Wedding in Yangshuo (eBook)

Stress levels were high around Wake Robin Farm the summer before Miles’s academic launch at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. At my instigation, we had a total kitchen remodel underway, and were camped in the backyard in terms of cooking, a grating set-up since our cook, Herb, didn’t actually give a damn about improved facilities, and expressed this sentiment by serving up bad vibes with every meal. I just kept washing the dishes in the bathtub, hanging on for the day when the contractors would leave and Herb would have to grudgingly admit to liking his new kitchen. And warm the hell up!

Miles’s long, drawn-out college application process had taken a toll on all of us, especially when suspense over his fate dragged into the horrid summer of remodeling, his acceptance arriving late in our high-achieving town’s intensely played game of Whose Kid Gets Into Which College.

We worried: had we gone too far in helicoptering the admissions process? When his stellar SATs and almost too-smart-to-sound-genuine essay on Hong Kong film combined to counter his pathetic, barely-graduation-worthy GPA of 2.1 to land him on the wait-list at this alternative-type school in Amherst, there’s no denying we rushed to switch on those whirling blades. In the dead of a New England winter, Herb hauled our firstborn back East in a desperate effort to showcase a candidate who sincerely wanted to be counted in Hampshire’s incoming freshman class.

Did he? Probably not, turned out, but at the time it seemed like his best hope, and we breathed huge sighs of relief when being a West Coast male apparently counted as diversity, and that acceptance letter finally arrived.

Still, maybe a little guiltily, we were trying hard that summer not to be controlling, not to pester. As fall approached, our occasional hints that it might be time to start packing were met with dismissive annoyance. Leaving home? No sweat. He’d been wanting to for years. Please just chill.

Right. The day before our flight to Massachusetts, Miles was struck down by the worst sort of blinding, throwing-up migraine. As he lay there moaning, Herb randomly scooped the stuff from his floor and threw it all into boxes for shipping.

The next night, as we turned off Highway 91 at the Amherst exit, Miles leaned forward from the backseat of the rental car we’d collected at the Hartford Airport.

“Wait!” he said. “Isn’t there a whole bunch of stuff you were supposed to be telling me? You know, about how to do stuff? Stuff I need to know before you leave me here?”

And when we did finally leave him, it was hard. They had a big assembly. We’d decided to bail on the parents’ wine and cheese party and thought we’d already said our goodbyes to Miles, but as we tried to slip away, we heard him calling. We turned around and saw him standing at a second floor railing, hand raised in one more send-off salute.

At Hampshire that year he wrote a paper called The Hong Kong Handover on Film which his professor called impressive and insightful, encouraging him to expand it into what was called a Division One Project at this school where people were supposed to figure out for themselves what they wanted to study, and the entire student body seemed made up of young people hearing the so-called beat of a different drummer.

But whatever drumbeats Miles was hearing, he interpreted from them no revise-and-expand message. Once home for the summer, he decided to ditch a return.

Well, okay. It was me, after all, who was always pointing out to our three kids my belief that sometimes a person has to go a little ways down the wrong road, if only to find out which is the right road. That the only mistake is in never setting out at all.

Miles spent the next year living back with the rest of us, through a temp agency working a variety of soul-crushing, boredom-inducing jobs which rendered him ready, by the following summer, to give college another shot.

But not in Massachusetts.

Picture that parental helicopter emblazoned with Hampshire on the side doing a crash and burn.

At the University of Oregon, Miles jumped into learning Chinese and caught on fast. He first ventured to China itself in the summer of 2001, enrolling at the New Asia-Yale-in-China Chinese Language Center at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, an undertaking of his own devising. He would study Chinese characters and take an intensive course in Cantonese. Best of all, he would be in Hong Kong, a city that had been sending him an irresistible siren call ever since he had first become enamored of Hong Kong films.

At the end of his session, he would meet up in Beijing with a group of students from several West Coast universities and colleges for an official fall-term-abroad program.

In his brief emails, he sounded happy exploring Hong Kong, using the purchase of meals to practice his language skills, admitting to the satisfaction of finding that a couple of his fluently tossed off sentences could unleash a reciprocal torrent of Cantonese from someone who clearly thought he sounded good enough to be able to keep it up. “I tried chicken feet,” he wrote. “Not bad, but not worth the effort; too slippery, and it’s hard to eat around those toes.”

What he would not do, this otherwise adventurous son of ours, was anything that smacked of being a tourist. He would not ride the cable car to the top of Victoria Peak. After a summer of my begging for pictures, he sent shots of his campus and a couple of group pictures of fellow students clowning around in a classroom. But he could not bring himself to stand in front of a landmark and get his picture taken like everyone else. He regarded it as undignified to be seen in public so easily amused. He saw his temporary residence in Hong Kong as strictly about learning. And, honestly, I think he arrived on earth with this dead-serious gene firmly in place, for, as he’d told his grandmother at the age of three when she offered to take him to the local museum, “Good. I like educational.” Our son, it sometimes seemed, did not quite approve of fun.

During this summer, and also later when he was back in Hong Kong for a longer period, I suffered a terrible sense of distance when he didn’t check in with any sort of frequency. Late one night, missing him unbearably, I turned to Google. Surprise! He popped right up, posting under his own name on a Cantonese language message board. Checking in became my guilty pleasure. He was so articulate in his comments, and I loved how the other posters seemed to respect his opinion and ask his advice.

Of course my children are smarter than I am; that’s what happens when you marry up, intellectually. But I like to think my personal form of nurture had something to do with my firstborn’s particular gift for language.

When he was three weeks old, I strapped him into his car seat in our little red truck with the homemade shingled canopy and backed out the gravel driveway.

“We have to go to the dump,” I told my baby. “That’s where we throw away our garbage. You can help me.” As we drove north through the main street of Corvallis, I kept up my narration. “This is your town, honey. See all the stores?” And on the way home, on Fourth Street: “That big white building with the tower is the county courthouse. It’s almost a hundred years old! Daddy and I got our wedding license there.”

To this baby I narrated my whole fairly boring day as a young mother. It wasn’t boring to him. The world was new and he liked hearing words. I wasn’t following any parenting guideline books; I was just doing what came naturally. I talked; he listened.

And I was always talking to him. Without any sort of handheld device to distract me, he had my undivided attention. It wasn’t long at all before that kid was talking right back. I got a huge kick out of him. I scratched out “Baby’s Visitors” in his baby book and devoted the section instead to “Miles’s Big Words.” At three years the list included such choice offerings as adequate, reflection, necessarily, familiar, complicated, usually and forty-five other three and four syllable words.

I swear, he started trying to be an adult from the day he was born, turning his back on nursing at ten months and going straight for a cup. Bottles were baby stuff. At three he asked me when his voice was going to change. He wanted to be dignified. For his sixth birthday he requested a suit with what he called a “hang-down tie.” I found a pinstripe vest and pants set with a white shirt and maroon tie. He loved it. In the picture taken that day he looks like a little investment banker. I stand proudly by, pregnant with his twin siblings, my hands demurely, carefully clasped beneath my two-baby bump, resisting the urge to so much as put a hand on his shoulder or ruffle his hair.

I had to love him carefully, from a respectful distance, hiding my delight at his keen intelligence. He seemed precocious even in this, becoming annoyed with me in the way that parents usually don’t have to suffer until their kid’s teen years. If I allowed my face to light up...