In Old English, Tatum means “Cheerful bringer of joy.”
The woman dips a brush in her inky black pot and paints three Chinese characters in the upper right corner of a painting of cherry blossoms. She blows it dry, rolls up the scroll, seals it in a purple square tube, and asks for a photo with the blonde-haired recipient. Tate smiles as the shutter actuates.
We walk away holding hands, me and my cheerful bringer of joy, a caregiver of peace.
That evening, we meet Ashley and her boys at a park for an afternoon playdate and let the kids run back and forth on bridges that pass over a massive pond full of koi fish. From the other side of the pond, I see locals stop to photograph our children. Sometimes they will pose next to them, as though we are family friends, and sometimes they ask first. Most of the time, they pull out their phones and steal photos paparazzi-style, cooing over hair and eyes. Our children are objects of beauty, born with blond heads for strangers to freely touch.
We have dealt with this for two weeks, and will still have one more week before we leave China, but Ashley lives here; this is her local park, nearby is her local supermarket, and these are the people among whom her family lives. I ask her, “How do you deal with this without going insane?” My mother-hen instinct is full throttle as I watch a third group of strangers pose with my kids.
“It is incredibly hard,” she says, “easily the hardest thing about living in China. My kids have learned to say, ‘One photo? One quai’ in Mandarin.” (Quai is the equivalent of “buck” in American English.) “At least they earn some decent money that way.”
A Communist worldview means no concept of the individual, in which your rights end where my body begins. Groupthink is the modus operandi; the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. On our flight from Xi’an to Guilin, in southeast China, Tate and I sit next to a woman whose eyes light up with eagerness as we take our seats. Over the two-hour flight, she asks us about our travel plans, what Tate is reading on her Kindle and may she read with her, too, where we are staying next, and would we like to meet for dinner at a restaurant sometime soon. I’m an introvert and have to take deep, managed breaths to make it to the flight’s finale with a courtesy smile still on my face.
It is dark when we arrive in Yangshuo, a small town nestled in the peculiar karst mountains fifty miles from the Guilin airport and our final stop in the country. Our home for the week is a family room in an inn tucked into trees and the cadence of crickets. Yellow lights glow from the front door as our taxi pulls through the entrance, red lanterns sleepily twisting in the midnight breeze. The next morning, we open our curtains and are smacked with the side of a steep hill, one among hundreds and drawn by God the way a child draws mountains, an unsteady conglomeration of the letter u upside-down. They seem fake, a clichéd background in a motel room painting of Asia. The sky is not yellow-gray for the first time in weeks, and the pink horizon makes my eyes ache.
Unknown to us when we booked our transpacific flight, it is Golden Week in China, their national holiday that covers seven full days, during which everyone takes a week off of work to travel across the country to visit family. We take a tuk-tuk ride into town, where red flags with yellow stars flap in cadence on banners stretched across streets and booths sell plastic light-up trinkets and paper-thin sarongs. We pop into a market to find snacks and only recognize prepackaged chicken feet, shrink-wrapped and glazed with an orange coating. The thump thump thump thump of a bass drum from a troubadour pelts my ears. I push my way into a stationery store, buy postcards, borrow a pen and scribble hello to some family and friends, then hand them back to the cashier, who promises to put them in the mail. I wonder if I have just thrown away ten dollars.
Outside the store, irrepressible floods of people halt all semblance of walkability, and the five of us hold hands. My overworked senses beg for mercy.
I think of Ashley in Xi’an empowering her kids, and it frees my mothering instincts to take over in fierce protection of my kids’ bodily ownership as they say no to the camera flashes. Reed forcibly poses with locals on holiday in their own family photo, but he shrugs his shoulders and says, “I guess it’s okay, Mom.”
In China, strangers unabashedly read over my shoulder on the bus when they see me with an English book. Twentysomethings pull my kids onto their laps on the metro. English speakers interject themselves into conversations between Kyle and me, give us their two cents about where we should go and what we should eat, ask why we are there.
We take a tuk-tuk back to the inn and stay there for our final few days in China. Kyle watercolors and I write; the kids work on their school and play foosball in the game room. They swim in the pool while I park poolside in the private backyard, and though there is a school field trip group staying here, as well as gatherings of extended family for holiday reunions, it trumps sharing my one square foot of bodily occupancy on Chinese streets.
Finn climbs trees and names one Steve, and after dinner one night, we stay in the inn’s restaurant and play Uno while Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton croon from the speakers about islands in the stream. Sail away with me to another world; and we rely on each other, ah ha. Kyle and I laugh, surprised at this song playing in the southeast China countryside.
Back in Beijing, an English-speaking local made chitchat with us at the diner downstairs from our apartment, where we suspect Tate got sick from the sesame rolls. Kyle asked him if he was a native of Beijing, and he replied, “No, I’m from the south. It’s a tiny village of only one million people.” I smiled and said, “I’m also from a village of one million people.” In North America, a million feels like too many people. In Asia, it is a village of neighbors and friends.