“It’s more open here in southern China than it is in Beijing, thank goodness,” Mom says.
“Yes,” my father agrees. “I haven’t noticed anyone following us, but we still have to assume our phones are tapped and our mail will be steamed open and read before it arrives. So be very careful what you say and write.”
“I remember, Dad.”
My stomach clenches with the familiar fear of discovery.
Dad explains that while China has been slowly allowing more foreigners to enter as teachers, this leniency is new. If caught, we’d be deported, but it would be far more dangerous for our Chinese friends. They would certainly be harassed, and worse, sent to detention camps. We can’t pass out posters, busk, or preach openly about Jesus.
“When we find people that we think are Sheepy, we can invite them to our home for individual Bible studies.”
At these Bible studies, we need to carefully feel out each person, knowing that some of the “Sheep” may have been sent by the government to befriend and spy on us. He tells me that we need to start out by introducing simple Bible verses—none of the heavier doctrines on sex and certainly nothing about the Family. We must appear to be a normal System Christian family that has come here to study Chinese.
I turn the conversation to my parents’ escapades in China these past six months. They tell me about the friends they’ve made, and even a few more tidbits they’ve heard about my siblings, who are popping out more children. Dad boasts that he has nearly twenty grandkids already. When he gets up to make a peanut butter sandwich, Mom winks knowingly and says, “Patrick has become a very handsome young man.” I try to keep myself from rolling my eyes. She has never really grown up.
Mom tells me his whole family lives on the nearby island of Gulangyu, a pedestrian-only island off the coast of Xiamen. “We go there often for dinner and fellowship! Who knows what might happen between you two now that you’re older?”
I shrug indifferently. Mom loves nothing better than to find something she can tease me about, so I try not to give her any ammo, but I can’t ignore the flutter in my stomach. Will I finally find out that the boy I’ve known since childhood is the love of my life, like Gilbert in Anne of Green Gables?
Mom raises her eyebrows suggestively. I smile and excuse myself to go to my new bedroom, which I’m to share with Ching-Ching and Sophia. Though I’m happy to see my mom again, I’m also just a bit uneasy. Our relationship has always been rocky, especially during my younger teen years. But at nearly twenty, I’m an adult now and ready to move beyond these childhood episodes. I just hope she’ll be able to treat me like a fellow adult Home member.
The next afternoon I’m sitting on my twin bed, reading a new Mama Letter, when I hear Mom yell to me from the living room, “Auntie Grace just called to say Patrick is on his way over. He should be here in thirty minutes!”
I quickly change into a nice dress, checking the mirror a dozen times, and when I give up on braiding and rebraiding my long hair, I dash out the door. There, climbing the steps, is a tall, handsome man with light brown hair. His round, freckled face has been replaced by a strong, chiseled jaw, and through his thin shirt, I can see the lines of his body, lean and well-defined.
He speaks, and I hear the slow drawl of my brothers. The flutters of anticipation subside. “How is it that you speak exactly like my brothers?!” I ask with a laugh. Growing up with us, he’d escaped his parents’ Irish lilt.
We both laugh, releasing our pent-up anxiety.
“I heard you were in town and had to see for myself,” he begins, and before I know it, it’s like we’re back on the Farm. “Remember that time . . .” and off we go.
The goofy boy I loved still flashes through the young man who is trying to be serious. We walk the shady campus paths for an hour before he has to go. He has a few errands to run for his parents in the city, things they can’t buy on the island for their large family.
“I can’t believe your parents have ten kids now!” I say.
“They were trying to catch up with your family and now they’ve surpassed you!” he says, and we both laugh. We hug tight in goodbye as he leaves me at the bottom of the hill.
I’m panting from the long flight of stairs when I enter the tiled entrance of my new Home, where I find Mom, once again, at the door, waiting. “So how did it go?” Her eyes gleam in anticipation.
“Patrick feels like one of my brothers. No chemistry.”
She looks crestfallen. I’m disappointed, too. I use one of her old French phrases. “C’est la vie.”
At Devotions the next morning, Mom tells Ching-Ching and me, “As far as how the Home runs, we are not the leaders or Shepherds here. We expect you young adults to be responsible for yourselves. We’re all on the Home Council, which means we all vote on Home decisions.”
As the days pass, I start to crack through the fa?ade of humility and submission I’d carefully built for myself in Kazakhstan. My parents aren’t going to force me to share or try to break me for being opinionated. They are all too aware of their own small disobediences. I quickly recognize my parents’ real desire is to be left alone to do their own thing, much like in Macau, which is fine with me.
My mom is more interested in her university job than she is in Mama Maria’s latest prophecies, and while my dad still reads the Letters with us at Devotions, he’s become obsessed with Hudson Taylor, the zealous British Protestant Christian who was a missionary to China from 1854 until his death in 1905. Because university classes start at 8:00 a.m., we have united Devotions only on the weekends. We generally follow the Family rules, have a schedule, go places with a buddy for safety, but the constant pressure to be the perfect disciple is lifted from my chest just a bit. For the first time since leaving the Farm five years ago, I’m able to take deep breaths, appreciating the fragrance of honeysuckle mixed with car exhaust, and my body imperceptibly relaxes.
But with my parents abdicating much of their control, a good part of the responsibility to make sure everything runs smoothly according to Family standards falls on Ching-Ching and me, which means assuming responsibility for cooking, cleaning, and caring for Jondy and Nina, who are now eight and eleven.
Out of two hundred foreign students, there are only two Americans in the entire class in Xiamen University’s Mandarin language school, Ching-Ching and I (Sophia is Canadian). Most are overseas Chinese coming to learn their mother tongue, with a few Europeans sprinkled in.