by Jeff Gammage
As we head up the stairs to bed, I ask Jin Yu: What did you like best? What was your favorite part of the party? Another kid might say, “The presents,” or, “The games,” or, “The ice cream.”
Jin Yu answers, “Laughing with my friends.”
That is just like her.
For all of the lovely gifts, and there were many, Jin Yu has always been a girl who prefers experience to souvenir. Given the choice, she would rather take a trip than have a toy, would sooner meet someone than have something. As this birthday approached, she didn’t ask her mom and me for a new Barbie doll or a Dora the Explorer nightgown or some other character-driven children’s product.
She asked if as a special treat we could go and visit what she calls “the dinosaur bones.”
So a few days after the party, on her actual birthday, August 2, I take the day off from work and Christine packs our backpack. The four of us head into Philadelphia, stepping past the bronze statue of the Velociraptor that guards the door of the Academy of Natural Sciences on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, ready to spend the afternoon among the skeletal remains of a T-Rex, an Avaceratops, and a Giganotosaurus, the last the size of a bus. Jin Yu is as usual full of questions about the animals, children’s questions like, “What color were their eyes?” and “Where did they keep their blood?”
Today, as we ride the elevator to the third floor, Jin Yu takes both my hands in hers and poses a question that has nothing to do with fossils:
“Daddy,” she asks, “how do you spell ‘love’?”
TODAY, AT six, Jin Yu is thoroughly American. And Chinese at the core.
Here, in this country, her intelligence and creativity are confirmed by her achievement in preschool and kindergarten. Her teachers love her. Her friends do too. Jin Yu is the kid with whom all the other kids want to play, the child every boy and girl recognizes on sight, the one whom half the class considers their personal best friend.
Her success was preordained. Jin Yu was born in the year of the dragon. More, she was born in a year ending in double zeros, a turn of the calendar that occurs once in a hundred years. That makes her a golden dragon, supremely blessed, destined for greatness.
And in fact, she already has a career goal: to become a princess and live in a castle.
When Jin Yu gets home after school, and first thing on weekend mornings, she slithers into a frilly gown. Her favorite is a bright yellow dress, the color of sunshine, with highlights of small pink roses. She adds a plastic-jeweled crown and a pair of elbow-length white gloves. Once properly attired, she commences to recite entire scenes from Beauty and the Beast, complete with sound effects and selections from the musical score. Naturally, Jin Yu casts herself in the lead role of Belle, the heroine, while her baby sister, incongruously, plays the muscle-bound bully Gaston.
Their first months together were rough.
One night, not long after we got home from China, the four of us were sitting at the dinner table, Zhao Gu at the head in her high chair. Jin Yu pointed her finger at the little girl who had taken roost in our home.
“Where are her mommy and daddy?” she asked.
I thought she was kidding. She wasn’t.
“Jin Yu,” I said, nodding toward Christine, “we are her mommy and daddy.”
Jin Yu didn’t say anything. But she must have thought I’d misspoken, because a couple of weeks later she came back with another question, posed not in anger, but as if wanting to be sure of the timetable: “When is she going back?”
Today, after two years together, Jin Yu may never accept having to share the limelight, but she has more than accepted her sister. She has come to love her. The realization that Zhao Gu would be staying, that she was not a temporary houseguest but a permanent part of our family, took root slowly but deeply. One evening after dinner, offered ice cream for dessert, Jin Yu swept her arm across the table as if welcoming us to a grand banquet, then inquired, “Do you have some for my good friend Zhao Gu?”
The other night, as usual, Christine and I put the girls down, each in her own bed in the room that they share. After an hour of silence, with only the purr of the fan coming over the monitor, I thought for sure they were asleep.
Then I heard Jin Yu:
“Zhao Gu? Zhao Gu? Zhao Gu?” She paused. “I love you.”
And Zhao Gu replied in her tiny, three-year-old voice: “I nuff loo too.”
Jin Yu has learned that her sister will for the most part graciously accept second billing in their dramatic productions, that she doesn’t mind taking the smaller piece or the later turn. She’s begun to see how her little sister adores her and looks up to her. That Zhao Gu is happy to cheer her on.
On Saturdays, Jin Yu puts aside her Disney gowns and faux jewels, donning a pair of loose-fitting nylon pants and a red T-shirt, traveling into the city to a class where she learns the ancient art of lion dancing. Supposedly the dance began, some four hundred years before Christ, as a way for defenseless farmers to scare off invaders, or to at least scare away the elephants the raiders rode on.
Jin Yu loves learning the steps, and playing the drum, and figuring out how to position herself for the Kung Fu stances. Christine and I like her to take the class not just for the skills she learns, or even for the joy she derives from the public performances, though those are important, but because Jin Yu’s participation gives her a chance, at least for a couple of hours each week, to be part of the majority. Perhaps equally as essential, it affords Mom and Dad a regular dose of what it feels like to be in the minority, to be the people who look different.
Our family is now half Chinese. In fact if our household was a democracy instead of a dictatorship, the Chinese contingent would hold the ruling majority—two votes, against one for Ireland and one for Switzerland. Christine and I try to recognize that the ethnic makeup of our family has changed. Jin Yu already sees that. About a year ago she began to comment on the fact that she looks different from her parents. The first time, we were having lunch at a favorite eatery, Vietnam Restaurant. Christine had taken Jin Yu to the bathroom. There, next to the commode, our daughter placed her arm beside that of her mother’s.
“You have white skin,” she said. “I have brown skin. I wish I had white skin.”
Christine told Jin Yu that her brown skin was beautiful. That her skin helps make her who she is. That many, many people have different shades of skin color—and it doesn’t matter, that what matters is what they have in their hearts and their heads.
Jin Yu responded, “I wish I had white skin.”
After that she seemed to put the issue aside, not mentioning it again until a morning shortly before her sixth birthday. At breakfast she announced to her mom, “I wish I had a pointy nose like you.” One of her friends had told Jin Yu that she had an “ugly flat nose.”
Which hurt. Me more than her.
I understand that children will notice difference and comment on it freely. What I don’t understand is why one distinction or another must be defined as good or bad.
That morning I told Jin Yu she has the most beautiful nose I’ve ever seen. That her nose—her eyes, her mouth, every part of her—is stunning. But my words don’t carry much weight. From me she expects complete support, or preferably, fawning admiration. She usually gets it. And that renders my opinion biased.
Jin Yu has also begun to construct an understanding of how she came to be with us. About a year ago, she began telling everyone we met that she had come here from China. Jin Yu would politely introduce herself by name, then brightly add, “I’m from China!” I didn’t know what to make of it. I was glad she understood the rudiments of her origins, and that she considered her homeland worth bragging about. But I wondered why she felt it so important to share that information immediately.
The roles reversed when a friend from Shanghai, a woman named Hu Yan, came to our house to visit.
“Jin Yu,” she asked, “do you know where I’m from? I’m from China.”
Jin Yu paused, astonished. Then s
he blurted, “I’m from China too!”
She was so pleased. As if they belonged to the same sorority.
Today Jin Yu no longer informs everyone we bump into that she came here from China. Perhaps the psychic need that spurred that introduction has been met. Maybe she just wanted to hear how it would sound to say it out loud.
Now that she’s six, I tend to think that her earlier declaration of origin was a means to lay a base for larger, harder questions.
Even as a toddler, Jin Yu was interested in the swollen bellies of pregnant women, amazed to hear that a baby was growing inside. She would tell Christine and me that she grew in the belly of one of her nannies in Xiangtan. And we would gently correct her, saying that, no, while her nannies took care of her, she developed within the body of a different woman who gave birth to her in China.
For a long time Jin Yu never asked the logical follow-up question: where is she?
Then, the other day, Jin Yu was riding in the back of Christine’s car, looking out of the window as they rolled past a neighbor’s house adorned in blue ribbons and banners.
“They had a baby?” Jin Yu asked.
Yes, Christine told her, a son.
“He grew in his mommy’s tummy?”
Yes.
“I grew in my nanny’s belly?”
With this she was teasing.
But in her next question she took a step forward.
“Where is the woman who gave birth to me?”
And a few days later, she asked the toughest question of all:
“Why didn’t she keep me?”
When it comes to China, to the orphanage, to her birth parents, Christine and I tell Jin Yu the truth, in digestible bits and appropriate language. When Jin Yu asks, “Where is she?” and “Why didn’t she keep me?” I know she is not asking for a political dissertation on the nature and scope of the one-child policy. But at the same time, too often, when it comes to even the most basic details of her life story, the truthful answer is, “I don’t know.”
I don’t know where to find your birth mother.
I don’t know her name.
I don’t know if you will ever get to meet her.
Jin Yu got quiet after hearing Christine’s answers to her first questions. I’m sure more queries will be coming. And I know Jin Yu will be able to handle the answers.
She is so strong. So firmly planted. So proud to be Chinese and so comfortable being American. On Saturdays, as I watch her maneuver her shoulders under the furry, pink-and-silver lion head, her feet sketching the movements of a rite that connects her to the children around her and to ancestors unknown, I doubt she will grow up suspended between two cultures. I think she will live her life as a link between them.
Lately she’s begun telling Christine and me that she wants to visit China.
I wonder what she expects to find there. It has been four years since she left Hunan, more than two since she last set foot in the country.
She has taken to watching repeated screenings of Disney’s Mulan, with its bold, courageous heroine, a woman brave enough to take her ailing father’s place in war. A woman who brings glory to her family, not by marrying well, but by employing her brains and strength to save all of China from the Hun hordes. Miss Fa Mulan, as Disney princesses go, is not a bad role model at all. Jin Yu pays attention to how Mulan talks with her father, to their debates over the meanings of responsibility and duty.
Not long ago, Jin Yu and I were walking up Eleventh Street in Philadelphia after a lion dancing performance, her one hand holding the flap-jawed head, the other nestled in mine. She seemed a little somber, as if something was on her mind. Finally she looked up at me and asked, “Did I bring honor to my family?”
I had to look away. I couldn’t answer.
A moment later, I recovered enough to tell her: Yes, yes, my dear one, you have brought honor to your family. To all your family, everywhere.
WE FOLLOW our usual route to Chinatown, driving directly south down Broad Street, almost to City Hall, then turning left onto Vine Street, going east for five blocks, toward the Delaware River. It’s Sunday morning and traffic is light.
We park in the lot on Ninth Street. I take Zhao Gu in my arms. Christine takes Jin Yu’s hand. It’s a glorious day, bright and breezy, the August sunlight just beginning to assume the quality of fall, casting the shadows just-so-much darker and longer.
We cross the street, stepping onto the sidewalk outside the Ocean City Restaurant. This place holds memories. Christine and I had lunch there a day after we received our first pictures of Jin Yu. I can still remember what I ordered. As a threesome, and now as a foursome, we go there for dim sum. In one restaurant picture window hangs a row of glazed ducks, their heads and feet still attached, their mouths open in silent protest. The other window displays tanks brimming with live lobsters and crabs.
Today we’re not stopping to eat.
We continue down Ninth Street, past Amazing Jewelry, with its rows of jade bracelets in the window. Everything at Amazing Jewelry is expensive, but the wares are first-quality, and the husband-and-wife owners have incorporated an appealing Chinese tradition into their business: they’ll bargain with you on the price.
We pass neighborhood families carrying sleeping babies and pushing babes in strollers. Seeing children so young always makes me wonder what Jin Yu looked like at that age. If as a baby she possessed the same feisty temperament she has now. The Chinese say that girls from Hunan are as spicy as the food, and they’re absolutely right.
At the corner of Ninth and Race Streets looms the concrete edifice of the Verizon phone building. It seems incongruous, a tall block of cement and white brick dropped among older, lower, red brick buildings. Around the turn of the century this corner was the site not of a telecommunications company but of a mysterious structure known as the House of a Hundred Rooms. Supposedly it was a brothel and a hideout for gangsters, sheltering lucrative Chinatown trades in opium, gambling, and smuggling. But nobody knows for sure. It was torn down to make way for a gas station, which later gave way to the phone building.
For most of its 135-year existence, and to a lesser extent today, Chinatown served as a gateway for immigrants, a first stop on their trek toward the American dream. Yet there is little in the way of recorded Chinatown histories to explain the way people lived here or how they felt about it. The residents were too busy trying to survive to worry about documenting the activities of their day-to-day routines. So the job of describing and defining Chinatown fell largely to local journalists, who saw the neighborhood as a foreign place, full of foreign people, worth noting only for some bit of entertaining exotica, or a Tong war, or perhaps at Chinese New Year, when the noise and smoke of firecrackers filled the streets.
Or when the city fathers needed part of Chinatown’s land.
The four of us turn west on Race Street, our backs to the majestic Benjamin Franklin Bridge, its pale blue span soaring across the Delaware River and linking Pennsylvania to New Jersey. We walk past bakeries selling delicious cheese-and-corn buns, pharmacies offering herbs to cure every ailment, and shops trading in imported clay teapots. Halfway down the block we come to the H. K. Golden Phoenix Restaurant.
When I’m in Chinatown by myself, I always like to stop here for a minute.
This spot, with its cracked sidewalk and pile of construction debris across the street, is more than what it seems. It marks the heart of Chinatown, the place where the neighborhood began, the spot where a man named Lee Fong established a hand laundry in 1870.
Chinese people had been living in Philadelphia for years by then, since at least 1845, operating laundries in scattered neighborhoods. But sometime after Lee Fong started his laundry, a restaurant opened on the second floor, the Mei-Hsiang Lou, a place where Chinese living far from home could find a familiar-tasting meal. With the convergence of those businesses, laundry and restaurant, Chinatown was born. More small stores and eateries settled nearby, drawing more Chinese, who drew more businesses.
Today two big plaques hang on the brown tile facade of the Golden Phoenix, marking the importance of 913 Race Street.
The plaques, one in English, the other in Chinese, recognize the sacrifice of all who came to the United States to seek the Gim San, the Gold Mountain. During the mid-1800s, more than a quarter of a million Chinese arrived in this country, attracted to jobs building the transcontinental railroad and the prospect of striking it rich mining gold in California. Very few became wealthy. Most lived out their lives in the bachelor societies that grew up in places like Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore, the Chinese Exclusion Act having banned the men from bringing in wives.
Jin Yu is too young to read the words on the plaques, to know the hardship of the immigrants who came here from southern China. I hope that as she grows she will claim that history as part of her own, come to see herself as part of a continuous chain. After all she too is an immigrant, one who also left everything and everyone in China to find her future in this country.
Half a block on, the four of us reach the corner of Tenth and Race Streets, where we stop for a traffic light. If we kept walking we’d come to the Chung May Food Market. In the front of the store, twenty-five-pound bags of rice are stocked chest-high. In the back, hundreds of hand-painted bowls and cups are stacked one atop the other. Search the nooks of Chung May and riches emerge—like 1950s-era tableware from the China Village Restaurant, which burned down in 1973. For a few dollars you can outfit your table with its dishes.
Chung May stands near Chinatown’s western boundary. The physical size of the neighborhood has been shrinking for decades, pieces claimed for one public development project after another. The Vine Expressway sliced through the north end, sparing Holy Redeemer Chinese Catholic Church and School, a local institution, only after Chinatown residents laid down in front of the bulldozers. The Galleria shopping mall and the Market East train station took parts of the south side, while the Temple University podiatry school and the city Police Administration Building blocked expansion to the east.