Such violence, the memoir goes on to narrate, is not merely familial
but also communal and political, with colonial agents, postcolonial
riots, and the mayhem of New England Vietnam-era conflicts and New York
crime scenes all composing the memoir's world. But it is in the violence
of motherhood that to my mind the memoir has its most overt feminist
manifestation. Never mind the usual violence of childbirth - in this
woman's life, a caesarean operation, "When the anesthesiologist crammed
the plastic apparatus into my throat like a giant obscene penis" and
when "at that moment, I felt the cold swab of the anesthetic-soaked
cotton like the curve of a scimitar across my abdomen and lost
consciousness" (290). The most difficult story I told about my life was
of my own physical abuse of my infant son. The temptation to not tell
that story was very strong; I had stopped shaking and slapping him when
he was around two. What was the point of leaving him a memory he did not
himself possess, and one in which I was so clearly the wicked witch of
the East, when I had been long reformed? My commitment to a feminist
ideal of social transformation finally convinced me to tell on myself.
In confronting that past I understood in full the horrible legacy of
abuse, which leaves its memory on the body, a body inscribed, as with a
recipe for violence, to reproduce that violence on yet another body.
(The following excerpt is reprinted from Among the White Moon
Faces, pages 200-203, with permission from The Feminist
Press.)
Violence, like racism, imprinted from childhood, can never be totally
eradicated. My rage at my baby was all the more terrifying to me in
contrast to my usual intimate protectiveness. He was so small and weak,
but he struggled to have his way. The shame I suffered when my father
beat me was the same shame I felt when I hit my son, only fourteen
months old.
Barely walking, Gershom had already learned to say no. "No" was like
his fist which he waved before the mirror and which rang the bells. He
beat us with it. "No, no!" he shrieked, even when he meant yes. It was
the lever that pulled his mother back and forth, back and forth. He was
terrified when this lever did not work, as if he could no longer see
himself in the mirror. With this word he commanded us to turn back from
the front door, like a fast rewind of a videotape, and to reenact the
earlier scene, erasing the action that has so offended him. He believed
time was plastic and recoverable, that he could control events, even to
playing them exactly the way he wanted them to be. When the television
cartoon displeased him, he yelled, "No!" then cried because the
television set would not replay for him the cartoon he had in mind. He
regressed from godlike power to mere human frustration; his rages went
on for months.
Like him I too was suddenly enraged. One night, after I had tried
unsuccessfully to get him to sleep by himself, I shook him hard and
roared, "Go to sleep, damn you, go to sleep!" He gave me a look, then
threw up, the white-spotted vomit splattering my face, his sheets, the
carpet. Once, hurrying someplace, burdened with his bags, his obstinate
weight, I heard him whine. He wriggled, protesting at our errand, and
the bags fell. My slap left a red palm print on his cheek, and he
wailed. I did not admit my guilt. He was bad, bad, bad. But I
remembered my father's anger, and I was afraid of myself.
Then I slapped Gershom in front of Jane and Milton. It was true that
Jane and Milton, who came up to northern Westchester every weekend,
escaping the West Side, were comfortable people to be around, pleasant
because safe. Some weekends they would invite us to drop by their
country home, a convenient mile away. Their son, Ferdie, two years
older than Gershom, was fascinated by a creature even smaller than
himself. I looked forward to visiting their home, a cozy jumble of
small dark rooms, set among several acres of brambly blackberries, pines
and overgrown rhododendrons, a wilderness which Jane's grandparents had
bought just before the Depression as an inexpensive summer cottage to
escape the city's dangerous polio-ridden streets.
That afternoon, the October Sunday streamed blue and gold outdoors.
We sat in the one sunlit room, an expanded kitchen, around the scrubbed
kitchen table. Gershom was babbling in the highchair while we waited
for the kettle to boil. He was familiar with Jane and Milton, and at
fourteen months, his confidence was overweening.
The cup of herbal tea steamed up my face, raising a different kind of
gold in the kitchen. A placid boredom filled the cluttered kitchen,
where every counter space was taken up with brown shopping bags from
Waldbaums, packed tight with coffee, sodas, carrots, cabbages, toilet
paper, cereals, packages of matzos and bagels, honey jars, and assorted
cookies, combustibles that Jane and Milton carried off every Sunday to
their Manhattan apartment to see them through the week. Gershom,
smiling in the highchair, beat my arm with his fist as I leaned, elbows
forward, to inhale the dusky steam.
"Chinese children do not hit their parents," I said. By the kitchen
Jane was pouring the water for her tea bag, and Ferdie, his nose
dripping from a cold, was tugging at her skirt for an ice-cream cone
they had just refused him.
Bang! Again the pudgy fist hit out. It didn't hurt, but I felt
myself flush. "Don't do that!" I warned. "Children should never hit
their mothers!"
I suddenly imagined him an adult. There was a panic that if I could
not stop him then, make him obey, everything would be lost. "Chinese
children must respect their parents," the tape played in my head. A few
minutes later, as I listened to Milton, elbows on the table, and blew on
my mint tea, Gershom slapped my arm a third time, and chuckled as my
elbow gave way. I did not think; my arm flew across the table, and the
slap left red finger bruises on his face.
Milton stopped talking and raised his eyebrows. I heard Jane saying,
"All right, Ferdie, if you'll come outside I'll give you your ice
cream," and the sound of the kitchen door opening and shutting.
Strangely, Gershom didn't cry. Perhaps it was Milton's presence at
the table, the adult's sudden wary silence and look of surprise, that
stopped him. He lowered his head, bit his lip, then pretended to eat
his cookie. I saw a shame in Milton's averted glance. In that moment,
I saw through Milton's eyes the scene of my own childhood; it was
excruciating. The shame prevented me from picking the baby up; it spoke
in a stifled insistent voice, "Chinese children do not hit their
parents!" It forced me to stay in my chair sipping the flat mint tea,
while Jane and Milton politely talked about Ferdie's ear infections, and
led me home, where I cuddled my baby tearfully, because I hadn't meant
to slap him.
The shame did not prevent me from hitting him again. Sometimes it
was a smack on a diaper-cushioned bottom; or a slap on the hand, sharp
enough to cause a pucker and a wail. Each time I felt shame and
defiance, mixed with panic: panic that he was not me, he was hatefully
not me; defiance against the shame that insisted that what I was doing
was wrong.
The last time I slapped him, it was in front of my husband. Not yet
two, Gershom was fussing about putting on his shoes. "Hold still while
I put on your other shoe!" I said. Sitting on the stairs, he continued
to wriggle. His foot slipped out of my hands and the tiny sneaker fell
down. As unreflecting and as quick as a branch in a wind storm my hand
went up. Whap! Startled I watched the vivid shape on my palm print on
his cheek turn crimson.
Charles stood at the top of the stairs, a calm presence. "I'll put
your sneakers on for you," he said, and reached down for the baby. A few
minutes later we were out of the door, nothing discussed.
The red finger marks on the cheek faded after an hour, but in that
silent hour I rehearsed the scene through Charles's eyes, seeing with no
excuses my adult size, the actual littleness of my baby, and finally that
I was repeating those very scenes of brutality that my father had
wreaked on me.
There were no more slaps after that morning, although I continued to
struggle with stubborn outbursts of rage, an adamantine insecurity that
would turn my child into my enemy were my reason less supported by my
love for him. Once started, the cycle of family violence may never end.
Only the consciousness of one's own precarious position in the cycle
can contain the violence. To change the blow to a caress, the sharp and
ugly words to careful explanation, the helpless choking rage to empathy,
that is my struggle as a mother: to form a different love.
