Big deal, you might be thinking. Babies speak a foreign language that consists entirely of wailing, strange guttural mumblings, and odd orificial emanations, and yet, parent and child eventually arrive at a sort of mutual understanding. How can parenting a foreign 3 year old really be that different?
It is different. Much different.
I parented Bean from the time he was a zygote onward, and I will be the first person to tell you that I didn't understand anything about that child until he was at least six months old. He screamed, arched his back away from me, and caterwauled like a cat on ecstasy, and I had no idea how to appease him or respond. The difference between Baby Bean and Newly Adopted Pearl, though, is that in the case of Bean, no one knew what he wanted. Angry Driver was mystified. Our friends and family were at a loss. Even the lactation consultant declared that she had never heard/seen anything like him and she excused herself from my room on the maternity ward so fast I assumed I had just delivered Rosemary's Baby and no one had the courage to tell me to my face.
The difference was that with Bean, at least I had an ace in the hole. I could always make something up and everyone would assume I was right because I was his mother and, after all, who could possibly know him better than me?
I took full advantage of this. "He's just over-tired," I would confidently declare to wide-eyed strangers as I hauled my screaming infant-seat bound boy out of Target. "He just doesn't feel well," I shared in my best Expert Mom voice as I yanked a stroller full of yowling baby across the waiting room of the doctor's office. In truth, I had no idea what this bizarre side-burned living football in a sleeper thought or felt, but who was going to contradict me?
Eventually, Bean learned my language (English) and I learned his language (Klingon? Tuvan throat singing?) and parent-child harmony ensued.
With Pearl, she speaks a real, actual, exists-on-this-planet language (Mandarin) and I ... don't.
Don't get me wrong. I've picked up a few Pearl-words here and there, such as the three variations of "ba ba" (Daddy, poop, and hold me, which when you think about it are really more similar than one might initially assume), "shuǐ" (water), "coolah" (drink), "shay la" (put me down, or let me do it), "shah lay" (lie down, or go night-night), and "nuey nuey" (kiddie version of urinate). Unfortunately, anything more complex than that appears to be lost in translation. Various attempts on my part to produce Mandarin speech have all evoked the same response in Pearl: polite indifference, as though by pretending I didn't speak at all, we can both avoid the embarrassment of acknowledging my linguistic inadequacies.
During our first week or so together, Pearl primarily limited her verbal communiqués to a few words here and there, mainly uttered in either a dissatisfied scream or a soft little whisper.
Just imagine Nicolas Cage doing a film in Mandarin
and you will have the perfect mental image
to accompany that description.
Over the ensuing weeks, she gradually expanded her communication outreach attempts to include a fascinating ritual in which she repeatedly pats my arm, points insistently at some ambiguous object in the distance, and utters a stream of sounds that I can only assume represent real Mandarin words. Usually, these proclamations are accompanied by rapid establishment of eye contact, a quick smile, and a cunning nod of her sage little head. My usual response to these wise declarations consist of something along the lines of, "Oh, yes. Of course. Um, I know that car is really noisy," or some other idiotic non sequitur. Amazingly enough, Pearl seems satisfied with my ridiculous responses about 90% of the time which, in my mind, means one of three things:
1) She assumes I understand her language but that for some mysterious reason, I elect to only respond to her in gibberish. She further assumes my bizarre answers are contextually appropriate.
2) She knows I don't speak Mandarin but in order to keep from going crazy in captivity, she's determined to keep talking anyway. I know why the caged bird sings, indeed.
3) She's messing with me. She ain't saying $h)&.
OK. I think I know what you are thinking here. You are probably saying to yourself, "Hey, Crazy Lady. Three year old Chinese orphans do not mess with their new parents by engaging in fake conversations. They do not purposely try to make their parents feel stupid by spouting incessant gibberish."
My old self would have agreed with you. Really. But I have evidence to back up my claim.
Here it is:
Despite uttering nonstop streams of sounds aimed at Angry Driver, Bean, and me, Pearl absolutely refuses to speak in front of anyone who knows Mandarin. She wouldn't speak to our guides in China. She won't speak to Chinese teachers at Bean's music academy. If a person even remotely appears as though he/she could possibly know Mandarin, my darling Pearl clams up faster than a North Korean caught with a pen camera at the Pentagon. That's right: Pearl is a racial profiler. And I have yet to locate a single dark-haired individual who is exempt from her policy.
Heaven knows I've tried to provide her with opportunities to impart her wisdom to me via the miracle of translation services. I've tried English-to-Mandarin phrase books, iPad apps, friendly appearing Asian strangers (OK, so I profile people too. Don't you judge me). No luck. While we were grocery shopping two weeks ago, I actually seriously considered approaching an Asian woman at the customer service counter in order to beg her to just tell me what my little girl wants me to know so badly. The only thing that stopped me from making a complete fool out of myself that day was my certainty that Pearl would either refuse to speak at all or perhaps even worse, she would smile endearingly, wave, and say "hello!", thereby causing the woman to think that I don't know simple English when I hear it and cementing my reputation in the community as a loon.
Pearl is crafty so I refuse to discount Theory 3 completely. The rational part of my brain (yes, such a thing does exist) suspects, though, that Pearl is just doing her best to communicate with her strange new family, just as I did my best six years ago to find a language Bean and I could share. Since she is now starting to mix English words in with her stream-of-consciousness version of Mandarin, and Angry Driver and I have been known to ask her things like, "Did you ba ba in your diaper?", I think we are currently enjoying some small measure of success. Pearl probably doesn't want to talk to Chinese people because, at least on some level, she's worried that they will remove her from the land of French fries, light-up shoes, ice cream, adoring hugs, and beds with slides and return her to a bare crib in a Chinese orphanage. That is pure speculation on my part, but if you could see the immediate blank mask that descends over her face when an Asian person tries to speak with her, you might suspect the same thing.
Perhaps I'm just hyper-sensitive because I can't pretend with Pearl the way I could with Baby Bean. Pearl and I look so physically dissimilar, her ramblings are so fluently non-English, and my responses to her entreaties are so patently un-Mandarin, I often presume that it must be obvious to anyone within earshot that I do not speak Pearl's language. And, if I can't even understand my own daughter, what kind of mother does that make me?
That wasn't rhetorical. But being as this is a blog and not a panel discussion, I will attempt to answer my own question. I guess it makes me the mother of a daughter who has her own Origin Story, her own unique history that intersects with my own unique history at this particular point in time and space. In a few years this era in our lives together will be a memory for our family and we will have (best case scenario here) discovered our own harmonious rhythm. My hope is that when that time comes, I will understand both the language of my daughter's spoken words and the more subtle vernacular of her soul.
In the interim, we continue this hard work of building a family. Or, as I secretly suspect, my children just keep messing with me to make me look incompetent. One or the other.
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