I’ve been poring over the journals I’d kept when my former wife and I lived in China in the late 1980s. I do this nearly every year about this time as a way to remind me of one of the most gratifying, although difficult, periods of my life. Twenty-three years ago, we landed in Beijing and walked into university jobs teaching English as a second language without any knowledge of Chinese or experience teaching anything. We were either courageous or crazy, I don’t know which. But when it was over I knew it had been a life-changing time.
During the nearly two years Wanda and I were there, we were able to set aside many of the concerns and questions we had about our careers, about where we’d like to settle down, about whether or not we were going to have a child. We went to China at a point in our lives when we wanted to do something really different, to have an adventure. We got that. Also, Wanda was a Chinese-American who still had distant family in China whom we wanted to get to know. We got that, too.
When it came time to leave China, we decided to make our way back to the States by going West through the Soviet Union (it was still the Soviet Union then), as well as Scandinavia—to see some of my ancestral land. We would then get a cheap flight out of Amsterdam back to New York.
Our arrival in Copenhagen coincided with a visit there by my aunt and her husband from North Carolina. We met them in their hotel restaurant, an expensive place with white linen tablecloths and candlelight; it was the sort of restaurant Wanda and I had not set foot in for almost two years. And it was this particular evening that stands out in many ways above the so many of the other things that had happened to us while we’d been away simply because, perhaps, of its blow.
I don’t remember, but I’m sure we looked quite shabby. I do remember that we felt worn out. If life in China wasn’t enough to grind us down—it was in many ways a soul-killing, back-breaking, totalitarian country then—we’d just spent three weeks on an Odyssean journey aboard trains and crashing in cheap hotels and even spending the night in a couple of plastic seats on a small cruise liner during a sleepless overnight trip, all of it with a ton of luggage in tow. We must have looked like refugees. Even our best clothes had become threadbare and stained, and our hair had been hacked at by a Chinese friend back in Beijing, who had something of a knack for hairdressing. That was fine for China, but I know we did not look nearly as well-coiffured as the people around us now. We were also broke—we would stuff our pockets and daypacks with food from the continental breakfasts we got at the small hotels we stayed in along the way so we’d have something to eat for lunch and dinner—and we were looking forward to a lovely, relaxing, sit-down meal paid for by someone else.
It didn’t take long for the conversation about our “China thing”—that’s what my aunt called it, our “China thing,” like it was something you did when you were young and irresponsible, and then moved on—to draw a bead on what Wanda and I were planning to do when we got back the States. My aunt was an academic. She had a doctorate in education and worked in the administration of several colleges and universities in her career. My uncle was an executive with Dupont. My aunt had married late and never had children of her own. He was on his second marriage (his wife had died several years before) and had two grown daughters who were now married. My aunt’s reference to our transformative, mind-boggling time in China as our “China thing” struck a nerve in me from the get-go, and I was about to learn that it was just the beginning of a conversation that I soon wanted to stop, even it meant getting up from the table and walking out.
“So what are your next plans?” my aunt asked.
It seemed like an innocent question and I answered cheerily, “Your guess is as good as mine. Got any suggestions?”
“Don’t you think it’s about time to start thinking about little ones?” she asked suddenly.
“I have thought about them quite a lot, actually,” I said, trying to be polite. It was true. It was the subject of many conversations Wanda and I had been having for several years—even before we were married—and I always came to the conclusion that I really wasn’t interested in having a child, but still remained open to the possibility. But I did not want to talk about that just now.
“And?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, it’s time you decided, don’t you think?”
“Wanda and I made an arrangement in which I have to tell her by April 2 whether or not I want to have kids,” I said. This conversation in the restaurant took place on August 13, 1987. I have no idea now why we picked April 2. I don’t even recall making that agreement. But it’s in my journal that I was keeping of that time and in which this entire conversation is recounted.
“Good for her,” my uncle chimed in, winking at Wanda.
“How old are you?” my aunt asked me.
“I’m thirty-four.”
“Too old,” Wanda joked.
“Not too old,” my aunt said.
“Shucks,” I said.
“The trouble is this,” my aunt said. “My father had me when he was 33. By the time I reached 20, he was already in his 50s.”
“You can’t turn back the clock so you don’t have to go into that,” I said, my bile rising. It might have been the wine. Did I have wine? I cannot recall.
“What I’m saying is that there is a point in which you have to get on with your life,” my aunt continued. “It’s important that you do something, have commitments, or make a contribution so when you are old you can look back and say you’ve done something to make the world a better place.”
Jesus Christ. “What do you think I’ve been doing in China all this time?” I snarled. “You have no idea what a foreigner can do for people there. I personally got one person into the United States to study.”
“A drop in the ocean,” my uncle sneered.
“So be it,” I said.
“You’re afraid of having children because you’re afraid you won’t be a good parent,” my aunt went on.
“That’s part of it,” I admitted.
“That’s all of it,” she shot back.
“It’s not all of it,” I replied. “I don’t necessarily even like children.” It was not entirely true. I just didn’t want the responsibility of taking care of children.
“I know you and you’ll be the first to fall. You’re such a softie,” my aunt said.
“Maybe not,” I said. “I have a very short temper. I can’t stand to hear a baby a cry. Every time I hear a baby cry my blood begins to boil and my heart starts pounding and my palms begin to sweat. I have to get up and leave the room.”
“It’s different when it’s your own,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s worse because you can’t leave the room.”
“There’s a change that takes place,” my uncle said. “You feel different about it.”
“I don’t have a very good image of family and child rearing,” I said.
“I know that,” my aunt said. Yes, she knew that, I thought. “But why deny yourself a family just because you have a bad image of one?”
“Here’s a chance for you to start over, to prove that can have children and be happy,” my uncle added.
“That’s a good point,” I agreed. They’d touched a soft spot in me. “I’ve heard that before and I think it’s a good point.
“Kate’s husband didn’t want children,” my aunt said. Kate was one of my uncle’s daughters. “But now you can say no wrong about his little John. He just adores the boy.”
“Listen,” I said, getting my back up again. “I know all about what you are saying. I know we’re a selfish generation and a lot of us run around afraid to make commitments. But that’s not my reason for not wanting children. The reason is not because I’m afraid of being a bad parent or afraid of making a commitment. It’s because I don’t want to spend my life raising children. I just don’t think I would enjoy it all that much.”
“Well….” my aunt began, and then let her sentence drift off.
“And I don’t like this thing about getting on with one’s life,” I continued. My final salvo, the last of my ammo. “There is no point in which one gets on with life. This is my life. I went to China and it was part of my life. So I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say one has to get on with one’s life.”
The conversation suddenly stopped. Had I won? After a moment of uncomfortable silence, my aunt made some comment about the food or the weather—like a white flag of surrender, the delirium of someone in the throes of death—and my uncle either agreed or disagreed, I don’t recall because my mind was spinning and overheated. If I had won, what did I win?
Finally, I wanted to say something that spoke to the journey we’d just made, to get back to what was really most important for me at that moment and about which I had some authority that they didn’t. I was feeling desperate to tell people what I saw—things that they had no knowledge of and I felt needed to be known about real life in Communist China and the Soviet Union—and it came not from books or from other people telling me about it; it was based on my own experience and nothing and no one could refute what I knew simply because it had happened to me.
“You might be interested to know that everything bad you’ve heard about the Soviet Union is true,” I started, a bit lamely. “There are lines for everything.” I knew because we had to wait in them.
My aunt immediately replied, “The longest line we’ve had to wait in was to go to the bathroom. The bus pulls into a stop and everybody gets off and runs to the john.”
“There’s a toilet on the bus but they don’t let you use it because it has to be emptied,” my uncle added.
And that was the end of our talk about the Soviet Union, China, and everything Wanda and I had done and seen and that was now so much a part of my life it inhabited my viscera like nothing had before. I could feel that my brain had been rewired by the experience, but there were so many loose wires still. Even so—or because of this—I had so much to tell. And neither of them cared a jot about any of it.
I don’t remember what I ate or drank that night. I’m sure my aunt and uncle picked up the tab and I’m sure I thanked them for it, and I really was grateful. But when I left them I felt embittered. It wasn’t simply the subject of the conversation—children—that irritated me. It was their lack of curiosity in who I was and what was really on my mind then.
***
It wasn’t long after that meeting that my aunt, a heavy smoker most of her life, was diagnosed with lung cancer. By the time it was discovered, it had metastasized to her brain. The last time Wanda and I saw her in her hospital bed—and the first time since our dinner in Demark—she was a bald, emaciated form with wide eyes that stared blankly out the window at the yellow pines outside. Now she did not even know who we were. After her funeral, I never saw my uncle again. Always a bit of a drinker, he besotted himself in his years alone and presently died from complications due to alcohol poisoning.
I don’t know what, in their final hours, they believed they’d done to make the world a better place. My uncle gave the world two daughters, and giving life is always a blessing. Perhaps my aunt was so keen on me having a child because she knew the pain and longing it had caused her to not have one herself. If this were the case, I wish now she’d just come out and said so. As it was, I felt so resentful about that talk we’d had in Copenhagen that I’d snubbed them. I hate to admit it, but I’d snubbed them. Which is too bad—for me and for them. We missed so much life we could have shared.
They used to visit my family and I remember when I was getting ready to go to college my aunt kept insisting that I apply to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where she was working at the time. I never did; I didn’t think I could get in. I am thinking now that perhaps she had a higher opinion of me than I had of myself, both as a student and as the father she wanted me to be—and I never have become.
I may have pushed them out of my life—perhaps unfairly; maybe we were poor company then—but they taught me a valuable lesson that evening: The way they’d harped on me in Copenhagen taught me that it is sometimes better to listen rather than to talk because sometimes people just need to be heard. I would have greatly appreciated it if my aunt and uncle had deferred to me a little, and let me tell them about what’d I’d just been through. Someone once said there is no pain greater than an untold story. I had a story. And I so much wanted to tell it—the invigorated yet, at the same time, the strangely sad if not wrecked version of myself who was in no way ready to start having children, for heaven’s sake. They were the first people Wanda and I met up with from back home, and they seemed more bent on getting us there and resettled than on hearing anything about where we’d been, what we’d seen, what we’d been through. It was as if they’d showed up with a clean, crisp map to suggest places for us to go when I wanted to pull out my ragged, torn map to show them the places where we’d been. So we just of sat there in the middle of nowhere, lost and arguing which road would get us where we wanted to go. Thing is, my aunt and uncle wanted us to go one way and I wanted to go another way.
Listening a little more would make the world a better place no matter what else you might want to leave behind—stadiums in your name, endowments, a park bench with your name engraved into a brass plaque. Even children. It’s usually not what you do that people remember, a friend once said to me. It’s how you treat them. And, frankly, I can’t think of anyone at any time who couldn’t use someone to hear them out.