The Fortunes (31 page)

Mostly, though, there's some essential math at play here. How do you expect to take one of theirs without them taking one of yours?
Gotcha!
indeed.

He's relieved when he sees the hotel bar still open, hurries into its hushed, shadowy embrace.

As much as he resents the other adopters, he knows they resent him too.

Bev suggested as much, albeit wistfully, when she confided in him over dinner one night, “Oh, how I envy you, John, and little Mei Mei. You'll be able to take her out to the park, and parties, the mall, and not have everyone know she's adopted. Even if you and Nola are together, people will think the little one is your own flesh and blood. That'll make a difference, I reckon.”

(Bev told him another time that Lily loved helping out around the home. “Her favorite thing when she first came home with us was folding laundry. Imagine! My little Chinese laundry, I call her!” She laughed, and then covered her mouth as if to catch the words.)

John had nodded along with others around the table, and remembering it now, he finally grasps that all their study of things Chinese—all their acquisitions of scrolls and knickknacks (Eric and Scott have arranged for a rosewood dresser to be shipped to them in Seattle for their daughter's room), which make him think of pet supplies to furnish a habitat—is a compensation for what he has: looking the part. And they know it too, and resent him for how easily it comes. In particular, he's felt it when people ask how long the process has been for him and Nola.

Nine months, Nola says, proud of the symmetry. But everyone else has been waiting a year, eighteen months, two years in one case. “Serendipity, I guess,” Nola says, and it may be—a fluke of timing—but he knows the others suspect they got special treatment because he's Chinese.

The only couple less liked on the tour are Norman and Amanda. They're “preferential adopters,” as they're quick to point out. “We could have kids of our own,” Amanda begins. “But why bring another life onto this overcrowded planet?” Norman finishes for her. It makes a kind of sense—John doesn't disagree with them on the issue of overpopulation—and yet Norman's righteousness grates. Other couples on the trip, after all, have tried very hard, gone to extreme lengths, to bring another life onto the planet. “It's egotism, plain and simple,” Norman said the first night, “to want to perpetuate our own genes, and suicidal on a planetary, species-wide level.”

“Egotism indeed!” Nola fumed later in their room.

“Ignore him,” John counseled (the man has a receding hairline
and
a ponytail). But he can't take his own advice. Norman fascinates him. Their fate, after all, is his
choice,
his principle.

“You share the Chinese government's position on population then, the one-child policy?” he asked one morning over breakfast (toast for John, rice porridge for Norman), and Norman nodded sagely. “A regrettable necessity.” But this is a tricky response. They—their group as a whole—are beneficiaries, indirectly, of the policy, even if they mostly deplore it. Chinese families who can have only one child get rid of their girls—sometimes to orphanages, but sometimes by killing them, aborting them, or abandoning them after birth. The policy is in large part why they're here, these Westerners, yet it's also a source of heartbreak, broken homes and families. They are already practicing what they will tell the children they haven't even received yet when they ask about their biological parents. For the sake of the kids, they don't want to make these shadowy figures into villains (you can't tell them they didn't love them or didn't want them, you have to say that they couldn't keep them, the adoption books advise). Much easier to make the law the villain, the government. If they're saving these children from something, it's from the consequences of this law, and yet here they are, about to gain from it.

It's a moral knot, but one that in Norman's big hands seems to unravel, and the rest of them envy him this bluff confidence more than anything.

But John can't let it lie. For him, the law isn't the problem per se. The problem is that Chinese families want boys, a cultural phenomenon (albeit one hardly unique to the Chinese).

“But if you make Chinese culture the bad guy,” Nola observed back in their room—Norman having gone off exploring with Amanda—“you run the risk of alienating the girls from their heritage and potentially damaging their self-image.”

“But why,” John wanted to know, “should they have to maintain any connection with a culture that devalues them and has cast them out? Because they
look
Chinese is why,” he answered his own question. “Because we know they will look different and be treated as if they're different in
our
society. We're giving them something to fall back on when they're discriminated against.”

“Oh, come on,” Nola hissed. “It's not that bad.” (Nola, who had felt the need to warn her mother before she met John that he was half Chinese.)

“Really? You think if we were all in Romania now we'd be talking about keeping our kids connected to Romanian culture?” (
Are you sure he isn't black?
her mother replied.)

They'd fought in fierce whispers, not wanting anyone to hear them through the walls, the way they'd have sex if they ever had sex.

The whole “culture” thing, for John, is a defense against racism, an anticipation of it, but also perhaps in some obscure way a perpetuation of it. “If even their parents see them as other, what hope do these babies have of assimilating?”

“If you believe that,” Nola wailed, “why are we even here? If you had such a shitty childhood, why are we doing this?”

John wonders himself. Norman, he knows, would call this kind of thinking very Western. “The Chinese,” he has pointed out, “are matter-of-fact about adoption. They see it as practical . . . on the parents' part. We need children to look after us in our old age.” He and Amanda laughed as if they couldn't imagine ever growing old.

“What do
you
think about all this?” John asked Napoleon over lunch one day. They'd just watched the noodles they were eating being made—oohing and aahing at the show as if at a magic act, the noodles appearing from the twisted, stretched dough as if by sleight of hand—but now they paused in their slurping. Napoleon grinned at them. “Is good! Good for babies, good for mommies and daddies. Also more Chinese girls in America now, for Chinese American boys for marry.”

Such guileless, sunny chauvinism! It made John laugh, but only him.

“No offense, Miss Nola,” Napoleon said, small head bobbing birdlike on her slender neck. “You so
ho leng,
beautiful. Skin like white jade.”

Nola gave her bright, tight smile. “I don't think John ever even dated a Chinese.”

“What? Really!” they asked. “Never?” And now, John thought, they were calling
him
racist, offended on behalf of their not-yet, not-quite daughters. “They were always going with white boys,” he said with a sour smile. “Aren't all our desires racist in one way or another?”

They paused to watch the cook demonstrating how to make shaved noodles, slicing them off a long loaf of dough and flipping them acrobatically into the boiling water.

“Besides,” Norman said, changing the subject magisterially, “all this thinking is very twentieth-century. The pendulum is swinging back. Already boys outnumber girls in Chinese schools. Within a couple of decades the gender imbalance could be as much as twenty percent. What will all those boys do when it comes time to marry?” Eric and Scott exchanged a glance. “Maybe the girls will finally be valued for their scarcity.”

The little boys they've seen on the streets, in parks and pavilions, are often only children and plump (or just bundled up), and Jeannine has remarked that the little fatties, round as the blown-sugar animals they clutch, will be lucky to find wives. But John is an only child and was husky as a kid, and he finds himself feeling oddly sympathetic to the piggy-eyed, pink-cheeked brats.

“Do you know what you're going to have?” Norman asked Napoleon. Just like that, John marveled.

She shook her head.

“What are you and your husband hoping for?” Norman pressed, and she blushed.

“Give her a break, Norm,” John said, which was enough to stop the questioning. Norman doesn't like being called Norm. Norm is the name of a fat man in a bar. Norman is whippet-thin, tall, a cyclist. John pictures him all in Lycra, skinny and tubular as his bike frame. Behind his back the others call him “Normal.” When it thundered one evening they called it a “dark and normy night.” John is responsible for most, if not all, of these lines.

One consequence of the gender imbalance looming in China, John recalls in the bar, is the likelihood of increased prostitution. It's already happening, if the hotel is anything to go by. After dinner, the long rosewood bar was lined with young women. In Beijing they snaked through the lobby in a loose line, as if on the catwalk at a fashion show—“knockouts in knockoffs,” as Norman put it—heels clicking on the marble floors like beads on an abacus. Now, even though the bar is almost empty, the girls at work somewhere in the hotel, their absence seems to fill it. He watches one of the stragglers close her phone with a snap, sashay toward the elevators in her mini-cheongsam, her stilettos lean as chopsticks. There's a single girl with a glossy bob left at the end of the bar. He watches her dial, hang up, dial again. He wonders if she was the one who called him. He wonders if he was her first call of the night.

She has set her phone down to take a drink, exchange a few words with the bow-tied bartender. John's curious if she'll approach him, feels obscurely rejected that she's barely cast a glance in his direction. He's used to a kind of sexual invisibility in the U.S., but here he's affronted.

He takes out his Little Red Book, reminds himself he's never been attracted to Chinese girls. He attributes it to being brought up surrounded by images of blondes, Western ideals of beauty. Conditioned. Nola, his “occident waiting to happen,” is all sturdy curves, her milky complexion set off by rosy cheeks (and, to his enduring delight, rosy breasts, rosy thighs, rosy buttocks). By comparison Chinese girls tend to seem, well . . . girlish to him (their efforts at sexiness a kind of vampish dress-up, not to be taken seriously), if not boyish (slim-hipped and flat-chested, though he's dimly aware it's this very quality that makes Chinese men seem effeminate). He considers himself immune to the Western fetish of otherness, even if—perhaps
because
—his father wasn't. And yet he envies these girls too, their desirability. He recalls roommates in college extolling the appeal of Asian girls, calling him a lucky dog. But he didn't feel lucky. White guys chased Asian chicks; white chicks ignored Asian guys. Not for nothing does he jokingly call Nola his trophy wife.

On the plane, looking at the young Chinese stewardesses, so different to the aging attendants on U.S. fleets, he'd tried to picture his mother in her youth. She'd quit her job after she married, and his father had quit long-haul flights, settling for regional routes that meant he could spend two nights out of every three at their new home in Seattle (though he called short-haul trips “milk runs”). John's mother had told him once that the Captain hadn't quit sleeping with stewardesses, though. “Sluts of the skies,” she'd told him acridly. In fact, the only time he'd recognized his mother in the Chinese flight attendants was when one of them barked at someone to sit down while they were still taxiing to the gate.

Why aren't Chinese prostitutes popular with American men?
(If only, he thinks reflexively.)
Because half an hour later you're horny again.
Was that one of the Captain's? One of Jordison's?

He flicks through his Little Red Book to the section on women. “It has become necessary to arouse the great mass of women . . . to take their place on the labor front.” Mao too? In his head he hears the tinny rimshot of an irony more wearying than jet lag.

He steals a glance at the girl along the bar, as if she's heard it too, and catches her uncrossing and crossing her long legs on the barstool. He looks away too quickly. Between them the bartender polishes glasses intently, as if he's trying to will his smudge of downy mustache to thicken.

A memory of Singapore's strict censorship laws, of a part with the famous bans on gum and long hair, occurs to him. This was back in the late eighties. The movie
When Harry Met Sally
was out. John had seen it in the States and then flown to Singapore with his mother to visit family during his summer vacation. He'd been homesick, miserable, had jumped at the chance to go see the movie again when a couple of slightly older female cousins—a lawyer and an accountant, though they were both lovely enough to be local news anchors, the acme of Chinese American beauty, back home—had suggested it. The cousins were thrilled that the movie was even being shown in Singapore. Why? John had wondered; it was an innocuous enough flick (wiseass that he was, he liked to say he'd enjoyed it more the first time he'd seen it, when it was called
Annie Hall
).

“Because of the orgasm!” one cousin had giggled, covering her mouth, referring to the film's famous scene in which Meg Ryan noisily and lengthily fakes an orgasm in a deli. “I bet the censors cut it” was the other cousin's—the lawyer's—prediction, but lo and behold, when they saw the movie, the scene was still there. Afterward the cousins, while exultant that it had been left in, couldn't see what all the fuss was about: “It wasn't even that funny, lah.” John had shrugged, too embarrassed to discuss orgasms with these two beautiful women, at once older and more innocent than he, and yet . . . he could have sworn the scene was funnier in the U.S., funnier and
longer,
which meant, he figured later, that the Singaporean censor had decided . . . what? That faking an orgasm was fine, but for only so long? And what did that say about Chinese women's orgasms? he reflected. (Knowing at the same time that it surely said as much, if not more, about Chinese, probably male censors.)