I’d known that for years Tami had been trying to move her parents from Chongqing to Greenwich. I wasn’t in the main house to hear the call she’d apparently just had with them, but as my mother told it, Tami was saying that now might be the time to act, should borders truly close—if that were to happen indefinitely, when or how would families split overseas be able to see each other again?
As my mother was talking, details about Tami came back to me. During her master’s, she had gone, as did most international Chinese students, the entire two-year stint without flying back to see her family (doctorates went longer, sometimes five, six, nine years). The primary reason being cost, she couldn’t afford the round-trip airfare on the stipend. But even if she’d been able to, I doubt she would’ve gone. None of these international students wished to give the school that had sponsored them the impression that they were taking unnecessary time off.
Grad school burned Tami out. Or it was the years of schooling beforehand and maybe the fatigue of having been sent down a conveyor belt of achievement tasks to be exported as a commodity. Her parents had other plans for her, that after the master’s, she would continue on to the doctorate, then after the doctorate, import herself back to China to find that high-paying academic job. There was no doctorate but there was a wedding. And so quick after marrying my brother did she become the sister-in-law who shook her bejeweled wrist of status at me that I’d almost forgotten about the Tami who had arrived here status-less, on a student visa, and knew no one except an advisor and a school liaison who picked her up from JFK.
Tami’s parents remained unhappy with the outcome. They came for the wedding, and after the birth of each grandson, but stayed no more than a week. I knew that they’d made some blunt remarks to Tami. I knew they’d said, Why did you go to America just to be a mom? You could have done that in China, without all those years of education and the distance. Remembering this again, I saw Tami’s pursuit of motherhood in a new light. The critique was harsh, but for parents like those, much had been at stake, substantial sacrifice and pulling out of the heart. A daughter lost, in a way, to another place, and had they had a do-over, they might not have encouraged her to leave. Tami’s parents refused to move to America and have never wavered on that decision. A permanent move overseas at their age would be crippling. If they couldn’t read, write, or speak the language, then they regressed, relying heavily on Tami for everything that in China they could do on their own. China was their home, and there, they had good pensions, a spacious apartment, independence. The same things that my mother had there and wanted back. So why move to the land of the free to not be? Whatever mile radius Tami had envisioned for them was not what they wanted for themselves.
But don’t you want to be near your grandkids? she’d said on the call, many calls.
I can’t help you from here. I can’t always get there in time.
And what if something happens to one of you? What then?
Yes, what if something did happen, like sudden death, a freak accident, like tripping over projector cords and hitting your head.
The last detail about my sister-in-law that occurred to me was that because of the one-child policy, she was their only one. She had no siblings back in China to help care for her parents as my parents had theirs, as I had Fang to look after our mother here. Hence, if she could not go to them, and they would not come to her, then what becomes of their family, the first that Tami had known?
That family becomes amputated, as do the people within them. Limbs feel hacked off, and you find yourself hobbling around on one leg. Or how I felt after my parents emigrated back when I was still in college, and how I felt about my family in China, who had carried on long enough without me and I had lost the opportunity to know.
* * *
—
THOUGH IT SEEMED THAT I didn’t know my family here any better.
Mornings I spent in the main house, with breakfast set at 7:00 a.m. as Tami and the housekeeper tried to get three boys ready for school. Neat uniforms. Clean shoes. Black hair combed to the side with a wet comb or just the palm of their mother’s hand. String cheese, orange juice, buttered bread, all laid out on the kitchen island for the boys to stop and grab like race cars. I would exchange a few words with my brother, who was always on his phone checking end-of-day numbers from the Asia markets, while waiting for the company chauffeur to come pick him up. How had I slept? More coffee? Tea? Biscuit? That each morning there was always a plate of warm biscuits on the counter astounded me. It was all the comforts of a home that no adult here had grown up with but now had. The aide would arrive—hello, waves—and set down her things before going upstairs to fetch my mother, who had been allowing herself to sleep in. Three book bags were brought out, strapped on, after which my brother went over to give each son a head pat, the youngest a pick-up hug, and then Tami ushered all of them out the door. Quiet for a moment, before I heard the sounds of Tami pulling out of the garage and speeding down the driveway, since they were already late, then not long after, the sounds of a slick black sedan slowly pulling up. If done with his coffee, Fang would leave. If our mother had come down by then, he would peck her on the cheek.
I was confused and made more confused by scenes of physical affection I’d never seen. I wondered why I’d never seen it or if I’d never looked. No, I had looked before when it’d been just Fang, me, and our parents, and physical affection was hard to find. Like night and day, comparing this breakfast scene with those of my youth, when sometimes no parent was around and the only noise was the clinking of my spoon against my cereal bowl, a dim flush mount overhead.
By Valentine’s Day, the case number in China had doubled again, to just over sixty-six thousand. In a speech to the nation, Xi Jinping called the disease a big test for the country, but that they would all, all 1.4 billion Chinese people, cross the river in the same boat, or so the idiom went. Fifteen cases in the United States, when the CDC announced that the disease still had a lot of unknowns and some screening kits had been found to be faulty.
On Valentine’s Day, Fang and Tami went out to eat, just the two of them, leaving my mother and me to watch the boys. We ordered pizza.
When both Fang and Tami ate with us, so much dinner talk revolved around my nephews and their activities. The youngest had started to play tennis, which the middle and oldest sons already played. Fang added a fourth, and now there was serious hope for a doubles match sometime down the line. Boys needed tennis, my brother still said, otherwise they won’t turn out right. Fang wasn’t a strict dad, but he spoke to each son in turn and like small adults. Name three things you did today; list the three you plan on doing tomorrow. He had a 60-40 rule, that 60 percent of his parent voice should be used in praise, 40 percent in constructive criticism. Tami had no such ratio and was far less strict. After dinner, she instituted game night or put on a movie. She would tell the boys to shower, brush their teeth, go to bed, but then be lulled into another ten-minute extension. Was she trying to be a better mother than hers had been to her? Than mine had been to us? A fun mom, or the most American of all things, a mom who was also a friend. Circumstances improve. Time, money, the question of survival no longer hanging overhead. As a child, I hadn’t felt my situation to be lacking until I became an adult. Because a child can get used to anything, a child will find a way to grow up.
After the entire Valentine’s pizza was consumed, I heard myself say the same thing to my nephews. Shower, brush your teeth, go to bed.
But it’s only seven p.m., they replied.
Then just shower.
What about a story or game night or a movie?
I said I couldn’t be like their mother.
What about homework?
It’s not done?
We’re done with homework.
So, it is done.