The Chopsticks-Fork Principle, A Memoir and Manual
By Cathy Bao Bean, December 2004

No father - especially an immigrant from China - says to his daughter, "Please, marry an artist."

In 1974, during the month of Aquarius and two years before the American bicentennial, our Asian-Caucasian son was born, 7 pounds, 14 ounces and clueless

"The one with the blindfold. Under the Bili Light. That's your grandson, Mr. Bao."

"He's under the ultraviolet because of the jaundice," the nurse explained, "Nothing serious. A lot of babies are born with the condition. It's temporary. It doesn't hurt. It just makes the skin appear yellow," she said watching my father while he squinted his already small eyes to find the human form amidst the medical artifacts, With a totally straight face, my father responded, "He looks perfectly normal to me."

The nurse started to explain again and then stopped abruptly as my father's words penetrated. She looked to the baby's father, Bennett, for a clue. He was dead pan. A veteran of a thousand maternity ward introductions, this woman from a small New Jersey town was not prepared for the playful man from Ningpo and the roguish artist from Iowa. Her "Yes, but the yellow isn't..." sounded almost impolite under the circumstances.

My father smiled in an understanding that the jest was intended though her discomfort was not. She returned it with one that gradually warmed to the situation. He had exposed her to a different way of looking and she had let it flash quickly on her embarrassment before letting its illumination reveal a larger stage. The nurse was a pushover.

While William was absorbing the ultraviolet, my parents were soaking up the details of his delivery by emergency Cesarean section. Bennett and I each described the events from our respective viewpoints. Then we told it from each other's viewpoint. Then my parents each told the other all four versions. And then they told it back to us. With each telling it became gradually a "story." Part of the past. Part of family lore. With each telling, the fortunate outcome was stressed. The story, complete with happy ending, was thus finalized in their minds and the minds of the gods. Done. There could be no different epilogue, no additional chapter, and no untold misfortune.

But not everything is worth repeating. During the rest of my hospital stay, I started to sort through the kinds of experiences William would have and what we would or wouldn't make of them. Remembering Mr. Gunnar, my high school biology teacher, I recalled his lecture on Hybrid Vigor-- the idea that when two different strains of corn were crossed, the result was greater than was normal for either parent type. The idea was powerful and not just botanically. William would be the proof. We wouldn't just throw him into The Great Melting Pot, vaguely hoping he'd emerge and be able to do more than grunt in two languages or co-exist in the vicinity of his grandparents without grossing them out. If he was to converse while dining--not just eating--and be interesting to people who didn't have to love him, we had to be much more careful and deliberate about his cultural nurturing.

Lying in my arm and looking like Winston Churchill gone Asian, it was obvious that physically we had the makings of an experiment that intellectually had the wealth of his Bao and Bean heritage from "The Middle Kingdom," to its American equivalent, "The Lawn" at the University of Virginia. Practically, however, I did every so often wonder how much difference it would make that William wasn't an ear of corn.

Brushing aside this detail, I proceeded to my first idea of what I would inform him. "This is a rose" or "That is a skunk," but I wouldn't characterize the odor as "good" or "bad." One day he could decide for himself. Thinking it over, I was unable to foresee any difficulty with this resolution. Leaving out my two cents on odors couldn't be crucial. As far as I knew, there was no philosophical point that rested solely on knowing whether someone likes or dislikes a particular smell. My second idea was that I would never tell William stories of Wicked Mothers, "step" or otherwise. The role I had just taken on would be tough enough to play without panning myself in a preview. (I thought about but didn't dwell on the possibility of my own demise and that one day he might have to love one.)

But mere omission wouldn't be enough for if Confucius was right in that what people really needed were models of excellence, William would have to learn something positive. I couldn't just say, "Cinderella was a weakling for accepting the bad behavior of her step relations, and Pinocchio was an inveterate liar with extraordinarily poor taste in friends. "Don't be like them." Or just avoid declaring, "You ought to know better," as if the human condition was self-evident or cultural foundations self-revealing. The whole project was starting to resemble what I did for school, a course outline for a very long term.

As I had been with my students, I wanted to teach William about caring deeply yet thinking critically, to be pragmatic yet honor certain ideals, to anticipate and relish the challenges, and yet be serene. But unlike most children, William would be, from the beginning, made conscious of his Double Major, of his learning how to live in America and how to draw sustenance from Chinese roots--to be bicultural.

Actually, so were my students but they just didn't know it. Instead, most believed themselves to be culturally neutral, even "normal," so that every other way of being was "different" and by implication, "abnormal." An increasing number has even thought it unpatriotic to encourage self-examination, especially among immigrants, not realizing that it is the art of critical thinking that best portrays the strength of democracies.

As I waited for the nurse to bring William in, I envisioned different colored kernels all on the same cob, the kind that appear in Halloween and Thanksgiving Day displays, each ear boldly exhibiting its variegated heritage. It didn't take much to go from that image to a mental collage of William, like a Picasso, one Chinese and one Caucasian eye on a half yellow half white face, his mother's ankles, shoulders and underarms, his father's immune system, hands, and of course, teeth. Even when Bennett informed me that the colorful variety is Indian corn, not hybrid corn, I wasn't deterred from planning our son's entire future. The kid didn't have a chance. As he nursed I looked carefully at my newborn's coloring, somewhere between Bennett's and mine. Going to the Nurse's Station, I checked The Random House Dictionary under Mendel's laws. "Genetics, the basic principles of heredity discovered by Gregor Mendel, showing that alternative hereditary factors of hybrids exhibit a clean-cut separation or segregation from one another and that different pairs of hereditary traits are independently sorted from each other." He was wrong. William and I hoped that human cultures were the proof.

Now I grant that a child his age has limited resources by which to control his world but around the seventh week babies cry for no good reason except to see if they can make parents appear at will. William soon began using tears to get sympathy and manipulate. There would be no Bili Light for this kind of "jaundice." We wanted him to know that people, ourselves included, are not to be used and that healthy emotional commitment is a matter of mutual trust, not just an easy opportunity.

Throughout the first hour, we repeated this belief like an incantation against his spell. By the second hour, William's caterwauling was beyond a play for sympathy: This was extortion. We held his hands for comfort, clip-clopped periodically to check whether he still stopped at will, and turned up the volume on the television set. Toward the third hour the din was almost unbearable. Then he suddenly stopped. We tiptoed in on our stockinged feet and listened outside the door. William was happily babbling to himself. We waited another minute just to be sure his shift in mood was permanent and then went and greeted him as if we just happened to stop by. He cooed his "Hello" as if to unexpected, but welcome, callers. Swooping him to our room, we gave him all the attention he could possibly want.

From then on, if he cried for no acceptable reason, we preferred that he did so by himself, and put him in another room. As soon as he stopped crying, we picked him up. Our American friends approved of this when we explained the reason for our son's exile.

Americans fear repression, reduction of individuality, restriction of freedom and self-expression. They believe that the person who can stand above the maddening crowd must draw strength and conviction from within and independent of others. Until recently, Kipling's poem was taught to every child in school. "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs...you'll be a Man, my son!"

Our Chinese relatives praised William's general good behavior and sociability. Chinese fear isolation, being set apart. The Confucian social ideal defines individuals not as separate entities but rather as persons only in orderly relationship to others. If William wanted company and enjoy its full benefit, he shouldn't be a distraction or act too differently from those around him. Thus if Kipling had been Asian his poem might have been, "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs...then there is probably something very wrong with you, your family, your village, your ruler, and your ancestors!"

First crying. Next the United Nations.

Adapted from The Chopsticks-Fork Principle. Copyright (c) 2002, 2003 by Cathy Bao Bean. Published by We Press. ISBN 0-9725663-0-9