Growing Girls (16 page)

One of the women approached and opened the little gate leading back to the long aisle of manicurists. “Three of you?” she said with a wide smile. “Come pick your colors.”

“There’s another,” I said, holding up four fingers. “My friend is coming.”

“Sit, sit, sit,” she said.

“Actually, I just want to make an appointment for a little later,” I said. “When my friend gets here.”

“What color?” she said.

“No, I need to wait for my friend,” I said, pointing to my watch to suggest another time.

“We paint you now, your friend later.”

“Um, I’d like to schedule us all
together
.”

But she took me by the hand and already the girls were sitting with another woman who was dazzling them with her display of glitter polish, and in no time I found that I was sitting in a big white leatherette lounge chair with a shiatsu massage
mechanism working my lumbar region and my feet were soaking in a pool of invigorating bubbles. Did I say I wanted a pedicure? Did I even indicate that desire?

Oh my God, China, I thought. I forgot all about this. But this was exactly how it was in China. You never walked into a shop and simply browsed. There was no time for browsing!
Sit, sit, sit. And here, let me take your children off your hands, here’s a yoyo for them to play with, and here’s my aunt she loves babies, she will play with them, sit, sit, sit, do you like this? What kind of pearls do you like? You would look good in jade. You should try on jade. Here. This one. You take this one for you and how about buy your daughter something for when she gets married someday, you should get her something just like yours. Sit, sit, sit. This is pretty. This is nice. Do you like this? I will wrap it up
.

In China I never got the sense I was getting snookered, exactly. The exchange was simply pragmatic. It’s a crowded country. It’s a busy place. There’s not a lot of time for folderol. You’re here for a reason, you want to buy something, so let’s just get to it so we can all move on to what’s next.

I called BK on my cell phone. “You want a manicure?” I said. “We’re at the nail place outside Sears.”

“Oh,” she said. “That sounds good.”

“You better hurry,” I said. “And be thinking about what color you want.”

“Huh?” she said.

“Just … hurry!”

Then I hung up so I could concentrate on my calves, which were experiencing a deep-tissue massage by a woman with a wide brow and skimpy jeans and little high heels. She was
sitting at my feet, hovered over the shallow bath of bubbling water, and a pudgy American in the chair next to me was having the same thing done to her and she was smiling at me as if to say,
“Isn’t this positively heavenly?”

It was. And maybe if the woman doing the massaging weren’t from China, but, say, from Peru or Poland or Idaho or some other place, I wouldn’t have been having quite the allegiance problem I was having, but then again maybe I would. I think you have to be heavily into the “services” circuit—a person who regularly gets massages and facials and other treatments—before you can successfully block out the notion that you are a spoiled brat with enough cash to pay for this nonsense, while the person kneeling at your feet and scrubbing off your calluses and not complaining is figuring out any way she can just to get by.

“Mom, she’s from China!” Anna yelled over to me about the woman applying blue sparkle polish to her nails.

“I China too!” Sasha chimed in.

This was exciting. It gave us all something to talk about. Well, it would have.

“Ni hao!” I said, over and over again, the Mandarin expression for “Hello,” and the only word I could seem to pull up from our Chinese lessons at the community college.

“Ni hao!” Anna mimicked.

“They speak Chinese?” one of the women said, motioning to the girls.

“Oh, Anna can count to one hundred in Chinese!” I said to them, then to Anna, “Honey, do your counting!”

My daughter looked at me, drew the same blank I was drawing. “Can you do it for the people?” I said, and tried to get her started with the Mandarin words for “one,” “two,” and “three,” but I couldn’t seem to remember them. If I could just get her started, the numbers would roll off her tongue, I knew they would. She was really very good at this.

“Oh, how do you say ‘one, two, three’?” I said to the woman at my feet. She looked at me, smiled. She spoke no English at all. “Can someone get us started?” I said to some of the other women gathered. “What is ‘one, two, three’ in Mandarin?”

“Thirty-five dollars,” a woman at the sink said.

Huh?

“Thirty-five dollars,” she said.

“Um, I’m talking about counting in Mandarin,” I said. “How does it start?
Anna, don’t you remember how it starts?”

“I am going to get one hand blue and the other hand green, Mommy,” she said, way too far gone into the manicure scene to care about Mandarin.

“Well, she
can
count to one hundred,” I said. “You just have to get her started.”

“Ahhh,” said one, smiling. “Chocolate?”

Chocolate? She could see my confusion.
“No, I said she can count to one hundred in Mandarin,”
I said, raising my voice loud, like you do in nursing homes.

“Ice cream?” the woman said.

Okay, I officially had no idea what we were talking about.

I shook my head, shrugged. The women gave up on me. They began chattering to one another in Chinese, smiling
much of the time, looking over at my girls, and then one of them seemed to get angry about something and a debate ensued. Arms flailing, fingers pointing, brows narrowed and lips pursed. I sat there wincing, as you might when trapped in the crossfire of another family’s fight, but I didn’t just stay there. No, soon I was cringing, gripped with a ridiculous paranoia. The argument could have been about the temperature of the pedicure bath water, or about towels, or about paychecks, or about a mutual friend who needed a ride home, but what I imagined in all that animated Chinese chatter was a debate about me and my girls. That’s where my imagination went. They were talking about me. And
my
girls. These little girls here, who looked like them, but no, they were
my
girls. The women were commenting on what a crazy mixed-up picture this was. Of course they were.
Who is the mother here? That one? Her? The one getting her feet massaged? The bleached-blonde American in jeans and a tank top spending her Saturday flipping and flopping through the mall and dreaming of food-court pizza? Her? She’s the mother of these Asian girls?

Yeah, I’m the mother. And yeah, my girls are from China and you women working here are all from China but these are
my
girls. Girls I took away from you. No, girls you gave up. Girls I rescued. Girls who rescued me. Girls I stole?

In one unexpected moment of clarity, or maybe it was transparency, I tumbled into a nameless shame.

When I was working on my last book, about adopting Anna from China, a professor visiting the English department where
I teach asked me if I was struggling at all with the material. “Of course,” I said, since writing is almost always a struggle, a miserable truth I didn’t feel like descending into at the time, so I tried to remain optimistic. “But I just got a few chapters in to my editor and she liked them, so at the moment I think I’ll survive.” She asked me about the content of the chapters and I told her they included some of the tender moments upon first holding Anna in my arms, a section I reworked a thousand times so as to avoid making it as sappy as, in fact, it was. “It’s hard to write about that kind of joy without getting all gooey and sentimental,” I said. We were standing by the department mailboxes and I was sorting through my mail, throwing out all the invitations for evening lectures on dialectical approaches to pedagogy, seeing as my nights were now pretty much booked with bath time and story time and watching the girls twirl around to the beat of “Toot Toot Chugga Chugga Big Red Car.”

“Oh, I don’t know why she won’t let you write about what you
really
want to write about,” the woman said.

I looked at her blankly. Did she mean Anna or my editor? Anna was only three at the time so I assumed she meant the latter. “Yeah, I know …” I lied.

“No commercial publisher wants to deal with American imperialism!” she said, with a knowing chuckle, so I chuckled, too. “Or the politics of white supremacy inherent in the international adoption trade.” She went on like this. “It would be so interesting to read about the ways in which you locate and manage the guilt you must on some level feel when facing up to your own complicity in such a fundamentally racist experiment.”

I think I had my eyebrows way up. I think I had inhaled but the exhale wasn’t coming out. There were so many things I wanted to say, not the least of which was,
“What in the name of poopie diapers are you talking about?”

“The personal is political!” she said with a smile.

I stood there speechless. I hate this. I’m so bad at expressing anger, so lame at returning punches. When it comes to fight or flight, I’m on the first available plane. Only well after the fact do I imagine what I could have done if I had stayed for battle.

“Look,” I could have said, “you can criticize my work all you want, but stay away from my kids.” Or, “Hey, where do you come off talking about the ways in which I formed my family?” But that wasn’t quite it, either. “What do you mean …
experiment?
My children are not an experiment!” Or, “Listen, sweetie, you don’t get to turn my kids into a victim for your cause. Get your hands off of them! Off!”

I didn’t say anything. Or, at least, anything intelligible. I think I mumbled something about being late for class and went on my way.

I had a hard time writing anything for a while after that. I walked around for months trying to untangle the attack. Here we had one brainy Caucasian female accusing another of participating in a “racist experiment,” with an oblivious yet deliriously happy tutu-wearing preschooler its guinea pig and victim. This was, to me, as preposterous as accusing me of secretly sheltering space aliens in my basement. Why would I even waste time entertaining the thought? Perhaps it was the delivery, the confidence with which that woman leveled the accusation, that made it stick.

White American guilt. To be a socially responsible white American in America today is to have white American guilt. It’s good to have white American guilt. It means you’re a thinking person, a moral person, a person who has some awareness of the fact that you are entitled, spoiled, fat, and greedy. This was the subtext of my attacker’s claim. I was busted for having no white American guilt, or certainly not enough of it. I believed that woman and I felt guilty. I hadn’t had the time for white American guilt. I’d been too busy trying to find the matching lids to all those sippy cups and wondering why the sippy cup industry didn’t standardize those damn things. I’d been too busy scrubbing spilled glitter out of my living room carpet and shopping at Target for some kind of craft table I could set up to save my floors from the ravages of Elmer’s glue and Play-Doh chunks.

(I don’t know if my attacker had kids, but I doubt it. One thing about mothers is we give each other enormous slack around almost every issue. Cleaning throw-up off one’s shoulder has a supreme leveling effect.)

So, I was … a racist? No, I was a
dolt
racist, ignorant of my own crime. If only I had had an
awareness
of my offense, I could have written about it. I could have put it in some larger geopolitical or moral context, and thus receive from my attackers the forgiveness that comes after a show of noble guilt.

I felt like an idiot. I felt irresponsible. I felt like running away, taking my girls to a deserted island where we could duck the madness—and this is what I more or less did.

When I was a kid I learned the best thing to do when I was angry, or scared, or disgusted, was run to the neighbor’s
backyard where they had a little barn with a pony and some rabbits and even a goat. I’d stay there for hours just talking to the animals about how cold it was or how hot it was and how I might assist them with any of their comfort needs. Now I have a fifty-acre farm I live on and where if you don’t put the chickens away at night the raccoons will come and eat them in just a few quick gulps. These are important, urgent matters that steal your attention. Anger and shame and guilt and other worldly matters get absorbed into the earth, or they dissipate into the clouds, or maybe they just hide in the soft folds of your skin.

I’m an avoider. I don’t take people on. I decide they’re not worth my time. I move on. I go about my life. I know I’m a good person. I don’t care what anyone else thinks. I drink wine. I watch TV. I get insomnia. Then one day I’m at the mall, at the Pedicure Junction nail salon, and I’ve got my feet in a tub while all these Asian women around me are bickering in a language I can’t understand, and there I am, with zero evidence to support the theory, but fully convinced that the conversation going on around me is about me and my girls and my crime at taking them from their homeland.

The day at the mall was at least a year after the attack from the visiting professor in the English department. A full year. And there I was wincing, listening to a language I could not understand, but wincing like some kid expecting to soon feel a punch.

My
girls. Not their girls. Girls who looked like them but talked like me. Girls who brought back memories of their own childhoods, or reminded them of the cousins they left behind,
or whose eyes seemed to whisper rumors, the hush-hush of babies disappeared.

My
girls. And yet girls with toes that wiggle in angles utterly different from mine. A girl I call Anna who has a tough, compact body, oblivious to cold and heat, a ruggedness earned in my imagination by ancestors toiling in rice paddies, wearing hats made of bamboo and shaped like lampshades—a cliché. A cartoon I draw on the blaringly blank page of her ancestry.

And Sasha, a circus gymnast. A tiny little girl with big almond eyes and skinny arms strong as piano wire; surely she descended from a family of trapeze artists. She would have been the one they shot out of the cannon at the end of each show. The finale! She would have
loved that!
(And so I sign her up for gymnastics class at Gym Dandy’s gymnastics studio. An apology?)