In Another Tongue

Abstract

The baby is screaming again. My baby. I hoist her off the narrow hotel bed again and try to cradle her as I rock my torso back and forth in an uncomfortable straight-backed chair. This baby does not cradle. She doesn't know how to cuddle, to be soothed in anyone's arms. She howls and arches away, squirms and flops, a sixteen-pound fish out of water. I'm not used to holding babies, and she's not used to being held, but when I try to put her down, she wails. My arms feel chafed, raw, and my wrists ache from the hours of straining to hang onto her. Huge tears pool in her eyes. These tears could break my heart. These screams could break my eardrums. God, I'm weary. Sometimes it startles me how beautiful this baby is despite the rash that inflames her face, the nick in the corner of her eye where her fingernail caught the skin, sores and scars up and down her arms from her incessant scratching. The beauty of her bright eyes and even features surprises me again and again, as does the sheer power of her small lungs. She has barely rested them in the two days since she was placed in my arms. Outside the window, many floors below, China is an abstraction. I am too lost in the foreign country of parenthood to focus on the birthplace of this baby. Despite Chinese language classes, when I go outside, indistinct words swirl around me, a womb-like roar. In contrast to the stifling heat out there, the hotel is cool and quiet, guards stationed at the doors of the lobby, marble-floored and thick-carpeted. My friend Sara used to write to me about squat toilets without stalls, Chinese women gaping openly at tampons and pale pubic hair. She told me about rats falling into her bathwater and people blowing their noses on bus floors. She described visiting a zoo containing nothing but a snake, some goldfish, and a housecat.