Annescapes is a work-in-progress, a collection of essays her mother wrote about life with Anne and with Anne's art work included as part of her story. Here is an excerpt from "Her Arrival":
Her Chinese name, I remember quite clearly, came to me at three in the morning the night she was born. She arrived eight minutes after a December midnight, one month earlier than expected. The thirty minutes of delirious exhaustion after giving birth to her is the happiest sleep of my life, before and ever afterwards. When I opened my eyes, my husband, David, was looking down at me with the sweetest, saddest eyes I have ever known, and reminded me, I thought incongruously at the time, of the Little Prince, standing all by himself on a lonely asteroid in space; he had been alone with the news while I slept.
He held my hand in his and said, “It’s okay.”
He paused, as if something caught in his throat, “all we have to do is love her,” he whispered, almost to himself. Then, louder, “they say she has quite a few markers that lead them to believe she has Down syndrome.”
“What does that mean? What markers?” I asked, groggily combative through the postpartum haze.
“Well, apparently she has some Mongoloid features,” and before he could continue, I dismissed it with “What the hell? I have some Mongoloid features! I’m sure it’s a mistake.”
David looked tired, sighed and said, “They’ll be doing further testing and we’ll know for sure in a couple of weeks. I guess we should wait till we’re certain before we tell our parents.”
We had moved to Austin, Texas a year ago, our families were far away, our friends, new. No one expected her to come so soon anyway. His parents were in England and mine in Toronto, recently moved there from Hong Kong. I agreed, there was no need to tell them before we’re certain.
“I don’t believe them though,” I said, but I didn’t have long to remain defiant. We were told she may have to be rushed to Houston right away as they detected heart trouble. She didn’t come to the room that night and when we finally went to see her it was at the “baby’s quarters” where she was kept in an incubator with a lamp shining on her. Apparently, though, the arrhythmia had corrected itself. Now, she was merely jaundiced. She had on this tiny infant mask to protect her eyes that made her look like a superhero. We laughed; we were relieved, clinging to this minor, fixable condition for the interim. Two weeks passed, Anne was released from the hospital with her diagnoses confirmed. Yes, she has Trisomy 21, better known as Down syndrome. Unlike some others born with that extra chromosome, Anne did not have the heart or lung diseases that sometimes accompany the condition. Later on, she did not even suffer much from the more common ear infections or eye problems, but she was not entirely spared other complications. On that first night, however, we were unaware that other life-threatening issues lurked. . . .
. . . . . . I remember the exact moment and the exact spot on Alexander Road when the line came to me. “O swallow, swallow don’t you cry.” It was not the opening line of the poem, but the sixth line to the end in the Chinese, uttered in English. I had been trying to translate Bo Juyi’s “Swallow Song” for a couple of years, but was stymied by its simplicity, its music and, by a piece of architecture I couldn’t find the name for in English. Funny thing was I wasn’t even thinking about the poem that day. I imagine it was in the back of my mind, but in the front, was T.S. Eliot, specifically, the last segment of “What the Thunder Said,” at the end of “The Waste Land.” In those days, Eliot and the Modern poets like Pound and Yeats et al, were never far from my mind. My dissertation was on “Modern Verse” after all. It was April, and I had been walking by the lake where the magnolias had just started to bloom, so I am not at all surprised that “The Waste Land” popped into my consciousness. April is the most beautiful time of year in Princeton, even Eliot’s famous line, “April is the cruelest month,” couldn’t spoil it for me.
As I was walking back to campus, Eliot’s cry of madness and grief, “O swallow, swallow,” came to me and right there and then, “O swallow, swallow, don’t you cry” translated itself from Bo’s poem; it is almost a literal translation, a word-for-word of the Chinese line which occurs as the concluding thought to the poem, and through the many versions my English poem would be going through, this line has remained constant. I did not immediately ask why Eliot’s madness led me to a poem I had always associated with my mother. Besides, I was so excited about it coming to me so unexpectedly that my focus shifted to the Chinese poem. Bo Juyi’s 燕歌, “Swallow Song” was one my mother made me memorize when I was still a child. I sang it like a song when I learned it and it had meant little to me other than as a ditty. When I later left home and started to think about the meaning of the song, I resented her for instilling such a “lesson” in me. As my son would say of me in his rebellious teenage years, I felt she was just trying “to guilt me;” Bo Juyi was admonishing the young man for whom he wrote this poem for not looking after his elderly parents in a backhanded sort of way. And, like it or not, if it was meant to “guilt me,” it worked; this became one of those poems that brought me back to her, a poem that lives in the back of my mind, always and makes me feel inadequate about not making myself more available to her. Eventually, it took me thirty years to write and rewrite it and may still rewrite it again. Here is the latest version of my translation:
SWALLOW SONG
Note: Summertree is an architectural term that describes any large timber or beam which serves as a bearing surface. In this context, it refers to the large horizontal beam across the ceiling of old Chinese houses which often has an open sitting room, like a large porch which looks onto the garden or courtyard. Many martial arts movies feature this kind of house. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” is a good example.
Round about my summertree, two swallows came a-courting,
Bringing mud to build their nest, till four chicks to them were born.
Day by day the four chicks grew, chirp, chirp, chirping for worms.
But worms are not easy to find, and young mouths don’t stop asking.
All day long, they pecked and clawed as if they’d forgotten how to rest.
Back and forth and back and forth and still she wanted to give them more.
Thirty days and thirty nights, baby chicks grew fat, the mother grew thin.
Cheep, cheep, they learned to speak, as she preened their feathers one by one.
Then, one day, their wings were ready. She led them out to the garden tree.
They took to the wind without a glance back to the pair they left behind.
Mother and father birds called and called till darkness filled the empty sky.
They came back to the empty nest, keening, weeping through the night.
O swallow, swallow don’t you cry, remember that day so long gone by,
when you flew away with not a glance to the mother you left behind.
Finally now you know what it means to think with a parent’s heart.
Those of you who know Bo’s poem in Chinese will say I have taken liberties in the translation of the last line, particularly, with the “parent’s heart.” And you will be right. A word for word in the Chinese lines read: “Swallow, swallow, don’t you grief, /You should think (or reflect) back on yourself/ Think of the day when you were a young bird/ Flying high, with your back to your mother./ On that day, your father and mother worry about (or long for) you/ Today you should know (what it is like.)” In those few lines, however, he had used four characters with the heart radical (悲grief, 思 think, 思reflect, and 念worry/long.) Before I became a parent, I had not realized that these were things parents do. Now that I recognize them as parent activities, I also recognize them as what one finds in a parent’s heart.
My mother had four children, two boys and two girls. She definitely identified with the mother bird in the poem. Being a mother was her primary identity. In my eyes, my father was not a good husband to her. Her children, including myself, did not return the favors she bestowed on us, we all took her for granted; I regret now not trying harder to be more a part of her life, and let her share more of mine. I know how proud she was of me when I won all those scholarships and went to all those prestigious schools. Being a mother was her only identity, and she was good at it too, but I often felt that she wanted more. She was smart and educated but trapped by the limitations of her era, her culture and her fate. She was frustrated even though she performed her duties well as wife and mother. Despite her strong identity with the role, however, she looked down on it, as if if was not work, not a profession. When I had to give up my full-time teaching position to look after Anne because of her medical needs, she was full of resentment, “What is the point of going to school for so long? Swallowing all those books into your belly, what a waste, ending up being nothing more than a housewife, an unemployed do-nothing!”
Shivers run down my back whenever I recall how T.S. Eliot’s allusion to the fierce sisters who gave me the voice to my translation of this poem I have loved/hated for so long. How Philomela and Procne, the victim and the avenger, led me to thinking about my mother, whom I had left so long ago and saw so little of and yet haunted me throughout my adult life; she haunts me still now that she is gone forever. While I was growing up, I thought of her as victim, and at times, resented her for it. Why did she not speak up for herself? Why did she let my father, and then her children, neglect and mistreat her? When I grew up she often complained quietly to me. It was torture to hear her complaints. At the time, I often felt she allowed others to mistreat her, and even dared to think she enjoyed the role of victim, mistaking her endurance for submission. In retrospect, I admire her ability to find joy wherever she could, to love and forgive us despite our selfishness, cruelty and ingratitude.
For years, I thought of this poem as an admonition. As a parent, I know “a parent’s heart,” and I know one of the hardest things to do for your child is to let him or her fly away. Having taken to the wind myself, I understand the joys of flying. Now that I have Anne, however, the poem is more than an admonition, the poem is incomplete, as I know that there are those who can never fly away, those who cannot fly. I also know now that Bai Juyi wrote the poem for a father who was missing his son. In a preface to the poem which I had not known until I was “studying” Bai Juyi, I realized that the poem was addressed to an older man who was the poet’s friend and whose son had flown and was meant to be consoling. I wonder if my mother was ever consoled. I wonder if she ever forgave me for not living up to her dreams.