CHAPTER 24

SCARBOROUGH, ONTARIO

EIGHT POUNDS OF PERFECT

JULY 1994

From the time I had been hospitalized as a child, doctors, surgeons, specialists, nurses, therapists, and my own well-meaning ma all came to the same conclusion: Because of the severity of burns I had sustained, my body was unfit to carry a child. My skin at those burn sites had lost its elasticity, which would be problematic when my pregnant belly decided to “pop.” My internal organs, while functionally fine, had endured too much stress from being singed by the napalm and would not fare well during any stage of childbirth. My blood pressure—such a critical marker of health during pregnancy—had all but slowed to a stop and showed no signs of picking up speed. My typical daily pain was already off the charts; how would I cope with still more?

But truly, since those days of playing corn-cob prince and princess with my childhood friends, I had always seen myself getting married someday and, later, bearing a child. Now my real-life prince, Toan, and I were praying about this very thing. “Lord, are we meant to become parents? And if so, how will that occur?”

The practical considerations before us were great: We had no family here to help us with caring for a baby, and our food and home situation was always fluctuating. And then there were my myriad health problems—did we have any business adding a baby to this mix?

“But Toan,” I remember saying to my husband, “if I wait too long to become pregnant, then the risks will only rise . . .” I was now thirty-one, which by gynecological standards at the time meant o-l-d.

With Toan’s consent, I sought advice from a naturopath in Chinatown. In Asian culture, one’s “pulses” are a big deal, and evidently, my pulses were quiet. My menstrual cycle was irregular, my circulation was not great, and the stress that I had endured for two decades did no favors for my adrenal glands. The practitioner mixed together a variety of herbal remedies and gave me thorough instructions regarding their use. “You come back in ten to twelve weeks,” he said. “We check you again at that time.”

Nancy Pocock also put me in touch with Doctor Phillips, a Western doctor she knew, so that Toan and I could weigh a professional opinion alongside our own. Looking back, Nancy’s introduction to this gynecologist transformed my entire world for the better. In addition to the herbs taking effect, the doctor assured me that I was capable of carrying a baby and proceeded to encourage Toan and me to try for the pregnancy.

Within six weeks, I was dancing through our tiny kitchen, waving a completed pregnancy test in hand, all but singing the results to Toan. “We did it, Toan! We are pregnant! You are a daddy now, and I am finally a ma!” Toan pulled me into a tight embrace, his smile giving way to laughter, and for what felt like an eternity we simply held each other. Our dream was at last coming true.

Toan and I had been reading the Bible together one morning when we both were struck by a name we saw there: Thomas. We loved it immediately and decided it would be the name of our first baby boy—if it were a boy, that is. We had already chosen the name Rebecca if we had a girl, but there was something about Thomas. I loved it from the start.

The moment we named our child, the abstract idea of a baby—inside me!—became very real. I began to draw pictures of my baby, as I imagined him or her: perfectly formed, thriving, alive. I sang the same lullabies my grandma had sung to me when I was a child, hopeful that my baby would know my voice. I talked to my baby day and night in a soothing voice. “I love you already, sweet child,” I would say. “May you always be healthy and strong.” I spoke these things in Vietnamese, in Spanish, and in English, figuring I ought to cover my bases in case he or she ever lived in any of the countries where I had lived, even as I secretly prayed to God in heaven that my child would always stay by my side.

At the time, Toan and I were still enrolled in the ESL class and were studying several hours each evening in order to improve our inflection and pace. I do not remember much of those classes, save for one thing: the smell. A group of immigrants from Africa were also in our class, and although I never pinpointed it, one of the spices they used in their cooking made me sick. Oh, I do remember rushing to the washroom on many an occasion, while our teacher plodded faithfully on.

During those quick walks to the washroom and also whenever I was headed to the subway station or bus terminal, I held my belly carefully, not wanting to jostle him or her to and fro. From the beginning of my pregnancy the baby was big, and kept getting bigger as the months passed. The doctor expressed concern about the baby’s size. “If your baby continues to grow at this pace,” he said when I was thirty-five weeks along, “you most certainly will require a C-section, which for you is not a good thing.”

That was on a Thursday afternoon, during a regularly scheduled appointment, and as Toan and I started to leave, the doctor said, “I think we ought to do another ultrasound, Kim, just to be sure everything in there is all right. Call on Monday, and we’ll schedule it.”

The next morning my water broke. Toan immediately got up and headed for the door. “I will go get the shopping cart in the alley.”

“Toan!” I hollered, barely catching him before he rushed out the door. “What will you do with a shopping cart? My water has broken, Toan. This baby is about to be born.”

“Yes, Kim, I know, I know!” he said, a flurry of movement and stress. “This is why I will get you the shopping cart, so that I can transport you to the hospital at once!”

In my husband’s defense, we only lived three blocks from the hospital—not a long trip, by any measure. But still, would it be wise for me to make that trip by shopping cart? And did I mention that it was raining?

For several minutes, I rested comfortably on the little couch in our living room, doing my best to calm my pacing husband, who was quickly losing control. “Toan, it is no problem yet,” I kept saying to him. “I have zero pain at all.”

As I waited, I reviewed in my mind what Toan and I had learned in the Lamaze classes we had taken. But I have no pain to speak of, I thought. I do not need to recall how to manage my pain, until I actually have pain to manage!

An hour passed before I said to my husband, “I still do not have pain, Toan, but I think I should get to hospital now. I do not want to get an infection. I do not want our baby harmed.”

“But how will we go to hospital, Kim? We have nobody to take us there!”

Since Toan and I had never once called a cab service or dialed 911, it never occurred to us to do so now. Instead, we opted for waking our landlord, Andy, who happened to live upstairs. Thankfully, Toan did not ask me to climb the stairs too.

After hearing what was going on, Andy said, “Oh, Toan, I’m so sorry, but my car hasn’t run in weeks. I’ve been taking the bus to work each day.”

Toan was resolute. “Andy,” he said very quietly, “would you mind trying the car . . . just this once?”

Andy indulged my dear Toan, and the car decided to run. By 7:00 a.m., Toan and I were nestled in a hospital room, eagerly anticipating all that was to come.

As the hours ticked by, I became more and more aware of my lack of pain. “You will experience ever-increasing discomfort,” the kind Lamaze lady had informed the other mothers in my class and me, “culminating with a pain so sharp and severe that if you were holding an iron rod, you’d be certain you could bend it.”

Wow, I had thought at the time, now that is some kind of pain. Here in my hospital room, I might have considered the anomaly of no pain to be a cause for grave concern—was something wrong with my child?—but I did not. Instead, I treated the entire smooth, peaceful experience like the divine gift I believed it to be.

Just before Thomas arrived, I felt perhaps forty minutes of intense pressure, during which I focused my attention on the image of a beautiful red rose, fully in bloom. Red roses are my favorite flower, and something about that visualization kept me calm. Toan was okay when we arrived at the hospital because he had gotten all of his pacing done when we were at home. And he was okay when I went into labor and when the contractions intensified, reaching for my hand to pray with me. But when the doctor pulled out the forceps to help get Thomas out, due to our son’s large head, Toan nearly became unglued. “Stay with us, Toan!” I remember cheering for him, as he braced himself on the edge of my bed.

Once the doctor safely delivered my Thomas, I noticed that my baby did not cry. For several heartbeats there was silence, giving everyone in the room great pause. I glanced at Toan as the doctor patted Thomas’s back, and within seconds my boy was wailing—what a wonderful sound it was! At last, I had birthed a baby. This was not a politically staged photo shoot; this was me, holding my own flesh and blood.

Because he had arrived earlier than my due date, Thomas’s birth coincided with our ESL class’s final exams. I would fail to graduate once again from school, but I gained something more meaningful instead. “Yes, you all received a diploma,” I told my classmates with a wide smile, when I saw them at Toan’s graduation ceremony, “but I received a baby. Much better, I think you agree.”

I spent three days in the hospital before being discharged; Thomas, who had jaundice, stayed a week longer. All in all, this was for the better, because I was weary and craving rest. As soon as my milk came in, Toan would make four or five trips per day to the hospital to drop off bags of breastmilk for Thomas. Finally, seven days later, my Thomas was healthy . . . and home.

It was during Thomas’s extended hospital stay that the driver of a large truck pulled up to the curb outside our apartment building, located Toan and me, and proceeded to unload box after box of baby items. It turns out our beloved family doctor, Paula Williams, had put a note on the bulletin board in her waiting room, explaining that an immigrant couple from Vietnam needed gently used baby goods—anything a little boy might like.

Dozens of families responded with nursery decorations, toys, and clothes. When Toan finished sorting all of the clothes, we realized that Thomas had a complete wardrobe that would last him until age seven. What a generous gift from people we did not even know.

I look back on those days in our tiny Chinatown apartment, and I can still feel the love that the three of us shared. We were free at last, finding our way in a brand-new country, nothing but hope and beauty before us. It was picture-perfect! Except that it was not, for the simple reason that I was still at odds with my ma. Since I had never received any responses to letters I had written, I had no idea whether she knew I was in Canada, and that I was never returning to Cuba again. Or even if she knew I was married or had given birth to a child. She did not know so many important things about who I was becoming or about the treasured dreams I now held. And as the years flew by with ever-increasing speed, I wondered if she and I would ever see each other again.

Every day I prayed a simple, straightforward prayer: “Father, please protect Ma while we are apart. And please let this distance between us end soon.”