She comes into my classroom in that shy way that students
have when they're new or they're late. She's really just
a little girl. And this is an adult class. Her uncle is with
her and struggling in his broken English pleads with me to
take her anyway. He says she is 16, although to me she looks
about 12. I tell him she can stay for the day, but I will
have to check with the school and see if they can make an
exception.
She stands before us, 20 pairs of eyes turned towards her
and takes a seat at the back. She is all in pink, wearing
clothes and accessories by Hello Kitty, things that my daughter
wore 15 years ago when she was 12. A fuzzy pink hat with
floppy ears, a Hello Kitty ring that looks like 18 karat
gold, and a little plastic purse that dangles from her delicate
fingers, with the silly face of Kitty smiling incongruously
to no one in particular on this frosty February morning.
The other students, mostly middle-aged refugees from war-torn
countries try to catch her eye and make her feel welcome.
But eyes cast down, she sits apart from them looking at her
hands. Very pretty hands. A woman's hands. When she finally
has the courage to look up, she gives me a smile that feels
like she is sprinkling champagne over our classroom. For
the first time I see her dimples - and her fear.
The school never approves her being in the classroom, but
I let her come anyway. There is something about her that
I want to keep close to me. We are lucky, because our classroom
is far away from the school in a portable attached to a high
school that we have no contact with at all, except to use
their phone in an emergency or the washroom when we need
it. She is my secret. And for once I'm happy that the English
as a Second Language classroom is the low priority it is
- always the poor cousin to everything else, with no one
in authority ever coming around to see how we're doing. They've
pretty much forgotten about us, and we like it that way.
She tells us her "English" name is Suzi (the
Chinese name becoming unpronounceable even after she tells
us what it is) and we all fall in love with this little treasure
that is Suzi at once. The class is full of women, and she
suddenly has half a dozen mothers, especially now that we
know she is essentially an orphan who has been sent to live
with her aunt and uncle who live here and that they are going
to adopt her so that she can become a citizen and go to high
school. Day after day, she smiles her sweet smile and continues
to light up the room and all of our lives. She is polite
too. And smart. When she finally begins to speak, I realize
that her English is pretty good. Broken, of course, but not
hard to understand at all and she works so hard at it, she
keeps getting better and better.
When the warm weather comes, I notice that her arms are
scarred. From the wrist to the elbow, she has marks that
look like cigarette burns, but I dismiss that idea and think
it must have been a fire. Maybe some boiling water spilling
over from a pot that was taken off the stove too quickly
and splashed.
One afternoon she stays after school to help me with the
plants and flowers and herbs that we have on the windowsills.
Students bring in cuttings from their gardens, or just go
out and buy something to share with us. This is in many ways
their home. More of a home than wherever they live. We
are a little walled-in community, sharing our stories and
our glories and our pain together, private worlds spilling
into the warm comfort of women together in a safe place.
She looks up at me and smiles that smile that could break
your heart or make it sing. She is a Helen who could launch
a thousand ships.
"You always look so happy, Suzi," I tell her.
She fixes me with a look I haven't seen before and says, "You
think so?"
I say "Yes, you are the happiest girl I've ever met."
With that she puts the little clay pot she is holding down
on a desk, and puts her head in her hands.
"I need you to help me," she cries through a
burst of tears covering her cheeks and her beautiful hands.
Her rail thin body is shaking with some kind of pain that
I don't understand.
Choking out the words, "I can't live there anymore.
They hate me," I see a face of despair that shouldn't
be living on a girl so young.
Putting my arm around her, she cries like a baby until
she gets it all out and we are rocking together like mother
and child.
I invite her to come and stay with me for awhile and call
the family to see what they think. I tell them nothing about
what she has told me. Just that we have a special relationship
and that I would be happy to have her stay for a little while
so she could improve her English and then be able to get
into high school sooner rather than later.
There is no problem at all, and she arrives with her bags,
her uncle emptying the car of everything she owns.
I'm happy to have her with me, especially now that I'm
on my own after telling my husband I need some time to myself,
and suddenly the house is alive again with all the things
I don't even realize I've missed. And with every day that
goes by, I fall more in love with her, even as my family
and friends wonder what this is all about. She is the daughter
I had too soon, who left too soon. She is mine and my life
is full.
She has never talked about feelings and when I ask her
to tell me more about herself or how she feels about her
family and being with me, leaving home or not having many
friends her age, she shuts down like a trap door and asks
if she can go and study. Sometimes she exercises until she
falls asleep on the floor. She doesn't eat much and what
she does eat usually ends up in the toilet. When I ask her
about this, she doesn't want to talk. I make arrangements
for her to see a doctor and a therapist at the Eating Disorder
Clinic and they tell me she is anorexic.
"I'm not used to talking about those things, like
feelings," she says. "No one asked me."
There is never a call from the aunt or uncle, even at Christmas,
when I take her with me to celebrate with my family at my
mother's house. My own daughter, who I love more than anything
in the world, doesn't realize that this love I have for another
child is based on the fact that mine, born to me when I was
a teenager, has grown up too fast and her absence is like
a hole in my chest where my heart should be and I need to
fill it. Although I've tried to explain this, she's jealous
of this stranger from a foreign country that she doesn't
know or particularly like and the day doesn't go well for
us at all. For Suzie, however, it is one of the highlights
of her life. She has never had a Christmas tree or gifts
from anyone, nevermind someone else's family. She enchants
my nieces and nephews and my mother takes special pains to
make her feel at home, placing the origami basket of flowers
that Suzie has given her as a Christmas gift in the middle
of the dining room table where it has a place of honour,
surrounded incongruously by more traditional offerings of
turkey, cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes.
"I like when your mother calls me 'honey,'" she
tells me later, smiling her sweet smile. "It's good."
Months later, when she is ready to go to high school, I
feel proud to meet with her teachers and some of her new
friends. I am enjoying being a full-time Mom again and secretly
making plans to adopt her. My husband and I have decided
to get back together again as soon as we find a house, and
he is happy that Suzie will be moving in with us. He has
never had children and I can't have any more, so we look
forward to raising her as our own. I am saving this news
for her birthday next month.
At school Suzi is happy, joining the volleyball team, taking
art classes where she is a star, and watching her teachers
fall in love with her, as everyone does. She makes friends
with Jen, who invites her to join a youth group she participates
in, and sometimes she's invited for a sleepover. Suzie tells
me that she really likes this family, especially the father,
who is a minister. Before I know it, Jen's family begins
to pick her up for church on Sundays and she is missing meals
at home to take the long bus trip to attend meetings of the
Christian youth group twice a week.
I worry a little, as organized religion is something I
let go of a long time ago, in fact the whole idea is anathema
to me, but I'm happy that she has some friends and don't
think it can hurt. We are now like mother and daughter in
most of the ways that count, but when I begin to question
this sudden interest in the church, she gets angry. I have
never seen her angry before and we fight. I tell her it's
a crutch and that these people don't care about her the way
I do or the way some of the women from the class who still
see her do, that they are always looking for new recruits,
that they see her vulnerability and are using her in a way
that she just doesn't see. She cries, she yells, and tells
me I just don't understand. She loves Jesus and he is taking
care of her. Not me. I try to avoid the topic but it sits
there like a smoldering fire between us, even in our almost
perfect moments, when she braids my hair or makes me a hundred
tiny paper hearts and puts them in a bottle (to make all
my wishes come true), or one of her famous sugar omelets
that I'm becoming addicted to.
I know her story now - the mother who committed suicide
after her father was sent to jail, the aunt and uncle who
are dealing with her aunt's gambling problem, how the aunt
has spent all the money that was sent for her and now there's
nothing left, how they never wanted her there but especially
not now when the money is gone and she needs to be taken
care of financially; how she lived with her grandparents
in China until they were too old to take care of her. The
time she spent in a gang in Hong Kong, the cigarette burns
being part of that terrible time, the drugs, the smoking,
the loose sex, the boyfriend who beat her, the father who
never cared who is now on death row for dealing heroin in
China, and I worry. But my worry comes out as anger and things
start to go wrong.
"If the church makes you so happy, maybe you should
go and live with someone from the church." I tell her,
in the heat of one of our arguments. I regret the words as
soon as they come out of my mouth, but they're out there
and I can't take them back.
"Maybe I will," she says.
I forget about this exchange and go to work, she goes to
school, I meet a friend after work for dinner and when I
get home she is gone.
There is nothing left - no note, no clothing or books,
no scent, no trace that she has ever been here at all. Then
I sit down and cry - for myself, for her, for the way the
world is sometimes. For the children who are lost, the parents
who can't keep going, the love and the heartbreak and the
misunderstandings that make such a mess of things. And for
the phony altruism like mine that fills our own needs rather
than someone else's and then trips us up. I can hardly get
my breath and feel like someone has cut out a piece of me
and left the raw bits dangling like severed nerves.
I know she is living with Jen's family, because this is
a small town and everyone knows everyone else's business.
Somehow we never bump into each other, but she haunts me
like a sweet ghost. I am too proud and arrogant to call her
or ask anyone about her, but I assume that she is all right,
and finally standing up for herself the way I've tried to
teach her to do. The irony is not lost on me. My own daughter
is just the same.
In the meantime my husband and I find a house we love and
move away. I don't see Suzie for a year, during which time
I fill my maternal needs with two little Himalayan kittens
who don't talk back or leave, but neither do they give me
kisses or braid my hair.
Within a short time my husband falls ill, but I am tougher
than I used to be - almost an expert at loss now - and we
manage to plough through this latest crisis in a way I never
would have imagined myself capable of before losing Suzi.
I have discovered my own strengths and don't need people
to rely on me as much now as I did before. Instead of trying
to be everything to everyone, I am beginning to be everything
to myself. I notice that I am starting to take risks that
I was afraid to take before. I do public readings of my writing
and write a controversial master's thesis on a topic that
frightens my advisor into passing it along to someone else,
a silly thing that thrills me to no end. I begin to exhibit
edgier photography and not worry about the reaction and find
the reaction is good. My daughter and I become closer than
ever and I find a way to enjoy her as a woman rather than
as a little girl. And my husband, who can't stand tears or
pity, neither of which I show to him now, revels in my newfound
self, and falls in love with me all over again. Losing Suzi
was finding me. My own little treasure - to have and to hold, 'til
death do us part. |
