself had found China—who had to be more careful than everyone else. Who felt, I suppose, a kind of guest.
When I strolled Wendy through town now I was reminded of the days when having a child of another race was simply a matter of fending off ignorance. How simple that was—how easy to know what was right. When people asked, Is she yours? or, Where did you get her? I could laugh and feel proud—of myself, of my family. It was a species of vanity. I had struggled against it when Lizzy was a baby. But now, I sometimes brought Wendy out into the world to feel that challenge, and my own fine resistance. I had always drawn strength from the fact that my hair next to Lizzy’s should be a picture that challenged the heart. Now I drew on it purposefully, the way other women drew on the knowledge that they were intelligent or thin. I had had the heart to take these children in, after all. Had I not loved them deeply and well, as if they were from the beginning my own?
7
A Kind of Guest
CARNEGIE / Still,
confoundingly, Lan refused to set a place for herself at the dinner table. Still, patiently, we set a place for her. She had proven herself knife-and-fork competent; still, hospitably, we provided chopsticks every day, and a cup of hot tea, so she wouldn’t feel she had to drink our cold water.
The water business—I understood that much, my mother having drunk everything room temperature.
Gently, sensitively we inquired, did she like the food? Serve yourself, we said, please. Serve yourself. But though she half-smiled back and did eat, it was nibblingly. One bite, two.
Several evenings Blondie left food out for Lan at the base of her stairs. An after-school snack, in case she was hungry when she came home.
She never touched it.
BLONDIE / Wrote Gabriela:
you know what she is? she is chopsticks.
I e-mailed back:
Isn’t it more understandable, though? For her to be chopsticks than for us to be forks? I think it is more understandable.
She replied:
it’s more understandable if you understand it.
WENDY / She has no place in America, that’s what she says late at night in her apartment. Or that’s what she means. ‘No any place’ is what she actually says.
— America is cold, she says. In China, many more people help you.
— Help you? says Lizzy. I thought people were mostly out to get you.
— Help you too, insists Lanlan.
Sometimes Lizzy and I go over to her apartment after she gets back from class, when we are supposed to be asleep. We eat snacks. Nothing tastes right in America, she has no appetite, but she still likes eating with us, we find out. And so we come, so she’ll eat and not starve, most of the time we boil up some of those frozen dumplings that she said from the beginning were just like the ones you can get in China. We eat chicken ones, and pork ones, and vegetable ones.
