What Was Mine (26 page)

That is what I am, in this place of refuge. A no-country woman. I'm lucky, of course, to have a refuge. But how would it feel to spend the rest of my life here? I can't work without papers. But even if I had them, what work could I get, not being able to speak the language? I'm studying with a tutor, but I don't expect I'll ever master it. One of the few words I thought I knew in Chinese was the word for “light.” It was Mia's first word.
Dengdeng
, Wendy taught her to say, pointing to track lights in the ceiling. But my tutor tells me
dengdeng
isn't the word for “light.” The word for “light” is
deng
.
Dengdeng
is baby talk, like calling a horse “horsie.” Word repetition is used only by children. I'll always sound like a child here, with childish thoughts, an imbecile.

I am sweeping the front stoop with an ancient straw broom and a breeze undoes my work with a drift of cherry blossom petals. Beside the stoop is a bush with a frenzy of yellow foliage growing out of it, wild as Mia's hair used to look coming out of the shower, before she'd take her wide-toothed comb to it. How oppressed I sometimes felt by that hair, by her desire to leave it unmanaged, her refusal to
brush it, claiming that brushing ruins the ends. She'd read that somewhere, a claim that seemed preposterous to me, who was raised to believe in the habit of brushing one hundred strokes every day. How much stock I put in her neat appearance, which, to me, meant a glossy sheet falling sleekly down the back of her uniform blouse. Now I see that her desire to leave her hair untamed was a harmless attempt to claim individuality. I'm sorry I discouraged it. I'm sorry, I breathe useless apology into the wind. Mistakes I made as a mother. Regrets. Mia's days were proscribed: playdates and practices and after-school activities fit together as tightly as puzzle pieces. There were no unplanned spaces in which a mind could idle. I should have allowed her boredom. I should have been less indulgent, more vigilant. I should have spent more time with her after Wendy left. Would Marilyn have done better? I can't let my mind go there.

I can't get a job.

I can't make friends among expats who would surely see me for only the worst thing I have done.

My visa is good for seven more months. And then what? What will happen to me?

The falling blossoms make a pink path and I imagine following it, setting out on a road to oblivion.

T
oday, Marilyn asked me about Lucy.

She was kneeling on little pads she strapped to her knees, not looking up from the row of arugula she was picking for dinner. I was filling a basket with cherry tomatoes. Gardening is new to me and I still haven't stopped being amazed by being able to walk into your backyard and pick out a meal.

“Was she a good mother?” Marilyn wanted to know.

Marilyn never asked about Lucy this directly before and I never wanted to talk about her to anyone here. Especially Marilyn. Why would she want to talk about my having another mom. I can't call Marilyn “Mom.” I try not to call her anything.

When I didn't know what to say, she stood up with her basket and I watched her kneelers go back and forth on her legs as she came to help me with the tomatoes.

Lucy wasn't a “homey” mother like Marilyn was, who made us purple juice for breakfast every day, surprisingly tasty, waking us with the roar of a mixer spotting the wall tiles with colorful specks of kale, beets, carrots, who only served us bread she'd made herself, who kept a huge freezer in the garage stocked with homemade snacks in frosty Ziplocs. The only things in our little freezer in New York were pints of Häagen-Dazs and blue ice-wraps left over from my high school sports injuries.

Lucy hadn't been there to greet me after school with snacks and questions about my day—Ayi had done that. She hadn't cooked except when Ayi wasn't there, and then we usually had takeout. Lucy didn't spend anywhere near the time being a mother that Marilyn did. So I said what seemed true, and what I knew Marilyn wanted to hear. “She wasn't as good a mother as you.”

But as soon as I said it, my stomach lit with flashes of memory: the smell of Lucy's shirt as I sat behind her, on a bike seat, passing runners in Central Park, the thrill I felt as one of them high-fived me; making homemade Play-Doh with her at the stove when she let me stir and add drops of color; her hands covered in glue as she stayed up all night with me in fifth grade, fixing my map of Egypt out of papier-mâché; her excitement when I got the part of Tom in Tom Sawyer, regretting she couldn't be there opening night, but then she flew home early from a meeting in London, surprising me in the front row. She'd bring me on shoots for commercials where I did my homework in a director's chair, everyone going out of their way to be nice to me, because she was the boss. Once, I saw Sarah Jessica Parker in an elevator;
Sex and the City
was shooting on a different floor and Lucy spoke up and introduced me, as if I were somebody.

Marilyn's eyes were shaded by the big straw hat she wears to shield her face from wrinkles, but when she adjusted it, I could see tears. I saw I'd said the wrong thing. She didn't want to hear that my childhood hadn't been perfect.

“But I loved growing up in New York,” I added. “I liked going to museums on school field trips and musicals on Broadway and
The Nutcracker
at Christmas and have school recess in Central Park and a sleepover birthday party at the Plaza once, like Eloise.” Suddenly I got an ache in my stomach. I missed it all. I missed my mom. I missed sitting on opposite sofas, watching
Gilmore Girls
with her. I missed my bed, I missed my room, I missed things I didn't
expect, like the smell of our house, which is a place I can never go back to. It would make me too sad.

“Mommy, look!” Chloe's voice rang out from the other side of the yard, where she was jumping on the trampoline they call a rebounder. Each of us was supposed to use it a half hour a day to transport nutrients through our system, to drain our tissues of toxins.

But Marilyn didn't look. Her arms were going around me in a hug. I smelled the sweet peppermint Dr. Bronner's we all used instead of gels or soaps that have aluminum in them.

Usually, when Marilyn hugged me, I relaxed into her arms, but this time something in me resisted.

“Mommy, look!” Chloe called again, bounding higher this time. There was no way she could hurt herself, the trampoline was shielded by a protective wall of netting.

“I'm looking,” I called to Chloe, but I knew my attention wasn't what Chloe wanted.

M
ia's not getting enough rest. Chloe wakes up sometimes and sees her reading her iPad in bed. I tell Mia that screen light depresses her melatonin, but she doesn't listen.

When she was born, after the scare in the delivery room, they put her into my arms and I didn't recognize her. She was long and thin and dark. Not the plump, pink-cheeked baby I'd imagined was floating inside me. At first, she didn't seem related to me. She seemed like a stranger. But after a few days, that stranger evolved into Natalie—and I came to understand her and her wants and needs almost better than I did my own. So I thought that maybe my daughter's coming back to me was like this. Someday soon I'd understand all of her again because she was once a physical part of me.

I put lavender drops on her pillow, but she still can't sleep.

T
he Blind People's Massage Parlor. Wendy says a massage will realign my chi. She says massages are medicinal here, good for the health. The massage parlor isn't a spa, it's more like a clinic. No scented candles or fluffy white robes or sweating pitchers of cucumber water. Outside the entrance, two old ladies stretch out on vinyl Barcaloungers, reading newspapers, while white-coated men on stools rub their purpled, gnarly feet.

Inside, in the massage section, shower curtains separate paper-covered mattresses that are flat as cutting boards, and almost as hard. How different from massage rooms I am used to, humming with soft music and white-noise machines. Under low-watt bare bulbs, I take off my shirt and pants and fold them on a plastic stool and nest my face in a hole flowering with paper towels. Soon foreign fingers are divining my ills, the silence broken only by the rustle of the curtains, a distant cough or a groan. The
slap, slap, slap
indicating that a session is over.

The hands work over my shoulders, kneading the muscles on either side of my spine, relieving me of the weight I am carrying, granting blissful distraction, temporary respite from the weight of my bones.

I am a child again. It is a dream so real I feel I am standing in the old bedroom I shared with my sister, Cheryl. Cheryl isn't there. The
door to our closet is open and I notice that the closet is a lot bigger than I'd realized. It is big as a field—in fact it
is
a field, and standing in the middle of it is a horse. I run through the tall grass to pet his coat gleaming like honey. He doesn't have a saddle and I run my hand over his bumpy back and wish I knew how to ride him. The horse nuzzles me in a way that seems an invitation to mount him, and once astride, I see that riding is a simple matter. All I have to do is hold on to the ropelike strands of his mane. The horse moves swiftly, but his back doesn't sway. We keep up a good clip across the field, which ends in a row of houses. When we get to the houses, the horse doesn't stop. He runs right through them. We whoosh through living rooms, dining rooms, down narrow hallways, and out back kitchen doors. The horse is surprisingly adept at avoiding furniture, but he breaks his stride for a narrow spiral staircase. We stop. There is my mother, still alive, coming downstairs, young enough to be wearing makeup first thing in the morning. Right behind her is my father with all of his hair. He'd left us as soon as he lost it, when I was five. There they are, so young and attractive, and I hold my breath, hoping the horse will keep us in shadows so they won't see us. It is of great importance that they don't see us. But the horse bolts out from under me and I see it isn't a horse at all. It is Mia, running from me, her golden hair flying. I scream to her but I have no voice.

I wake, embarrassed to discover that I am sobbing. At first, I am relieved to remember that the masseur can't see me. But of course, he must have felt vibrations racking my back.

W
endy took me to a wedding today. The bride was her cousin's niece, a relationship for which the Chinese have a word, as there seems to be a word for every relation here, no matter how distant—except for a daughter you raised who is no longer your daughter. There is no word in any language for that.

I wore a dress I'd brought from home. I put it on for the first time since I've been in China and was happily surprised at how loosely it fell over my hips. I don't have a scale, but I suspect I have lost the ten pounds I've been trying to get rid of for years. Partly due to the illness, of course. But also because I eat healthier here—vegetables fresh from the market, tiny portions of meat. In Wendy's home, meat is eaten sparingly, added for flavor, not as a dish in itself, unless the meal is for celebration of something. I think back to the days when she cooked for us, in my kitchen. Our appetite for full chickens, legs of lamb, must have appalled her.

The wedding was beautiful. The ceremony was outdoors and the bride wore white, an unconventional choice because red is the traditional color here for bridal wear, white being the traditional signifier of death. White was reserved for funerals until recently, when the “one-child” generation was sent abroad to be educated and started bringing home Western ways.

When Mia was growing up, we'd sometimes plan her wedding
together. She'd loved to look at dresses in magazines when she was little. Now, when it comes time to plan her wedding, I won't be there.

I was the only Westerner in attendance. But the language of food is universal, and all of us around the embroidered cloth tables communed in our enjoyment of the elaborate feast: five kinds of fish and roast pig and dragon shrimp (lobster) and chicken cooked in red oil to symbolize prosperity for the new couple.

We toasted them with maotai in little brass cups. Maotai is strong! At first, it tastes sweet, but going down it feels like you're swallowing jet fuel. I was tipsy after a few toasts, and so, I could tell, was Wendy, who I've never seen take a drink of even wine before. We both needed the loo and we made our way toward the door, but the line was long and we waited together on a red velvet sofa.

Suddenly, for some reason, it seemed like the right moment to speak. Perhaps my courage was bolstered by the maotai, or the fortifying presence of a noisy crowd. Wendy sat there laughing at a little niece twirling around and around in her ring-girl dress (Chinese have ring girls; boys are entrusted only to carry flowers), but she stopped laughing when she saw my serious face.

“I have something important to tell you,” I said.

She fixed me with an inviting expression and I remember thinking that after I spoke, I might never see her look kindly at me again.

I told my story, and when I had run out of words, she leaned forward, taking my hand in hers, pressing my palms with her steadying thumbs.

“How is Mia?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “She won't talk to me.”

Wendy's eyes grew wet. She looked down at our entwined hands. We didn't say anything for a while. Then, she said she had something to tell me, too.

T
his story I never tell any person. But tonight, I tell Lucy.

In 1979, I gave birth to a daughter. Lin was three years old then. In my country, a new rule became law in 1978: One Family, One Baby. Babies were rationed, like eggs and rice. More babies were allowed families who lived in the countryside, but we lived in Shanghai, so our rule is One Baby. Lin is One Baby. If we have Two Babies, we will lose our good status. We must pay many fines. When I was pregnant, people come to my home. Nurses, doctors, even my own mother talk to me, talk to me, saying I need to give up my baby. They want me to take medicine, make baby die before it is born. They say number two baby is not good for Lin, not good for us. But I want to keep my baby, and so does Feng. We think maybe this rule will change.