A Father's Thoughts One Year After Adopting his Daughter

'The Island Pagoda'

from Foochow and the River Min by John Thomson

(1873)

I knew of Fuzhou before our daughter was born there. The city’s name hung in the air of my father’s study when I was small, together with the smoke from his pipe that curled around other names I heard spoken there: Tientsin, Guangzhou, Xiamen, Shanghai, Hankou, Nanjing. Interesting names, having something to do with his work, but also printed over the old postage stamps he collected in rows of black binders, names spelled in different European languages – Foochow, Futschau, Fou-Tchéou – and stamped over the images of European sovereigns who cleared the way before everything affixed to them.

One year after bringing Mei Mei home from the once treaty port and now affluent modern city of Fuzhou on China’s southern coast, memories like this take on new significance. They are a link to my daughter, a rationale for why it is I who am her father and not someone else, in the absence of any knowledge of who her biological parents were. After the first traumatic months – the gorging and recovery from undernourishment, the surgical removal of rotten teeth and the repair of a cleft palate, the fearful howling and tentative attachment, the rotation of various therapists through the house on a weekly basis – after all of this, something akin to normalcy has settled upon our household. It no longer feels like we have a boarder on the third floor, a small Queequeg coated in layers of dust whose pointed teeth were carved by cavities rather than a Maori chisel.

I begin to consider all the ways in which our daughter now fits ‘naturally’ into our family and its history. I return to my philatelic memory and wonder, was it pure coincidence, that I knew about Fuzhou and treaty ports long before I knew about other things? Or that we would one day travel there to adopt our daughter?  My first sense is that it is coincidental, without a doubt. Families are matched with children from across China; we could easily have been called to a place that had not been a treaty port and that I had not heard of when I was small.  My frail effort to establish some sense of ‘deep’ paternity with Mei Mei, something besides the legal kind that is embedded in all her documents, is no more than a mythopoetic effort to compose a few harmonies from a mass of moderately random experience.

Perhaps this is my attempt to create the kind of link, the sense of connection, that is unselfconsciously affirmed whenever a child is said to resemble a parent, or a grandparent, or to have a certain trait that is reminiscent of how so-and-so used to tilt her head, how she used to laugh, or how she used to notice this-but-not-that about the world. In all of these ways we claim direct physical embodiment of our ancestors. They are, in a sense, inside of us forever. A state of holy communion that has long been the objective of ritual: when we consume the divine, we are at one with it. We are not alone.

This sense of belonging probably won't be available to Mei Mei.

Then again, obviously we are surrounded by people most of the time. Why limit oneself to the ancestors and their embodiment in our DNA? As I have learned from my uncle, who has been slowly but steadily tracing out our ‘family tree’, it is tempting to be selective about who we identify with among our forebears. When for a brief moment it seems as though a great great grandfather was a learned rabbi, a man respected by his community, or that another was a dandy, a cosmopolite and worldly success in the constrained world of the Czars, I become excited. I become less so before the photographs – a majority – of less distinctive though no less closely related folk. 

Not only that, but the complexity of descent over more than a few generations quickly becomes boggling, and the notion of ‘family’ empties of meaning as the general promiscuity of the human race becomes evident in the ever-ramifying branches of each single ‘tree.’ I strongly suspect that few people care much about knowing their ancestry beyond their mother, father, and grandparents – the people they have personally known in their lives – because to go further back makes the arbitrariness of our kinship structures plain.  

So my philatelic connection with Fuzhou may not be so meaningless. Or, at least, no more meaningless than my (fictional) claim to be descended from a grand rabbi in one line, rather than a serial embezzler in another, or any number of similar choices of identification. Perhaps I carry something that was part of them; but I also choose among them like so many books, some of which I wish to read, and others, not. 

Mei Mei doesn’t have quite the same selection of books to choose from. A wing of her library was destroyed when she was orphaned. But multiple wings have been added since, with the prospect of still more to be built in the future. There are many volumes at her disposal. Whether she will grow to be more concerned with the ones she has lost, or with the ones she has gained, I can't predict.

The Way of the Toddler Fist

Seven months after my daughter’s second birthday, she snapped. Not the regular toddler tantrum that had become a regular occurrence in our home. Nor was it the ‘I’m going to run myself into a shelf, yank all of the boxes of cereal to the ground—and then dance on them’ whirlwind. It wasn’t even the ‘I’m going to thrash my arms and legs about on the floor, just like I’m at a Bad Brains show, and then I’m going to wail and force everyone in the grocery store to look at YOU’ type of snapping. Baby-girl elevated her game to the next-level. She snapped in that way that forces you to reexamine your parenting style and ability.

We were at Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park, in Berkeley when it all went bad. The park is kind of like a prison yard, especially during the Farmer’s Market: little pockets of the homeless in one section, families in another; skaters, folks who believe that Burning Man should never end, and people attempting to get you to sign something all dot the landscape. Tucked away, next to a fountain that has seen more piss than water, is a raggedy little park-ish play area that my daughter adores.

The centerpiece of this spot is a little saddleback climbing structure—the primary reason that my kid chooses this place over others. It was here where my wife and I discovered that our daughter is not afraid of heights, or jumping from them. It was here that she realized that she could climb up and over something—she didn’t have to go back the way she came. Revelatory. And it was here where she had her very first violent encounter.

It was a busy day, and the line to climb was longer than usual. I was completely impressed that the baby-monster was as patient as she was. I praised her repeatedly. In return, she gave me her smile—the one that she now uses to try and manipulate, but was fully genuine back in the day. Makes me fall in love every time she unleashes those perfect teeth and high cheekbones. In the middle of our little love-fest, it was her turn. Abruptly she mountain-goated up the wall in about two steps. Just as she was about to summit, some five or six-year-old boy grabs her hood, and yanks her backwards off the wall. When she slammed into the ground, I heard her breath forcefully escape—but she wasn’t moving. Not once, have I ever felt so fucking helpless. I froze: trauma-induced ossification. ‘She hit her head. She hit her head,’ was all I should think. Would she have a head injury? As a survivor of one, I knew how dangerous they were. Oh, God. What did I just let happen? (I always blame myself when my kid gets hurt).

She stood up, unsteady, but standing on her own. This made me feel like the ultimate in crap fathers because I had no part in helping her get to her feet. She looked around, and she seemed okay—I felt the lower part of my body begin to defrost and I slowly made my way over to her. Before I could ask how she was, she jumped on the boy. She must have been twenty-four, twenty-five pounds at the time, but she marshaled all of it to knock this kid to the ground. She then started punching him in the face. Not little kid punches, but very well executed pistons: Left, right. Left, right. Raining down hurt on this boy. And she wouldn’t stop.

Watching my little wisp of a daughter handle herself against this big kid made me proud. When I find out that we were having a daughter, I made it my life’s mission to ensure that she would never be a victim of violence—at the time, not acknowledging that participating in a violent act, is being a victim to violence—but I knew too many women who have had their bodies and spirits violated, and this would not happen to my baby-girl. So to see her, without fear, standing up to and retaliating against a bully, made me feel as if I was setting her on the right track.

But something just felt wrong. I am no stranger to violence, nor am I opposed to it as vehemently as some of my more politically progressive friends are. I grew up violently, and have achieved a relative level of comfort with the act and all of the attendant spiritual mess that comes with it. I’ve been shot, stabbed; have a permanent scar in the back of my head from fighting racist skinheads—but this is my story, not my daughter’s. She (hopefully) will never have to live through one percent of the evil that I did.

I rushed to her, lifted her off the boy, and held her. I was surprised at just how strong she was. Then she said one of the clearest sentences of her life. Eyes wild, body continuing to thrash, at the top of her lungs: I want my justice! What the hell? What kind of concept of justice have we been teaching her? Not even bothering to check and see if the boy was okay, I broke wide and ran over to my wife who was dozing in the grass. She lazily looked up at me, saw that I was shell-shocked; looked at our daughter, saw that she was going crazy, screaming about wanting her justice. The look she launched my way was purely: what the hell just happened? I cannot even take a rest without you two getting into some kind of trouble.

I glanced over my shoulder and saw that the little boy, and whom I assumed were his parents, coming over to us. They were too close for us to make an escape that did not look obvious, so I braced myself for the eventual conversation. My default setting was “crisis, with a side of aggressive response” and this has me on edge, ready for confrontation. Always. Needless to say, it is a tiring way to live. I have been on a personal project to purge violence from my life—physical, emotional, verbal, all of it. Violence has no place for me, as a partner, or as a parent. This isn’t to say that I won’t protect my family, or myself but it is nowhere near the top 10 responses to confrontation—it used to be my first three choices.

I figured the best course of action was to meet them halfway, adopt a neutral stance, and let them speak first. See, I told you I’ve been working on it. What happened shook me. They were nice. They were more than nice; they were apologetic. They gave me the history of their son’s behavior and how his comeuppance was long overdue. That it was delivered by a tiny little thing made it all the more poetic. While we laughed and made small talk, I couldn’t stop thinking that our laughter and easy conversation was an endorsement of violent behavior. I mentioned this, and it kind of killed the mood. They awkwardly disengaged themselves, and my wife and I were left with how to redefine and appropriately teach what justice was. Like that would be easy.

We had to figure out a uniform way to discuss a concept that we didn’t even agree on. For so long, I confused justice with retaliation and revenge. But in my new social and psychic evolutionary state, I had absolutely no clue what to tell my daughter as my concept of justice was in flux. My wife comes from a profoundly religious background, but she was moving towards a more holistic spirituality, so her ideas around what is just were also changing. Why in the hell did we have to explain heavy-duty concepts so early in the game? As neither my wife, nor myself have parents, we’ve already had to explain death to our daughter after she asked about her grandmother and grandfather—her mother told her about heaven, and I told her about dirt and worms—can we get a break?

Despite all of this; all of this trying to be a socially and politically responsible parent; trying to get the more negative and destructive aspects of my upbringing to scab over and sink beneath the surface, lessening their influence on my present—there was still a sliver of pride at watching my daughter handle herself in that way. She was assured, confident, and fearless, traits that girls are very rarely allowed to cultivate, without great cost. Me and her mother’s ongoing project is to somehow extract the violence as a first resort, without affecting her confidence, fearlessness, and self-assuredness. We’ve been working diligently on this, but we may have pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction.

About a month after the park incident, we went to a birthday party. She was having a ball, until it was piñata time. We played zombies and dragons at home, so she’s used to all types of crazy stuff. But this particular piñata had an advocate that day, in the form of my daughter. The kids all took turns whacking this multi-colored fish. Whap! The last hit exploded the fish, and snacks and money spilled from the fish’s guts. My little baby-girl burst into tears. For about ten minutes she was inconsolable. When she finally calmed down, we asked her what was wrong. Through the remnants of her tears, she said: “Is the fishy okay? Kids shouldn’t hit the fish with sticks. Now all of his insides are on the ground.”

My wife and I had two completely different reactions: My wife was so proud that our daughter could show that type of compassion, even for something inanimate. I reacted to it as if her piscine concern was a form of weakness. I felt that all her blubbering was a sign of weakness, a loss of her fighting spirit. Needless to say, this is something else I’m working on. More later.

Daughters and Sons; Sons and Daughters

Pip and Polly are the proud inheritors of Ava’s childhood collection of 1980s Cabbage Patch dolls, and last week they decided to take each doll in for a visit to the doctor. They do these visits periodically, designating one of the tables in our living room as an exam table and pulling out various utensils from the kitchen to serve as a stethoscope, an x-ray machine, etc. Pip usually takes the lead in this process, handing out roles to Polly and me and telling us what we should say at various points throughout the examination.

This time, Pip told me that I was to act as each doll’s parent and that I should bring them into the examination room and explain to them what will happen during their visit with the doctor. He then handed me the first doll – a girl with stringy blond hair who we’ve named Olivia – and led us into the living room. As I walked in and sat down on the couch with Olivia on my knee, I was thinking ahead to naptime and how I needed to get a lasagna made for dinner, put a load of laundry in the wash, clean up the dishes from breakfast and lunch, and do some writing for the week’s blog post during that time. After waiting in silence for a few seconds, Pip impatiently prompted me to start explaining to Olivia what he and Polly were going to do. Stuttering a bit to get my words out, I quickly said, “Um, Olivia, this is, um, Dr. Pip and Nurse Polly…”

Then I stopped, remembering as soon as the words had come out of my mouth that thirty-some years of enculturation create habits which are annoyingly hard to break.

Polly and Pip looked over at me in confusion. I took a breath, paused for a moment, and then made a correction: “I’m sorry Olivia, this is Dr. Pip and Dr. Polly.”

*****

Taking care of Polly has brought me into direct and immediate contact with the mysterious world of women. While I thought I was ready for this, it turns out that, much like in rock climbing, there is a distinct difference between visualizing a route and executing the climb. From the ground it can be relatively easy to pick out the series of points one wants to hit, but up on the cliff, getting through those points is never that simple. With each move upward, new details emerge and new options appear, creating questions that challenge and complicate the previously established choices.

With Polly many of the daily questions are sartorial in nature. Dressing Pip each morning is relatively simple: I pull out of his drawer some variation of the same button-up shirt and khakis that I wear most days, throw on some athletic socks and tennis shoes, and run a brush through his hair. Polly’s wardrobe choices require a whole other set of considerations: Is today a dress day or a pants day? Do I put bloomers on if she’s wearing tights? Which pair of shoes is supposed to go with this outfit? How do I get these hair clips and hair bands in without her screaming in pain?

The questions take a more serious turn as intimations of sexuality appear: How short a dress am I willing to put on her? How low a top? Do I really want decals or words on the seat of her pants? What if they’re just flowers? And why do some people insist on putting halter tops on two-year-olds? Do girls become sex objects the moment they can stand on their own two feet?

Even more seriously, Polly’s presence in my life has made me hyper-aware of how many historical inequalities of power between men and women are still present in our lives. For example,

- In 2007, women in the United States earned an income that was only 80% of that received by men.¹

- In 2008, only 35% of science and engineering positions in business or industry were held by women and only 15% of top-level managers were women.²

- Of the 535 seats in the 112th edition of the United States Congress, only 93 (17%) are held by women. ³

- 1 in 4 women will become a victim of intimate partner violence in their lifetimes. ⁴

Every day I think about these statistics and contemplate what they mean for Polly’s future. I wonder how I might prepare her to face these realities and what I might do to help her overcome some of the obstacles that create them.

My first instinct in this regard was to avoid making her excessively feminine. Driven by the idea that being “too girly” leads people to dismiss a woman or treat her as weak and incapable, I hypothesized that by keeping the pink to a minimum, avoiding the plague of Disney princesses and fairies, and cultivating interests in trucks, sports, construction equipment, LEGOs, electronics, and other ‘boy’ topics, I could somehow make Polly immune to all the statistics. I imagined that as she grew up people would recognize that she was different, that she was better than all the other girls, and consequently they would not subject her to the same indignities that all the rest wind up suffering.

This hypothesis, of course, is ridiculous. Trying to essentially raise Polly as a boy is not the answer. For one thing, intentionally creating significant discord between what Polly understands about herself and what things are socially and culturally expected of her as a woman is unfair to her. This discord would only make things more difficult for Polly as she navigates through the world outside our door. For another achieving equality among men and women cannot be accomplished through the creation of sameness. Such attempts only instigate further oppressions by limiting everyone’s life to the simplest and most linear of existences.

In the face of this false choice between Polly being too girly and not being girly enough, I have come to two conclusions. The first is that the best thing we can do right now for Polly is to create within our household small interventions in the dominant patterns of the world beyond. My hope is that through these interventions she will eventually become aware that the inequalities of power between women and men in our society are not natural and unalterable properties and that this awareness will allow her to negotiate the inequalities she encounters with some sense of ironic separation between herself and her cultural position as a woman. As such, I don’t want to, for example, regularize the doctor = male, nurse = female equation in Pip and Polly’s role playing. This equation reproduces a relationship in which the highly paid man holds final decision-making power and the lesser paid woman is responsible for following his directions. I’d rather have them enact the other possible combinations: Pip and Polly as doctors, Pip as nurse and Polly as doctor, Pip and Polly as nurses. She will see plenty of the first combination during her real visits to the doctor.

The other conclusion I have come to is that such interventions may not be as important for Polly as they are for Pip. As Ava has brought to my attention repeatedly, it’s easy to think that addressing the patterns of gender inequality means altering how women operate in the world. But the reality is that the practices and habits of men drive the reproduction of these patterns. As beneficiaries of these inequalities, men bear greater power and responsibility for acknowledging and changing these patterns than is often recognized. For me living up to this responsibility means creating our interventions with Pip in mind as much as Polly. If Pip grows up sensitive to the historical practices of exclusion and obstruction that determine the unequal nature of the opportunities with which he and Polly are respectively presented in life, then perhaps he can further contribute to the type of cumulative cultural adjustment necessary to eliminate from our world the specter of the false choice and all the associated injustices that still haunt women today.

*****

After my slip that morning, I spent the next hour or so making a point of talking to Dr. Pip and Dr. Polly as I brought each of the dolls out for their turn in the examining room. Much to my relief, Pip eventually began parroting this manner of address as well. In some respects it seems like such a little thing, but at the moment these little things are what we can do. One day Ava and I will be able to have those conversations with Polly and Pip where we will talk about history and statistics and the reproduction of inequalities. For now, though, we have to try and show them what could be possible and hope that through this showing they learn to imagine and work for what the world should be instead of accepting as good enough what the world has already been.

¹ See this report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
² See this report from the National Science Foundation.
³ For the current list of women in the US Congress, look here.
⁴ See the Department of Justice’s webpage for the National Institute of Justice

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