We became news junkies, not just following Al Jazeera anymore but seeking out writers and activists on Twitter, looking at all the major news sources plus the blogs and photos from people on the ground. It was desperation, a need to put some context on this. Was this the beginning of something larger or just a really bad week in the Middle East?
Then things started to wind down. Drew looked up from his computer and announced, “I think we’ll be fine.”
“We will?” I asked, fanning myself with a paper fan. The electricity was out again. Our ceiling fans hung useless overhead.
“I mean, we’ll watch it,” he said. “What do you think?” He was sitting on the couch across from me. Cole clambered up his shoulder, trying to navigate his way to a higher perch on the back of the couch.
“I don’t know.”
• • •
AS PROTESTS AROUND US began to wind down, there was more violence in Tripoli. Tripoli was forty-five minutes north of Beirut, just a quick drive up the highway. We tracked it online obsessively, checking Al Jazeera every few hours.
Then the power went out. At first we thought it was just an unscheduled blackout, like the others we had experienced over the summer. We packed up our laptops and headed to a café with a generator (you can tell which cafés have one—they are the ones with AC and lights on) and checked the news.
That night, we made dinner in the dark: I opted for apple slices and a small salad. It was too hot to eat. We sat outside in our garden, eating by candlelight, a slight breeze tickling our sweating bodies.
“Let’s go to bed,” I suggested to Drew, who had grown quiet over the last twenty-four hours.
“It’s only eight o’clock,” he said, and swatted away whatever was buzzing near his head.
“I know, but the electricity will be on tomorrow. Let’s go to bed, rest, and start over in the morning.”
“Okay.”
The next morning, I woke to the sound of birds and the morning light falling on my pillow. Cole was still asleep next to me, and Drew was typing on his computer at the desk.
“Is there electricity?” I asked, squinting in the half light.
“Not yet,” Drew said without turning around.
“What time is it?” I said as I sat up in bed.
“Ten a.m.,” Drew said flatly.
That day the electricity stayed off all day long. Anxious that we’d gone more than twelve hours without checking the situation in Tripoli, we returned to the café to catch up on the news and to charge our computers. When we returned home, the house was still dark. After another backyard dinner eating the things that were slowly melting in the powerless fridge, we walked to Smuggler’s, the corner shop up the road, to ask Gilbert about the electricity. “What do you think? When will it come back on?”
Gilbert was stocking jars of pickles and listening to Lebanese pop music on the tiny TV his father had installed right in the middle of the shelves. “No idea, a few more days?”
He was right. On the third day, the electricity returned, suddenly and without notice. The lights all turned on, and the fans; the TV roared to life playing an Islamic prayer, with handwritten Arabic over an illustration of a mosque at night. That afternoon, the electricity went out again without warning, and we were done. We packed up the laptops, headed to the café, and looked at the price of flying home. How could we stay safe if we didn’t have access to news and couldn’t keep track of what was going on in our area? The Middle East was dissolving into protests against Americans, and if it happened in our neighborhood, we wouldn’t even know until they came for us.
I kept running through it with Drew over our laptops at the crowded café. It was packed with people who had come to charge their devices and check e-mail. I talked quietly.
“I mean, if something happens, the protesters will shut down the road to the airport. That’s the first thing they do.”
“Right,” Drew said.
“And I’m pregnant.”
“Right.”
“And we have Cole.”
“Christine, why are you trying to convince me? I am convinced. Let’s go. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
I e-mailed our friends and Drew’s parents about our decision, and they were relieved. It suddenly seemed cruel to have put them through so much concern.
We packed up and left. I said good-bye to everyone, and our friend Gilbert called a cab for us. He seemed so unfazed. When we climbed into the cab, I wanted to puke. I felt so sick about being able to leave when so many cannot. I remember when I lived in Seattle, just after 9/11, I heard someone say, “We should just bomb that whole region back into the Stone Age.” Years later, driving out of Beirut, I was retroactively furious about the ignorance and hate in that statement.
About a month after we left Beirut, a car bomb went off in our neighborhood. I watched the footage on CNN and sobbed. It went off on a Friday afternoon during rush hour, one street over from the mall that we frequented. That mall was where we bought Cole his first bike, his little bouncy house, and the Cars-the-movie-themed training toilet. The façades on surrounding buildings fell from the blast. The entire area looked like a war zone. The beautiful French architecture in rubble, the kindly neighbors now with faces full of fear, soot-stained and bleeding, fleeing the scene. Eight people were killed, another eighty wounded. The target was intelligence chief Wissam al-Hassan, who was linked to the Syrian opposition. He was killed, but at what cost? The scene left behind was an angry twist of metal and fire and destruction, and for two days straight that scene played on every cable news station for audiences around the world, reducing an entire city full of charm and grace to its latest worst moment.
I checked in with everyone I could. All my friends were okay. Five days after the bombing, my school sent me an e-mail announcing the schedule for the winter term. Life in Beirut continued, without pause, because what else could they do? I finally understood what my teacher Majed meant when he said in that first week that we’d have an exam, inshallah. God willing. Nothing was certain, not even a test, not even the electricity, not even whether you’re living in peace or war. But you move forward anyway. And you hope.
Twenty
For weeks, we lived with one foot in Beirut, even while we adjusted to life in Thailand. Slowly, as my belly continued to grow, we shifted our attention from all that had happened to what was about to happen. Eventually there was no avoiding it, the question we had put off asking.
Where should we have this baby?
I was sitting in the waiting room of the Chiang Mai Ramkhamhaeng hospital, starving. I had been fasting since midnight in preparation so I could down a big glass of syrupy sugar sludge and be tested for gestational diabetes. On the wall was a large display of perfectly airbrushed Thai models, with China-white skin. They were selling skin-whitening products right in the middle of the hospital, a product that was so common in Thailand that I had to routinely check to make sure I didn’t accidentally buy whitener in my face wash, lotion, or deodorant.
We could have the baby here, I thought.
My Thai doctor spoke English. He had trained in the United Kingdom. There were private hospitals here; I had the brochure from Bumrungrad in Bangkok, and beyond being internationally accredited, they had suites that looked like hotel rooms, nicer than the guesthouses we normally stayed in. And there was pricing to consider, because as a freelancer, living overseas, I didn’t have U.S. health insurance. I had to figure out somewhere safe, peaceful, and affordable.
The sugar syrup made me gag, but I managed to keep it down. The doctor let me leave the hospital for the hour I needed to wait, so I took the motorbike to the grocery store to buy lunch for Drew and Cole. The Tops Market in the basement of the Kad Suan Kaew Mall had the best penang curry in Chiang Mai. It was so spicy that some days we couldn’t even finish it, pushing it aside with tears in our eyes. It was delicious, though. They’d m
ake it in huge batches for their mostly Thai customers, so by the time we ordered the curry, it had been prepared and sitting under the lights for half a day—and we’d learned by now that the longer curry sits, the better it tastes. When we ordered, they’d cover our bowls with wisps of kaffir lime leaves.
The women there didn’t speak English, but they knew our order: two penang moo (pork—it had to be pork, forget chicken in your curry, it dries out too much), to go. For Cole I got the khao kha moo, pork leg on rice (no spice), served with pickled greens, a hard-boiled egg, and cilantro. I couldn’t contemplate eating anything at the moment, but I had promised the boys before I left that I’d bring back lunch.
Back at the hospital, I was taken into a private room to have my blood drawn. I looked up and away from the needle as the nurse inserted it and saw a faint splatter of blood on the ceiling. I looked down toward the wall on my right and noticed that it was a little grimy, a faint gray smudge on the white paint. It’s not exactly clean here, I thought. Maybe I won’t have this baby in Thailand. At least not in Chiang Mai.
Two days later, my tests came back clear. I paid the bill in Thai baht, the equivalent of $30 for the test and a checkup with an obstetrician. The pregnancy was going well, the baby was healthy, and I had finally moved into that happy, rose-glow second trimester during which you’re no longer sick and your bump is big enough that you look pregnant but not so big that it’s hard to move around.
Drew, on the other hand, was exhausted. After we landed in Thailand, he collapsed emotionally. We had just lived in two challenging places back to back, learning languages that he had no interest in really learning. Drew’s good-natured, easygoing attitude hid so much, but back in familiar, easy Thailand he seemed to unclench for real.
“Being stuck there was my worst nightmare,” he finally confided in me. Our last days in Beirut had shaken him. “It’s my job to protect you guys. But if the worst had happened, there would have been nothing I could do.”
We watched the Beirut car bomb footage together, and he held me as I cried. I had a suitcase of Mandarin and Arabic books and while he never mentioned it, I knew he would never want to study those languages again.
We’d given up on China because of our own circumstances and had to leave Beirut because of a situation out of our control. Spanish started to feel like the promised land. I had faith in this language project, but my husband’s was shaken. I wanted to take him somewhere that would definitely, without fail, work. It had to work. If we found ourselves packing our bags at midnight again, I didn’t know what Drew would do. I had painted this vision of our future together, learning these languages, traveling to exciting (but not too exciting!) locales, having the time of our lives. It was about time I delivered.
Drew left the decisions of where to have the baby and where to learn Spanish up to me, and dove into life in Thailand: hammocks, good spicy food, and cable TV. The electricity always worked, the showers were hot, there was fast and plentiful Internet, and while there were social and political problems, in this year at least, no one was burning American flags.
I kept a low profile in my research this time and skipped the whiteboards. No index cards. No Language Learning HQ. Just me, on my laptop, pretending to surf online, while I actually Googled “birth story [insert country name].” I found out that if you have a baby in Mexico, you can apply for dual citizenship for your child. In some countries, this dual citizenship also gives you a direct path as a family to obtain long-term residency visas.
“Hey, Drew, if we have the baby in Argentina, we could at any point live in Argentina long-term.”
“That’s cool,” Drew responded without looking up from his computer screen.
“Do you want to live in Argentina?” I asked tentatively.
“I don’t know.”
“What about Peru?”
“What’s in Peru?”
“I think you can go skiing there during August.”
“Okay.”
He wasn’t going to engage; I could plan to have the baby in a hut on the Amazon and he’d go along with it at this point. He wasn’t going to get excited. He wasn’t going to help plan. He was just going to carry the luggage from Thailand to wherever I chose because right now that was all he could handle thinking about. I knew when he got like this he just needed time. He couldn’t process all the change—most of all leaving Beirut so suddenly—so he packed it all away for later. Instead he caught up on episodes of The Walking Dead and ate plate after plate of pad kra pao gai, a super spicy chicken stir-fry with basil served over jasmine rice—his favorite Thai comfort food.
Finally, I started thinking about Mexico. A friend put me in touch with a couple who’d had their two children in Puerto Vallarta, a beach town on the Pacific coast of Mexico, with a doctor they loved. I e-mailed them. They gushed. The doctor was great, the hospital was top-notch, and the whole birth cost less than $3,000. I was sold.
“Drew, what about Mexico?” I tried again.
“Okay,” he said, with the same minimal enthusiasm.
“No, really this time. It will be super easy, we’ll get six months as tourists so we won’t have to constantly make visa runs, and it’s cheap!”
“I like cheap,” he said cautiously.
“They have tacos!”
“I like tacos.” He looked up from his screen finally, and smiled.
• • •
WE FINALLY TOLD DREW’S PARENTS about the baby. Drew’s relationship with them had been fading for years, but I was stubbornly trying to keep them in the loop. I would remind Drew about birthdays, Mother’s Day, and anniversaries. Even then, he seemed reluctant to reach out to them, and the silence grew longer and longer. His mother sent a daily e-mail to Drew with a piece of scripture in it, but other than that they had little contact. They never asked about his life, and the only time they made contact with me was to ask why Drew hadn’t responded to their latest e-mail.
When I mentioned that we’d be having the baby in Mexico, Drew’s mother wrote back immediately: “PLEASE don’t go to Mexico.” I was a little shocked—we had just been in Beirut! Was Mexico really more dangerous than the Middle East?—but Drew just shrugged. Still, I told his mom that the area we were moving to, Puerto Vallarta, was one of the safest in Mexico. It had a comparable crime rate to Hartford, Connecticut. It was safer than Miami. However, she was unconvinced. She wrote, “I wish I could show you a clip from the O’Reilly Factor. He warns people when they could be in mortal danger. He says, ‘Don’t drive, don’t do anything in the country of Mexico.’ If you can get ahold of a clip from this segment, please do.”
In response I sent her photos of the sweeping coastline, white sand beaches, blue ocean, the landscape dotted with resorts and beach umbrellas. I tried to explain that Puerto Vallarta was not the same as the borderlands—millions of American tourists went to Puerto Vallarta and Cancún every year without incident. Eventually she stopped bringing it up. We pressed on with our plan to have the baby in Mexico.
From Thailand, Drew flew to Seattle, where it was easy to establish residency, thanks to our mailbox there, to buy a car and take his driver’s test (his previous license had expired). He failed the driving test the first time because he forgot for a moment where he was and started to drive on the left side of the road. Oops, too much time spent in Asia! A few weeks later, I would fly with Cole from Thailand to L.A. to meet up with Drew and drive across the border to Mexico together through Arizona.
On the flight over, Cole and I had a six-hour layover in Shanghai. The airport was freezing cold, and I paid $7 for an orange juice. I found a corner of the airport that was empty, and I lay down with Cole to get a little sleep after our long flight from Thailand. Two Chinese women came over and sat next to us. There were twelve rows of empty seats on all sides, but instead of picking a spot anywhere else in the nearly empty gate, they plopped down next to Cole and me. After watching us
for a few moments, they offered some advice in Mandarin. I didn’t understand them, but their miming made their meaning clear: Hey, lady, put your child’s shoes back on. One of them reached over and grabbed Cole’s foot and frowned. Cold. My baby’s feet were cold. What kind of mother was I? (The kind that has a son who already kicked off his shoes three times in a row before I gave up.) I stared at them blankly. They stared back.
Oh, China.
I was too pregnant, tired, and achy to argue, so I did it. Cole immediately kicked his shoes off again. See! I thought, and walked off with Cole to the gift shop to buy him a tiny stuffed panda bear. We ran into a couple with a son about Cole’s age, and they were very excited to tell me that they were teaching him English. “It’s a very important language,” they told me.
I smiled. How bizarre is the world when there’s a doppelganger family just like mine, but also the opposite. It was so easy to be annoyed by things like the price of orange juice or curious old ladies, but then you were reminded: Everything was a miracle. I was in Shanghai, pregnant, traveling with my toddler son, and talking to a Chinese couple about their child learning English. This was my life.
Their child was adorable. I leaned down and said, “Ni hao.”
• • •
DREW PICKED ME UP at LAX after a customs officer took pity on me, a pregnant lady with a squirming toddler, and let me skirt the line (a long line of Chinese nationals pushing carts filled with foodstuffs from home). I stretched out in the front seat of our new-to-us minivan, a 1994 Dodge Caravan, that despite being old as dirt ran fairly well. Cole was in the back, in a car seat, something he hadn’t experienced since we left the United States after he was born. He fell asleep almost instantly.
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