Now, back in the courtroom, Ed Lim paced a few steps. “How about books? What kind of books do you read with May Ling?”
“Well.” Mrs. McCullough began to think. “We read her a lot of classics. Goodnight Moon, of course. And Pat the Bunny—she loves that. Madeline. Eloise. Blueberries for Sal. I’ve saved all my favorites from when I was a child, and it’s very special to get to share them with Mirabelle.”
“Do you have any books that feature Chinese characters?”
Mrs. McCullough was ready for this one. “Yes, in fact, we do. We have The Five Chinese Brothers—it’s a beautiful retelling of a famous Chinese folktale.”
“I know that book.” Ed Lim smiled again, and Mr. Richardson’s shoulders grew tight. Whenever Ed Lim smiled, he was learning, you had to watch out. You just can’t tell what he’s really thinking, Mr. Richardson thought, and then, instantly chagrined, What a terrible thing to think. He flushed. “What do those five Chinese brothers in the book look like?” Ed Lim was asking.
“They’re—they’re drawings. They all look alike—I mean, a lot like each other, they’re brothers, that’s part of the story, no one can tell them apart—” Mrs. McCullough fumbled.
“They have pigtails, don’t they? And little coolie hats? Slanty eyes?” Ed Lim didn’t wait for Mrs. McCullough to respond. His daughter had seen this book in the school library in second grade and returned home deeply troubled. Daddy, do my eyes look like that? “Not exactly the image of Chinese people I’d want May Ling to have in 1998. What about you?”
“It’s a very old story,” Mrs. McCullough insisted. “They’re wearing traditional costume.”
“How about other books, Mrs. McCullough? Any other books with Chinese characters?”
Mrs. McCullough bit her lip. “I haven’t really looked for them,” she admitted. “I hadn’t thought about it.”
“I can save you some time,” said Ed Lim. “There really aren’t very many. So May Ling has no dolls that look like her, and no books with pictures of people that look like her.” Ed Lim paced a few more steps. Nearly two decades later, others would raise this question, would talk about books as mirrors and windows, and Ed Lim, tired by then, would find himself as frustrated as he was grateful. We’ve always known, he would think; what took you so long?
Now, in the courtroom, Ed Lim stopped in front of Mrs. McCullough’s chair. “You and your husband don’t speak Chinese or know much about Chinese culture or history. You haven’t, by your own testimony, even thought about that entire aspect of May Ling’s identity. Isn’t it fair to say that if May Ling stays with you and Mr. McCullough, she will effectively be divorced from her birth culture?”
At this point, Mrs. McCullough burst into tears. In those early weeks she had fed Mirabelle every four hours, held her every time she cried, and watched her grow until her heels stretched her newborn rompers almost to the breaking point. It was she who had checked Mirabelle’s weight regularly, who steamed peas and sweet potatoes and fresh spinach and pureed them and fed them to Mirabelle in doll-sized spoonfuls. When Mirabelle spiked a fever, it was she who spread a cold washcloth on her forehead, who pressed her lips to that little brow to test the heat. And when an ear infection turned out to be the culprit, it was she who fed antibiotic syrup drop by drop into Mirabelle’s small pink mouth and let her lap it up like a kitten. She could not, she had thought as she bent to kiss the baby’s flushed cheek, have loved this child more if it had come from her own flesh. All night—because feverish Mirabelle would not sleep except in motion—she cradled Mirabelle in her arms and paced the length of the room. By morning she had walked nearly four miles. It was she who, after breakfast, before bath time, and at bed, nuzzled Mirabelle’s soft belly until the baby gurgled with laughter. She was the one who had caught Mirabelle in her arms as she stumbled to stand upright; she was the one to whom Mirabelle stretched out her own arms when she was in pain, or afraid, or lonely. She would know Mirabelle in pitch dark by one cry of her voice—no, one touch of her hand. No, one breath of her smell.
“It’s not a requirement,” she insisted now. “It’s not a requirement that we be experts in Chinese culture. The only requirement is that we love Mirabelle. And we do. We want to give her a better life.” She continued to cry, and the judge dismissed her.
“It’s all right,” Mr. Richardson said as she took her place beside him. “You did just fine.” Inside, however, even he was beginning to feel a faint tremor of doubt. Of course Mirabelle would have a good life with Mark and Linda. There was no question about that. But would there be something—something—missing from her life if she were to grow up with them? Mr. Richardson was suddenly keenly conscious of Mirabelle, of the immense weight of the complicated world on this one tiny, vulnerable person.
On the courthouse steps, when the reporters stopped them, he made a brief, anodyne statement about having faith in the process. “I have complete confidence in Judge Rheinbeck, that he’ll weigh all the issues and make a fair decision,” he said.
The McCulloughs did not appear to notice this subtle shift in his tone—in earlier statements he’d spoken with some force about how clear it was that they should receive custody, how obvious it was they would raise her best, how completely evident it was that Mirabelle belonged with the McCulloughs (she is a McCullough, he’d insisted). Nor did the newspapers, which ran stories titled LAWYER FOR ADOPTIVE PARENTS CERTAIN OF WIN. Mr. Richardson, however, was far less certain than the news stories made it sound.
At dinner that evening, when Mrs. Richardson asked how the day’s hearing had gone, he said little. “Linda testified today,” he said. “Ed Lim was pretty hard on her. It didn’t look good.” He meant for Mrs. McCullough, but as the words left his mouth an idea occurred to him, a way to spin this, and later that evening he would call his contacts at the paper. The following morning, the Plain Dealer would publish a story mentioning Ed Lim’s “aggressive” tactics, how he had badgered poor Mrs. McCullough to the point of tears. Men like him, the article would suggest, weren’t supposed to lose their cool—though it was never specified whether “like him” meant lawyers or something else entirely. But the truth was—as Mr. Richardson recognized—that an angry Asian man didn’t fit the public’s expectations, and was therefore unnerving. Asian men could be socially inept and incompetent and ridiculous, like a Long Duk Dong, or at best unthreatening and slightly buffoonish, like a Jackie Chan. They were not allowed to be angry and articulate and powerful. And possibly right, Mr. Richardson thought uneasily. Once the article came out, a number of people who had been neutral threw their support behind the McCulloughs; some who had been on Bebe’s side found their passions cooling.