Beijing Welcomes You

A motorized cargo tricycle putt-putted up the alley, carrying a load of tall, swaying potted plants. Black smoke trailed behind the moving green thicket. Step forward, step back. It was springtime; the men of Beijing had begun rolling up their shirts to bare their bellies—their hot-weather custom. The official Xinhua News Agency reported that 10,000 bags for spitting into had been distributed over the weeklong Labor Day holiday at the beginning of May, and fifty-six people had been fined for spitting in the street.

A new sticker in the front seat of taxicabs advised the drivers to brush their teeth regularly, change clothes, open the window and let air circulate, avoid smelly food, and not live in the car. Video screens appeared on the back of taxi headrests, and an animation clip showed humble cartoon animals being invested with an aura of superhero magic—Billy Batson as Tibetan antelope: Shazam!—and reborn as the Fuwa.

The reality of the city was noticeably rattling the Olympic plans: the No. 5 subway, the first of the new lines, had been due to open in July, but now it was going to miss the mark and open in the fall. Tunneling through Beijing’s underside was not as simple as making an office tower spring up on schedule. The timetable for the other subway lines said only that they would be done by July 2008; the No. 10 had caved in again, killing six laborers. A news report said ten people had been arrested in that incident, after the construction company delayed calling for rescue and confiscated cell phones from its other workers. The opening of the Bird’s Nest, slated for year’s end, had been pushed back to March 2008.

I followed the changes with a mix of attention and detachment. My wife and I had no illusions about belonging in Beijing. The old city was becoming a new city, but we were passing through. Christina had come over to start up an office, and the more that the starting up turned into the running of it, the less specifically she was obligated to stay. The professional problems of China—how to organize an enterprise, how to work with officials—had answers, and she basically had figured out what they were. Meanwhile I was waiting on the Olympics, off in the middle future, but with a clear end date. We had an apartment in New York still, in the midst of a perpetually uncompleted renovation job.

Then, at the end of a Christmas trip home in the last days of 2006, I had woken up one morning to the sound of vomiting from the still-unimproved New York bathroom. Christina had been suffering from what seemed to be her worst case of jet lag ever, groggy and ceaselessly catnapping. And she had been ravenously hungry. Suddenly, those dots of information connected themselves. By August 2008—in fact, the doctor estimated, by August 2007—there were going to be three of us in Beijing.

The delivery would be in New York, we had decided. Beijing was not much different from New York for a normal birth, if you were an expat with decent health coverage, but why take chances? At thirty-three weeks, in late June, we’d fly back and settle in for two months of American life while we waited for the baby. We would just have to miss the one-year Olympic countdown in Beijing.

We had enrolled in a birthing class at a hospital catering to expats, tuning out the lessons that were specific to China: laughing gas as anesthetic, advice on dealing with Chinese staff midwives. I was not ready for Chinese midwives. Thanks to language school—two hours a day now, with friendly teachers in rooms like interrogation cells—the daily hum of Mandarin around me had begun to crackle into and out of intelligibility, like a far-off AM broadcast. New York was the way to go.

The plan seemed even better once our Beijing landlord informed us, via the ayi, that we’d be losing the apartment. The collective housing for bank employees was being decollectivized, as part of privatizing the bank. In preparing to transfer ownership, the bank had discovered that our unit was smaller than what our landlord, a branch president, was entitled to get. So we would have to rent his new, larger apartment—another fourth-floor walkup, a long block away down Outer Dongzhimen Avenue, a dark and chilly space in a building even less charming than ours. The landlord would redecorate it, and he would take care of moving our stuff while we were away.

I bought some boxes at the post office and began packing things. We wouldn’t need sweaters before then. I filled a carton with bootleg DVDs—there was nowhere to rent DVDs legally in Beijing, and most foreign titles weren’t cleared by the censors for import anyway, so everyone ended up with a stash of countless pirated movies, most bought on impulse at a dollar a pop. The intellectual-property breakdown had led to the creation of products that didn’t even exist on the legal market: looking for The Big Lebowski, I ended up with a box containing every movie directed or produced by the Coen brothers, for something like ten dollars.

Olympic tickets were going on sale to Chinese residents in an online lottery. For this, we qualified as residents. The lottery system was an elaborate one. You could put in for as many as eight different batches of event tickets, and for each batch, you could pick multiple fallback options. The best tickets for track-and-field were more than $100 each, while tickets to watch runners stagger into the Bird’s Nest at the end of the marathon were free. People debated strategy—request too many events and you could be stuck buying thousands of dollars’ worth of tickets; request too few, and you could be shut out. By the time the lottery closed in June, it had received applications for more than 5 million tickets. We requested track-and-field tickets, two batches. If we got ours, the Olympic organizing committee would notify us in late August.

In the evenings, Christina and I went out walking, around the neighborhood and beyond. It was exercise. Till April, Christina had been enrolled in ballet class, but then the biddies who tended the door had turned her away for being pregnant, before she could even talk to the teacher. The thing about Chinese people is that they have strict rules about pre- and postnatal behavior. Pregnant expats in Beijing, with all the wrong habits, faced a dressing-down for even taking their delicate bellies outside to run errands. Dancing ballet at five months was unimaginably reckless.

So we strolled down the alley and out, this way or that. It was a way also to get a last look at the city of the moment, to see what we might be missing during a summer away. The construction fence was coming down by the Liangma River, the water flowing again in its repaved and refilled bed. The footpath beside it, formerly an institutional mottled pink, was patterned with black and yellow blocks.

Down by North Workers’ Stadium Road, the old socialist coliseum and its neighboring Workers’ Gymnasium were closed off and scaffolded, to be rehabbed into Olympics-worthy venues. Along the south side of the street was a strip of parkland with freshly installed benches and flower beds and planters, and with a set of outdoor exercise equipment. This was a marker of the New Beijing, wherever renovation or demolition created a narrow open space: all-weather workout machines, in primary colors, a full fitness center mechanically simplified to basic pedals, levers, weights, and wheels.

In America, this sort of project would have been an almost certain boondoggle and a failure, an empty gesture at including average citizens in the athletic spirit. But Beijingers still believed in public space. Wherever the fitness machines went up, even squeezed in by the highway, people found them and got going—stair-stepping or ski-sliding, leg-lifting or chest-expanding, hanging from the pull-up ladders. If there was exercise equipment, why not exercise?

By June, the weather was baking hot, even after dark. On the backstreets, the sidewalks were taken over by ramshackle tables and chairs from tiny restaurants. Throngs of people were out eating, drinking beer, and smoking under stark white lightbulbs.

About two weeks before our flight to America, we followed the Liangma all the way out to the Third Ring, then doubled back toward home on Xinyuan South Road. Ahead of us a truck appeared, driving slowly. It had a tank on the back, and riding on top was a crew of workers wearing orange vests and round straw hats. They were spraying down the treetops, using twin hoses the size of firehoses.

For a moment, I had the innocent thought that they were spray-washing the dust from the leaves. Then we smelled a synthetic-sweet vapor: the truck was pumping out gallons and gallons of pesticide. We hailed a cab and shut ourselves inside for the last few blocks home. The spray dripped from the trees and lay in puddles on the pavement. So much for walking.

This was not the place to be having a baby. From the bootleg Coen brothers set, we watched Raising Arizona, and laughed out loud. America was a good place for babies; the presumption of baby-safety was so strong that an infant could go through kidnapping and armed robbery and come out okay.

Two days later, we were at the expat hospital. Christina was having bad cramps, and there was bleeding. A doctor from New Zealand, with cropped silver hair and an old-fashioned, fatherly air, delivered a verdict: bed rest, at home, for weeks. Flying to New York was out; we would be stuck in Beijing till the baby came.

Then something made him reconsider even that. It might be better, he said, to start the bed rest there in the hospital. While they processed the admission papers, Christina lay down in an empty room. As we waited, we started tracking the cramps as they came and went, the way we’d studied in birthing class. Just to see. What we saw was that they were coming about two minutes apart.

You could tell the difference between false labor and real premature labor, the doctor advised us, by whether a baby came out at the end or not. Those anxious, inconvenient weeks of bed rest were now what we might get if we were lucky. The admission was to the maternity ward.

The room was tasteful and up-to-date. No sooner were we in it than a man in dark slacks and a dress shirt was in the room with us, seeking insurance authorization. China’s medical system asked for all payment up front; the expat hospital sold birth packages in advance, for people planning to have their babies there. We had not planned any such thing. We gave him the insurance card, and he withdrew.

I took a cab home to pack an overnight bag, the overnight bag that the parents-to-be in birthing-instruction stories always keep packed, as a talisman of readiness. I had been going to pack a good one as soon as we got to New York. Now I couldn’t figure out what I would need to put into it. On my way back down the alley, I passed a bamboo-slatted pram or shopping cart, in which a naked baby boy stood up, in a muscleman pose.

The contractions did not subside. Afternoon plunged on into night; tape spooled out of a fetal monitor. As the baby squirmed, the heartbeat reading drifted in and out. They had given a steroid shot, to try to finish up the fetal lungs in a hurry. It would take twenty-four hours for the shot to work. The lungs were the key.

At a café up the block, over a sandwich, I used my fading laptop battery to Google what I could about premature birth. That part of the Internet was unblocked. The message seemed to be that birth at thirty-four weeks was not much to worry about, while birth at twenty-eight weeks was a lot to worry about. This was thirty-one weeks, right in the middle. Nobody said anything about thirty-one weeks.

What had started was not going to stop. The perspective of the fatherto-be on these things is too impoverished to dwell on: fetal monitor, watch dial, music rigged up to play on the computer. The overnight nurses and the doctor were speaking in a Chinese far beyond the reach of Intermediate Chinese Dialogues, Book One. The baby was breech and was making no move to settle into delivery position. Fetal monitor, watch dial. Despite being roughly the same geographic size as the United States, China observes a single national time zone, and on the eastern end, where Beijing is, dawn breaks before five a.m. in the summer. We were into a second day.

At thirty-three hours, things had gone as far as they could go. This was how it was going to be. The neonatologist—the neonatologist was out of town. Another doctor, a Westerner, looking rattled, said that he was almost a neonatologist, all but the certification, really. Now the operating room was tied up. Someone else had been getting a C-section. Well, how fast could they get cleaned up in there? We needed the operating room, badly, now. The nurses, speaking Chinese, were preparing my wife. I was in and out of the hallway. Why was it—

At this point, a drab woman buttonholed me. She was from billing. Our insurance plan was set up to reimburse us after payment, meaning we would have to pay directly, up front, meaning now. The C-section would be—she named a figure. And then the neonatal intensive care—another figure. The figures reeled around my head, as I tried to convert the currency and compare it with the dollar limit on our credit card. Sounds of agony were coming from behind me. The woman stood there, impatient. It seemed to me, as I did the math, that we could probably cover the birth and one day in intensive care. Intensive care. Clarity settled over me. I was not going to talk about this now, I said. One of my wife’s colleagues—a doctor previously with Médecins sans Frontières, who had come to the hospital to keep an eye on things—steered the billing woman away with promises of secured cash payment.

Except for the not-quite-neonatologist, the team of doctors in the operating room was all Chinese. They spoke Chinese behind their masks as they cut. I stayed behind the protective sheet, by my wife’s head. They were cutting. Then—then they came up with something in their hands, something purple and gray and limp, and as they hurried it across the room, I recalled that the very first moments were not supposed to mean anything, and I willed the image not to sink in: not purple, not gray, not limp; these would not be the facts until I allowed them to be the facts. The birthing instructions had said so.

The sound carried across the operating room, loud and full. Time did not need me to hold it back; time slipped loose and trickled away, out of sight again, underneath the mechanisms of the world. The baby yelled. He was pulling air into his lungs and pushing it out, strongly, on his own. The doctors had machines to make you breathe, but not to make you yell. Only you could do that.

It was 5:15 p.m. on June 9 in Beijing, China. Later, when it was time to fill out the birth certificate, I would learn that I was the only person in the operating room who had remembered to look at the clock. They brought him to us, with a too-big knit hat drooping low over his eyes. He looked at us quizzically, not without alertness. He weighed 1,685 grams, or 3 pounds, 11 ounces. The not-quite-neonatologist offered the conversion from metric.

His name, we decided after a few days with the blank birth certificate, would be Mack. We had all sorts of reasons we liked the name, reasons that seemed to be singular and personal. The other American babies from our birthing class, when they arrived, would be named Mookie and Duke, so possibly there were larger forces at work. That left the middle name, his Chinese name. There was a generational protocol for coming up with the names, a complicated set of traditional rules. We called his grandparents to ask them what the name should be. Zhong-Sheng, they said. It had nothing to do with the system. It meant “Born in China.”

The breathing was not completely solved. Every once in a while, he would stop, and someone would have to tickle him a little to get him to restart. This was quite normal, they said, but it put us at a disadvantage in arguing with the doctors. In the United States, the goal is to get premature babies into their parents’ arms as much as possible, which has been clinically found to help them thrive. In China, a preemie goes into a plastic box, under close medical supervision, until it hits certain targets of growth.

At least that’s what happens to a preemie who gets medical care at all. “I think you love your baby too much,” an English-speaking intensive-care nurse said, smiling. She meant it nicely. But she also had mused to Christina, by way of chitchat, that Mack was very lucky we were wealthy enough to put him in a hospital, unlike babies where she had come from.

He was the only baby in the neonatal intensive-care unit. We settled into a routine of commuting to and from the hospital, dividing the days into shifts. In the next room, full-term babies were constantly being examined and vaccinated as they arrived—awkward, blocky, improbably pink caricatures of humanity. By comparison, ours looked more like a person: slim, long-limbed, with a neatly shaped head, thick hair, and huge, serious eyes. To be honest, he was sort of liver-colored, when he wasn’t turning yellow from jaundice, and his ribs were showing, and one had to mentally subtract the heart-monitor leads and the blood-oxygensensor lead and the feeding tube that was always in one nostril or another, but one miracle of parenthood was how easy it was to edit all of that out.

Outside, as we came and went, Beijing went on. It was still hot. Horse carts of watermelons, in from the country, were parked by the roadsides. The massage girls at the beauty parlors across from the hospital hung out by the storefront, calling and waving to pedestrians. The vacant lot by the apartment had grown into a full-blown meadow. People were still driving badly; time after time, the trip to or from the hospital was prolonged by the local custom, enshrined in law, of preserving every accident where it had happened. Cars with no visible damage would sit askew in the middle of the roadway, gently touching, while their drivers stood around, talking on cell phones and traffic backed up for a mile.

The renovations on the new apartment had never begun. Some of the bank employees were unhappy with their compensation in the privatization plan, and the whole process was tied up indefinitely. We would renew the lease and stay put. After three weeks, Mack had put on enough weight to get out of intensive care and into a recovery room.

Not long before Mack was discharged, he received some visitors: two relatives from Henan Province, on his grandmother’s side, from a branch that had never left the mainland. Christina had been to visit them once before, early in her time in China. Now they were up in the capital, bringing with them a rectangular zippered bag as big as an old steam radiator, made of clothlike plastic bearing images of Mickey and Minnie Mouse—or, as the text on the bag had it, Mikey and Mimi. Inside was an infant’s trousseau: one quilted winter outfit after another, handmade sets of jackets and padded pants, some accompanied by little matching coverlets. Some of the fabric was in traditional patterns and some was in black-and-orange shark-themed print like surfer-wear from the mall. The trousers, even the thickest ones, were open at the crotch, so a child wearing them could squat down and relieve itself in the street. This was the usual Chinese practice. For warm weather, they had included little aprons, designed to protect the baby’s belly from drafts while the rest of the baby ran bare and free. And there were packages of store-bought socks. Ours was the first male baby born to Christina’s generation, and we could not risk his getting cold.

Then it was time to bring him home. I put a new Ikea crib by the window, laid sheets on the mattress, and set a stuffed Fu Niu Lele, the mismatched Paralympic cow, in the corner. The cab that took me back to the hospital had to brake hard to avoid a rear-end collision, then spent the rest of the drive honking and flashing its lights. Friends moving back to the United States had left us a hand-me-down rear-facing infant safety seat. As I struggled to fit it into the back of a Hyundai cab (forgetting to properly level it) the hospital staff wondered aloud, in Chinese, why we didn’t just hold the baby.