Paula Hiatt's Blog

At the end of May we left our home in Suzhou, China to spend the summer in the U.S. where we landed in Columbus, Ohio, bought a dented Ford Explorer and hit the open road. It wasn’t long before my kids began to grin and poke each other, speaking out of the sides of their mouths as we bought gas or waited for a table.

“She’s a two.”

“He’s definitely a four.”

“EIGHT! Did you see that, an EIGHT.”

I had to ask. “What do you mean?”

“It’s the number of Chinese people they had to eat to get that big.”

“That’s so rude, you shouldn’t say that,” although the woman who did my nails in Tennessee was absolutely a twelve.

The transition from China to the U.S. is a pretty fair shock, especially if you start in the south where the word “barbeque” means something completely different than it does in the west, and where they prefer honest fatback to that namby-pamby I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter that is chemically closer to plastic than food. I was raised in the west, but my dad is Huckleberry Finn went to college, where he married a nice western girl who couldn’t understand why his watch moved slower than hers. We spent many summers in the south with our dad’s family, and as a child I hardly understood a word my grandma said, believing for many years that my grandfather was named “Author” rather than “Arthur,” which, of course, made perfect sense since my dad grew up to be a writer.

Our dented Ford Explorer had a temporary license plate—excuse me, tag, which the great state of Ohio asked that we tape into the back window, what with it being thickish paper. In Henderson, North Carolina we ran across a cop took issue with it, lights flashing, pulling over, all that stuff.

“Where’s your tag?”

“Right here in the back window.”

“It’s supposed to be screwed to the plate.”

“What if it rains?”

“The law is it’s supposed to be screwed to the plate.”

Apparently Ohio and North Carolina don’t see eye to eye. Dutifully my husband handed over his license and registration to be matched in the officer’s computer. Who knew driver’s licenses were connected to passports.

“I see you’ve been in and out of China and Taiwan several times. Do you want to explain that?”

We pointed out that we live in China, and they went back to their car to do more checking. Porter began to complain that he had to go to the bathroom, and the officer’s partner loped up all nonthreatening, “Sorry this is taking so long.” Then he began to casually question the kids to make sure the adults matched with the innocent. “By the way, our son has to go to the bathroom,” we said. He went back to do more checking. Both officers returned all smiles and apologies and asked my husband to please step out of the vehicle and off to the back where they questioned him again. We finally got off with a warning, which was pretty nice, what with our being international criminals and all. We exited the freeway and drove straight into Henderson proper so we could acquire screws for our cardstock tag and Porter could go to the bathroom at the nearest fast food restaurant. There we were astounded to discover that in the United States of America you can now buy a bacon sundae.

That cop was probably a three.

I’m not sure why a female with that much armpit hair thought a sleeveless dress was a good idea, but perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.

I love jewelry, pearls, diamonds, pearls, onyx, turquoise, pearls, rubies, emeralds, and did I say pearls. Yeah, I really like pearls. I suppose it’s lucky that Suzhou is one of the pearl trading centers of Asia. Now, before you look at that list and think me uppity, you should also know I’m the girl who scours thrift stores for the ugly but solidly built nightstand that can be sanded down and repainted—$10 vs. $250, works for me. So when I buy my pearls I don’t go to the jewelry store with the flattering lighting that subtracts ten years from everyone’s face and adds a thousand bucks in sparkle to each engagement ring. Rather I head for one of the pearl markets in Suzhou, Shanghai or Beijing where jewels are heaped in great pirate piles of lapis, aquamarine, onyx, coral, and jade, all strung raw, just waiting for a customer to strike a bargain and direct how they will be configured.

On Thursday night my daughter Abby spent an unfortunate evening reintroducing her dinner to the back of her teeth and awoke Friday morning with a lingering stomachache, though by midmorning her cheeks had pinked up considerably. Now, a good mother would have sent her straight to school, but we’ve already established that I give my kids scorpion for lunch, so I declared a field trip: Pearl Market or Bust.

There is method in my madness. Abby has a flair for design that I’m keen to encourage, and the huge pearl markets provide labor and beautiful materials far more cheaply than a little bead boutique in the U.S. If you can dream it, they can make it, and it’s a wonder to watch. Abby had a bracelet made and a couple of matching necklaces for herself and a friend. She and I skimmed through the various venders as she filled a tote with little boxes and jewelry bags, $1 here, $3 there, once in a while a major purchase of $10 or $15, a serious decision. But I had saved up some mad money and had a hankering for pink champagne pearls, good quality, but not too expensive. At least half the vendors could have sold them to me, but I chose the tiny woman in the demure champagne dress because she talked and talked, interjecting English words here and there, back and forth until we understood each other.

I fingered a set of pink pearls. “Oh, good pearls, good price. I give you good price. How much you want to pay? Such good quality!” The pearls were small and I could see the spotty imperfections. “Do you have anything else? Anything better?”

It was like I’d flipped a switched. “Oh, Oh, I Show You!” She winked into the safe and began pulling out ropes of pink pearls and piling them on the table next to her first offering. “Look Look! These pearls good quality, you know good quality. Those other pearls no good,” she said with a sniff, then repeated herself for good measure. The new pearls were better, shimmery even in the fluorescent light, but not so fine and perfect that I couldn’t afford them. Once we’d reached a price and I had described what I wanted, she said, “Okay, I make.”

Immediately she emptied my three strings onto the table, deftly dividing them into two piles as she took her seat. She looked so sweet in her soft dress, fingers flashing as she fingered the pearls, piling them onto her needle, rejecting the match and piling them on again. Then a woman came in, her boss or her mother, talking to her in rapid fire Mandarin before leaving the room. Frustrated at the interruption she set to work fast and concentrating, less aware of Abby and me. Within moments it seemed my demure young woman had vanished and in her place sat a tomboy with her knees pointing east and west, so far to either end of the map that I had to avert my eyes to avoid meeting her Friday panties. That was the first time I noticed her shoes, purple heels with her toes thrust a good inch beyond the end. And then of course, there was the armpit hair. That was some long thread requiring a great deal of wide arm movements and, uhm, let’s just look at the shoes, purple, very colorful. She leaned forward, intent on her work, herself, utterly herself. I liked her that way, even took her picture, her hand blurry with speed, the wall behind her piled with plastic bins of pearls, small and big, perfect and pitted, all of them beautiful.

People show their colors when they forget that others are looking. I learned that at the Silk Market in Beijing where I used my credit card for the only time in months because I didn’t have my ATM card and found something I just had to have. The young girl at the counter kept calling me “friend,” never breaking character. I bought several things, only losing sight of my card for a couple of minutes when she went to the next stall to run it through their machine. That night I took a sleeper train home and arrived to discover that while I slept across the rails, someone on the other side of the world was charging thousands of dollars in beauty products to me. Now my card is cancelled and I am without it until I get home for a visit.

In Beijing the necklace that cost me my credit card is a circle of dark gray pearls only half emerged from the shell, and it reminds me of the girl who called me “friend.” In Suzhou I acquired a double strand of champagne pink and if you ever see me wandering around in my cut-rate elegance, come up to me and smile, and we will share a secret.

Last week I was in Shanghai walking along the Bund with my husband and two boys, Chase and Porter.

“It looks kind of Greek,” Porter said, nine years old and keenly interested in design and mythology.

“This area was built by the English, and Greek architecture is meant to symbolize stability and ancient power,” I said.

“And a lot of naked bottoms,” Porter added matter-of-factly. “That building over there looks more Roman, because of the lines.”

In Shanghai’s defense there are no naked bottoms on the Bund, unless you count the big bronze bull with the giant pair of, well, the giant pair. Lots of people get their picture taken with the bull, and my boys decided to get one from the back because they’re nine and eleven and anatomically correct bulls are totally hilarious, especially here where things are a little more buttoned up than they are at home.

Several years ago I read Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series aloud to my children, initiating a romance with mythology that continues to the present day. Porter would practice his reading by reading aloud from mythology books, and we would talk about the common threads among the world’s uber stories that weave and twirl around one another in a vast Pangeaic tapestry of power, creation and destruction. Unfortunately we never discussed Chinese myths which left us less prepared to understand the Chinese people at a time when many of the Chinese themselves are struggling to understand what they believe. About a month ago a man at my husband’s office pulled him aside and began asking him about our religion. Not wanting to be rude my husband hemmed and put him off because it’s illegal to teach such things to a Chinese national. Not to be deterred the man said, “Let me ask you this, when you were a child you believed in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and when you get older you don’t believe, but you still follow the tradition. Is that what your religion is for you?” “No,” my husband said, “we really believe what we say we believe.”

We love classical architecture for banks and universities, anyplace we need to feel stable and secure. The ancient Greeks, who bequeathed their beautiful mathematical symmetry, also brought us Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, which the Romans translated into Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto. But how did India come up with Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer, while the Norsemen told of Odin or Allfather, Thor the protector and Loki the vicious trickster. In China there are also three main gods to be found in shops or people’s homes: Fu, the god of good fortune associated with Jupiter, Lu, the god of influence and prosperity, and Shou, the god of longevity believed to control the length of a person’s life—always three, two gods of life and one of death.

C.S. Lewis, one of the great proponents of Christianity, spent many years as a confirmed atheist, until his study of mythology led him to believe Christianity had to be true. The night he finally put it all together, he said he sat in his room the most dejected believer in all Christendom. For my part I would like to read all the world’s stories, laying them end to end along a timeline of world events to help me understand how we got where we are today.

On my desk I have a “Happy Family Ball,” a round green stone of five concentric balls carved one inside another to represent the interconnectedness of a family. It is an old design, available in styles of three or five, sold in any price range from expensive to cheap, and deeply rooted in Chinese tradition. We bought it because it reminded us of our family, Seth, Paula, Abby, Chase, and Porter. But looking at it reminds me that the human family is far more interconnected than any of us realize, and I think that one day we’ll be held accountable for how we define the word “neighbor.” Underneath our funny clothes we all have naked bottoms, just ask Chase and Porter.

When you first come to China the whole world is turned on its head and there’s a good bit of calling your sister to exclaim, “You can’t imagine what I saw today!” Trash bags are too thin, middle-aged women don’t know how to use a can opener, and it appears that the population is kept in check by removing all warning labels and letting natural selection take its course. But gradually the shock wears off and without realizing it you come to the day when you are getting a little peckish as you’re wandering through the street market, and you turn to your child with perfect seriousness and say, “They have scorpion on a stick. Do you want some?”

Recently our family visited Suzhou’s Lion Forest Garden, which is essentially a giant rock maze comprised of native rock formations that look like a human-sized coral reef. We spent hours gleefully ducking into caves, crossing rock bridges that spanned rock passageways, and scrambling up treacherous rock stairs, built narrow and irregular, and now polished to a glassy sheen by six hundred years of passing feet. I did see a couple of guardrails, but never on the flyover bridges, only on a couple of stretches right near the water. Owing to the water pollution most Chinese can’t swim, and apparently they’re more nervous about getting wet than falling eight feet to the rock walkway below. The guardrails I did see were small metal tubes set about three and a half feet off the ground, marginally safer for adults, but anyone smaller takes his own chances. Such a garden would never fly in the U.S. There would be petitions and lawsuits, and Mothers Against Bad Mothers all screaming about child endangerment. Porter said, “Can we go back to the Lion Garden?” “Sure,” I said, but I give my kids scorpions, so don’t pay attention to me.

This weekend the first line of Suzhou’s brand new subway system is going live so they’ve been testing if for the last two weeks. In many other countries new subways are tested with sandbags in place of people, what with underground glitches and all. “Sandbags? Pfft. We’ve got a billion people, what do we need with sandbags?” Each of the test riders received an apple or a bottle of water for their trouble. Some of them probably would have preferred fried scorpion, though that’s a relatively expensive delicacy, too expensive for such an insignificant sacrifice. The subway will simplify our lives dramatically and my husband’s been watching with great interest, keen to take the whole family on opening day. I see no reason to risk my life without even the promise of an apple, so I’ve balked and put him off. My kids just want to get back to the Lion Forest Garden and figure they could crash in a taxi, on an ebike or in the subway—just get us there, Mom, we can die on the rocks just the same. Well, when you put it that way.

Not too long ago, we were in a car with a new arrival from America who looked at the passing traffic with the same wide eyes we used to have. “Did you see that, did you see how close that was?” I had seen the near miss, but unless it endangers the paint it no longer really registers. I don’t know if I’ve become more jaded or more adventurous, but I’ve noticed that it’s easy to spot the foreigners that will either turn tail and run, or remain here but grow a deep disgust for China and Chinese people. I cannot afford to be that woman. A few months ago my eleven year-old son Chase popped a dried silk worm in his mouth and laughed at me when I refused. He told me they’re kind of bitter, but I think I need to taste it for myself.

Today is Tomb Sweeping Day, a mandatory holiday which closed schools, factories, and offices on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week. Yay, three-day holiday, but there's a catch, a left cheek sneaker that takes the shine off mandatory holidays—You have to hit the rock pile the previous Saturday and Sunday to make up for it, schools, factories, and offices—Mandatory. Americans don't get it.

"We have three days off."

"But you have to work Saturday and Sunday."

"Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, that's three days."

"But 3-2=1"

"It's still March, why are you wearing short sleeves? I'm usually the first in this office to do that, and that's not usually until mid April."

"I'm sweating."

"I'm wearing long underwear under my suit. See you Saturday."

"Actually, I'll be busy running around the lake in my shorts." Then I'm going to lie on the bed and moan to my wife. (I'm pretty certain my husband didn't say that last part, but I'm still feeling a little bitter.)

Aside from the obvious greeting and caring for ancestors, Tomb Sweeping Day is also a time to enjoy the outdoors and fly kites. Today the park next to our house was swarmed with people, the kites flocking through the sky, tangling around each other and sometimes careening to the ground amidst laughing people. The boys and I flew our kite too, tying two reels together and sending it up to the very last inch. We love to fly kites, especially in the park at dusk when hundreds of bats suddenly appear, swooping and fluttering around the string. Once we brought our kite down this afternoon, Chase and Porter wanted to do bubbles by the lake where the breeze blows big bubbles through the long wands they sell along the sidewalk. Naturally there ensued an epic bubble battle, Attack! Attack! followed by a good deal of bubble wand fencing. "Which do you prefer, Mom, the staff or the sword?" they asked earnestly, iridescent foam caught on their shirts and in their hair. Halfway through the soapy solution there was a lull in the mêlée and we watched the bubbles float off on the water.

"You know, Mom, we might as well just dump this stuff in the lake. That's what we're really doing," Chase said.

"But it's better with the bubbles," Porter said.

"Kids dumping unidentified substance into the water," Chase said.

"I'm casting a spell," Porter said as a long string of bubbles wafted out of his wand.

Chase is all about math and Porter likes shiny things and calls himself a magpie. I tried to relaunch our kite over the water, but by that time the boys had used up all their bubble magic and were distracted by trying to forge their wands into weapons with actual edges. By myself I managed to get the kite up a little ways, but the bullheaded wind kept blowing it the across the walkway toward the park, the exact opposite of where I wanted it to go. Funny thing about kites, they can fly so high you can barely see them, as long as you keep the string taut and use the wind you have.

Chase and Porter are math and romance, and they bruise each other every time they wrestle, but they continue to do it, and one would be so lonely without the other. Incidentally, since coming to China, they've taken to wearing long underwear to bed, and they're excited for three days of no school.

George Bernard Shaw pointed out that "the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."

"Are there any cute boys in your class?" I asked my daughter, Abby.

"They're freaks, mom."

"Are there any cute freaks?"

"They brought a toaster to homeroom. There's a piece of burnt toast still in there. I can smell it—and a fly, I can hear it buzzing."

Translation: I'll tell my cousin I like boys, but there's no way I'll admit it to my mom.

I kissed my son Chase's head on his way to school.

"Don't kiss my hair, mom. It's got China water on it. You could die."

Translation: Three weeks ago I would have walked the world with my hair pointing to the North Star, but I've suddenly realized that girls are looking. Don't mess up my do.

Then, of course, there's Porter who has no filter.

"Mom, I can smell your perfume."

"Well, thank—"

"And by that I mean really stinky perfume."

The irony being that his eyes fill with tears when he thinks he's hurt my feelings.

In spoken form Mandarin Chinese is tremendously vague. "He" and "she" are both a unisex "ta," and a sound like "shi" can be fifty or more unrelated words, each denoted by a distinct written character. Meaning is somewhat blurred at best and heavily dependent on tone and context. For a foreigner it means that many people won't even try to understand you, and many others will fill in the blanks to suit themselves.

Exhibit A

"We need a rabbit hutch."

"No problem, I can build that for you."

Clearly we should have specified what year.

Exhibit B

Unable to find a taxi in a strange city, the kids and I found ourselves in the back of a delivery van, flung from side to side on a wooden box, contemplating our own mortality as the van careened through the streets, weaving in and out of heavy traffic, the driver slapping the brakes every now and then to give the paint a chance to catch up.

He promised to get us there, our fault for not negotiating how many pieces.

Exhibit C

This morning I discovered that for five months my maid has been washing our dishes with the same grotty scrubber and without benefit of soap.

Here's how it went down:

"Please do the dishes."

"Shi" with a smile.

Time passed.

"Please put the dishes away."

"Shi" with a smile.

Time passed.

"Please make sure you dry the dishes so we're not mixing a quarter-inch of canary yellow tap water with our dinner."

"Shi" with a smile.

Time passed and I figured the training was over. How could I forget to mention soap and water? It's a mystery which may or may not have given us plague, so you might want to think twice about kissing me.

Outside someone is shooting off fireworks, and I'd love to run out and ask him why. But even if he answers, I don't know if he'll really tell me. Abby would ask him if he owns a toaster.

The other day I was standing in the checkout line at the grocery store watching a fish slowly gasp it’s last in a plastic bag as the conveyor belt lurched forward so it’s dead body could be scanned along with the soy sauce and toilet paper. Gingerly I placed my items on the moist rubber, wondering what else might have died there. Yesterday I saw a father helping his little son pee into a plastic bag hanging below the meat counter. In China most children’s clothing is sold with a split crotch, for, uhm, convenience. That has nothing to do with my story, but I saw it and I needed to tell someone. I knew I smelled more than seafood.

The way they drive in China, you’d think nobody feared death, though they’re not keen on the number four which sounds perilously close to “dead.” Emperor Qin, the first emperor of China feared death though, so much so that he spent vast resources looking for the elixir of life, and damaged the economy of his newly unified country building a tomb complex of over fifty-six square kilometers, the largest single tomb in the world, if you don’t count all the people murdered to keep him company.

Recently our family visited Xi’an, the home of the Terracotta Warriors, Emperor Qin’s army reproduced man by individual man to protect him in the afterlife. It is said that any Chinese man can find his own face among the warriors, an ancestor perhaps, a portrait from the dust. To keep Qin comfortable there were all manner of riches buried with him, not to mention a terracotta menagerie and acrobats and carriages and an underground palace complete with heavenly constellations, quicksilver rivers that actually flowed by mechanical means, and whale oil candles to ensure an eternal flame. Crossbows were set to deter thieves by, you know, killing them. As an added precaution most of the records were destroyed and many artisans and officials were killed to keep the secret. They’ve excavated a field of corpses nearby, some of them frozen in the act of struggle, as though they’d been buried alive.

Old Qin was serious about his privacy, but that scale of buried treasure is hard to forget. Even after 2,200 years there lingered in Xi’an mythic tales of a ghost army that lived underground, right up until the day in 1974 when a farmer digging a well came upon a terracotta face with painted pink skin and black hair, though all the colors have now faded in the open air. Some said it was a human being, put it back, but he didn’t. We met the farmer, he signed our book. He’s in his eighties now and they’ve already marked his tomb, in among the warriors. I suppose it saves time, working so near your final resting place, though I would find it a little unnerving. It’s probably good I don’t speak much Chinese because it would be tough not to ask his thoughts.

I have other questions too, about what you can and can’t take with you . . . love, maybe, brains, kindness, anger, bullheadedness . . . As someone who’s been waiting for her luggage for nearly five months, I feel a certain sympathy for Qin. It’s been 2,200 years and all his grand comforts are still sitting on the loading dock to be ogled by tourists, scientists and kings, all of whom will also die someday and probably want to ask him about it. I suspect Qin dragged a load of baggage into the afterlife, though not quite what he intended.

Meanwhile breath bursts forth, life and death lurching forward on a grocery store conveyor belt, peeing in the meat department, crowding the subway, cutting in line in front of polite foreigners. The dead wear our faces, calling a single question into the thunderous silence, “Where is your treasure?”

17 March 2012

The other day I was standing in the checkout line at the grocery store watching a fish slowly gasp it's last in a plastic bag as the conveyor belt lurched forward so it's dead body could be scanned along with the soy sauce and toilet paper. Gingerly I placed my items on the moist rubber, wondering what else might have died there. Yesterday I saw a father helping his little son pee into a plastic bag hanging below the meat counter. In China most children's clothing is sold with a split crotch, for, uhm, convenience. That has nothing to do with my story, but I saw it and I needed to tell someone. I knew I smelled more than seafood.

The way they drive in China, you'd think nobody feared death, though they're not keen on the number four which sounds perilously close to "dead." Emperor Qin, the first emperor of China feared death though, so much so that he spent vast resources looking for the elixir of life, and damaged the economy of his newly unified country building a tomb complex of over fifty-six square kilometers, the largest single tomb in the world, if you don't count all the people murdered to keep him company.

Recently our family visited Xi'an, the home of the Terracotta Warriors, Emperor Qin's army reproduced man by individual man to protect him in the afterlife. It is said that any Chinese man can find his own face among the warriors, an ancestor perhaps, a portrait from the dust. To keep Qin comfortable there were all manner of riches buried with him, not to mention a terracotta menagerie and acrobats and carriages and an underground palace complete with heavenly constellations, quicksilver rivers that actually flowed by mechanical means, and whale oil candles to ensure an eternal flame. Crossbows were set to deter thieves by, you know, killing them. As an added precaution most of the records were destroyed and many artisans and officials were killed to keep the secret. They've excavated a field of corpses nearby, some of them frozen in the act of struggle, as though they'd been buried alive.

Old Qin was serious about his privacy, but that scale of buried treasure is hard to forget. Even after 2,200 years there lingered in Xi'an mythic tales of a ghost army that lived underground, right up until the day in 1974 when a farmer digging a well came upon a terracotta face with painted pink skin and black hair, though all the colors have now faded in the open air. Some said it was a human being, put it back, but he didn't. We met the farmer, he signed our book. He's in his eighties now and they've already marked his tomb, in among the warriors. I suppose it saves time, working so near your final resting place, though I would find it a little unnerving. It's probably good I don't speak much Chinese because it would be tough not to ask his thoughts.

I have other questions too, about what you can and can't take with you . . . love, maybe, brains, kindness, anger, bullheadedness . . . As someone who's been waiting for her luggage for nearly five months, I feel a certain sympathy for Qin. It's been 2,200 years and all his grand comforts are still sitting on the loading dock to be ogled by tourists, scientists and kings, all of whom will also die someday and probably want to ask him about it. I suspect Qin dragged a load of baggage into the afterlife, though not quite what he intended.

Meanwhile breath bursts forth, life and death lurching forward on a grocery store conveyor belt, peeing in the meat department, crowding the subway, cutting in line in front of polite foreigners. The dead wear our faces, calling a single question into the thunderous silence, "Where is your treasure?"

17 March 2012

This morning Seth said, "Chase and Porter, we're making stew that usually takes all day, but we're doing it in thirty minutes, come peel this garlic."  Chase looked up from his jam bread and Porter tore away from his Indian chicken curry over rice, his hair fanned straight up in the back like a peacock's plume.

"Is this like a science experiment?"

"No, it's a pressure cooker.  See this garlic, can you smell it?  No?  That's because it's covered in this stuff.  You have to peel it, and cut off the hard flat end.  Then you smash it with the side of the cleaver and chop it up fine."

"Is this going to be like steak at Teppanyaki's?"

"It's going to be like steak in a stew which will feed five people for two days instead of two people for one day.  Stir the garlic in the frying pan, don't tap it."

"Why do you cut the meat instead of chopping it?"

"Because the fibrous properties of the meat won't let you."

"Can't we just have steak?  I really want steak."

"Peel those onions."

"It burns us Precious."

"You know dad, this beef used to be a cow.  If there wasn't so much supply and demand the cows would still be alive because no one would want to eat them," Chase said.

"It's like skunk.  Nobody wants to eat skunk," Porter pointed out.

"Help Mom dump those tomatoes out of the frying pan and into the pressure cooker."

"On top of the steak?!!  Can't we at least do the Teppanyaki's Choo Choo to prove that steak was there?"

Once everything was in the pot, Seth poured in some water and began stirring it around.

"Where'd you get that water, Dad?"

"From the tap."

"That water's polluted," Chase said.

"It's going to boil."

"So all the pollution will fall to the bottom," Chase added, assuming that the tap water speaks the same sordid language as the gray air we breathe.

"Boiling will kill the bacteria."

"Mom, do you see how my hair's sticking up?" Porter asked.  "It was worse when I first got up, but gravity did the rest.  My hair sleeps all day and likes to be up all night.  The hairspray is like the mom who tells it to go to sleep."  Last night in the taxi he kept wrenching backwards in his seat to mash his left ear on the filthy right window.  "Porter!  What are you doing?"  "I'm having a hot ear crisis!"

"Boys, look at this pressure cooker," Seth said, demonstrating the intricacies of the rubber seal and screwing the parts together.  Eyes alight, Chase and Porter each dragged over a chair to get a bird's eye view.  When the pan became too hot, Seth used a chopstick as a pointer.  "When it builds up enough pressure, this first valve pops up.  Then, when too much pressure builds up, it steams out the center valve.  If that gets blocked, the whole thing could blow up."

"Could it kill someone?"

"The third valve is a weaker weld, and it will blow before it blows up.  But pressure cookers in South America don't always have those, so sometimes they explode."

"Wow, so this is lethal."  They crowded closer.

"It builds up pressure inside, so it's like there's a bag of rice sitting on every square inch."

"So it's like a sucker," Porter said.  "If you lick it, it takes a long time, but if you suck it, it's faster."

"Are we finished yet?"

"It's fun to see the first value pop up," Seth said, crowding close as the boys.  "Wait for it. . .wait for it . . ."

Pop

Several years ago my stepmother sent me an email from India where she and my dad were serving as missionaries.  On their morning walk they happened across a group of children combing a garbage pile for their breakfast.  The oldest girl carried the baby, and when she found a bit of discarded food, she fed the baby rather than herself.

I've carried this image ever since and thought very hard about those who jab their fingers at the unfairness of life and proclaim it proof that God couldn't possibly exist.  We started off equal, Adam and Eve running around buck naked without the faintest notion of what a Louis Vuitton handbag might be for–can't eat it, won't haul much.  Throw that down and help me remember what I named this thing with the eight foot neck that just pooed polka dots all over my foot.  Life was simple, until the day Eve handed over her apple, opening man's eyes to the essential symbiosis of good and evil.  Lots of people hate her for this.  Life's not fair because Eve got us kicked out of Paradise.

A few weeks ago I started volunteering in an orphanage, a beautiful, brand new facility where the babies are eerily quiet and hardly ever wet their pants.  In the baby rooms the cribs are arranged in rows, cute rosy babies up front, bouncing against the rails, the next row a little more handicapped and/or a little less attractive, more handicapped and  less attractive, a little more and a little less until you find yourself in the back row with a girl we'll call "Vada," because it means "brave."  In the finite world of the crib, too many of these children retreat into some private universe where the hunt and peck volunteers have a tough time reaching them.  The first time I saw Vada's blank expression I was trying to give her the bottle the attendant had just thrust into my hands.  I dribbled milk before I realized her hands were too palsied to take it, but more than that, she didn't even react.  She had to have been hungry, but she didn't move.  She was larger than the others, with thicker hair and more defined features, so I figured her for an older toddler.  I wrapped her in the towel that serves as her blanket and lifted her in my arms to carry her to the baby activity room which is only heated because the expat volunteers won't make do with less.  Settling into a chair, I fed her the bottle which she guzzled almost instantly before curling into a tight, safe ball like a pill bug.

Vada suffers from sandpaper hair and irritated scalp.  She smells a little sour and her teeth are coated in the kind of plaque that takes months to build up.  Her arms are the size of two of my fingers and her legs aren't much bigger.  She looks to have something in the neighborhood of cerebral palsy with her limbs all bent inward, a back crib child for sure.

"How old is 'Vada'?"

"Eleven or Twelve."

Like most of the children in the orphanage, Vada was probably found outdoors in the middle of the night, wrapped in blankets, like the nine day old boy found last week with blond hair and Chinese eyes.  It's illegal to throw away children, but it happens sometimes.  It could be poverty, death, the stigma of single motherhood or the complicated issue of a handicapped child.  In a land where you can only have one child, and the younger generation is supposed to support the older, there is precious little margin for one who will never work.  All these factors combine to fill the orphanages, cute babies in the front, ugly babies in the back.

I rubbed Vada's curved spine and massaged her limbs until she relaxed into me.  She can't talk, but she likes music, even if it's only me humming.

On Wednesday we got an early call–government officials are touring the orphanage and they want to show off the expat volunteers.  Most people are gone for the holidays, so you can even bring your family.  Can you be ready in half an hour?

We were ready, and two hours later Seth stood holding a baby and chatting with the Communist equivalent of the state governor.  The rooms were warm.  Vada smelled better and her teeth were brushed, everyone smiling and laughing, taking pictures, the film crew recording everything for posterity.  I did what I do, which is hide in a corner to watch.  But they found me anyway and came over to say hello and thank me as I sat stroking Vada's sandpaper hair.  They genuinely seemed well-meaning, and our foreign faces meant foreign eyes and foreign internet access . . .

My son Chase stood next to Vada.  Chase just turned eleven, and I couldn't begin to lift him.

It's not fair that a twelve year old girl is spending her life in a crib instead of with a physical therapist.  It's not fair that the perfect infant with the blond hair and Chinese eyes was left on a pile of rubble.  And it's not fair that a young Indian girl was picking through the trash to feed herself and her siblings.  Freedom would be such an easy master, if it weren't for all those pesky consequences.  It's not fair when one man's choices bloody another man's nose, or worse, when a string of people bloody the children.

Yet I keep going back to that Indian girl who chose to feed the baby ahead of herself, a bit of soiled food and a moment of choice, a grand choice, a golden choice, a chance to decide whether to live in the dirt or wear a queen's crown.  Satan must have raged when he realized he'd tempted Eve to usher the god-like power of Agency into the mortal world, the very thing he sold his soul campaigning against.  Because of Eve, every individual human is endowed with the capacity to choose for himself whether he is more comfortable under the hand of God or the whip of Satan, choice by choice, back and forth, good and evil warring together in every soul, every day.  Such a battlefield cannot possibly produce a fair world, yet victory is assured for those who Choose it.  Mortal life is short, hardly a blip in our eternal timeline, and Paradise, it seems, is one of the last geographic mysteries, a place that cannot be found unless it is first lost.

I'm not a queen.  I'm a fat American wearing a diamond that's too big and holding children that are too small.  I know nothing more of the Indian girl, but the blond Chinese boy is healthy and has a chance of being adopted into some country where his mixed race won't matter, preferably before he learns to hoard his food.  Vada probably won't make old bones, but when this brief mortal test is over and she towers strong and glorious, I believe her true character as Teacher will be revealed.  In that day when we stand woman to woman, I hope I get to thank her for giving me the chance to stroke her sandpaper hair.  She will smile and tell me I sing off-key.