The Natural Laws of Good Luck (13 page)

Sweet Sweet

H
ER NAME TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH
was Sweet Sweet, and she was Zhong-hua's daughter. Eighteen months after my husband arrived, I finally succeeded in bringing her through the immigration maze from China. There is an expression in Chinese that means that although something may be such and such, this suchness is not pure and simple. The expression is a qualifying one. For example,
Hao shi hao
means “Good is good,” and
Congming shi congming
means “Smart is smart,” but such phrasing invited contextual inference on why a good thing is not entirely good and why a smart man is in some way foolish. There was a book called
Honey Bunch
that I had found in my grandmother's attic when I was a child. The little-girl character Honey Bunch, consistently loving, obedient, and helpful, so nauseated my mother that she finally threw the book in the backyard incinerator. I thought it unfair to name anyone Sweet Sweet and did not intend to hold my stepdaughter to her name.

I soon realized with dismay that my husband had no clue how to raise a girl into a young woman or to parent in any way other than to nurture and coddle as one would a very young and helpless child. Sweet Sweet, at sixteen, did not know how to go about the most basic daily chores. No one had taught her how to wash a dish, make a bed, hold a broom, or squeeze a sponge. I showed her how to use
the washer and dryer, run the vacuum in her room, and wash her woolen sweaters by hand so they wouldn't shrink. Then I assigned her the simple task of wiping the bathroom sink every day. She did this, once. I was more puzzled than annoyed. My other four children had always helped with communal chores, either willingly or with prodding. Not helping was not an option. Sweet Sweet seemed to have no awareness of responsibility, no desire to please others, and no natural inclination to reciprocate their help. Her father hovered about her anxiously. He even brushed her hair, while she acquiesced. I gently pointed out that he might need to prepare her for the rough road ahead. He replied, “You already raise four children. Why not this one?” I was just dumb enough to have a go at it.

I opened her bedroom door that first day. She was standing there in the middle of the low-ceilinged room, having finished folding all her clothes and putting her things in the drawers. The look on her face said she would like to fold herself up, too. She had ordered her few belongings with startling precision: colored markers, pencils, and erasers lined up with the bottom ends flush, largest to smallest. Identical plastic pencil sharpeners queued up in a progression of hues from lightest to darkest, according to the spectrum of visible light. Inside the desk drawer, gum was neatly stacked next to candy bars and small foil packages of gelatinous Chinese confections. One drawer was completely full of miniature pink origami cranes, another of hearts. Nothing migrated out of its own category. It was as if the hermetic room had been shipped intact from China.

The contents and inhabitant revealed themselves with frank innocence. I say “revealed themselves” because Sweet Sweet never tried to conceal or reveal. She was matter-of-fact where most people would be secretive, ashamed, or at least evasive. I sat on the floor and talked to her in my bad Chinese. I asked her about her grandfather, my husband's father. She said flatly, “I hate him a little. He only likes grandsons, not granddaughters.” When I told her to call her mother whenever she liked, she replied, “I don't like talking to my mother. She has nothing to say to me.” When
I questioned Zhong-hua, he said her mother never took time for her. This unforgivable shortcoming was the only reason he ever gave for his divorce. He told me his first wife constantly bickered with his father and disliked his siblings but seemed not to consider contentiousness a serious flaw compared to a dearth of maternal impulse.

I showed Sweet Sweet pictures and maps and pointed around the room speaking the English names for things. She had the slightest of reactions, just a half nod or a small noise, “Hmm.” She cultivated the art of being indifferent to the world, though not unobtrusively. Her very stillness cast an electric shadow. It was impossible for me to know if this was the shadow of her life in China or if she had been born this way, with a crackling moat around her where forces of attraction and repulsion canceled each other and left a void.

School would not begin for three weeks. It did not take long to figure out that Sweet Sweet preferred her room to the outdoors, where bumpy country terrain buzzed with blackflies and bees that left swelling welts on her thin arms. She was from a city in northern China where people moved down the road by bicycle in slow, wide rivers, each so closely pressed from all sides that it was impossible to fall down. Sometimes there was a quarrel and someone got shoved; then a hundred people would topple over. My husband had described his windy city, where plastic bags billowed and tacked high in air so thick with pollutants that people went about their business with masks covering their noses and mouths. Sweet Sweet told me she hated the smells of sweat and urine that steamed from the stone steps and walkways of Linyi City. She loathed stepping on slimy garbage and getting her white clothes smudged with soot. She preferred a clean solitude to crowded anonymity.

Short on things we could do that skirted the insect world, I thought to invite her for a ride in our pickup truck. The truck had no muffler, and the windows rattled inside the door casings when we hit the bumps. It was kind of fun hurtling downhill on Route 2, making tremendous noise, with a green blur of wind rushing
past on either side—at least I thought so. Sweet Sweet sat looking straight ahead, not having fun. She wouldn't give me a glance, a smile, a question. Sweet Sweet had no interest in playing the simple game of give-and-take that was human relationship, not with me.

Then the noise took a turn for the worse. It wasn't just the rattle of the truck's improvised sheet metal body. It was more like gunshots. I pulled over, and the engine died. We had to hitchhike to a friend's house and call Triple-A. He drove us back to the truck. I opened the hood and peered in. To get a better look, my friend thrust his baby into Sweet Sweet's arms. She held the gurgling baby with awkward impassivity until it was time to go. When the tow truck arrived, we crowded together in the front seat with the husky driver and towed our silver spray-painted gem back home. I was used to this kind of adventure, but all the way home, my stepdaughter's pretty mouth pursed in a tightly closed porthole, then let out an exasperated sigh as her eyes rolled skyward. She seemed to wish her surroundings would all go away, especially the people.

I decided that Sweet Sweet's apparent apathy was a result of culture shock that manifested in a generalized lack of interest in interacting with other people for any reason, except to ask for something. She asked without hesitation as soon as she had the words: “I have homework, need you help,” “I want get hair cut,” or, to her father, in Chinese, “Give me a massage.” It was always matter-of-fact: “I want,” “I need,” “Give me.”

When well-meaning neighbors brought their teenage daughters to meet her, she endured their advances politely, never responding with warmth or interest. When classmates from school called and invited her to gatherings, she made excuses not to go. When Paroda stopped over, Sweet Sweet was loath to rise from the floor in front of the TV to greet her but just a few days later asked if Paroda might take her shopping. This seemed a most peculiar way of relating. Paroda could not help feeling disheartened when Sweet Sweet did not respond to her efforts at conversation during the three hours that it took to hunt down jeans and bras. She
wanted to be a good big sister. Sweet Sweet even refused to come downstairs when her aunt visited. Da Jie whispered to me, “Sweet Sweet don't like talk to me. I try, but she don't like. She come to my house, don't say ‘Hello,' just walk in and sit on couch. Ignore me! I decide: ‘You not baby. You don't care me, I don't care you.'” This formula could not work for me.

Sweet Sweet asked me if she could join the school's soccer team. I bought soccer shoes, socks, and shin guards. My husband frowned when I told him. “You don't know Sweet Sweet. My daughter only do something new one day, two day. After three day, she already want to stop. Not interesting anymore.” At the school, Sweet Sweet was the only Chinese student. Besides two French patois–speaking orphans recently adopted by a local farmer and his wife, the student body was overwhelmingly born and raised in our rural village. The first day of practice, Sweet Sweet jogged behind the other laughing girls. They turned and motioned her to catch up. Not being mean-spirited, they asked her all about herself, but when she could not understand, they fell silent. I felt a mother's helplessness as I watched her cross the playing field by herself. After the season began, she sat on the bench alone for most of the games. The other girls had gotten tired of trying to reach her and often neglected to let her know when the schedule had been changed. She would find herself alone in an empty locker room or running after the team bus as it left the parking lot. When the coach motioned her, she set out on her gangling legs chasing an elusive ball. If she got close enough to kick, she invariably missed. After two weeks, she wanted to quit.

My husband fed her as if she were a toddler, watching her chew each bite. At home or at her aunt's house, she sat hunched at the table, her sullen face hidden behind a silky cascade of black hair, while the extended family bustled around bumping into one another, chopping, peeling, mashing, stirring, chatting in Chinese. They sounded as if they were taking turns hitting each other with flyswatters. That's just how northern Chinese usually sounds—it's
not gentle. The sounds are pushed from the deep chest with great gusts of air and fly like arrows to a bull's-eye. My husband picked out the best morsels of food and placed them in Sweet Sweet's bowl. He murmured, as if he did not want his sister to hear him coaxing her,
“Ni xiang chifan ma?”
(Do you wish to eat?). Da Jie and her daughter exchanged disapproving frowns. Behind my husband's back, they called Sweet Sweet “the big baby.”

Once, in the middle of the night, Sweet Sweet appeared by our bed, a willowy wraith in cotton pajamas.
“Bu neng shuijiao.”
My husband sat up and fumbled hurriedly for his shirt, as if the house were on fire. He followed her to her bed and crawled in beside her so that she could more easily fall to sleep. He did this whenever she had a cramp, a headache, or fear of lightning. I considered the possibility this might be customary in China, but my husband's sister did not consider his way of dealing with his daughter normal Chinese behavior. She said, “My brother do wrong way. He stupid!” But then, back in China, my sister-in-law had sucked the phlegm from her daughter's nose whenever she had a bad cold. “And that's love!” her daughter told me.

Not knowing what to do with a child who did not wish to leave her room, I applied the boot-camp tactics I had used on my first four children to instill in them the principle of common effort. I asked her to help me split wood. She shrugged. “OK.” Stepping outside, she squinted and reeled on her long, just-straightened legs. It appeared to be an inconvenience to have to stand up. In my mind, I heard the Taoist Lao-tzu's words: “Neither seek to help nor hurt. Each thing will of itself transform.” I believed this, and yet this approach required an inhuman amount of patience. I suppressed an urge to shout at her: “You are the most helpless, clueless sixteen-year-old I ever met.”

Sweet Sweet followed me in her bright white sneakers, the skin of her bare arms and legs fragile and pale as leaves kept from light or the thin, translucent skin of caterpillar larvae. She looked exactly like the grim, wispy teenagers in the manga cartoons she
loved. Her black eyes were perfect half-moons behind long icicles of black hair. She wore a tiny, little-girl shirt and spotless white cotton pants. She could stand perfectly motionless, as though she were a hologram and not a real body with intestines and bones and blood. She watched me balance a log on end and crack it in two with one blow on the splitting maul.

“Have a try,” I said, passing her the handle. She lifted the heavy maul above her head. It wavered in the air, held in her childlike arms, and thudded into the soft ground. She spaced her feet apart and tried once more to lift the maul. On the third try, she brought it up over her head and let it fall on the log. It bounced off, and she shrugged, looking up at me. “You don't have to have big muscles,” I said, touching my biceps. “Do it with your mind. It's not about muscles.” I pointed to my head. She focused her eyes on the log and lifted the maul in the air with both hands gripping the hickory handle. Her face remained placid and calm. She lowered the blade in her flimsy arms, halving the oak log. I grinned. “Yeah, like that.” She let out an exhausted sigh. I now possessed what would prove to be the most useful information about my stepdaughter that I had to date. She had true grit, and if she felt like it, she could use it.

Though the true grit of Sweet Sweet did not daily manifest itself, I tried not to forget it was there and to let go of useless judgments. “Sweet like an onion” was the one thought I couldn't erase. Otherwise, we were only a displaced girl in an orderly room painted with the fluorescent green she had picked out herself, a disquieted stepmom, and an overcompensating father on an out-of-focus topography of values and expectations. I felt I had half stumbled out of my body and was watching myself try to walk and talk. My husband and stepdaughter held themselves in, which made me too aware of myself. My small gestures felt invasive and my speech garrulous. We were pieces of a puzzle that couldn't find how to fit together.

I asked my husband why he did not just teach his daughter all the things his parents had taught him about how to behave. He sighed
heavily and shook his head. “You don't understand. Every day family think one thing: ‘Today we can find what food? Can eat what?' No food! No food! Teach what? Kids need go outside look for leaves or try to kill small bird. Parents no time teach kids, no energy care kids. Also, mother have bound feet, almost cannot walk. Father lose job because government say he think wrong way. He need clean garbage, push big broom, sweep street. Father can teach what?”