An easy silence

The social spaces between strangers to which I am accustomed in the U.S. do not exist here. Strangers approach us every time we leave the hotel. We walk out near the edge of the lake in the evening and find rows of chairs and sit for a while to watch the sunset. A woman sits beside me and begins examining Ji Xia like a pediatrician. She turns the bottoms of her feet to the sky, looks in her ears, pinches her thighs, repeatedly pulls her thumb out of her mouth, all the while scolding me in Mandarin. I know she’s scolding me because scolding sounds exactly the same in all languages. That, and a man behind us translates in broken English that the baby is not covered well enough for the evening air (despite the fact that the temperature of the humid air is still in the mid-eighties from the afternoon high of mid-nineties), and that if we let her continue to suck her thumb, she will destroy her thumbnail. She takes the bottle of formula from the bag at my feet and shakes some liquid into her palm, tastes it, frowns, scolds some more. She’s too old for a bottle, the man behind us translates, smiling. She tells us that new parents must learn a great deal to be good parents. As she scolds I realize that she has taken on the traditional role of the aunt whose job it is to tell the unvarnished truth, to balance the spoiling effects of overindulging parents and grandparents. So a while later, as Crescent and I stand to leave, I thank her and pull Ji’s thumb from her mouth and the lady frowns sternly and nods her approval, shooting me a hard look. Caring takes many forms. Sometimes its form must be hard because it is a hard world, made of hard things. These last few days, even as one beautiful moment after another has washed through my mind, that awareness has grown crisp. It is the contrast. Bright lights cast deep shadows.

Ji Xia has invented a game: the fall, tickle, and fly. We are learning to laugh with each other. Ji Xia palms the ground, props herself, turns a knee outward and stands roughly, wobbling like a drunkard, then falls backward into my waiting hand, arching her back and giggling upward, her little laugh rising into the air like a flock of starlings. Crescent, laughing, reaches out to tickle her and sweep her up through the air and I laugh as she flies along the cobblestones in the airplane of Crescent’s arms. We play this game and games like it throughout the day. In moments like these I sometimes think of a poem that I stumbled across in my teenage years by an author I can no longer remember that describes a feeling I first had then that is very much like a feeling I have now, a realization that moments like these, as perfect as they come, are at the basement level built on much more than they seem. There was a lake on the edge of my home town and I would sometimes go there and sit on the end of an old wooden pier that sagged on old pilings barely a foot proud of the mirror surface and there I would watch the summer sun lowering behind the pines, watch lightning bugs flash on and off above the fields and in the trees on the other side of the lake, wait in silence as evening darkened around me. I would sit without moving for an hour, two, more. I would lean back on the pier and watch Venus rise, and the moon. Here is the poem, or what I remember of it. (I’m sure my memory has butchered it.)

This silence would be perfect
If it weren’t for the urge I have
To tell you how perfect this silence is

As I listen to my new daughter laugh I know that in this world it is a stone fact that people leave babies at bus stops and in doorways, and in rivers and empty fields too, and only the lucky ones find their way to orphanages, where they sleep on thin mattresses or bare plywood and bathe in a trickle of cold water running from a pipe. Their legs are not strong so they walk late and they wear bald spots on the backs of their heads because they are crib-bound but they are the lucky ones because they live, lucky because they eat every day and they stay dry and generally warm enough and when they get sick they get medicine. I know that only a slight few of them have their files selected by clerks in the matching room in Beijing for referral to a waiting family or are chosen by a family from a list of waiting children with special needs, but most do not. They graduate from the crib rooms to the toddler rooms, to the school rooms, learn to read and write, learn trades when they’re old enough, leave state care at age 18, and move into adulthood never having known what most of us identify as the fundamental force behind who we are – our connections to family.

What I’m saying is that sometimes when I listen to Ji Xia laugh it reminds me that it is a hard world, made of hard things, and that thought makes her laugh sweeter still. I hope that when I think back to these first days with Ji Xia from a great distance, long after these days have been carved into the sculpture of my memory and stored neatly into my past, on the softest of days when I’m watching her swim in the ocean or listening to her complain about eating vegetables, I will remember that we are, all three of us, stupendously lucky to have each other and I hope that the remembering will help me mark each of these soft days as a treasure.