by Kate Bolick
Or perhaps my parents lost me the moment I landed in America. I had been ripped away from my extended family and the home I had known, plopped into a foreign land to be reunited with parents I no longer remembered, and forced to start kindergarten not knowing any English words except “bathroom,” “yes,” and “no.” On the first day of school, a boy in my class who had been left back twice emerged out of nowhere and saved me. Every day, he would take my hand when the last bell rang and personally escort me through a throng of would-be bullies and tormentors, and not let go of my hand until he had personally transferred it from his to my mother’s, just as that strange man had held my hand above the clouds and across the Pacific Ocean to lead me to my mother earlier that summer. Was that when I began to eroticize men as saviors? Was that why I despised Jo from the moment she appears on the page? Because she desires to be as free as a man rather than to be saved by one?
Jo is so difficult to pin down and capture that no matter how many times he tries, Laurie discovers he can’t write Jo into his breakup opera:
He wanted Jo for his heroine, and called upon his memory to supply him with tender recollections and romantic visions of his love. But memory turned traitor; and, as if possessed by the perverse spirit of the girl, would only recall Jo’s oddities, faults, and freaks, would only show her in the most unsentimental aspects,—beating mats with her head tied up in a bandanna, barricading herself with the sofa-pillow, or throwing cold water over his passion à la Gummidge,—and an irresistible laugh spoilt the pensive picture he was endeavoring to paint. Jo wouldn’t be put into the Opera at any price, and he had to give her up.
It was impossible to turn her into an object. She was always the protagonist of her own story; no man was up to the task of writing her into his.
Let a man take care of you, be less strong, that’s how a woman should be, my mother warned me a few years ago. Don’t try so hard to be special, just be normal. You’ll see, she said. You’ll see how hard it is to be strong on your own. But I knew already, I felt it every time someone told me I was strong, or intimidating, or different. Sometimes it felt amazing and other times it was deadening. I felt the sting of being “strong” when I was asked to write about Jo March for this book. Out of all the March sisters, Jo? Why was I suited to write about Jo and not basic-ass Meg who gets everything she wants and plays by the rules? Why not spoiled little Amy who is literally saved by Laurie over and over again, offered a free trip to Europe, and comes back married and financially secure for the rest of her life? Why not angelic Beth who is nothing but dutiful and good and rewarded with early death, so selfless and allergic to taking up space that the mourning of her death isn’t even awarded a full chapter? Why did it fall on me to write about Jo?
I thought I was feminine like Meg, fragile like Beth, and vain like Amy. I thought I needed love, companionship, and touch just like everyone else. At times I have needed help more than I have needed people to see me as self-sufficient. And yet, like Jo in part one of Little Women, I doggedly pursued writing and some elusive, stupid notion of “genius” more than I pursued whatever notions of domestic bliss my parents and mainstream society tried to program me and every other little girl into wanting. Maybe I committed the same sin my spinster aunt and all the spinsters before me committed—thought I could have it all when, in reality, all women must choose. When it came down to choosing a romantic relationship or writing, I always chose writing. I wanted to devote myself to writing books more than I wanted to devote myself to a man. Was that a false dichotomy? I don’t know.
Of course a girl can grow up into a woman and hold multiple identities—daughter, sister, mother, wife, friend, comrade, artist, writer, iconoclast, leader—but without being a “wife” and especially without being a “mother,” one’s womanhood is called into question. To pursue art at the cost of starting a family, to not have it all, but to just have one—a career and not a family—is seen as brave, but tragic. Having reached my mid-thirties without a ring or a baby bump in sight, I have started to resent when other people, especially those who are married with children, praise me for not caving into societal pressures. Equally irritating is to be the recipient of other people’s pity.
When Laurie and Amy come home from Europe, Laurie finds his old friend Jo hiding behind a pillow and comments on how terribly she’s aged, how sad she looks. Jo, for her part, refuses to play the role of the poor spinster.
“You are older; here’s a line, and there’s another; unless you smile, your eyes look sad, and when I touched the cushion, just now, I found a tear on it. You’ve had a great deal to bear, and had to bear it alone . . .”
But Jo only turned over the traitorous pillow, and answered in a tone which she tried to make quite cheerful,—
“No, I had father and mother to help me, the dear babies to comfort me, and the thought that you and Amy were safe and happy, to make the troubles here easier to bear. I am lonely, sometimes, but I dare say it’s good for me.”
Near the end of Little Women, Jo is miserable and alone. It may be well and good to decide, as Jo has several times throughout the book, “I don’t believe I shall ever marry; I’m happy as I am, and love my liberty too well to be in any hurry to give it up for any mortal man,” but when nearly everyone you love is a woman who has decided to marry and give up their liberty for mere mortal men, you are left all alone to bear the consequence of your decision to live for yourself. Like Jo, I am lonely sometimes, but I don’t need to convince myself it’s good for me. I may not be able to (or want to) alter my entire way of thinking in order to rescue myself from loneliness, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy it either. Maybe I am rebelling now against the idea that I might be any kind of rebel. My life has not been in the service of some kind of resistance or in accordance with any great ideology. I don’t wish to be twisted into a lesson for some young girl one day, either as an example to emulate or one to avoid at all costs. I don’t need to write yet another rallying cry against the oppressiveness of convention, or a bitter treatise on how I should have chosen a more orthodox existence. I don’t wish to be idealized or scorned. Sometimes I just want to shed a tear in peace, without it being a statement about anything at all.
“I’m the one that will have to fight and work, and climb and wait, and maybe never get in after all.”
In part one of the book, when the sisters are still little women, Jo (who as self-declared “man of the house” is more of a probationary little woman than the rest) muses while they hike to their secret spot where they go for a glimpse of heaven, “Wouldn’t it be fun if all the castles in the air which we make could come true, and we could live in them?” When Beth expresses concern she may not be good enough to make it to the good place, whatever that may be, Jo reassures her, “You’ll get there, Beth, sooner or later; no fear of that,” and then adds a self-pitying coda, “I’m the one that will have to fight and work, and climb and wait, and maybe never get in after all.”
Ten years later, in the very last chapter of the book, the three married sisters revisit their castles. Meg assesses that hers is the most realized: “I asked for splendid things, to be sure, but in my heart I knew I should be satisfied, if I had a little home, and John, and some dear children like these. I’ve got them all, thank God, and am the happiest woman in the world.” Amy too is happy with how her castle has turned out, even though it is different from what she envisioned as a child. “I don’t relinquish all my artistic hopes, or confine myself to helping others fulfil their dreams of beauty. I’ve begun to model a figure of baby, and Laurie says it is the best thing I’ve ever done.” The ghost of Beth does not get a say, but for me, the most disturbing part is how Jo, now married and rechristened Mrs. Bhaer, remarks, as if under hypnosis, that her original castle was too “selfish, lonely and cold . . . I haven’t given up the hope that I may write a good book yet, but I can wait, and I’m sure it will be all the better for such experiences and illustrations as these,�
�� referring to her sons.
The many young girls who were fans of part one of Little Women wrote to Louisa in droves, insisting that Jo and Laurie were endgame. But Louisa refused to give her readers exactly what they wanted. Nonetheless, she did yield to the pressures put on her by her publisher and by devotees of Little Women, despite her original plan to keep Jo a literary spinster. In the 150 years since the novel’s publication, readers’ responses to Jo’s marriage to Professor Bhaer have been varied—some view it as cheekily feminist while for others, it’s totally disappointing. But one thing is to be said—Jo chooses Bhaer. She is the one who stoops down to kiss him, a traditionally masculine gesture. She leads him into her home, and he follows. She’s the domme, he’s the sub, at least in that moment. A chapter later, she becomes a wife and gives up writing. I’ve often wondered whether Jo would still be quite so beloved, if Louisa had written her closer to her actual life.
When I was exactly Jo’s age at the start of the book—fifteen—I had a small brass bell on my dresser table. No idea where it came from, but it opened up and was hollow inside. I anointed it the keeper of my future dreams—not quite a castle in the sky, but a bell in my room, anyway. I wrote on a piece of paper I want someone to love me, folded it up, and kept it inside the bell. It was my only wish. I didn’t think to jot down anything about my writing. One, after all, was a wish, and the other was something I could actually work toward, something I could earn with some determination and grit. Love, on the other hand, was not in my hands, it was in the hands of fate. It was something one prayed for, not worked for.
Years later, as I was editing my first book of fiction, I enlisted my parents to help translate a famous Chinese folk song, “Fairy Couple Returning Home,” for one of the stories where the mother sings karaoke to relive her glory days in China and to connect with the singer she could have been if only her life hadn’t been wrecked by the Cultural Revolution and then again by her husband’s decision to come to America. I remember my parents singing that song together many times, in particular on their twenty-fifth anniversary. I sat on the couch in the family room of our split-level Long Island house and watched as my parents sang the song to me.
You hear this song a lot at weddings, my father told me.
One day your daddy and I will sing it at your wedding, my mother added, and on that occasion, it touched me.
I saw what they were so afraid of, but even more I saw what they were looking forward to. It wasn’t only about how my decaying, rotting body had been created for nothing if I wasn’t someone’s wife and someone’s mother, but also about how ceremony imparts meaning to the people participating in it. Our lives as immigrants in America were bereft of ceremony; the culture my parents came from had no home in America, and so it died a little bit each day. The rituals that most people organize their lives around, the milestones that we celebrate within a community—all of that had been axed out of my parents’ lives. We were atheists, big neutralized nothings. Maybe, I thought, in regard to their lifelong mission to get me married, all they wanted was a ceremony and the magic that comes with it.
During the time my parents helped me with the translation, I learned that the song comes from an old Chinese folk opera that has undergone many revisions and interpretations. With each passing era, the work warps a little more, becoming what people need it to become. It was originally a folktale about a fairy goddess who goes down to earth in search of her lost weaving equipment and coat of feathers, which she needs to fly. While on earth, she falls in love with a mortal man, a struggling peasant who has sold himself into indentured servitude to pay for his father’s funeral. The song is about her choice to give up her immortality in order to be with her lover. They sing about all the struggles they will have to endure, and how they aren’t afraid, for when two people in love have each other, even the bitter aspects of life are sweet. During the Communist era, it became a story about proletarian struggle. Nowadays it’s back to being a love story—two people from literally two different worlds decide they are better together and will give up anything for each other. In the end the goddess decides to go low rather than fly high.
Once, when I was little, I asked my mother if she regretted not becoming a famous singer, or renowned actress, or acclaimed writer.
No, she replied immediately. Because then I wouldn’t have had you.
It was an either/or situation. She could have been a great artist or she could have been a loving wife and mother. In the end, the choice had been made for her, and she was grateful she had a small, happy life of family rather than a big, lonely one of fame.
The weekend before my first book of stories came out, I went back to my parents’ house, the one they had moved to several years before when downsizing and to be closer to the city. My parents had lovingly re-created my teenage bedroom, given me a whole room in their new house even though I was no longer their little girl, although maybe according to traditional Chinese culture, I still was, because I was unmarried, and so I remained stunted in girlhood. I rarely stayed in that bedroom and treated it as a storage container that I would occasionally rifle through. On this visit, I found the brass bell I had used to store my most secret desire, my castle in the air, opened it up, and found nothing inside. My parents must have found the note during the move and thrown it away.
I was finally the writer I always wanted to be; still, I was melancholy. I felt like Jo March in the third act of Little Women, wondering if she had made a mistake all those years ago. Did she reject the wrong things, the wrong people? Her creator interjects to ask us, and perhaps also to ask herself, “Was it all self-pity, loneliness, or low spirits? or was it the waking up of a sentiment which had bided its time as patiently as its inspirer? Who shall say.” Really, who can say?
1. bell hooks, Susan Sontag, Ursula K. Le Guin, Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Jhumpa Lahiri, Patti Smith, Nora Ephron, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Zadie Smith, Erica Jong, Elizabeth Alexander, J. K. Rowling, and Maxine Hong Kingston, to name a few.
2. By contrast, Amy March, the youngest and most spoiled March sister, who often serves as the foil to Jo in the book, getting the opportunities that are denied to Jo, is decidedly not in the running for genius. When we check back in on the March sisters in part two of Little Women, Amy’s chapter begins with extreme shade: “It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women. Amy was learning this distinction through much tribulation; for, mistaking enthusiasm for inspiration, she attempted every branch of art with youthful audacity.”
“The big house did prove a Palace Beautiful, though it took some time for all to get in, and Beth found it very hard to pass the lions.”
I WAS SICK a lot as a kid, though I don’t know if you’d call me sickly. I wouldn’t have called myself sickly. I didn’t have a sick bed. I wasn’t sent to the seashore for the bracing salt air or the desert for its aridity. I didn’t convalesce. I watched the film version of The Secret Garden and scoffed at Colin, that little pale comma of a boy in a boat of a bed who was only sick because no one had made him walk or go outside, not realizing the demented dimensions of my scorn.
Many of my symptoms—abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting, assorted gastrointestinal complaints—have stayed with me into adulthood. Some have been partially explained, some have not; I manage them as best I can. I don’t have to go to doctors with the same frequency as I did in the past. When I think about my body’s enduring vices and mysteries too hard, it makes me anxious. If my life were a novel, I would worry about my character, wondering if my premature death is written on the wall.
The symptoms were severe enough that my parents spent several years taking me to specialists to locate a source, which they never really did. I did my best to torment the doctors, and my mother, at every turn. I did not go to my appointments willingly, and more than once my mother dragged me out from underneath my bed
in order to get me to the doctor’s office. I did not obediently stick out my arm so that they, vampires, could take my blood. My mother offered to take me to Waldenbooks—then B. Dalton, then Borders, as the chains multiplied and vanished in turn—if I was good. I could get one book, I could get two or three, I could get the new Animorphs books and frozen yogurt from TCBY and she’d let me stay home from school. Sometimes the bribes worked, sometimes they didn’t. They ran up against our respective worst traits: my fear and stubbornness, my mother’s intractable resentment and umbrage at having to bribe me at all. Often, we ended up going home and sitting in silence in front of All My Children while she ironed; to this day, the smell of clothes being pressed makes me think of Susan Lucci’s swooping, oversized bangs.
During one particularly bad appointment, I pulled my arms inside of my sweatshirt and knotted them against my torso. This story has been retold many times within my family with increasing hyperbole—my sister once told someone “six fat nurses had to hold her down,” even though she was only five when it happened and wasn’t even there—but the way I remember it, a nurse grabbed each arm, my mother grabbed my squirming lower half, and someone else drew the blood while I screamed the kind of scream that, in a horror movie, would indicate a demon leaving my body.