“Why aren’t you eating?” His words interrupted my daydream of lemons, sugar, and ice. “You need to eat.”
“Those dishes have pork and eggs.”
“So? Just take the pork out. When did you stop eating eggs?”
“I don’t feel like eggs. And when I eat food cooked with pork, I can still taste it even if I pick around it.”
“Máfan.” I didn’t know if he meant I was troublesome or if he was referring to my picky eating habits, but I couldn’t gather the strength to argue, especially in front of my parents who were still acting like everything was normal. I always was uncomfortable bickering with Cai, but especially in front of my mom and dad. After all, they had not only given up their summer to help us with household chores like laundry and cleaning, but had also purchased most of Jake’s clothes and baby supplies.
Most of all, I didn’t want to argue with Cai because I thought, for Jake’s sake, we should behave civilly to one another. Although he couldn’t understand what we said, Jake would be able to sense distress if we fought. But my worries about Jake being distressed vanished after we finished lunch and Cai walked into the living room to watch television. As we cleared the dishes from the kitchen table, I unleashed a rant my parents had never before heard from me, while rocking Jake in his car seat.
“I can’t believe he’s being so difficult. I’m the one who just had a baby, not him. I just want to eat what I want, not some god-awful fish head soup with those disgusting smoked dates. I never thought I’d be stuck in China after we left Hong Kong.”
My mom stopped placing dishes on the kitchen counter. “Have you talked to Cai about this?”
“What’s the point? He’s listening to the neighbors over me. If they say I need to eat pig feet, he asks how many. We never talked about these postpartum customs before Jake was born. I wish I had had some warning.”
Even though Cai was in the other room, supposedly watching Chinese television, I didn’t lower my voice. I wanted him to hear my anger. Since coming home from the hospital, I felt like my emotions were more volatile than ever. Every night I cried tears of joy just looking at Jake. Now I felt a rage burning inside like a hundred red firecrackers. I didn’t know it at the time, but after each of my pregnancies, I would come down with the baby blues, a dramatic shift in emotions after giving birth and suddenly losing all the new hormones my body had built up over nine months.
“Calm down. Do you want to talk to him in front of us, or alone?”
“I don’t want to talk to him at all. Every time I try to speak with him nicely about something he doesn’t want to do, he yells at me or gives me the silent treatment. I don’t want to fight. I just want to do whatever will make my life—and Jake’s—peaceful.”
My dad placed a stack of rice bowls in the sink. “He probably feels so isolated here. You’ve had tremendous life changes these few months: a move across the world, a new house, new jobs, and now a baby. Each of these things can be difficult to adjust to, but put them all together, and no one could make a smooth transition.”
“I’ve told him that many times, but he just doesn’t listen. He hasn’t even tried to find a good job.”
“Dad is right,” my mom said. “You are going through incredible changes. Even if Cai doesn’t acknowledge it, I’m sure he’s trying in his own way. He’s become involved in the Chinese music community and he’s learned to drive. He can find his way around the whole Bay Area now and has made new friends. Those aren’t insignificant achievements. He’s probably upset he hasn’t been able to provide for the family. I know you don’t care about that, but many men do.”
It felt good to vent to my parents and to know it was normal to feel frustrated. I didn’t want them to tell me to leave Cai, and I didn’t want that myself. But I wished Cai would act more like an equal spouse instead of a surly housemate. From three years of marriage, I could look back and see that there were two Cais: the one who was happy in Hong Kong, and the one in China who gave me the silent treatment and took his professors’ sides when they made me feel uncomfortable.
What my mom said about feeling helpless about not supporting the family could be true to some extent, but that hadn’t been the reason for his bad behavior in China. But my parents were correct about Cai—and me—experiencing many life changes all at once. Maybe I was overreacting. Who could complain about a comfortable house in San Francisco, a job that gave me excellent health benefits, a beautiful, healthy new baby, and a caring mother and father?
After I returned to the living room with Jake, the doorbell rang. We weren’t expecting company so I was still dressed in my blue cotton nightgown, my postpartum costume de rigueur. I placed Jake in his car seat and pulled on a long burgundy sweater. When I peered through the peephole, two unrecognizable Chinese women and a Chinese man stared back at me. I turned toward the sofa where Cai sat reading a Chinese newspaper. “I think your friends are here.”
Cai opened the door and greeted these friends I’d never met, his eyes and smile illuminating the dusky room. He introduced them to my parents and me. “This is Miss Chen Xiaohong, Miss Liu Bingying, and Mr. Liao Gang.”
After Cai emceed for Yuhan’s performance, he signed up for a few more shows. His deep voice, movie-star looks, and tall stature made him a sought-after emcee in the Bay Area. He rarely got paid for these performances, and when he did, it was an honorarium of fifty or a hundred dollars. But he was making a name for himself and I hoped he’d eventually find paying jobs in the field. These were friends he had met in the Chinese music community.
Mr. Liao handed Cai a shopping bag while Miss Chen sashayed into the living room on her long, thin flamingo legs. She carried a cardboard egg flat, the type found in produce markets, holding thirty-six light brown eggs. I led her into the kitchen, where she gently placed it on the tiled kitchen counter.
“For you.” She was pretty with shining hair and almond eyes that delicately tilted up.
“Thank you.” What else could I say? No one had ever brought me three dozen eggs before.
Back in the living room, Miss Liu lifted Jake out of his car seat without asking. She held him up and his shirt bottom separated from his pants, exposing his midriff, taped umbilical cord and all. Liu turned to me with a grave look on her face. “Ay yo. You have to cover his belly button. He could get sick.”
Cai’s friends visited for about thirty minutes. After they left, I pulled out two outfits with matching hats from the bag Liao had brought. A slit down the seat of each pair of pants rendered them useless to us. I knew from my trips to China that these pants would expose Jake’s diaper in back. In China, even in the 1990s, it wasn’t the custom to use disposable diapers, so parents trained their children much earlier with pants like these. Young children could just sit and squat, relieving themselves where they pleased. I tucked Jake’s new pants under a few baby blankets on the high shelf in one of the guest closets, never to be used.
Chapter 32
Trying Traditions
On Jake’s eighth day, my parents and I prepared for his bris. For the special occasion, my mom’s eighty-two-year-old mother, Adeline, had flown in the previous day. My parents’ friends Larry and Judy lived an hour or so north in Sonoma County and had driven down as well. They had introduced my parents to each other thirty years earlier.
My grandmother peeked out of our living room window after a rotund man stepped from a brown sedan out front, his salt-and-pepper beard hanging to the bottom of his torso. She turned to me. “Where did your father find him?”
“He asked around the Jewish delis. This guy is supposedly the Elvis of mohels.” I stared through the white curtains, just enough to take a longer glance at the stranger who was about to perform Jake’s bris.
Stepping inside, his protruding belly entering first, the mohel nodded a quick greeting to me under his black hat and headed toward my father, who had been looking forward to this milestone f
or his first grandchild. The mohel stood in the dining room, explaining the ceremony to us. Cai, who had seemed calm all morning, nodded his head as if he understood the mohel.
After speaking English exclusively with me for three years, Cai’s Chinese accent had whittled down to just enough to reveal he wasn’t a native speaker. But he didn’t always understand what others said in English, especially in a new context. And no matter how willing Cai had been to go along with the bris, I wondered if he really grasped what it would entail.
We leaned against a wall, standing in a line, while Larry cradled Jake in his arms. The mohel set up his instruments and placed a cup of kosher red wine on the dining room table. He chanted a prayer and then instructed Larry to pass Jake to my father and then down the line until he reached Cai and me. We carried Jake to the mohel, who placed him on a blanket on our naked dining room table. Dipping his right pinky into the wine, the mohel rested this finger in Jake’s mouth to give him a taste of wine—and to numb the oncoming pain.
My dad and Larry walked toward the table, standing behind the mohel while Judy, my mom, grandmother, and I gathered against the wall, choosing not to look. Cai, aware Jake’s foreskin was about to be cut, hovered between the women and the men. I thought it best if he stood back with me. But when I saw how Cai’s face beamed with pride in his son, I remained silent.
I didn’t know the mohel had clipped Jake’s foreskin until a piercing scream filled the room. I looked toward the table and saw him place another wine-dipped pinky in Jake’s mouth to ease the pain. My grandmother sighed in relief as the mohel dressed Jake’s affected area with Neosporin and gauze, encasing it in his diaper.
“You can give him a little Tylenol,” he told us as he finished zipping Jake’s sleeper, his voice overpowering Jake’s whimpers. “Change the dressings every time you change his diaper. Dab a little Neosporin on a fresh piece of gauze. He’ll probably sleep for the rest of the afternoon.” The mohel handed Jake to me.
But Cai’s face, a moment ago calm and relaxed, now transformed back into the look he wore months earlier in the Colma BART station. Tears flowed from his eyes, as if he were lost in a foreign country with no friends or family and longed to be in a familiar place. I’d had these same feelings in Hidden River, but this was different. My unhappiness hadn’t involved our newborn child. I understood that Jake’s pain was only temporary and that the bris was important to my father and to our traditions. I also grasped how foreign this concept was for Cai. Jake would be fine, but I knew that I needed to attend to Cai before he descended into another funk.
My mom was engaged in a conversation with Larry and Judy, while my dad and grandma spoke with the mohel. No one else seemed to notice that Cai was crying, so I tried to soothe him before it blew up into a bigger deal. “It’ll be okay. Jake only felt the pain for a second. See, he’s not crying now.”
Cai shook his head like a child refusing his parents’ orders. “It hurt him. He cried so much. We’re never doing this to another baby.”
I lightly stroked Jake’s wisps of baby hair. But then Cai pulled Jake from me and marched into the den. Hunched over like a weeping willow, Cai cradled Jake in his arms. I saw Cai’s pursed lips and closed eyes, and knew enough to give him space. Back in the living room, my mom interrupted her conversation with Judy. “Where is Cai?”
“He’s in the den with Jake. He seems pretty upset about the bris.”
“I’m sorry. I know it’s such an unfamiliar idea.”
“Jake is sleeping and seems fine. When we see Dr. Kwok next week, he’ll check to see that it’s healing properly.” I was confident Jake would be fine but still worried about Cai.
Just then Cai stormed by, his eyes focused on the floor as if he’d had a quarrel with someone. I checked the den to see if anyone was there. It was empty except for Jake, sleeping soundly in his car seat. When I turned back toward Cai, he had already stomped upstairs. I wanted to reassure him again that Jake was no longer in pain, but from experience, I knew he needed time to settle down on his own.
Later that evening, Mr. Huang, a friend of Cai’s from Wuhan who now lived in San Francisco, stopped by. Cai ushered him into the kitchen and introduced him to lox and bagels, including how to spread the cream cheese and where to place the tomatoes and onions. He’d calmed down, and thankfully, Jake didn’t cry again that day.
Chapter 33
A Parental Invasion
Halfway into my parents’ stay that summer, Cai and I applied for tourist visas for Mama and Baba. Cai gleamed at the prospect of his parents living with us for a year, but I half hoped that their visa application would be denied. I was ashamed to feel that way, but I worried that their presence might drive Cai further into homesickness, reminding him of what he’d left in China: the food, the conversations, the culture. If Cai’s parents suggested we all move back to China and I refused, would Mama really want to leave San Francisco without Jake after bonding with him for a year?
One evening my parents and I huddled around Cai in the kitchen while he dialed his parents’ number in Hidden River. Jake slept soundly in his car seat. We knew that Mama and Baba had just returned from their visa interview at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Cai greeted his parents on the phone but remained silent for minutes as his parents spoke. Was it unsuccessful and were they trying to lessen Cai’s disappointment? I would need to start looking for a day care that could take Jake at the end of the summer.
Suddenly Cai laughed out loud and pumped his fist in the air. Mama and Baba would be coming to San Francisco instead!
My parents cheered like fans at a basketball championship game.
“This is great,” my mom said to me. “Jake will get to know his other grandparents and won’t have to go to day care for another year.”
With a forced smile, I hugged Cai after he got off the phone. But his laughter was contagious, and I soon chided myself for ever having hoped Mama and Baba wouldn’t be able to come. My mother was right. No one would love and care for Jake as much as his other set of doting grandparents.
• • •
I returned to work a couple weeks before my parents drove back to Chicago. There was a two-week gap between their departure and Mama and Baba’s arrival. Cai would be responsible for taking care of Jake during that time. After he had quit his newspaper job, Cai became involved with a group that was organizing a Chinese concert for the following spring. They always met in the late afternoon or at night.
On Cai’s first day alone with Jake, I returned home to find Cai disheveled and exhausted, his eyes bloodshot. He excused himself to take a shower, grabbing a handful of almonds on his way upstairs. “I haven’t eaten all day.”
“Cai, you can bring Jake in the bathroom while you shower. I do it all the time. And there’s no reason you can’t eat while you’re looking after Jake.”
It had been a difficult day for me, too, returning to a job I didn’t love and leaving my baby home when all I wanted was to stay with him. I cried when I pumped milk twice that day in a kitchen galley that didn’t lock. My boss shunned personal phone calls, so I could only call home for a minute when she and the rest of the office left for lunch. When I came home at six the next day, Cai dashed upstairs for his shower. Again, he hadn’t eaten that day.
“Méiyou yìsi,” Cai lamented that evening as we watched Chinese TV after a quick dinner of instant noodles.
“What has no meaning?”
“This.” He looked around the room. “This life. Staying home all day, not working, not having friends—”
“But you’ve made many friends here. More than I have. And you have the rest of your life to work, so you should enjoy this time with Jake. Many dads wish they could stay home with their kids, but they can’t because their jobs aren’t flexible. You’re lucky you have this time now.”
“In China, friends come over every night for talking and chatting. It’s so rènào there, but here th
ere’s no meaning. It’s so quiet in the house. The friends here aren’t even good.”
I tried to remain supportive, all while digesting what he had just said about there being no meaning in our house. I felt sad and frustrated that Cai found no meaning in staying home with Jake when that was all I wanted to do. As a new mother, I didn’t want to leave my home or my baby for eleven hours a day, so this arrangement wasn’t easy on me, either. But instead of voicing my feelings, I said, “If they’re such bad friends, why do you drive a hundred miles every night to see them?”
Cai ignored my question and repeated, “I don’t know how long I can stay here.”
“Your parents will be here in two weeks. Once they arrive, you’ll feel more at home.” But a larger question loomed in my mind. What would happen after they left a year later?
When your mother-in-law sits
You should respectfully stand;
Obey quickly her commands.
—Ban Zhao
Instruction for Chinese Women and Girls
Chapter 34
Battling the Tiger Mother
On the day Mama and Baba were to arrive in San Francisco, I woke early to track their flight on our erratic dial-up Internet connection. Cai and I sat down for breakfast while Jake rested contentedly in his car seat on the floor next to us. I dug into my bowl of cornflakes as Cai sipped coffee and buttered a bagel.
“I’m going to a party at Chen Xiaohong’s in San Jose tonight, but I won’t have to leave until five,” he said.
Tonight? “What about your parents?”
And what’s so important about Chen Xiaohong’s house? I wanted to add. Chen Xiaohong was the woman who’d brought me three dozen eggs after Jake was born.
Good Chinese Wife Page 21