Something that made them continue to return their parents’ hugs with a genuine fervour not born of that ancient curse called filial piety.
After everything that’s happened, it must be said that we never heard the parents of the adopted Chinese daughters speak of undying gratitude; not once did they imply the girls owed them anything. It wasn’t a matter of not enough love, but perhaps of too much. Any parent would understand.
That bamboo our neighbours planted turned out to be highly resilient and invasive. We’ve been finding it everywhere lately-growing in the middle of a cedar deck, through a crack in the foundation of a garage. We need only lift the lid of a compost bin and a couple of rogue stalks spring forth, like something out of a 1950s horror movie. We’ve taken axes to the roots, flailing away until blisters rise on our palms. The roots themselves look prehistoric, like the skeletal remains of dinosaurs, curved vertebrae prickling, dry knobs of joints, and we feel strangely ashamed as we strain to pull them from the ground.
THE TAO OF LITTLE SUSANNA A.K.A. OOPS!
We watched, those of us with, admittedly, nothing better to do, as four years after the adopted Chinese daughters arrived on our cul-de-sac Bettina Lauridsen’s belly began to grow. We watched as if witnessing something terribly transgressive, almost pornographic, although a casual observer at Choices Market on a Saturday morning would simply have noted a tired, pregnant brunette in her late thirties leaning on a cart while an alarmingly red-headed forty-something male scanned labels for MSG and a small Asian-featured girl tugged on her mother’s jacket clamouring for a sugar-frosted cereal that was rumoured to be “Magically delicious!”
We threw a baby shower against Bettina L.’s protestations and invited all the mothers and their daughters. The girls were enchanted, especially Huan Yue, the sister-to-be. They pressed their palms to the tight bulge, their faces full of gravity and wonder, as if they were good fairies laying on a series of blessings, levitating the baby in its puddle of embryonic soup, while in the kitchen Darcas Conrad inverted an ice-cube tray over a bowl of guava punch and said, “Tubal ligation, my ass.”
Her name was Susanna, or Oops!, as her parents took to calling her, except within earshot of her grandparents. We had legitimate concerns that little Susanna might be abandoned somewhere in accordance with our cul-de-sac’s unofficial but implicit one-family-one-child policy. We watched for a woman sneaking out of the house under the cover of night and returning empty-handed, moth holes riddling her heart. But as time passed, it began to seem the little flame-haired girl was with us to stay.
The endearing thing about Susanna was that she wanted to be a Chinese daughter more than anything else. “Will I look like you when I grow up?” we heard her ask Huan Yue more than once, drooping when told she’d look exactly like herself.
She went door to door with a petition demanding her parents give her a Chinese name (meanwhile, we’d overheard the other girls secretly calling each other things like Krista, Madison, and Delaney). She begged to use chopsticks instead of a fork, to be allowed to practise Shaolin boxing with her sister, to learn Cantonese or even a little Mandarin. She drew little yin and yang symbols on her bare knees with indelible ink and was sent to her room to play with Florida Vacation Barbie™. And in the evenings, while her father diligently quizzed Huan Yue at the kitchen table about Chinese history (“The legendary woman warrior Mu Lan, unlike the Disney heroine, did not require the aid of a boyfriend,” Peter O’Reilly often told us, as if we were the ones in need of a lesson), Susanna was banished to the den with a
The day her parents caught little Susanna in the bathroom Scotch-taping up the corners of her eyes, they enrolled her in Irish step-dancing.
We’ve often wondered, is it a crime to want something you can’t have? “She’s a very clever girl,” we assured each other. “After all, she was born in the Year of the Monkey.” Her father, overhearing, actually harrumphed, something most of us had only witnessed in cartoons. “She’s a Taurus,” he said, as if that was that.
THE I CHING OF KRIS KRINGLE
We watched, those of us who could no longer claim to understand the true meaning of Christmas, who had long stopped believing no two snowflakes are alike. We watched helplessly late last year as the adopted Chinese daughters, in their thirteenth year, at the foggy outskirts of their girlhood, set out to defy their parents.
In mid-November, Jiang Li and Fang Yin were found spray-painting frozen New Brunswick fiddleheads with gold Krylon while watching a Martha Stewart holiday special. Their daring served to embolden the others. Li Wei and Xin Qian skipped out on a horticultural tour at Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Garden to attend a performance of Handel’s
A few days after it was discovered that Huan Yue had auditioned to play the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in the school pageant, we received (
Traditionally, the mothers did the binding, but it appeared the girls’ fathers were more than up to the task. Or as Nigel Kempton yelled through the open window of his planet-friendly family compact as he raced off to Fabricland, “Hey, women hold up half the sky, right?”
We didn’t see much of the girls for the rest of December. Every so often a wan face would appear at a window, or we’d notice one of the daughters hobble to the car, leaning hard on her mother or father, heading to the doctor for a flu shot or to join one of the other families at Floata for dim sum. Susanna came and went, aiming big, angry kicks at the sodden leaves still mounded in the gutters, while her sister sat inside, her own feet growing as small as her circumstances.
Then on Christmas Eve, close to midnight, when most of us were already in bed, our doorbells began to chime. There on our steps stood the adopted Chinese daughters, begging to come in, to peer into the stockings tacked to our mantels, to shake a gift or two and puzzle over the muffled rattling inside, to sniff the nutmeg-scented air, to gaze at their own elongated reflections in the shiny balls that hung on the trees they’d glimpsed through our front windows, to snuggle by our hearths and confide they’d always dreamt each other’s dreams and that they dreamt of the things they had done, or still wanted to do: sleep on ice floes, kiss the Queen’s papery cheek, walk barefoot across burning sand to lay a humble gift inside a stable. To make us pay heed, they peeled their sweaters over their heads, revealing a startling array of undergarments (a puckered training bra, a bronze satin bustier, a frayed, sleeveless T-shirt that read
It had already begun to snow and we noticed how otherworldly the girls’ footprints appeared along our front walks. (Some of us later swore we saw little Susanna tumbling end over end across a snowy lawn with stunning alacrity, an illuminated Catherine wheel, her bare heels and tail spitting sparks.) We only said what seemed the right thing to say at the time, before closing our doors. “It’s late. Go home.”
Now we watch, all of us who had a hand in the fate of the adopted Chinese daughters and Susanna. We watch the sky for a flock of long-necked cranes and a flying monkey. It’s early spring, but the houses on our cul-de-sac are decked out in full holiday regalia. There’s even a reindeer on the roof of Huan Yue and Susanna’s old house, Rudolph no less, its red nose a beacon that can be seen for miles. The lights on our houses are of the insistent blinking variety. The bulbs don’t wink on and off at random, but blink in unison day and night.
The other night we watched as one of the fathers bent to tidy a life-sized creche, scooping handfuls of wet debris and a crumpled beer can from the manger where baby Jesus should have been. We began to wonder whether it was too late to ask what God might have to do with all this, but instead willed ourselves to think about the girls’ footprints in that snowy field, and we marvelled, once again, at the effort it must have taken to walk even
