children
Joshua’s New Clothes
Written on August 4, 2006
It was cold outside – Very cold. We had come from Arizona for crying out loud! Even in the dead of winter, one couldn’t find a coat in Tucson. I know; I had scoured the city.
We arrived to Shijiazhuang unprepared for the frigid climate, but in the long run, we couldn’t have done much to prevent that.
Perhaps if we had been looking for swimsuits in January, American marketing strategies would have allowed us to purchase them, but coats for our children? No. Try again in July…
Josh soon fell ill and though his case of the sniffles was nothing serious, I wasn’t willing to risk exposing him to more new germs than his immune system could handle by allowing him to greet every person who walked through the front doors with a smile and a hug.
Unlike Sam, Josh adored all of the attention. He’d enter a room, bat his eyes, coo gently, and half of the woman in China would come running. If his sister didn’t feel like playing, fine, her loss, more for him… Even in the States, where children are tolerated, but not always loved by the people they meet, his insatiable flirting would win him aisles full of admirers in the grocery stores, the drug stores and the malls. His happy, outgoing nature complimented Samantha’s shyer tendencies well, but life in China was causing this difference between their personalities to steadily broaden.
My decision to keep Joshua upstairs in the warmth of our room until his condition improved did not go unnoticed.
Within days, I was approached on all sides by inquiries as to the reason behind his absence.
The answer to that question was not in the “Chinese for Travelers” phrase book a friend had given to me prior to our departure, but after digging at the Language Barrier with a dictionary for the better half of an afternoon, the message that, not only was Josh sick, but we were not in possession of suitable enough winter clothing to prevent his falling ill from developing into a pattern, managed to carve a large enough hole in the wall to squeeze through.
Everyone seemed to accept the fact that Rodney and I were doing our level best to care for our children, but as I scavenged for words with my utterly inadequate tools, I noticed something in the faces around me. They didn’t understand how, or to what extent, little things taken for granted in every day life can suddenly loom like dark, menacing mountains on the horizon when one doesn’t know the area or speak the language and, try as I might, I found myself unable to express to these people the feelings of helplessness which had been tailing me since our first few hours in Beijing, so, with an apologetic air tainting my expression, I gave up.
LanFeng cocked her head to one side, shook her finger at me as though she’d caught me with my hands in the cookie jar, then giggled a bit, grabbed her dust-mop and marched off to give the lobby a sweeping, RongJun smiled affectionately but had to make a dash to the Laundry Room as a lost looking Instructor began to wander in that general direction, and HuangJing, the cashier at the little convenience store located immediately right of the elevators, returned to leafing through her copy of the day’s newspaper.
One by one, all who had come to ask about Josh moved on in their separate directions. All but JunE… She remained where she stood, eyes fixed on something several feet away at ground level, squinting slightly, appearing to be caught up in her thoughts.
I did not wish to interrupt her, but I didn’t feel as though I ought to walk away without a word of goodbye, so I shifted my weight from one foot to the other begging my brain to remember the Chinese words for “See you tomorrow.” At the sight of my movement, she jumped as though she’d forgotten I was there, gave me an appraising once-over, nodded in a manner which told me she’d made up her mind about something, turned, and left rather unceremoniously.
“That was weird.” I thought, but she hadn’t behaved as though she were upset, merely preoccupied, so I tried not to read too much into it and headed back upstairs.
The next few days saw little of my family outside of our room. It was simply too cold to venture out into the elements without the proper attire and, daunting though it seemed, I had begun to resign myself to the prospect of remaining under house arrest until the weather improved.
The hotel was heated, but barely and what little warmth managed to creep through the ground floor escaped rapidly through the cracks around the un-insulated front entrance or the back door which, due to the fact that it didn’t latch properly, would often be left ajar. These factors in tandem with the emotional impact of the cold, heartless light which plagued the Lobby, made the brunt of my decision somewhat easier to bear, but we were all going to go stir crazy if nothing changed.
On the occasions in which I would venture downstairs (usually after Sam and Josh were asleep and Rod was home from work wanting nothing more than to watch television and relax), people would look around hopefully for the kids, smile politely in acknowledgement of their absence then go about their business.
I didn’t mind though, it was nice to be treated as a regular person rather than the “Woman with the Two Children”, but the fact that JunE no longer came to sit by me when I would draw and continued to stare at me with that evaluative glint in her eyes began to make me wonder what on earth was going through her mind? Why did she seem to be watching me so closely?
I had always felt remarkably at ease around her and this new behavior contrasted sharply with what I’d come to expect from her. She had something up her sleeve and, good or bad, I knew I’d find out what it was when she was ready to share it, but not a moment before.
One afternoon, approximately a week after our retreat from the weather, the staff seemed to be abuzz about something. This wasn’t particularly unusual. I didn’t think much of it at first, until I noticed that the buzz was following me throughout the Hotel. Housekeeping, the Wait Staff, the Cooks, even the tiny little woman who came every morning to wash dishes all seemed to be smiling a bit more than usual, so, when two o’clock rolled around, the sight of JunE’s silhouette quickly coming into focus as she made a bee line for me did not surprise me, but I couldn’t have been prepared for that which she presented to me.
Lying there, delicately folded and draped over the palms of her hands was an absolutely gorgeous one piece, cotton batted, very traditional item of clothing which looked to be roughly the size of my little boy.
The legs were clipped from a swatch of brightly colored yellow, magenta, blue and orange floral print and the empire cut bib was of an ultramarine calico, all lined with a soft layer of pale blue. The craftsmanship was impeccable. I could barely see her stitches, but the ones which did reveal themselves showed that a great deal of time had gone into the creation of this little jumper.
It was beautiful and as I stood there gazing in disbelief at the amazing gift, I found myself so surprised that it took me a moment or two before I could reach out to accept the garment, but as my fingers wrapped around the folds of fabric, I felt a smile begin to stretch across my face.
It was not your ordinary, garden variety smile, but the type that makes your cheeks hurt for a week after the fact, and, when I was finally able to tear my eyes away from the stunning article of clothing, it was with this smile that I answered JunE’s look of expectation.
Once again, I felt the overwhelming urge to throw my arms around her, but I’d been warned that Chinese don’t embrace each other, except on rare occasions, and I didn’t want to do anything to make her feel awkward, so I simply inclined my head respectfully and trusted that my “Thank you” had been stated clearly enough by my initial reaction. She knew. She had to. How could she not?
As soon as the appropriate window of opportunity revealed itself, I rushed upstairs to try the outfit on Joshua. To my amazement, it fit him perfectly!
