I Stand Corrected (25 page)

Virtually all Arab nations adhere to the Muslim religion, and etiquette in these countries is largely based on the observance of the Koran
.

Here are some basic points:

Like a small but deadly time bomb, one word in this written lesson would prevent my book from being published the month it was scheduled to appear in stores.

PART ELEVEN
Raising Sons

Easier to rule a nation than a son.
—
Chinese proverb

T
hough China’s Communist Party has recently agreed to a less draconian approach, its one-child policy will not be entirely forsaken anytime soon, for it is meant to slow the drain on the country’s resources. The result is a nation of predominately sibling-free children who are the future of their country and the source of their parents’ security.

While other cultures seem to be dispensing with the idea of family, family ties in China remain at the center of its value system, and children are treated like precious cargo. But there is a price for being so cherished. From an early age, Chinese children are expected to fulfill responsibilities to their parents—responsibilities laid out clearly in a code of conduct issued by China’s National Committee on Aging. It incorporates the themes of
The Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety
, written during the Yuan dynasty in the late 1200s. I made a gift of the book to Gilliam. Just as the title promises, it features twenty-four stories demonstrating exemplary acts. One tale tells of a son who lies down naked on a frozen river so the ice will melt, allowing him to catch fish for his father—a particularly ludicrous display of stupidity all around, suggested my own son.

Given the belief by the Chinese that their ancestors merge into the forces of the universe, given, as well, the more earth-bound issue of succession, particularly when it comes to family-owned
businesses and newly built empires, and given China’s one-child policy—given all of these things, it is no surprise that in China the urge to have sons is now skewing the gender balance of the population.

Increasingly and for the next twenty years, China will have more men than women of reproductive age. That has prompted the government to openly express concern about the consequences the gender imbalance will have on the nation’s social stability.

Thousands of years before the ancient lessons of
The Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety
, Egyptians set forth
The Instruction of Ptahhotep
, a collection of maxims that sowed the seeds of Western ethical conduct.

“How worthy it is when a son hearkens to his father … and how many misfortunes befall him who hearkens not!” cautions Ptahhotep.

I cannot help wondering if what resides not far below the surface of his warning is the primal fear of fathers that their sons will surpass them. Though never a great fan of Freud, I have seen for myself how accurate is his timeline charting the early childhood development of boys.

Gilliam went to sleep one night a four-year-old devoted to both of his parents and woke the next morning determined to eliminate his father in order to have his mother to himself. Before breakfast, he walked purposefully into the next room and glared at his competition stationed at a desk, drawing cartoons.

His father looked up.

“Well, hello, Gilly. Have you come to visit? How nice.”

Gilliam’s intentions were expressed politely, but they were as deadly serious as a Russian oligarch.

“You need to move out of our house,” he announced.

Caught off guard, his father nonetheless managed to retain the convincing tone of adult authority.

“This is my house as well,” he reminded his son.

Gilliam considered the accuracy of his father’s statement. Unhappily, it was correct.

“You wouldn’t have to go far,” Gilliam suggested.

“Where would you have me go?” asked his father with amused curiosity.

“What about the garage? That way you could visit,” Gilliam reasoned.

In China, it could well be that the cultural factors of Confucianism would have made the kind of Oedipal exchange between Gilliam and his father unnecessary. Perhaps far more thought provoking is the ever-increasing number of young Chinese men. By 2020, China expects a surplus of thirty-five million of them. That number of males for whom there will be no available women in China exceeds the entire population of Canada. This will not happiness make.

On the other hand, I’m not entirely sure what kind of happiness is actively encouraged in China, other than the kind that rewards achievement.

Instilled in the Chinese by the Cultural Revolution was the belief that pursuing happiness at the expense of others ran contradictory to the moral principle of communism and therefore those who did so would never be happy. The idea of romantic love has been systematically dismissed by Chinese politics as both frivolous and selfish. Perhaps it is a blessing in disguise. With so little reference made to romantic love, most likely Chinese people have been spared the anguish of its loss.

East or West, we are never entirely honest when it comes to issues of love, and so it is doubtful I can be the reliable narrator of my own. I am, however, absolutely certain that I married W. for love.

“For better or for worse” were words in a vow I took completely to heart. Fifteen years later, my heart remained devoted, but it was physically, emotionally, and financially impossible to continue life as it was. I hoped I could make W. understand this. Instead, he pivoted in an entirely different direction.

Despite my profound dislocation, I was determined to create security for Gilliam.
Security is home
, I reasoned.
I will make our home safe
, I told myself. Safety, at least the reassuring illusion of it, is to be found in a household routine, and so Gilliam and I became an enterprise of sorts, with the shared responsibility of routine. Each morning after breakfast, I left
for the office and Gilliam left for school. Each night during dinner, we compared our days and made plans for the next … each night, a plan for the following day … and the following, and the following … until, gradually, sadness lost its place and possibilities appeared in front of me. Isak Dinesen once said that sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story. I did that. I wrote a novel.

My life was uncommonly full, as was Gilliam’s. But the unspoken circumstances that reduced us from a tight three-person family to only mother and son required of me a sustained effort to redirect our futures, both of which had been pushed off course. I decided we should travel.

Regardless of where our journeys took us, I packed no more than could be carried on the plane. We were efficiency in motion, but the frantic hour before leaving was a showcase of my least attractive qualities. It took only a few trips for Gilliam to recognize my pretrip irrationality. He would station himself near the front door, away from the dangerous whirl of my helicopter blades.

If a psychiatrist were to explain that my anxiety had nothing to do with getting to the airport on time, he would not be telling me anything I did not already know. I understood the reason behind my pretravel angst: I was responsible for Gilliam’s life, but no one was sheltering mine. That fear made its own place, filled with longing and self-pity. Guilt lived there too—guilt for feeling anything other than gratitude that my son and I were fortunate in our health, that we were buffered by my resourcefulness, and that we both lived advantaged lives.

Determined not to allow my emotions to take the lead, I called on my organizational skills to hold them back. There were prerequisites to our trips. The flight was nonstop and overnight Thursday, placing us in the foreign city on Friday morning. By sleeping on the plane, we were able to stay in the local time zone for the two days we explored the city. We left on Sunday, the time difference returning us to New York before dinner. Slightly longer trips coincided with Gilliam’s French holidays, when off-season travel made it possible for me to afford more than our usual two-night stay.

Varied and vivid and surprising, our trips offered as many reasons for taking them as there were places to go. Sufis and Agatha Christie were two good reasons for Istanbul. The Goya exhibit at the Prado lured us to Madrid. A loaned apartment on the Île Saint-Louis made Paris possible. Mozart’s
Magic Flute
was the excuse for Vienna. Pompeian frescoes and the Cappella Sansevero’s
Veiled Christ
waited for us in Naples.

Three holidays anchored us to the same places with our offbeat version of an extended family: the Fourth of July was in Capri with the same set of friends from L.A.; Thanksgiving had a counterintuitive place in London with Gilliam’s English godmother and her family; Christmas Eve dinner was celebrated with a boisterous group of New Yorkers. Our birthdays—two days apart in August—were spent in foreign cities we’d not yet visited.

Gilliam’s life took shape in cities: L.A. was where he grew out of his infancy; Paris claimed some part of his childhood; New York—a city of sharp corners and brute force—seemed an appropriate backdrop for the assertive male pride of his adolescence.

Raising a son on my own confirmed what I long ago suspected: men and women are not set apart by biology; they
are
biology. The dissolution of my marriage left me with full-time parental responsibilities for Gilliam, and I carried the financial obligations of that unforgiving fact. Gilliam respected my role in our household, and I appreciated his. That was before, at the age of fourteen, he mutated into something unrecognizable.

Surliness appeared for the first time and fed defiance; defiance egged on provocation, until life with my son became like handling nitroglycerin. Expecting anything from Gilliam on the weekends became his equivalent of a miscarriage of justice. At first, I was furious at what I believed to be his indolence, but then I became worried when he slept for long stretches.

“Does he nod off in the middle of activities?” asked our doctor after I insisted Gilliam must be suffering from narcolepsy.

“There
are
no activities on the weekend—unless you consider eating to be one,” I told him. “The boy eats constantly
when he’s not sleeping. I don’t understand that either because he’s so thin. Could he have picked up a tapeworm on one of our trips?”

Ignoring my question, the doctor asked one of his own. “What about school, does he fall asleep in class?”

“No. He’s fine in school. It’s the weekends that are lost.”

“It’s not lost time if it’s spent sleeping,” the doctor pointed out.

“Of course you’re right,” I said, not because I agreed but because I wanted to sound supportive.

“The thing is, no matter how much sleep Gilliam has, he’s exhausted. Do you think he has caught one of those sleeping diseases you get from parasitically infected third-world water?” I asked.

“Your son doesn’t have a tapeworm or a sleeping disease,” said the doctor.

“Then what
does
he have?”

“He doesn’t ‘have’ anything. The boy is growing.”

I would not argue with that point. Gilliam’s height had increased five inches that year alone.

“All right,” I told the doctor. “I’ll let the boy grow.”