love, soft and hard

In my inquisition into the baby decision, I’ve spent concerted time with children. Ranging in all ages from newborns to preadolescents. The infants freak me out, tiny infinite wells of need with finite means of communication. Cry, wail, gurgle. Responding to that single signal is an exercise in repeat failure: bottle? diaper change? hug? burp? What is it you want??

It’s an exercise I had been able to avoid for many years. Difficult bosses can be managed; demanding professors can tell you what they’re looking for (even if they’re actually looking for something else entirely). And with language comes a sense of individual responsibility: after a certain point, it’s on the other person to sufficiently communicate, as well. If they don’t, we label our boss toxic and quiet quit; we switch to Pass/Fail and stop volunteering in class. I could still fail in the context of school and work, sure, but I never had to subject myself to repeat failure in the same way parenting requires.

Whenever I fail at addressing a baby’s need—which happens quite often—I hand the baby back to their caretaker, watch Mom or Dad or Nanny patiently cycle through the same set of offers. I watch how tenderly they are treated. They aren’t chided for crying. They aren’t told that they aren’t doing enough. They are held for as long as they need, until they stop crying.

It is strange: I don’t get emotional when I see children, but I tear up when I see how adults treat children. The more loving they are, the more tears well up. I think about all the ways humans try to express, and receive, love.

There are particular “immigrant child” core memories which haunt me. The one where your mom packs your lunch only to have your classmates ask you, with critical eyes, what’s that. The one where your dad cuts up fruit when your friends are over. Why don’t you have Cool Ranch Doritos and Capri Sun instead? The one where you spend endless dinners in high school silently at the dining table, making awkward conversation about school over plates of stir-fried pea shoots and eggplants in garlic and a large bowl of wintermelon-and-pork soup.

These memories haunt me because I don’t have them.

My parents fed me, but they did not often cook for me. Frozen pizza in the freezer, they’d tell me. My lunches, when they packed them, were both somehow non-Asian and non-American: alfalfa sprouts between two slices of white bread with Philadelphia cream cheese. By high school, I began buying lunch and eating the majority of dinners at my best friend’s house.

Whenever I tell people this and see the flash of pity in their eyes, I rush to assure them. I didn’t mind. Really. I liked the school cafeteria’s Caesar salad—thick processed dressing, rubbery chicken and all—and found the mushy rice-and-chicken of the burritos comforting, like jambalaya. It wasn’t until the spate of Asian American stories in media—exemplified by the popular short Bao—that I began feeling odd.

It is one thing to feel like a stranger in a strange land. It is another to realize that even among strangers, you are stranger still.