The Moth (25 page)

I went up to them and said, “Is everything OK? Why are you crying?”

And one of the ladies looked at me, and then she looked at my dad’s burned-down store and pointed, and teary-eyed she said, “Where are we gonna go now that we don’t have a home?”

And that was a turning point for me. I hadn’t really thought about my dad’s store in that way. I just thought it was something he was doing to provide for the family, but in fact he was providing for a greater community. These elderly women, they didn’t have a community center to go to. They didn’t have a public park in Chinatown. This was the only place where they would actually run into their friends. And they spent a lot of time there. In a way it
was
like a second home.

I guess it is true. It sounds corny, but you do only realize what you have when you lose it.

So in the months that followed, I kept begging my dad for more stories. I asked him what he did with shoplifters, ’cause I was really curious.

And he said, “Well you know, one day I caught a kid
shoplifting. He was only ten, and he didn’t know who I was. I was kinda following him around, and he was just taking stuff, stuffing it in his bag, putting it in his pockets. And at one moment he actually took a break from stealing and sat down and actually started eating the food he had stolen, right in the middle of an aisle.”

My dad told me that he came up to him, and he said, “Hey little boy, have you had enough to eat?”

And the little boy rubbed his belly, like
almost
, you know?

And my dad’s like, “Hey, so where are your parents?”

And the little boy said, “Well, um, they’re at work.”

My dad said, “Oh, well why aren’t you at home?”

The little boy’s like, “Because there’s no food at home.”

And my dad said, “Well you know, when you take stuff, especially if it’s at a store, and you don’t pay for it, it’s actually stealing.”

And the little boy got really nervous, like,
This guy is gonna get me in trouble.
And he was kind of angling for a way to get out.

But my dad said, “So in the future if you don’t have anything to eat at home, would you just come and find me and ask me for whatever you need? If you ask, I’ll give you whatever you want; just don’t steal, because stealing is wrong.” And in the months that followed I think my dad really looked forward to seeing the little boy.

It was these stories that I was craving, because in some way I think I was trying to re-create something that I had lost, taken for granted.

Whenever we went to Chinatown, lots of people would come up to us and say, “Please, we need a store like this again. When are you going to open up your store?”

And it was hard because my dad was basically penniless.
The fire had caused about $20 million worth of damage, and he barely had enough insurance to cover it. So he really had no money. But he had this idea that maybe he could pool together what little money he did have with a lot of the original employees, people who were immigrants and had gotten their first jobs through my dad at the store. Some of them had been working there since the 1970s.

So they pooled together, and it was a big risk. The only location they could find was just on the outskirts of Chinatown, which in the early nineties, during the last recession, was like a no-man’s-land. It was so unsafe, and the only reason you would ever go there was to get a prostitute or drugs. And at the time I remember thinking,
What’s the wisdom in that? Why are you going there? It’s so unsafe, no one’s gonna go, you’re gonna lose your life savings.

But he did it anyway because he’s crazy, and almost overnight the place was revitalized. There were really loyal people, families from the suburbs, who came and gave patronage to my dad. And people walked from Chinatown. Soon thereafter many businesses started popping up, and then there was more and more foot traffic, and then families started moving back into this neighborhood. And it was an amazing thing. He kind of helped revitalize this neighborhood, to the point that, fifteen years later, it became one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in Boston.

Which is why my dad got an eviction notice from the owner. He wanted to kick my dad out and knock down the whole block and build luxury condos.

At the time, my dad was seventy, and I said, “You know, Dad, what do you want to do? You have ninety employees, and they’re all in their forties and fifties. They don’t speak English. They’re very hard to employ. What’s gonna happen to them?”

And I remember my dad said, “You know, I’m seventy years old. I’m too old for this. I’m too old to fight.”

And I understood. But I decided that
I
wasn’t too old to fight.

So I organized the community and led this grassroots movement to fight city hall and fight one of the largest developers in all of Boston. And at our first public hearing, there was a really amazing turnout, and we got enough press that even the mayor changed his tune and started supporting us.

And after the first initial hearing I went to the store, and when I walked in, there were these two older women who were my dad’s employees.

They rushed right up to me, and they said, “Thank you so much for what you did last night. You know, we normally don’t think that we have a voice, and we normally don’t think we can advocate for ourselves in that kind of way, so thank you for doing what you did.” And when I looked into their eyes, I saw so much compassion and humility and grace.

And it was at that moment that I understood the wisdom that my father had given me.

Ellie Lee
is an award-winning director, writer, and producer of animated, fiction, and documentary films, which have screened at the Berlin Film Festival and over a hundred festivals worldwide. She is a five-time National Emmy Award nominee and won the 2009 Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award for excellence in broadcast journalism. She is a 2013 Sundance Institute Screenwriters Intensive Fellow and serves on the board of the nonprofit Karen Schmeer Film Editing Fellowship. Currently, she’s producing a new animated comedy Web series,
Chinafornia
(www.chinafornia.com).

CARLY JOHNSTONE

I
n August of 1998 I was trying to give birth, and it was well attended. I had a nurse, two midwives, my boyfriend at the time (who was not the father), my foster brother, and two women who were also awaiting the birth of
their
first child, who also happened to be
my
child.

Seven months prior to this, after many glasses of water, visits to the bathroom, and sticks peed upon, I had come to accept the fact that I was pregnant. This was not the best of news for a bunch of reasons. One of them was that I was sixteen. More so than that, my life had been a lesson in negatives. It had been a lesson in what not to do.

My mantra had been “How not to be my mother.” My mother was a prostitute, and I had grown up with her, and many other prostitutes, and the men that handled them. When she died in the 1980s, like so many from AIDS, I went into foster care. I did a year and a half there before my mother’s parents, my grandparents, took me in under duress. As you might note, people who don’t want children probably shouldn’t have them. I went from being touched much too much in really painful and
monstrous ways, to never being touched at all. Sometimes, I wasn’t sure which was worse. They lasted about five years with me before they threw in the towel, retired to Florida, and put me in a Southern Baptist children’s home.

I lasted about a year and a half there before I thought,
I could do better than this. I could raise myself.
I mean, the bar was pretty low. I studied a lot, and I took a lot of tests, and I graduated high school two and a half years early. I got on a Greyhound and went back to New Jersey, because that’s where I grew up and that’s where I felt safe. And I started college at a local community college. I got my first full-time job with full health benefits, and I got my first place. I was sixteen. And by the end of my sixteenth year, we get to the point with the bathroom and the pee sticks, and a wrench was thrown in the works.

I knew a few things right off the bat: I wasn’t going to abort. A lot of people asked me why I wasn’t going to abort (a surprising amount of people were willing to ask, “Why don’t you abort?”). And it wasn’t because of some misbegotten belief in God or because I’m pro-life, because I’m not. It was because I really, really wanted this baby. I desperately wanted this baby; the want was a pain. I had always wanted a baby. I always wanted to be a mother. I always wanted a family. I always wanted something that was mine and pure and good and whole.

I wanted it, but I couldn’t keep the promises I had made to myself about having a family. That whole mantra about not being my mom; I couldn’t give this kid a home. I couldn’t give a life without fear or want. I couldn’t promise that I would be there all the time. I couldn’t give unfailing support or provide a net. And so I had to find another solution. I looked at traditional adoption, but I couldn’t have a kid grow up the way I did, with so many questions about who I was and where I came from.
And I looked at fostering, but again, you know, I had traveled that road. It hadn’t really gone so well.

Finally, someone explained open adoption. It means that the adoptive parents want an ongoing relationship with the mother; and the mother—she gets to choose the parents. And I thought,
I can do this. If he never has questions, if he always knows where he comes from, I can do this.

So I attacked this like I attack everything else in my life, like a research paper. I made a lot of calls and took a lot of notes, and I finally found an agency that could meet my criteria.

I had three. My first was that it had to be a same-sex couple, because, at this time, it was a little harder for them to adopt. Additionally, despite my own sexual ambiguity, I realized that if I ever found anyone to settle down with, it would be another woman. I never wanted
that
to be an issue.

Number two: they had to not have any extreme religious affiliation. I had had religion shoved down my throat, and I thought faith should be a choice and something questioned. Number three: they had to want an interracial child as their first choice. The father of this baby was black, and I was half very white and half something very brown and short. I wanted this kid to be a first choice. I didn’t want it to be something they settled upon because they couldn’t find a perfect blond-haired, blue-eyed baby, or because they were trying to better their karma. Even with those narrow parameters, I had over two hundred couples that were viable choices, and each of them had a brochure. Each brochure was full of pictures of their family and friends and their homes, and information about how well educated they were, how much support they had, and how financially stable they were. (If you’re ever thinking of adopting, I recommend a background in marketing.)

After going through those, I found about forty or fifty couples that I really liked, and I made a long list of questions. Some of them were what you might expect, like “Why are you adopting?” But a lot of them were a little different, like “How are you going to do this kid’s hair?” and “Why don’t you believe in God?” and “What do you do when you’re mad?”

Eventually I found a couple that I really liked. Their names were Gwen and Gretchen. I did not pick their names, but it’s really fucking cute. They lived up in Portland, Maine, which was far enough for me. I didn’t want them to be too close, because I totally knew I might be a stalker mom, and I didn’t want to find myself on a playground. So they were close enough that I could get there if I needed to, but also far enough away that I couldn’t run there in ten minutes.

They came down from Maine to meet me. Gretchen is tall and strong and unflappable, and Gweny is tiny and sweet and nurturing. And I liked them, and they liked me, which was really important because they had to deal with me for a really long time, and a lot of people had not really hung in there.

I knew they were the right ones. I knew that they would work. I chose them, and they gave me an 800 number so I could always reach them. And we waited the wait of expectant parents, and I got bigger.

Eventually we found ourselves in this delivery room, and after twenty-three hours of back labor, I gave birth to an eight-pound, six-ounce baby boy.

And he was perfect. And he was whole. And he was so beautiful, and he had all of his fingers and toes.

I had forty-eight hours with him, and I sang him every song I knew. I tried to say hello to him, and I tried to say good-bye to him. And at the end of that forty-eight hours, I brought him
downstairs, and I helped them strap him into a car seat, and I watched these strangers drive away with my baby.

I hoped I had made the right choice. I hoped they were the right people. I hoped he would forgive me.

Up until this point I had never cried, but when I went home, I finally did. I shattered. I broke into a million pieces. I looked at my body, this seventeen-year-old body that should be healthy and strong and young, and it was broken too. I had stretch marks that looked like purple claws from my belly button to my pubis. My stomach that had so recently been filled with life was flaccid and dead. My breasts were heavy and hard and swollen and leaking, trying to feed a child that wasn’t there, a baby that was gone.

And I didn’t know what to do. I had had such a good start, but I stopped living the mantra of how not to be my mother. I did my best to prove I was just as bad as her. I was someone that could give away a baby. I was the person that could throw away a child. And after never drinking and never smoking and never doing anything bad, that’s all I did for the next three or four years. I tried to destroy myself as quickly as possible.

After four years, I made my way to Maine. I finally got up the courage to visit this family that had my child. I went to their home, and it was beautiful, and everyone in it was the kind of person that did what they said they were going to do as a child—they’re actors and inventors and dancers. The kitchen was the kind of place where everyone goes to tell their story and friends meet. And all I saw was everything I wasn’t; all I saw was a bar I would never meet. And I watched these people raise a child that I was incapable of holding or touching or saying “I love you” to, because I didn’t know how to do that. I didn’t know how to do it for myself; I didn’t know how to do it for him. I just hadn’t been given those tools in my life.