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62 Chapter Four “I miss our house,” Sophie sometimes says while we are in China. “I don’t miss anything else. Just our house. I wish I could move it here and live here.” I imagine our Victorian house, complete with squirrels and bats and mice, a wooden structure with cracked siding, lifted and dropped down here, dwarfed by the slick high-rises of Beijing, out of place among all the steel and concrete. I imagine sitting on our wide front porch and watching traffic tangle and snarl while people walk by, cell phones at their ears. I imagine hanging laundry from our upstairs balcony. Our house is many times larger than the typical Chinese apartment, and would, like me, be an odd sprawling creature among so many compact ones. I imagine instead living in something lighter, smaller, less cumbersome—a pagoda on a hill with willows waving beside a stream. Sophie’s attachment to our house surprises me. Sometimes I do miss being at home, the way time passes differently, more quickly and purposefully , when I’m in my own space. At the same time, it’s freeing to be away, even more so because I have no cell phone and little Internet access here in China. So often, the house, like my schedule, has felt to me like a burden , a trap I want to escape, an entanglement that is just too much work. Leaky pipes have necessitated replacing ceilings three times, until I finally just gave up. Now the kitchen ceiling is a checkerboard, square holes cut in it at intervals, offering glimpses of rough wood and snaking pipes above. Every few months, I call contractors or just let problems go, like the patio that is falling apart, the driveway that is breaking up, the unused basement toilet that emits a foul smell, the light switches all over the house that don’t work. The house could be a full-time job. The house could be a full-time job, parenting is a full-time job, teaching is a full-time job, and then there’s writing and my second teaching job. I have too many jobs. There is no hope for keeping up with them. v Crossing the Blue Willow Bridge 63 But for a brief time after I figured out how to deal with the squirrels, it felt like I might get things under control and gradually widen our world. We found a group in Erie called Panda Girls and an international adoption group in Allegheny that held regular gatherings. We both enrolled in dance classes, and Sophie started taking gymnastics. I aimed to make sure that my child was comfortable in her identity, in her body, in her home in ways that I hadn’t been when I was young. But at every turn, a family member died or another home repair emergency cropped up. Bats arrived and took over the house. My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. For some reason, it was the bat infestation that pitched me to the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Basic Needs. I was too focused on physiological and safety needs like shelter and protection from physical threat to move up the ladder, process more complex issues, and achieve progressively higher states of being, much less self-actualization. So it’s a surprise to me that the house that has never felt quite like home to me is, like China to Sophie, a place that she thinks of as home. Dance and bats were opposite yet somehow complementary forces— yin and yang—making us first more comfortable with ourselves and then more profoundly unsettled, bringing back my own regular vague childhood impulse to flee. I grew up in a family in which no one ever danced or sang. We sat stiffly in the back pew at church, standing awkwardly for hymns, waiting for the music to stop. Even jiggling my foot or swaying felt taboo. Although I’d always liked to dance and took a few ballet classes, I quit altogether in my teen years, swaybacked and self-conscious that the leotard made it more obvious . It was hard for me to stand up entirely straight unless I lifted my knee above my hip. I learned to pull in my stomach and lift my ribcage, but it has always taken work, and sometimes, then and now, I’ve longed for the freedom not to be expected to focus, at all times, on my carriage. Every Monday...

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