DRESSED IN A RED SATIN jacket, and wrapped in a red brocade quilt, a small bundle of red, the color of happiness, I was delivered into the arms of my American mother. I was one month old. Around my neck was a jade pendant on a thin gold chain, and on each wrist a gold bracelet. The jade pendant, a brilliant lustrous green, was carved with two peaches, the Chinese symbol for long life, an appropriate symbol for an infant starting a new life. I don't recall ever seeing the red clothing, or the quilt, but I remember the bracelets well. They were of twenty-four karat gold, by western standards far too pure for jewelry, too yellow and much too soft. They were made in a wraparound style, each one a thick gold band with a little ball at each end, the soft metal wrapped almost twice around to encircle my tiny infant wrists. I no longer have the bracelets. They were lost sometime during the war together with the Chinese silver dollars we children had saved through the years from the red envelopes we received every year from our elders at Chinese New Year. The jade pendant, however, rests in my jewel box, a treasured reminder of my origins. In later years I had it set on a double strand of seed pearls. It will one day go to my daughter.
The American woman who was my mother was not the one in whose womb my life began. She was not the one who brought me into the world. She endured none of the discomforts of pregnancy, no nausea in the early months, or back aches as the weeks wore on. She suffered no pains of childbirth. She was not the one to hear my first cries through the dim haze of post-birth exhaustion. Nonetheless, to me she was Mother, the only one whom I called Mother, the only one whom I thought of as my mother.
My father played no part in my conception. He was not the one from whose seed I had grown. His union with my mother produced neither me nor my brothers and sisters. But he was my father, the only one I ever called Daddy, the only one I thought of as my father. My birth parents I thought of not at all. I knew they existed, somewhere in another city. I knew they were related to my father. But not until I was eighteen, when I knew I would soon be meeting them for the first time, did they even enter my thoughts. That another mother had carried me within her womb for nine long months, had felt my first stirrings within her body, had endured the pain of pushing me through that narrow birth canal into the brilliant light of the open world, all that meant little to me. That mother had been no more than a receptacle, a vessel to hold the seed whose sprouts would send forth arms and legs, fingers and toes, for the infant me.
It was not her first pregnancy. This would be her eighth.. She had known almost from the start that I might not be hers to keep. If I were born a girl, I was promised to the family of her husband's older brother. She did not question the commitment. Her brother-in-law and his American wife had no children of their own; she had many. It was a good arrangement. It was the Chinese way.
My mother--and throughout this memoir, all references to my mother or my father are always to my adoptive parents--had been bitterly disappointed at her failure to conceive. I cannot believe, however, that any disappointment my father felt was not tempered with relief. He was certainly aware that any offspring of his marriage to my mother would be stigmatized throughout their lifetimes because of their mixed blood. Possibly it was because of this that he did not consult a doctor. Nor did my mother, for her own unspoken reasons, reasons that I did not learn of until many years later. But that story later. Each parent felt the fault lay with the other. Both parents wanted children, my mother because of her great love of children and the natural desire to have her own, and my father for the added reason that he needed a son and heir to carry on his line of the Chien family.
After three years of marriage and no signs of pregnancy, my mother began to think of adoption. With so many poor families in China, surely it would be a simple matter to find a couple who would be willing, even happy, to find a good home for a child they could not afford to raise. But when she broached the subject to my father she was surprised at his instant rejection of the idea. No, thats out of the question. We cant possibly adopt an unknown. We wouldnt know anything about the child's background, whether there were medical problems in the family, either physical or mental. No, Ill ask my brother for one of his.
What do you mean, ask for? You surely can't just ask for a child. How can you expect any of your brothers just to hand over a child to us? The mere suggestion seemed unthinkable to my mother.
My father explained patiently, Helen, you don't understand. In China this is the way it's done. Without a son, my line of the Ch'ien family will die with me. My oldest brother has only one child so he has none to give me, but my second brother has two, both boys. Dont you remember? You were the one who gave the first one his English name, Winston. Now Ill ask my brother to give the second one to us.
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