The Stories of Beijing *
*I wrote the following piece in 1996, after attending the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, in response to an essay contest sponsored by NOW, the National Organization of Women. It is one of my favorite pieces and marks a turning point in my life. It won first place.
We walked into the auditorium and a young Chinese volunteer, acting as an usher, handed us a set of headphones. “It’s for the translation,” she said in English and waved us down the aisle. We found a seat near the front, so we could see, and looked around. Not too many women had come to this workshop, it seemed. The program had already started and a woman in a sari stood at the podium, talking. “What’s this all about?” I whispered to Kelly. “It’s called a tribunal,” she said back. As it turned out we didn’t need the headphones; the woman spoke in English, heavily accented, some of it broken, but all of it perfectly understandable.
“We come from different parts of the world to testify on how different forms of direct violence, from war and religious fundamentalism to female infanticide and circumcision, have ruined our lives,” she began. She told the story of her Indian friend, who entered into an arranged marriage at age sixteen. Her first child, a girl, brought great disappointment to her husband and his family. They wanted her to kill the child, but her parents convinced them that, because they were both young, they would have many sons. So this girl child lived. The couple bore a second child, also a girl, and this time the woman succumbed to the mores of her society. She killed the baby with a poisonous leaf, a popular method of female infanticide. The woman, desperate for a son, began to pray. The man, angry, began to drink and beat his wife. The couple’s third child came, another female. It, too, died by the poison leaf. Frantic, the woman prostrated herself upon needles and meditated for hours. The couple’s relationship deteriorated but the woman conceived again, her fourth girl. Unable to handle the tragedy, the woman sent her only child, now ten years old, to fetch the fatal leaf.
A remarkable thing happened next. The girl did not retrieve the leaf. Instead, she ran for the help of a social service agency near her home. Social workers came and stopped the infanticide. The agency provided temporary shelter and support to the woman and her two daughters. The story does not have a happy ending. The man left his wife in search of one who would give him sons. The eldest daughter, now twelve, supports her mother and baby sister in a land that shuns divorced women and seldom educates girls. The hard work to stop female infanticide continues, and two more girls grace the streets of India.
Another story began, and this time we needed the headphones. The seventy-year-old woman who stood before us spoke in even tones of Japan’s infamous comfort women, adolescent Korean girls stolen in the night to administer sexual favors to Japanese servicemen during World War II. For years the Japanese government told its people, and wrote in its history books, that these young women had volunteered to comfort the soldiers in their hour of war and despair. Now, one stood before us, thin and wrinkled, in need of justice. She spoke of the morphine the soldiers shot into her arm so she could withstand rape after rape after rape, sometimes fifty a day. She became addicted and, after the war, was disgraced in her village. She wanted a formal apology from the government, she told her audience, and for the truth to be told. In solidarity a large group of Japanese women stood up in the now-still auditorium, holding signs: We demand our government tell the truth.
Kelly and I looked at each other. Our stories of female inequality included corporate glass ceilings, unequal pay, some domestic violence, and the fight to keep Roe v. Wade on the books. The largest delegation of women to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women came from America, home to the world’s richest and most advantaged women, most of them white. But we, imposters all, had the least to say. Kelly and I listened all afternoon to the stories of the world’s women. It was a gift.
My Mother's Mason Jar*
* I was born and lived in Camden, New Jersey, until I was ten. I wrote several stories that reflect my childhood in that city, all of which seemed to have taken no special notice of the place or people around me. It was just my childhood and the narratives of the houses, streets, and alleys that made up my world. I had a dear friend who was raised in Camden and had a brother who still lived there. My friend spent most of his adult working years in Albequerque, New Mexico, but returned to Camden upon retirement and to his brother. How he complained of the city then, the noise, the shots heard in the late night, the trash, the void of natural surroundings and beauty. As a child, I saw none of it. I only saw my playground.
This story takes place at a park, probably Pyne Point Park, but it is hard to say. Looking back, I am not even sure it is true. But it happened.
My Mother’s Mason Jar
I begged to get to go to the playground.
“I want to go, I’m too hot to stay home,” I said to my mother on the hottest day of the year the summer I turned nine.
“I don't like you to go there. It’s dangerous.” On the kitchen table, her black portable Singer with the gold letters hummed.
“Stanley gets to go. He likes to take me.”
“He does not,” my mother said. And of course, it was true. My mother got up to fetch a different pair of scissors and I followed her around the yellow kitchen, needling her in a small voice.
“Please, please, it’s too hot to stay home.”
“Oh, all right,” she gave in, “but remember not to walk through the park. You’re to stay in the playground area and keep your brother in sight at all times. You come home when he does.” She sighed heavily and started the procedure of packing my lunch, fussing all the while, placing a small square of waxed paper around the mouth of a pint Mason jar before she screwed the lid on, so it wouldn’t leak. “And don’t forget to bring home my jar.”
My mother hauled those jars out of storage every summer for canning rhubarb and applesauce. She also made jams and jellies, but the rhubarb sauce was the stuff everybody wanted. My father grew rhubarb in the small plot of yard that backed up to the alley behind our house, and the sauce came with us to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners at my grandmother’s and aunt’s. It showed up at my Nana's apartment in Germantown, Pennsylvania, at lunchtime, every Saturday when my mom went over to clean. After we ate, my mother retrieved the empty jars, wrapped them in newspaper, and packed them home in a brown paper sack. I knew she'd remind me to bring home that jar just as sure as I knew the look on her face when the screen door slammed shut behind me. I hurried to catch my brother, hanging on to my sack lunch.
Just the older kids played at the playground, big sweaty boys of all shapes and colors. They stood up on their skinny legs, pumping the swings until they looked like they would break right off their chains. When the swings reached the highest possible point, the boys plopped down in the seats and jumped off, launching themselves through the hot air, landing feet first and pummeling forward, arms outstretched. Who got the farthest was their game. They landed in the dirt, falling forward on their hands, their Converse sneakers kicking up the dry dust, jeering thick words I heard only when I was with them. They wore white T-shirts and blue jeans, square packs of Camels rolled up in their sleeves. They dominated all the playground equipment, even the teeter-totter, showing their teeth when they laughed, pushing and shouting at each other. I never pretended to understand them, and I never tried. I watched them from a distance, never playing and hardly moving. I only sat and drank and ate. I observed their world, a small girl who knew her place here.
I only got to this playground when I tagged along with my brother, five years older than me, and his friends. My mother packed me off with her Mason jar full of iced red Kool-Aid and a Lebanon bologna sandwich on white bread. On these occasions, I walked the eight blocks to the park slowly behind my brother, who turned every few minutes to see where I was. Once we got there, I picked an obscure edge in plain view of the boys and watched their every move. My brother disappeared instantly, off into this boy-world. Although at times I’d catch a glimpse of him swinging or playing tag, I rarely saw him till he came to fetch me a few hours later. He never watched me like he was supposed to, and I never expected him to. We dwelled in the same, unspoken awareness those days: If I got to go, I had to be invisible and no trouble at all. Otherwise, he’d simply refuse to take me. He owned the edge, and we both knew it.
The playground was packed that day, going strong with a hundred kids. The big boys leaped and whooped all over the monkey bars and swings. I never saw them spin the merry-go-round faster, jumping on and off it without it slowing down. I concealed myself under a big oak in the corner and settled in. I looked for my brother, but the crowd hid him. He disappeared into it the moment we arrived.
I decided to drink my Kool-Aid first. I wasn’t hungry. Too hot. I opened the jar slowly, taking care not to spill. I thought of offering one of the boys my wax paper, for waxing the slide. That’s how they got it going so fast. I thought they might appreciate it, but I knew I would never go over to them. If I left it lying on the ground, they would find it anyway.
I looked up to watch them and there, leaning against a smaller oak close to me stood one of the big boys, looking right at me. I glanced at him, noticed his arms crossed over his chest, with a bit of a smile on his face. I pretended not to see him and quickly looked down at my lunch, still in the sack. But I watched him moving toward me, saw him as a shadow moving across the dirt. I fingered the bag and stared at the ground, hard.
“Well, now, we got us a pretty little girl with a sack lunch,” I heard him say. Even though I didn’t look up, I felt his grin. I heard my mother’s heavy sigh, saw that pinched look that comes across her face when she does it. “Ain’t you gonna talk to me?” the boy said in a sing-song voice, like he was talking to a baby.
He stooped down close to me. I knew he was that close by the heat his body threw at me. We were eye level now, but I didn’t want to see him. I could smell him though. I thought about asking him if he wanted my wax paper for the slide. I practiced asking him in my mind and then remembered my sandwich. Maybe I should offer him that, too. If I offered him both my sandwich and the wax paper, he might go away. I didn’t believe it, but it was all I could think to do.
“I think you and me should take a nice walk through the park,” he said next. I’m not allowed to walk through the park alone, I thought to myself, and then I knew why. I watched his hand slowly inch its way toward me, like one of those toy snakes, coming just a little at a time. “This is sure a pretty little park, and I know it real good,” he said. His hand finally reached my arm and he put it there, rubbed it a little, up, and down, with his palm, fingers outstretched. I sat so still my jaw hurt.
I knew it was time to do something, but I still didn’t know just what. I didn’t think I could talk. I thought about Stanley. If I could see my brother, I could call out to him. A good thing to tell the boy, if I could talk, was how my big brother was waiting for me. I needed to find my brother, knew that he was my only chance in this big playground, where the boys played far away from where I sat under the big tree. I knew right then that I needed to look up, knew that I could do nothing until I did. As much as I feared meeting the boy’s eyes, everything depended on it. I heard my mother sighing, her sharp voice issuing its warning: stay with your brother. I looked up.
And at that moment loud cracking sound whipped through the air and shook the old oak trees, bouncing off the swings, circling its way around the park. People looked around, maybe for lightning and thunder, trying to decide about the noise. The sounds of the playground died down a bit, voices hushed. I could hear the boy’s breath. A scream broke it all and shouts filled the air. People ran in all directions, then toward the center, toward the big sandbox. The boy got up, darted away from me, lost interest. He was looking for the sound. Everybody was.
I ran. I took off harder and faster than I thought I could, holding fast to the jar. The lid got left behind, and so did the rest of the lunch. Kool-Aid splashed out onto my legs. At first, I lost my way and headed in the wrong direction, deeper into the park. Oh no, I thought, and made a quick about-face, running out of the park, past all the rushing people. No one paid me any mind, and I ran toward home, still clutching the Mason jar. About halfway there I slowed down. I lost my footing and tripped on a crack in the pavement. I didn’t go down, but the jar spilled out of my hands, splattering into pieces all over the sidewalk. I kept going and just then started to cry, because my mom would be mad that I broke her jar.
The noise, though, remained locked up forever to me. There was no way to know what caused it. Perhaps it was a shooting of some kind, maybe a big tractor-trailer tire blow-out. The noise had hailed from a different place, one where I never went. Had it been on the news that night? I never watched the news. My father watched the news, but the news came on at eleven o’clock, and I was in bed. If the noise was on the news, my parents never said anything about it. Some of the big boys probably found out what caused it. If my brother knew, he never said. He arrived home just minutes after me, a stinky boy covered in dirt. Relief showed on his face as soon as he saw me. He said nothing, and I imagined him looking around for me after the noise had sent people scattering every which way. We never talked about what happened and there was no need to discuss it. I made it home and he made it home.
At dinner, we dodged my mother’s questions like ants in a rainstorm. How did my jar break? How come Stanley got home after you? How crowded was the park? We never mentioned the noise and never thought of telling her about it.
But I knew I was forever in its debt, no matter what—or who—bore the weight of its jolt as it shattered events in its midst.
I recently received an email from a gentleman who was born in 1941. He had found and read my master's thesis on Soviet-American relations at the end of World War II. Titled "Soviet-American Relations and the Origins of Containment, 1941--1946: The Force of Tradition," he felt the thesis captured the motivation for Putin's policy to invade Ukraine.
Here's a link for anyone interested: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6214&content-edu