Walking the Line
- Maxi-Ann Campbell
- May 21, 2019
- 8 min read
May 1stis Labor Day holiday in China. This year, May 1stfell on a Wednesday, and the government moved the working days Thursday and Friday to the Sundays before after the holiday. In other words, Sunday April 27thand Sunday May 5thwere the working days, and everyone would have off Wednesday May 1stto Saturday May 4th. Not following? It’s okay; it took me some time to get used to moving work days when I first came to China as well.
The end result of this moving around was a 4-day weekend, and we had friends come visit us in Kunshan for two nights. These friends are doctors from Georgia who have four kids that they have adopted. These children were born in China with medical issues like spina bifida or congenital heart disease. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, it is very difficult for foreigners to adopt Chinese children that do not have serious medical problems. However, I’m not sure our friends would have chosen to adopt healthier children even if they had the choice. Throughout this post, I will not use names to protect the anonymity of our friends.
I really like our friends and their kids. We’ve known each other for five years now, and I’ve seen their children grow. The most recently adopted child is now 3, another is 5, and two of them are 8-years-old. None of the children are related to each other by blood, but they are very much a loving family now. Of course, there are the usual arguments, cries of unfairness, and so on that happens in any family, but they are a great bunch to be around.
When I am with this family, I feel comfortable being myself. The father always talks tome instead of atme in a way that still takes me by surprise. To be honest, white men do not frequently talk to me so directly as though I were an equal and as if they wanted me to like them. Despite being almost 30-years my senior and a medical doctor, the father puts on no airs. He is as down-to-earth as they come. The mother feels equally as comfortable to me, though more for her self-deprecating concern about being a burden. She reminds me of myself in that way, always worried I would be a bother for one reason or another. While she was visiting, she kept asking me how she could help and apologizing for any mess, noise, or trouble her kids made.
She didn’t have to apologize. Kids are kids. I knew they had four young children when I invited them to stay with us, and Ben and I continue to learn many good ideas about parenting, especially in China, from them.
One thing we’ve learned from them is about the struggles of helping their family with “walking the line.” What do I mean by walking the line? Well, in our society, we create many binaries. For example, boy and girl. I cannot tell you how many times I have been asked in the last couple of months, “Do you know if the baby is a boy or a girl?” I always answer, “No, we don’t want to know. We want it to be a surprise!” However, that’s not entirely true. I’m not a huge fan of surprises. I just do not honestly care about the baby’s sex, and I do not want the baby’s sex to begin affecting every decision I make about the pattern of the cloth diapers I am planning to buy, or the onesies, or burp cloths, or anything else. I especially do not want this impacting what others buy or make for the baby. When you go on a journey to parenthood like the one Ben and I have been on, if there is a baby at all, you are happy. If that baby is also healthy, you are even happier. The baby’s sex does not matter at all.
Now, walking the line is the result of not belonging uniquely to either of the categories society has created. It is living a life where you can feel people always trying to place you in one category or the other. For instance, I remember when I was younger walking down a street and trying to determine the category of someone who did not look clearly male or female. I remember my double glances, my leaning in to get a better look, my asking the person I was walking with what category she thought this person belonged to. My brain was subconsciously obsessed with putting people into one of two categories, and it became curious and somehow troubled when it could not do so with ease. At the time, I know I tried to make my double glances and staring look “natural” and to keep the question in my voice quiet so as to be unheard. I probably thought I was doing a good job of being stealthy, and I’m sure now that I wasn’t.
In China, the sex binary is also at play in the society, and another binary is the Chinese – Foreigner one. This is the binary of focus in this post.
You can imagine what a motley crew my friends, their children, Ben, and I made going about Kunshan, China. Here are two white people with four Chinese-looking children that call them “Mom” and “Dad” in Mandarin but then continue speaking in English. There’s also the pregnant black woman who calls the Chinese-looking man “husband” in Mandarin. I use the term “Chinese-looking” because that’s where the confusion comes in. You can see people taking a second glance and trying to figure out, Are those children foreigners? But they look so Chinese!The mother told me on this trip about a man who got right up in the youngest’s face to get a better look. I do not remember if she said, or just wanted to say, “Hey! What are you doing? Get away from my kids!”
These children were so young, but they were dealing with a lot of the same issues I was struggling with as a black person in China. Not only did they have white parents and speak English fluently, one of them also had a more visible difficulty in the way she walked because of spina bifida. People, not so stealthily, would talk about her. Why did she walk that way? What are those braces on her legs?The mother told me that this little girl preferred winter because she could more easily cover the braces on her feet. This resonated with me who loved the winter because my clothes mostly covered my skin, and if people didn’t see my face, they sometimes accidentally treated me like a human being instead of a “foreigner.”
This little girl wanted to cover the very things that made her strong, empathetic, and resilient in exchange for being treated like everybody else. I knew exactly how she felt, but I don’t know that I would have handled it as well at 8-years-old.
When we went to pick cherries from the organic farm, the youngest child sat with me. The youngest is known for being the most amorous in the family. When I went to visit their home last time, she offered me a hug good-bye without any prompting from her parents. After Ben and I gathered all of our stuff, she gave me another hug for good measure. Then while the family was staying with us one morning, she said, “Mama, I want to hold your hand.” Her small hands could only hold two of her mother’s fingers at one time, but she held on firmly to them with one hand and ate breakfast with the other. It was so sweet.
Now when we went to pick cherries, I could not help much with the picking because carrying around the weight of another human being is tiring, and the ripest cherries were at the top of the tree, which required climbing. Icertainly was not going to climb any trees. The youngest could not help much simply because she was too short to reach many of the cherries, and she had not yet developed the coordination to climb like her siblings. She picked some cherries from the bottom of the tree, and then she sat down with me. While we were waiting for the others to finish picking, a man came by and hung around. He apparently worked for the farm. I honestly don’t think he needed to be there at that time, but he tried to make himself useful in the area where we were. Who could resist the draw of the black pregnant foreigner speaking to an adorable Chinese-looking girl in Mandarin and the adorable girl responding in English?
I’m sure this man thought he was being stealthy, like I did when I was curious about someone’s sex. However, both the youngest and I had been through enough of these situations and conversations to see when someone was simply trying to assuage their curiosity. The man started talking to the little girl with the goal of categorizing her as Chinese or foreigner. He tried to be cute and endearing, but I think this little girl, at only 3-years-old, felt the insincerity of it. She would not answer his questions; she did not so much as look at him. She sat there steadfastly staring at the cherry trees, only occasionally turning to say something to me. When she looked up at me, she had that adorable, sweet, amorous look in her eyes that she always had for friends and family. It was in stark contrast to the droop of her shoulders when she turned back to the cherry trees. I felt very much that she just wanted to be left alone.
The man made several attempts to engage her in a conversation, awkwardly laughing off her silence. “Her mommy must have told her not to talk to strangers” was the conclusion. I didn’t say or do anything. I, like this young girl, often found simply not engaging the most efficient method of ending such encounters.
Just the other day, I arrived at my building and the security guard outside said to me in Mandarin, “Little sister, where are you from?” I just kept walking past. A person nearby said, “She doesn’t understand what you are saying. She’s from Africa.” When I got on the elevator, Ben looked at me sadly and mouthed “I’m sorry.” I shrugged. The only reason I remember this moment is because Ben brought it up again at dinner time. He mentioned that it had upset him when he heard these men talking about me. I had not been the least bit affected. I had forgotten all about it. Why?
I have been living in China for 6 years now, and I have come to realize that I have options in every situation. In the same way I am allowed to turn down a cup of tea when it’s offered or a pamphlet about a new gym opening up nearby, I am allowed to turn down opportunities to engage with strangers. When the security guard asked me where I was from, I was allowed to decline his invitation to have a conversation. Sometimes turning down such invitations—saying “no” by continuing on my way home—is the more compassionate, interculturally competent thing for meto do. I am not very good at faking it. It’s better for that person to think I do not understand him than suffer through another awkward, “Yes, I’m really from the United States” conversation in the name of being “nice.” Those conversations leave a bad taste in my mouth, and I suspect that the more insightful can sense my irritation with them and their questions.
I was amazed that the youngest was engaging in such strategies already at 3. It made me think about the child growing inside me. It made me think about Ben’s parents. How were his parents going to handle the strangers that wanted to categorize their grandchild? The people who not so stealthily stared and outright asked intrusive questions?
I came to realize that weekend in a way I had not considered before that I was having a child in China, and this child would have to walk the line of insider-outsider, Chinese-foreigner, third-culture kid. People’s not so subtle curiosity would be their constant companion, and it would be difficult to find places where they were treated, even accidentally, just as a human being.
**The featured image is of me playing frisbee with the kids. Playing frisbee at 6-months pregnant is “interesting” because I can’t run or jump. However, the kids were gracious enough to let me join in the fun even though I had to waddle slowly to get the frisbee from wherever it had landed.
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