“I didn’t say I was afraid.”
The doctor backed away. There was a spray of gray hairs on her temple, a gold wedding band on her finger. I sat very still in that big paper gown. The screen was blank again. I had traveled thousands of miles just to learn there was no difference between the provincial hospitals with their IDs and age requirements and marriage permits and this clinic in New York with its stupid rules on twenty-four versus twenty-eight. Four measly weeks.
“Are you okay?”
I nodded, looking at my lap. She gave me a sheet of phone numbers and several pamphlets in English and Chinese. I promised to return for another checkup and to buy vitamins.
I walked out of the clinic into a cloudy and cool afternoon, fell asleep on the subway and woke at the end of the line, in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood full of white people speaking some language that wasn’t English. I got off and heard seagulls and smelled salt water, and I walked to the edge of the city, removed my shoes, rolled up my jeans, and stepped into the ocean for the first time.
I stepped in farther. The cold water made me curl my toes and the waves lapped at my shins in a sharper, faster way than the dark blue of the river in the village, yet here the sea was cleaner, grayer, larger, more angry and thirsty and beautiful all at once, not unlike New York itself. I took another step. The water was up to my waist. My teeth chattered, but the cold felt good.
I had run out of choices; I was fucked. I had to have the baby. Or rather, Polly would have to have the baby.
I heard a voice calling from the shore. A man was waving at me and jumping up and down. A woman joined him. They yelled, their arms beckoning me to come back.
The water wasn’t that cold. “I’m not afraid,” I yelled in Mandarin.
Standing in the Atlantic, it grew into a challenge. For Polly, the girl who’d defy odds, the girl who could do anything. New York was a parallel gift of a life, and the unrealness of being here gave even the most frightening things a layer of surreal comedy. Peilan continued on in the village, feeding chickens and stray cats and washing cabbages, as Polly lived out a bonus existence abroad. Peilan would marry Haifeng or another village boy while Polly would walk the endless blocks of new cities. Polly could have a baby without being married. A baby might soothe the sharp edges of my loneliness, the loneliness that bubbled up when I saw couples and families and people laughing with their friends. I could raise my child to be smart and funny and strong.
I want you to know that you were wanted. I decided: I wanted you.
Yi Ba thought that only men could do what they wanted, but he was wrong. I stood with my toes in the ocean, euphoric at how far I had come, and two months later, when I gave birth to you, I would feel accomplished, tougher than any man.
I NAMED YOU DEMING. My roommates let me stay, despite their complaints that your crying kept them up at night, and in return I kicked in a little extra rent. I tried to hand you over to a stranger at a day care but I couldn’t, not yet, and instead I quit my job, called the loan shark, and took out an additional loan, one that enabled me to not work for six months.
No one had told me I could have such love for another person. When I thought of anything harmful happening to you the love burned a little, like a rash, but when I held you and you were calm, the love was beaming, like sunlight through the leaves of a tree. I was in love! I’d look down at you and get goo-goo-eyed and think, This is a human being I made. I no longer watched crime shows with my roommates; they made the world seem too dangerous.
Didi worked in a nail salon and said she’d try to get me a job there. She gave us her mattress and took over the sleeping bag. I don’t know if you remember Didi, but she had a squeaky voice and fluffy bangs, and when you fussed, she would hold you and you would quiet down, discharging bubbles of drool that she blotted, nonchalantly, with the bottom of her shirt. After weeks of only sleeping an hour or two at a time, I responded to your screaming on autopilot. I’d hear your cries even when I was sleeping.
But it was grueling, how much a baby needed, how you would tug my hair and grab my shirt and latch onto my body because you owned, it, too. Look how he wants his mama, my roommates would say, and a couple of them also got goo-goo-eyed, and a sliver of fear would present itself: what if I would always be required to offer myself up, ready and willing, constantly available? What had I done? And then: what was wrong with me? Didi loved kids, had grown up caring for younger siblings and nieces and nephews, and though she found it strange that I sometimes wanted to take off and walk around the neighborhood for an hour, smoking a cigarette—“By yourself? And to nowhere in particular? But why?”—she always offered to watch you.
“When I get married,” Didi would begin her sentences, “when I have kids . . . ”
“How many kids do you want?” I asked, as we prepared dinner one evening.
“Two or three. Do you want more?”
“One’s enough for now.”
“Only one?”
I told Didi about Haifeng. “I guess I wanted more than just staying with him.” I poured oil into the pan and turned the knob that produced a gas flame.
“You’re a free spirit, but practical. Like my sister in Boston. She’ll marry this guy for a green card. Me, I’m more traditional. I’ll marry someone I love.”
It pleased me, being called a free spirit.
ONCE A MONTH, I called Yi Ba. “How’s New York?” he asked.
“Wonderful. How’s Minjiang?”
“The same.” Then he’d tell me about a neighbor’s new house with rugs that tickled his toes.
“I’ll try to make more money so I can send you some,” I said.
“You need your money more than I do. I can take care of myself.”
Two of my roommates had given birth to children in New York and sent them to stay with relatives in China. “They don’t remember anything when they’re babies,” said Hetty, a hairdresser with a shaggy bob. She was folding her clothes and stacking them into a box that she kept under her bunk. “They don’t miss us. What do you remember when you were his age? Nothing, I bet.” Hetty had a three-year-old son whom she hadn’t seen in two and a half years, living with her parents in her village, her husband working in a place called Illinois. “I’ll bring my son here when he’s old enough to go to school. Two more years.”