Have Mother, Will Travel: A Mother and Daughter Discover Themselves, Each Other, and the World

by Claire Fontaine

  Nestled in the misty brown air, a complex once known as the center of the universe looks like a haunting, sepia-tone photo in a history book. By obscuring almost everything to the east and west, the pollution presents us with the Forbidden City of fifteenth-century Peking that I’ve been studying for a month.

  Because the yellow vapor also obscures the southern end, its sea of roofs seems to stretch on as endlessly as an ocean, wave after wave of russet and ochre that vanish into the false horizon. It’s as if a spell was cast when the last emperor, Puyi, left, taking two thousand years of history with him.

  It’s pitch-black when I wake up to my mom shaking me. I bolt up and fumble for the light, thinking she must be feeling woozy or sick. Concussed people aren’t supposed to sleep too much; I should have been checking up on her.

  “Do you feel okay, Mom? What year is it and who’s president?”

  “It’s 1962, JFK’s in office, and I’m Marilyn Monroe. Come on, honey,” she says. “I didn’t hit my head that hard.”

  “Well, why’d you wake me up, then?” I snap, angry because she scared me, and annoyed because I’m fully awake now.

  “Because I think we should get going. I was going to let you sleep more but it’s five thirty, you’ve slept eight hours, and we’ve got a ton of things to do today. We’re going to start at the Great Wall, then go to the Summer Palace and from th—”

  “What do you mean, you were going to let me sleep?” I interrupt, annoyed. “I set my alarm for six thirty A.M. because that’s when I wanted to wake up!”

  “Fine,” she sighs, wanting to placate me. “But don’t sleep too much longer or by the time we get there we’ll roast.”

  We’re roasting. By the time we arrive it’s almost noon and blisteringly hot. Thankfully, the Wall is breathtaking enough to eclipse physical discomfort.

  The Great Wall of China dwarfs everything in sight. The taupe-hued bricks match the dry and rocky terrain so well that it almost seems the Wall naturally sprung up along with the mountains, a goliath stone serpent winding across a series of jagged mountaintops. It’s such an ancient and commanding structure that standing at its base feels like being in another era.

  Almost.

  There’s a two-story Starbucks with green lettering big enough to see from Mars, a KFC, and a swarm of street vendors rushing toward my mother and me yelling, HEEEYYY LAAADY!!!! I wasn’t expecting China to be lotus blossoms and bound feet, but I didn’t expect to be surrounded by people thrusting Mao wristwatches, miniature jade dragons, and “real” Chanel handbags and Rolexes in our faces. One man actually screams, PAY ATTENTION TO ME, LADY!!!!

  Astonishingly, my mom does. Of all the god-awful, tourist-trap merchandise to choose from, she’s buying one of those hard, conical bamboo hats worn by laborers in the rice fields.

  “Don’t give me that look,” she says, tightening the strap under her chin. “This is the only hat for sale with a full brim.”

  “Mom, please, people are going to laugh at you.”

  “Mia, there is zero shade here. So what if I look like a rice farmer? I can take it off when we’re done. You’re going to leave here with a sunburn—and you can’t take that off.”

  My mom’s clearly back to normal: awake at the crack of dawn and sassy.

  “Well, don’t ask me to stand in any photos with you, because you look idiotic.”

  You look idiotic? What’s wrong with me? I’ve never cared about what people think or how my friends appear; my friend Dave’s gone out with a necktie knotted around his forehead like Rambo and sparkly gold shoes. In general, I’ve been bitchier than I normally am. I make a vow to start acting more myself around her, and purchase our tickets.

  The Great Wall of China was an utter failure as an unbreachable defense. Sentries could be bribed, Mongols on horseback could find ways around it, and, had the Ming dynasty bought European-style artillery instead of spending a fortune to expand and maintain the Wall, they might have staved off the Brits.

  Not that it didn’t have its uses: in ancient times it was a fancy elevated highway of sorts, enabling the quick transport of people and supplies across normally difficult terrain, and in the absence of e-mail and cell phones, lightly dried wolf dung on fire created smoke signals that enabled watchmen to silently holler, “Hey, move your asses, Genghis is on the way!” In more recent times, the Wall became a favored stomping ground for ravers looking to party.

  Up ahead I can see my mom’s hat bobbing along the sea of people on the Wall, a Where’s Waldo–type decal that actually turned out to be a useful tracking device. I catch up with her and we take a break to lean our elbows on the Wall and stare out over the valley.

  “I’m glad you’re feeling better today,” I say.

  I am glad. Not just because I love her and don’t want to see her in pain, but because I love her and if we’d been standing here yesterday I would have been tempted to push her over.

  Control is an issue between most mothers and daughters, and my mom will be the first to admit that she likes to be in command. Half of the time, I don’t mind, because the more control she assumes the less responsibility I have, plus she usually picks things to do that I’d have chosen anyway.

  But I do sometimes mind, namely when she tells me when to ask for a raise, whom to date, or what color to highlight my hair. When I was growing up, this caused arguments, but one thing I really learned from my teenage detour is that control is usually driven by fear. Understanding this allowed me to stop reacting to her and start interacting with her differently—for example, rather than snapping at her to mind her own business, I’ll examine what she’s really afraid of (not knowing my professional worth, marrying the wrong person), and simply talk to her about it.

  Clearly, however, that wouldn’t have worked yesterday, and traveling with someone as controlling as they are inept would make Mary Poppins homicidal. From the corner of my eye I notice my mom staring at me intently. I turn toward her and, just as I think she’s about to make some profound comment about China, she leans in and lightly touches my eyebrow.

  “If you plucked just these two hairs your brow line would be perfect.”

  She’s a melancholy beauty, the Forbidden City, a giant, feminine corpse who gave up the ghost the moment she was no longer forbidden. The paint peels from many of the enormous red doors, which are studded with perfectly aligned bronze half-spheres the size of softballs, most mildly corroded. The deep green or red paint on many buildings and corridor walls is faded or dusty. Most of the once-brilliant yellow roof tiles are darkened and rust-colored. Still, there’s a tired glory in her symmetry and stillness, her sheer size.

  The Forbidden City is walled into a rectangle of a hundred and eighty acres. The three great palaces are lined up down the middle, surrounded by elevated pale stone walkways punctuated by gargoyle spouts. The rest of the 9,999 structures inside the City are royal residences and buildings used for everything from concubines, state affairs, sacrifices (that was a surprise, animal sacrifices here), pavilions and gardens, libraries, housekeeping, and other things—like keeping warm (Palace of the Warm Chamber) and self-denial (Hall of Abstinence).

  Deliberately built to confuse, it’s a disorienting rabbit warren of red, green, or rose-colored passages, gardens, and courtyards. Almost every surface is painted, gilded, or ornamented. The end of every roof gable ends with a row of yellow mythical beasts, led by a guy sitting on what looks like a giant chicken, to ward off fire and calamity.

  The five-claw dragon motif, which represents the emperor, is ubiquitous. The empress was represented by a phoenix, a creature with the head of a swan, the chin of a swallow, the tail of a peacock and a fish, the forehead of a crane, the back of a tortoise, and, lastly, the neck of a snake (isn’t a snake pretty much all neck?). Personally, I think they were going for a one-dish meal.

  The names of the buildings reflect the values and hopes of past dynasties: the Pavilion of Pleasant Sounds, Hall of Peaceful Old Age, Hall of the Blending of Great Creat
ive Forces. Human nature being what it is, history made mockery of most names. While Chongzhen was preparing his noose out back, his wife, servants, and favorite concubines hung themselves by white silk nooses in the Hall of Earthly Tranquility. During the second Opium War, the Germans sailed through the Gate of Divine Military Genius as the U.S. forces plowed uninvited past the Gate of Correct Deportment.

  We’re here with another couple on the trip, Rainey and Zoey, both lawyers who are energetic and very funny. We’re looking for the Hall of Clocks and the only building guarded by dragons, but I’m feeling like I want a few moments’ quiet so I decide to wander ahead on my own.

  “I want to go all the way to the south end first,” I tell Mia. “I want to see how it feels to ‘Enter the Forbidden City.’ ”

  “How do you know which end is south?”

  “Because it’s late in the day. I just have to keep the sun on my right.”

  “Suit yourself, Girl Scout, don’t get lost.”

  I know Mia puts little stock in my orienteering skills, but they’re invaluable in places like this. It looks the same everywhere; it’s Groundhog Day every time I turn a corner. I finally trudge into what has to be the biggest front yard on earth, the great court in front of the main palace. Built to hold over a hundred thousand people, it was meant to awe, to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was a very long way between you and the emperor.

  Six centuries later, it’s an eerie, windswept place, still one of the largest enclosed spaces in the world. The scale is such that a saffron-robed monk walking across it right now looks like a pumpkin seed.

  After catching up to the others, we have just enough time to gawk at an anomaly here—a half-finished nineteenth-century Italianate structure with an empty moat, part of a complex that housed the emperor’s concubines. With chambers for 1,420 beds, it may be the most aptly named building here—the Palace of Prolonging Happiness.

  Though becoming a concubine could bring wealth and status to your family, once chosen, you were in here for life. If you bore the emperor a child, you earned some privilege. If you bore him a son, you could wield power. If you bore the emperor no kids, were no longer young, or were never selected to be stripped, shaved, powdered, perfumed, and deposited in the emperor’s bed, you didn’t have sex, ever. You lived out your days, chaste and bored out of your mind, in the Garden of Dispossessed Favorites.

  Possibilities did exist for the creative, however. There were always a couple thousand eunuchs in the City. Hence, what were called “vegetarian affairs.” This wasn’t without risk. One emperor caught wind of such a dalliance and proceeded to slaughter nearly three thousand eunuchs and concubines in one night.

  The last true ruling imperial, Empress Dowager Cixi, was a concubine who rose to power by retiring her sickly hubby to the Summer Palace, then hanging two princes and beheading another, all by the time she was twenty-two. She then allegedly managed, between 1861 and 1908, to end imperial rule in China. She put the “last” in the last emperor.

  Which should have been good news for our gender in China. The Communist regime that followed imperial rule gave women rights and outlawed female infanticide, which had been common for centuries in a culture where daughters were seen as a double liability, first for requiring a dowry, then for leaving to care for the husband’s parents. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, a one-child policy has brought it back in the form of selective abortions; baby girls are also placed in orphanages, often in secret, especially in the countryside. There’s a reason almost all the Chinese children adopted by Americans are girls.

  What must it feel like to be a mother who goes through pregnancy praying she’s not carrying a bitty version of herself inside? While it’s true that women themselves sometimes carried out infanticide, women often fought to keep their girls. Cixi herself is said to have had a daughter clandestinely by a lover who came to her chambers through underground tunnels. She supposedly gave birth in secret and had the girl raised by his family. Not surprisingly, she indulged and treated many of her ladies-in-waiting like daughters. Cixi was vain, greedy, power-hungry, depicted as alternately unspeakably cruel or charming; nothing of her life reflects my own, but I have to think that her longing for a daughter was no different than mine.

  As the seat of Beijing’s governmental buildings and a place that invokes the image of a lone man facing off with a column of army tanks, I expected Tiananmen Square to have a somber atmosphere. Instead, it feels rather festive. Brightly colored kites flap against the wind, children’s giggles echo through the plaza, parents and grandparents smile as they chase after waddling toddlers.

  My mom immediately brightens at seeing the children playing, which is nice, because she was quiet throughout much of the Forbidden City. Her silences are tricky—sometimes she’s quiet because she’s upset, but sometimes she’s just deep in thought, in which case it’s best to leave her alone or she really will get upset, this time with you. As a writer, she often has one foot in this world and the other in a world of her own making; snapping her back to reality from turn-of-the-century Paris or a shipwrecked World War II vessel could make her lose track of the missing plot point she’s finally unraveling. “I may never get that thought back!” was a common refrain I heard growing up.

  We’re meeting another team to have dinner at the Noodle Loft, whose menu boasts a mile-long noodle and hand-shredded ass meat, giving us about thirty minutes to figure out what the heck kaidangku are, fly a kite with a child, and locate the forever sleeping Chairman and the Great Hall of the People.

  My mom walks to a nearby vendor and purchases a kite. I ask her just how she plans on going up to total strangers and asking to play with their kid, but she just waves her hand.

  “See that little boy up ahead?” she says with a knowing smile. “Once he sees the kite he’ll want to come over. His mom won’t mind, honey—she’ll see I’m here with my own child.”

  Sure enough, the kid’s spellbound, eyes wide and mouth ajar as he watches it flit back and forth. He keeps looking from the kite to my mom but turns and buries his face in his mother whenever my mom gestures for him to come fly the kite. Everyone’s laughing, and after enough ushering gestures and encouraging words he toddles over, and is soon shrieking with joy every time a gust of wind lifts the kite higher into the sky. While everyone’s absorbed playing with him, I kneel down and snap a quick picture of his kaidangku, which turn out to be brightly colored pants split open at the crotch so when nature calls tots can squat ’n’ go. It is rather cute seeing all these little kids wandering around with plump little butt cheeks peeking out.

  The ease with which my mom did that amazes me. Small kids sometimes make me uncomfortable. Until they’re crawling, they can’t even sit up on their own. What do you do with a crying or gurgling blob that you can’t leave alone for nine months? My friend Sunny put it best when she told me that if she had a kid, she’d probably water it and hope it would grow. My mom says once I have kids, knowing what to do will come naturally, but I’m not convinced. I mean, the kid’s cute but Mao’s Mausoleum is far more interesting to me.

  One of my favorite college courses was the History of Dictatorship, and it’s oddly exciting to be so near the pickled remains of a man I studied and wrote about at length. Much like when he was alive, Mao rises every morning with the sun, is available to the general public during the day, and returns to his chambers every evening. Rather than containing a bed warmed by a waiting consort, however, his chamber is now a giant refrigerator, and “rising” actually means that his prostrated corpse is elevated mechanically.

  Despite the propaganda, cruelty, and mass killings, Mao is publicly venerated, and a goliath image of him looking almost grandfatherly hangs prominently in Tiananmen Square. China’s official stance is that Mao was 70 percent right and 30 percent wrong. I’m not sure who came up with these numbers or how, but I’ll make a quick list of Mao’s “rights” and “wrongs” and you can do the math.

  The Wrong:
he massacred, often quite brutally, between thirty and eighty million of his comrades. Unlike the Nazis, Mao’s Red Army wasn’t encouraged to meticulously document the carnage, so death toll estimates vary considerably. Either way, when he once said, “China is such a populous nation, it is not as if we cannot do without a few people,” he meant it.

  The Right: he ended China’s “Century of Humiliation” from Western and Japanese imperialism, greatly increased literacy and life expectancy rates, outlawed foot-binding and female infanticide, and granted women the right to divorce and inherit property. He may have enlisted women solely to further his revolution, but you have to love his slogan “Break the chains, unleash the fury of women as a mighty force for revolution!”

  Some things look the same in all languages. Failing at a decent drawing of the Bird’s Nest for the taxi driver, I flapped my arms like a chicken and, bingo, we’re deposited on a dark road full of construction equipment and debris. A patchwork barrier of battered blue metal panels disappears into the darkness in either direction. Behind it, China is building her first Olympic venue. It’s close to ten and we’re tired, but I persuaded Mia to come. Groups of locals peer through gaps in the metal.

  Surrounded by acres of darkness, the Bird’s Nest lies under the night sky like a glowing red larva safe in its blue playpen, napping after the effort of spinning half a cocoon round itself. High-rises under construction around the far edges of the barriers send spectacular showers of sparks from fifty stories up. The pollution makes everything so filmy and surreal it feels as if this whole scene is part of the giant creature’s dream.

  Groups of locals and a few tourists peer through gaps in the panels. After getting the driver to shoot a photo of us in front of the panels to prove the scavenge, I find a heap of stones and climb up beside an elderly Chinese woman in a dark blue Mao-style jacket and trim pants. She’s not tall enough to see it even on tiptoe. She looks in the general direction of it, then turns to smile at me. Oh, my God, I’m thinking, she wants me to hold her up? My footing’s unsteady as it is. I smile awkwardly.