Open Freezer, Insert Webcam

“I just want to see the whole big tub of it,” Emma said to me, via Skype, and who was I to deny her? I opened the freezer and showed her the to-the-brim result of the ice maker’s overnight work. I lifted up a few choice specimens for a close-up, and I swear I heard a little whimper from her end of the line.

Of course she loves ice. She’s been living in the U.S., originator of the sort of hyper-chilled excess that leads to the brain freeze, for sixteen years. Now, back home in China, my daughter is finding that people who do not balk at consuming double-boiled deer penises generally think that too much ice is disgusting. Why put two cubes in a drink when one will do? Or what about having that Coke at a yummy room temperature? It’s a pause that refreshes without creating any chilly yin/yang imbalance.

After a couple weeks in Beijing, Emma is getting enough distance to be able to miss things from home, and it’s fascinating (to me, anyway) to hear about her highly specific longings. Besides the ice demonstrations, she also wanted a view inside our refrigerator, where the cups of chocolate pudding made her dreamy. “Chocolate,” she sighed, and I reminded her that a country without a love of chocolate is a country without frightening obesity statistics. Then she demanded a walk outside to see the greenness that is the overgrown, sunflower-crazy front yard. The morning joggers might have wondered why I was walking around in my pjs, holding a laptop and narrating, “Here’s the cherry tree,” but they feigned indifference until they could get out of sight and call 911, I suppose.

After that phone call, I decided to see how things worked in the west-to-east homesickness department. I asked our friend Yue Wang, a Macalester college student from China, what thing from home she misses most. She said she missed something called tangyuan, but that she’d recently learned to cook it for her friends and offered to cook it for me sometime. First I accepted (I’ll try anything once, even Ecuadorian fried ants, but that’s another story). Then I did some research and discovered that tangyuan is … glutinous rice balls. 

Lest you feel unimpressed, there’s more. These glutinous balls are served in … a sweet broth, so that must make the difference. From what I saw on the web, it didn’t really look like a dish that had enough personality to cause anyone to lie awake at night, wishing she could see even a Skype transmission of them. 

When I thought about it, though, I realized that I’ve got a kid who’s homesick right now for frozen chunks of water. The heart wants what it wants, to quote Mr. W. Allen (by way of Pascal), and I suppose the tastebuds should have the same basic rights. 

Detained, not Arrested (There’s a Big Difference, Mom)

I have to confess that I feel a little sorry for the People’s Republic of China.  They exported their single greatest source of energy sixteen years ago. Now she’s back, roaming around Beijing, dressed in a geeky school uniform and armed with a camera, her mind and her mouth.

Her first little spot of trouble occurred when she and her pal Max Fong (of the Nob Hill Fongs) decided to take a stroll around the neighborhood.  They came across an official-looking building, one which Emma must have decided would make the perfect profile picture on the Facebook page she’s still managing to maintain. (Illegal in China, but that hasn't stopped her.)

“It was all going great until the guys with the guns showed up,” she reported.

That’s not the sort of phrase one wants to hear from one’s daughter, but I suppose there are worse ones, and I’ll try not to think of those right now.  Anyway, here are Max and Emma being interrogated, and here is Max doing his best to get them out, and here is Emma Losing Her Mind because she does not know what is going on. She always knows what is going on, even when she doesn’t.

Turns out that, while Max is fluent in Chinese, he’s not fluent in the sort of Chinese the guards are currently shouting at him. His parents don’t speak the language at home, but his grannies do. This explains a lot. I am guessing that Max’s vocabulary might be limited to words and phrases such as “Have some more,” “You look skinny,” “How are your grades?” and “You are the sweetest boy in the whole world, come give your granny a kiss.” He is probably less familiar with terms such as “Restricted access,” “Positively no photography,” “What are you, a dumbass American?  We said No Photography” and “We have big guns and you don’t, kids.”

This all happened twelve hours after she’d arrived back in her homeland. Just saying.

Finally, Max was able to extricate the two of them from the situation, possibly by telling the guards that they were the sweetest boys in the world and that they should come give him a kiss. The guards erased everything on Emma’s camera (if they had ever wondered how many photos of yourself you can take from arm’s length, crooking your head to one side as if your neck is broken and sticking your tongue out, and they discovered the answer – a lot). She left the situation with her dignity mussed and her outrage intact. “You can take pictures anywhere you want in America,” she said, sounding suspiciously as if she were debating at the Ronald Reagan Library with the rest of the Repub-la-goons.

You’re not in America anymore, toots?  Yeah, we said it, but it didn’t take.  In her view, she’s the sole citizen of the Empire of Emma, no passport required.

So, while they are having high-level meetings in Beijing to discuss how guys with guns can handle a teen with attitude, Emma continues to explore the place she left fifteen years and six months ago.  She saw a guy peeing on the street. She’s already developed a theory that you need to be at least the third person to step across the curb into traffic, because the first two are likely to get hit.

And, so far, she still understands the important difference between detention and arrest.

Good luck, comrades.

What's Next

An entire day at the zoo, in August. A long walk to the playground, followed by a visit to the ice cream shop. Going to see Santa. It never mattered what the activity was. The one constant was that as soon as the key turned in the lock, as soon as the backpacks and the purses and the sticky bags of leftover cotton candy were laid down, while the shoes were being slipped off and plans were being made for supper and bath, Emma would ask: “What’s Next?” 

There are lifetimes of accusations in those two words. “What else do you have?” was a large portion of the meaning, pointing the way to the inadequacy of what had been offered and rendering the swift judgment that if you thought that was going to be enough to entertain a person of her caliber on a sunny day or a spring break or a Christmas holiday, then you had better reach a little deeper into your bag of tricks, no matter how close it was to bedtime.

The question also signaled the aching desire to be anywhere but here, in this insufficient home with this falling-short family. What’s Next could be across the alley in the Shangri-La of the Brimacomb’s house, or with her boyfriend’s family, or in Beijing. What it most certainly is not, is here. Or now. 

In the years I’ve been her mother, I’ve moved from being an older mom to becoming, in a number of ways, a truly old one. “You looked so pretty,” she would say when we re-watched the video of her arrival day in Wuhan on the Family Anniversary each year. The hardness of that “d,” and the spit of the past tense, would shoot into the conversation like an arrow. Not a pretty mom. Not a young mom. Not enough mom.

With that hard “d” ringing in my head, I did what I could do, day by day. Sometimes, most times, it seemed all I could do to step away from my failings was to step onto my yoga mat. I unrolled it in studio refuges or the grotty basement of the YMCA. I took a deep breath. And then I took one more. I aimed to stop marinating in a woeful past or vividly conjuring an even-worse future. I worked to make peace with my now, the very place she never wanted to be, certainly not as long as it was a now that had me in it. 

I remember buying this house. I remember standing outside and taking photographs of it to attach to the adoption paperwork. I remember trying so hard. It never once occurred to me then that this house would never be the refuge I dreamed it would be for her. If not exactly a prison, then perhaps, more generously, it has been nothing but a launching pad, and one that never seemed to be getting to launch time quickly enough.

She has been thrusting herself into the future as fast as she can, for as long as she can. She reaches out her hands and clutches big fistfuls of time, willing it to move her along, sure that what’s next has got to be better than here. Anywhere but here. Any time but now.

I step onto my mat. I take a deep breath and put my clasped hands on my third eye. I bend forward; I wish her everything, I wish her nothing: “Namaste.”

Red Threads, Connecting Us All

I just heard that a long-time friend seems to be losing her five-year battle with ovarian cancer We have shared some good times together, especially at the annual Culture Camp for Families with Children from China, back when the girls were little and we were volunteers, making it up as we went along.

She has a daughter named Emma too, same age as Emma Bao Wei.  But while my Emma is focused on getting ready to fly away this coming week for a year of study in Beijing, Theresa's Emma is at a bedside right now. Maybe she's holding her mom's hand. Maybe she's talking to her dad. But she's not looking forward with the shiny optimism I see on my girl's face, I am sure. The future does not hold hope for her now, but resignation.

The space I occupy these days is full of bustle and lists and last-minute errands.  Theresa is preparing for her own journey now, and I am sending her all the strength and energy I can muster, to help her along the way.

I wrote this story a few years ago for our organization's newsletter.  I just went back and re-read it, and I'm publishing it here today in honor of a soft and sweet and utterly lovely soul.  Safe travels, Emma.  Save travels, Theresa.

Here's the article, from 2008:

As a metaphor for the magical and invisible connection to their homelands, the red thread is a concept very familiar to people with kids adopted from China. “It represents the link between you and your birth parents,” we say, and “It’s the symbol of how proud you are to be from China.” I’m sure we drone on so much about it that our kids wish they could use a bit of their own handy red thread to bind up our chattering yappers.

Still, the symbol of the red thread, no matter how many times it is invoked by earnest parents, is such a powerful image that I wonder if it isn’t time for it to be claimed by us grownups, too. The red thread was meandering through my thoughts on a recent Saturday morning when a group from Families with Children from China gathered at Sociale. It’s a “meal preparation store,” the central idea of which seems to be guilt assuagement for people who really hate to cook but would like to pretend otherwise. The gist is “we do all the thinking for you, but because you scoop the garlic and the frozen vegetables – from separate bins, mind you -- into the Ziploc bag, you can tell everyone you cooked dinner.” I’ve noticed these joints sprouting up in the locations formerly occupied by aerobics studios, beading emporia and paint-your-own-plate establishments. If only I could predict what people will be clamoring for five years in the future – Knitting circles? Finger painting studios? Brew-your-own-beer parlors? then I would be one rich marketing maven. In the meantime, I’m tying on my pristine apron and chatting with my pals, most of whom are veterans of the process and who have brought along empty laundry baskets to fill with completed dinners. I wouldn't be surprised if someone pulled out a hairnet and slipped it on, for that Lunch Lady look.

There are people here that I met at waiting family events, when they seemed so confident and I truly wondered if I could even manage to change a diaper. There are people I met at weekend playgroups, when our kids crawled about and drooled and we, maybe for the first time that week, let our guard down with each other, knowing no one would ask, “Is she your daughter?” We’ve worked on committees and gotten into spats and been on camping trips and seen each other acting less than our personal best as parents. All that history ties us together. So we chatter on about our kids, and about whose husband has found a job and about who thinks she should be prescribed psychotropic medications for being crazy enough to enroll both of her kids in traveling soccer. And, in between the ordinary stuff, we talk about Theresa.

Theresa is the reason we are here today -- the slender, serene and honey-voiced woman who is the mom of Emma Xinhua, age 14, originally from Jiangsu but now of Golden Valley, Minnesota. Theresa, the woman who performs as the Moon Lady in our annual kick-off skit at Culture Camp every year, and who looks better in a form-sitting cheongsam than anyone has a right to, has been dealing with ovarian cancer for some months now. We want to know what we can do to help, and, like countless generations of people before us, we come up with one answer – food. Theresa may not feel like eating much, but she has a daughter and a husband and a home to run, even when she is sick. And because of the red thread, we are here today – the vibration of her illness sent waves through this tightly knit group, and now we’re putting on aprons and plastic gloves and helping in the way that seems to make the most sense – by making dinner.

On this particular Saturday morning, I am realizing how much I care about these people who were strangers 14 years ago. We all quickly understood how connected we were to that darling bundle of Chinese orphan that we adopted so many years ago, but I think that very few of us realized at the time that we were not just forming a family but, blessedly, entering into a community of other families like us. Because of the depth of spirit and commitment of parents in our Families with Children from China group, we now have an extended family that mirrors our own enough to feel – and forgive me for sounding a little Dr. Phil-ish here – safe and supported, both for us and for our kids.

While we are working, we talk about another of these meal-making events, held some months ago, for the family of a dad in our group, the father of two girls from China, Grace Shu and Julia Qiao, who suffered a stroke. Someone mentions, as she scoops pork chops into a round tin, that, as much fun as she is having today, she hopes we don’t do this again for a while. “Maybe for a happy reason,” someone else says, and someone else adds wistfully, “Maybe for a baby.” The thought of a happier, life-filled occasion brightens the atmosphere.

As I stack up Theresa’s meals in the cooler, I find myself thinking about another happy occasion, her 50th birthday party, just a few years ago. I remember her slinky black dress and her sparkling eyes. She and her husband had the first dance when the jazz combo started, spinning around and around while all her friends watched. When Hal spun his back to the group, I could see her glowing face over his shoulder.

That’s the deal with life, I think, patting down a bag of pork chops to make room for some saucy chicken breasts. One minute it’s Gershwin and a dress you squeezed into and wonderfully unsensible shoes. The next minute, it’s the Parade of Phone Calls, everyone with an anecdote about someone Just Like You who not only Beat this Thing, she’s now running triathlons. And the poles of those two moments – the spaces between the Fabulous Dress and the Sympathetic Phone Calls – that’s where all the rest of life happens. What stays constant is the people who stay by you, whether you weigh 25 pounds less and look so much better in evening wear than they do, or whether you’ve lost all your hair and are too weak to leave the house, so they bring over a dumb movie you can both watch between your naps.

All these well-meaning meals, I think, as I make a trip to the freezer with a three-portion tin of Ginger Pork Tenderloin. Mentally, I try to wrap a bit of red thread around each item, weaving some prayers and wishes that I hope will stick to the pans and the bags. Strength. And courage. And knowledge of the love of this group, this rumpled bunch of Saturday morning people who have made so many of the same journeys as Theresa has, and who must now stand back and watch her make this particular one on her own.

We are most certainly connected. The little stuff like being “blood relatives” doesn’t mean much to people like us, who already starting moving beyond the constraints of DNA when making families of our own. Given that, it seems hardly unusual that despite deep dissimilarities in politics, religion and worldview – and, even more significantly, with some of us living in Minneapolis and some in St. Paul -- that we’d find a way to be a community. We know that a family is more than being born into a group. Sometimes you make the family yourself, with a little help from the People’s Republic of China. And when you do, you tie that red thread around a group forever, connecting not just China to your child, but yourself to all these other parents who are walking along the same path.

There isn’t a recipe at the end of this blog, because it's really not about the food. True, I hope Emma and Hal and Theresa enjoy the Mean Green Chicken Wraps and the Peachy Georgia Pork Chops, but the actual composition of the dishes is beside the point. This particular Saturday, it was all about the red thread. I hope Theresa senses that thread, and feels its power, with every warm and nourishing meal.

Stay well, Theresa.

CARE – EEE! The Creative Naming Dilemma

I’m all for individual expression and creativity.  Just don’t make me pronounce it or spell it in an email.  When faced with the wildly original stabs at phonics that pass for naming many of my fellow human beings, I turn into a stiff-backed wing nut, spewing out exhortations for things like a Return to Discipline and Uncompromising Standards.

Here’s my reasoning – names are something given to babies, and babies grow into children, and here is what children want to do – blend in. Being a kid is hard enough.  If you’ve already got genetically dispensed unfortunate looks, or a last name that’s the same  as the horribly smelly character on a popular tv show – well, then, you don’t really need a first name that requires its own pronunciation guide for the first day of school.  The thing most parents won’t acknowledge is that they’re going to be providing a steady stream of misery to their children for the rest of their lives.  Does the suffering really have to start on the day that the Birth Certificate gets completed?

So, while I am a “whatever floats your boat” proponent for most human activities, I am a staunch supporter of Old Fashioned Values when it comes to naming. As a long-time volunteer at the Crisis Nursery, I’ve encountered some real doozies. Purpess, Jurnee and Promiss, for example, are some very small children with some very awful names that they most certainly don’t deserve. 

I’ve gotten over my initial despair at how someone whose idiot parent named her “Neveah” (Heaven spelled backwards, natch) could ever succeed in life.  Whenever I hold one of these sweet innocents, I just tell myself, “Think of Oprah,” and imagine thousands of middle-aged women bowing at the poorly named child's feet.  It’s not the long-term future that worries me for these kids.  It’s second grade. 

And then there is the spelling issue.  I’ve noticed more and more that the very people whose names are not easily spelled correctly are the ones who get most upset at any deviation from the “three Es in a row, the middle one capitalized” that their name requires.  I want to spell everything correctly, really I do.  But, just in my own circle of acquaintances with the moniker of  "Carrie," (spelled the Stephen King way), I know a Kari, a Cary, a Kerie, a Kerry and a Carri. (The only variant that hasn’t appeared so far is “Carry,” as in “Cash and …,” I suppose for obvious reasons). This is too much for my brain to compute, even on a good day.  

My one-plank presidential platform of the Universal Permission Slip might need to be expanded to include a 20-name list, standardized spelling, from which every family must choose a name. Given our recent successes with the budget, this one should be a slam dunk – oh, right.  Perhaps I’ll need to rethink my philosophy, just a bit.

"No New Taxes?" Ha! Try "No New Permission Slips" to Win Moms' Votes

I’ve filled them out in doctor’s offices, surrounded by preschoolers who were spewing out rhinviruses the size of rhinos.  I’ve filled them out on the first day of school, trying to beat the clock before the school bus arrived.  I’ve filled them out while using my daughter’s back as an emergency desk, after I discovered that she wouldn’t be allowed on the camp bus because I’d forgotten to provide her fully mapped human genome on form FU-Mom, Part II.

So of course it makes perfect sense that I could easily win a run for president – all I have to do is look the mothers of America in their collectively weary faces and promise “No New Permission Slips.” 

First of all, I have to ask – who really needs this information, anyway?  The idea that there would be a serious injury at my grade schooler’s "Cupcake Surprise!" Summer Daycamp stretches incredulity beyond Spanx.  To think that the 16-year-old genius-in-charge, faced with a life-threatening buttercream incident, would really have the presence of mind to a)find the forms; b)start calling each of the 12 telephone numbers I was forced to provide and c)also ring up the health insurance company, just to see if the emergency sprinkles removal will be covered on our plan … no, it’s not gonna happen.

Second of all, I have to say – I don’t give a damn about privacy.  I’ve given birth, so that was the end of that, anyway.  You could paper a spare bedroom with the number of permission slips I’ve already completed with my name, address and any other deeply personal tidbits that were required of me. And don’t get all Trilateral Commission-ish, Brave New World-esque on me, either, because the cat, she is out the bag.  I’m just trying to control the litterbox situation here, if you follow the metaphor.

What I propose is simple:  One kid, one form.  When you fill out the birth certificate in the delivery room, you’ll get a Universal Permission Slip that will carry your child through every outing, class, summer camp and after-school detention for the next 17 years.  Tell them to bring a pen to college, because after that, they’re on their own.

And if you think the mothers of America wouldn’t vote for this one-plank platform, then you’ve never stirred frantically in the bottom of a purse for a working ballpoint, just so you can fill out one more damn sheet of paper for one more educational opportunity that isn’t complete without the name and cell number of your ex-husband’s stepmother. 

Vote for me.  And never complete a permission slip again.

Indirect Objects

Olivia nipped another warm Tollhouse cookie from the sheet and made a pronouncement that had the ring of  undisputed fact, not mere opinion:  “The thing is,” she said, still chewing reflectively, “that they taste okay now, right from the oven, but these cookies taste the very best when I eat them out of the Green Tin.” 

Oh honey. I smiled to myself and kept my mouth shut, but I felt like I had just knocked back a straight shot of pure joy. I was happy because I had helped to conjure a sacred object for someone I love, right in my own sticky-countered, fingerprint-ridden kitchen. That sacred object had been produced from the ever-potent mix of food and love and tradition. The Green Tin, bought for fifty cents at a garage sale a few years ago, has been invested with the power to summon up safe and happy memories for my good pal Olivia Louise, every time she thinks about it. That’s what you get for fifty cents and a few billion homemade cookies.

We all swim in deep, unseen currents of feeling for the objects of our youth, and even deeper ones about the food we remember from those times. So it stands to reason that everyone can recall one or two kitchen objects that summon up memories of unending sweetness and eternal comfort. And if those pasts weren't necessarily so rosy, one treasured object can become a featured player in a Mental Movie of good moments, repeated on an endless loop that deletes any scenes of shouting, worry or pain.

 When my mother died, and we cleaned out her house, I remember that what I really wanted to take away with me was her set of metal measuring spoons. They were the same cheap set that everyone’s mom had back then, at least moms of a certain age who hadn’t gone all modern and opted for the avocado green plastic set, earned as a hostess gift from a Tupperware party. Even though the spoons were not at all unique, they were a sacred object for me. They reminded me of cooking with my mother, which I did not do often, but which seemed, in retrospect, to be some of the most important time we spent together.

Holding those spoons, standing in her kitchen, just weeks after her funeral, I could feel myself back in that same room a child. I was so small that I was standing on a stool so I could see over the counter. I could hear the whir of the motor of the Sunbeam MixMaster, and I could see those beaters spinning and clanking against the white mixing bowl.

In my memory, she has found the bottle of vanilla on the narrow rack of shelves that hang over the back of one kitchen door. And now she’s standing over me, measuring vanilla into the bowl and letting a little extra spill over the edge of the spoon. “Always be generous with the vanilla,” she tells me, “because a little extra won’t hurt anything. But measure the salt in the sink, because too much of that is awful.” Then she tells me, as she does every time we bake together, that women used to put vanilla behind their ears as perfume.

Forty years from now, I will repeat all this to my daughters, and the words will spill from my lips as if I just thought of them. But that isn’t what happens. In fact, they are magic words that have been living in a place where thought doesn’t go. They have been conjured by the sacred object – the cheap metal spoons I use when I bake, the ones that bring me back to my mother. 

The day I saw the Green Tin at a garage sale, I knew that it had potential. I’d had a similar as an object in my childhood, one with a lid that was blue on the outside and deep red on the inside; it was covered with thin line drawings of men singing in barbershop quartets. The tin only appeared at Christmas, when cookies were baked. Every year, my mother told me that my grandfather, whom I’d never met, had been a singer in a barbershop quartet, the Missouri Belles. She told me this until I stopped listening, and I’ve only just now remembered it.

But back to the garage sale. When I say that I knew the tin had potential, what I mean to say is that it possessed a sort of uselessness that  I immediately admired. It was clearly too big, especially for any one-batch, God-fearing, “not too much” Minnesotan cook. To fill this tin with cookies would mean a triple batch, maybe a quadruple one, and people don’t act like that here, a place in which “over the top” means “just an inch shy of the rim, and lukewarm, please.”

When I saw the tin, I knew it would take work, too much work, to fill it with the chocolate chip cookies that Olivia and her siblings love. But I could picture that tin being stacked on top of all the other luggage, ready for trips to their cabin. I could see it being carried into the house by members of my family, all of them grateful for the invitation to be in a lovely place with the people they cared for most. The tin, filled with cookies, would be a thank-you, an offering and a talisman.

I thought all of this as I handed over two quarters and strolled down the sidewalk, holding the tin wth two hands in front of me, as if I were in some Holy Ceremony for Baked Goods, and had somehow broken loose from the rest of the procession.  I went home and I started to bake. It was exactly as much trouble to fill that tin as I had expected, but that was okay. There was power in the effort, not just that first time, but all the other summer weekdays when I slid sheet after sheet into and out of the oven, preparing for a Friday night trip to the cabin that would include a seemingly endless supply of cookies.

My mother's birthday was this week, and if she were alive, she’d be 91 years old. She would have hated being 91. She would have hated to slow down and feel old and watch her friends die. It’s better, I know, that she just fell down in my garden 13 years ago, better that she said “I don’t feel good,” and died in my arms before either of us had a chance to think about what was happening.

I have some memories, and I have the measuring spoons, although I’ve lost a couple in the garbage disposal over the years (we were too poor for such a luxury, which is why she was able to hold onto hers until I inherited them).

And thinking of all that makes me think this:  Olivia is right. They are better from the tin. Right now, she doesn’t know why. But someday she will.

And I hope, when she does know, that she’ll think of me, maybe on my birthday, and wonder what I did to make those cookies taste so good.