When Sam was born he was chubby and round, with slits for eyes. We called him Baby Buddha. But as he’s gotten older he’s started to look less and less Asian. His hair has grown curly and brown with red highlights like his mother’s. He actually has a bridge on his nose, something I didn’t enjoy until I reached my teens. His face has grown longer, his eyes wider.
Cars are becoming sparser, and suburban sprawl has surrendered to advancing grids of soybean and corn. Two-year-old Sam hates his car seat, so on long drives Kate usually sits in the back to entertain him. I twist the rearview so I can watch them. He’s sleeping now with his thumb stuck loosely in his mouth, his tattered blanket nestled beneath his cheek. Kate smiles as she watches him, and I imagine she used to watch me the same way, before we both got tired all the time with working and writing and going to graduate school and everything. She catches me watching her, and wrinkles her nose, making a little pig snort. She’s so beautiful, with her curly brown hair, and blue eyes, but so embarrassed when I look at her. She still imagines herself a frumpy farm girl.
“White woman, you’re gonna pay and pay again for that remark.”
“Eeeww, and we’ve had children together?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Let’s.” I wonder if our other kids would look like Sam. Then I wonder what his children would look like, and if he’d marry an Asian girl. Would he even consider it?
It wasn’t until years later, after I graduated from college, that I began to have visions of my own. They weren’t like my mother’s. They didn’t take over my being. Images I’d acquired from my grandfather’s journal, which was passed to me when he died, they came to me like dreams.
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That was it, as if such destruction were as routine as a birthday or a baptism or wedding. I headed to the college library, hoping to fill in some of the blanks.
