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The dorm was closed for the 1994 Thanksgiving break. I had to find a place to stay for the holiday weekend. I stayed with a couple of visiting scholars from China on campus. I took advantage of the break to start looking for an apartment. With a tight budget, I did not have many good choices before I bought a car. But for now, I had to live near campus so I could walk to classes and libraries.
It seems that in every town where there is a railroad running through, people want to avoid the other side of it. The other side of a railroad near campus was my only option. Richard, the landlord, was pretty well known among Chinese students on campus. He owned five two-story apartment buildings. They were within walking distance from campus. Due to the location of the apartments, he always had a few units vacant. I picked the cheapest available: an efficiency unit on the second floor.
I took my belongings from the dorm and moved in at the beginning of 1995 before Nora arrived. Richard promised that he would get us a used bed frame without headboard and a used mattress. The previous tenant left behind a sofa, a small breakfast table and a few chairs. I bought a TV on a yard sale while I still lived in dorm. That was it, my new home was up and running. Little did I know then that this would be the place that my only child was conceived and taken from the hospital to.
On January 5, 1995, I asked my friend, Liz to drive me to Nashville Airport to pick up Nora. She was from a family of high ranking officials in China. Her husband came to join her a few months earlier. They lived on the campus side of the railroad. I filled up her car at the gas station a few blocks away. It was a cold and wet day, I had to wait for Richard to deliver the bed frame and mattress before we could get on the road. Nora's connecting flight was delayed at Mexico City. We waited for two hours before she emerged from the terminal gate. By the time we got back to Bowling Green, everybody was tired. So, only days later, could Nora and I take Liz and her husband to dinner to thank them for her help.
After we moved in, we were told that most of my neighbors received government assistance for housing, the section 8 recipients that I know now. My next door neighbor was from Bosnia. They were refuge, fleeing from the war-torn regions in the Balkans a few years earlier. They had a lovely daughter, about 4 or 5 years old, who stayed home with her mom, while her dad worked in a Bosnian restaurant. They were still learning English by going to evening classes. Besides greeting each other on the stairs, we did not interact much at all. But, the girl was curious about us and tried to chat with us. After my son was born, she came over and played with him whenever she got a chance.
Nora brought all our savings from China, about $5000. The first financial decision we had to make was whether we should buy a car or not. Actually it was not even a decision. We had to. While I could walk 20 minutes to campus, every grocery store was beyond our reach by foot. Also, I had to start my job search soon and I might need to drive to Nashville or Chicago for interviews. I targeted these two cities for job search because they were the nearest big cities where there were more job opportunities for business and accounting graduates. Most of my Chinese friends had pretty easily landed jobs in Vanderbilt University's chemistry or biology labs with the promise of H1-B employment visas within one year. I wished to copy their successes.
After weeks of clipping the ads from the local newspaper, test-driving and hard bargains, we ended up buying a 1985 Toyota Camry with over 100,000 miles for $3000. That cost more than half of our savings. International students and their spouses are not allowed to work in the United States. We were friends with the owners of the few Chinese restaurants in town. They often needed some relief when their part-time waiters and waitresses called in sick or had to stay home for a sick family member. We had to decline them if they asked. A violation of the immigration laws would leave a negative mark on our records that would jeopardize our future efforts to apply for employment visa. So, our only income was the stipend I received working as a teaching assistant. We had to pinch every penny since then.
After Nora got over her jet lag, she joined other spouses for English classes offered by the International Student Office three days a week. She planned on getting a degree, too. At home, she would watch the soap opera "All My Children" on ABC to improve her English. It was amazing how much one could pick up a language by just watching TV.
The spring semester was really hard for me. All my courses were in accounting: management accounting, government & non-profit accounting and auditing. I had not taken any of these courses at undergraduate level. So, I had more ground to cover than my classmates did in order to make the most of the classes . After Martin Luther Kings’ holiday, the spring semester did not have any other holiday to give me breathing room to handle the seemingly endless class assignments. I constantly worried about not being able to turn them over on time. I even had nightmares of missing deadlines for papers. In early April, I was told that the funding for my teaching assistant-ship ran out. Not only would I not receive a stipend, I would also have to pay out-of-state tuition for my remaining courses. Everybody in my cohort would graduate in May since they took classes during the summer before I came onboard. But, I still had two classes in the fall with the next cohort.
Then, one day when I came home from classes, Nora told me that she might be pregnant after a self test. This news hit me like a brick on my forehead. I could barely pull myself over the finishing line in my study. It was the worst time to have a baby. We were not ready in any sense. I said: "Well, let's schedule a real test at the county health department." Two days later, her pregnancy was confirmed.
A gut-wrenching decision had to be made. We had never faced such a decision since we got married. In China, the one-child policy was enforced so proactively that almost every pregnancy must be pre-approved. Then, I recalled the people in my life who had once faced such situations. Liang, my co-worker who encouraged me to go to graduate school many years ago, and my own sister came to my mind.
Liang and I were not only both math teachers, we were roommates in the faculty dorm assigned to us by the school during my first job. His father ran a small general store back home more than 50 miles away. His wife was home to help run the store. One afternoon, he rushed back from the office, quickly started packing. I asked him what was going on. He said that his wife was in the hospital, about to give birth to their first child. I told him to take it easy on the way. Five days later, he returned to school with a stone face and distraught eyes. I asked how his wife and the baby were doing. He said that the baby did not make it. I was shocked and asked what had happened. He did not reply to me and went out to smoke. He never smoked before, as far as I knew.
Many days later, he told me what had happened. The baby was a girl. If they kept her, that meant, they would not be allowed to have a second child according to China’s one-child policy. His father was a very traditional man. He single-handedly raised Liang, his only son. His father desperately wished to have a grandson to carry the family name. He and his wife had to make the decision that agonized them for the rest of their lives. They drowned the baby!
The guilt and the heartfelt pain must have haunted them for many years. He often burst into deep sigh and looked lost in the following weeks and months. When the one-child policy was not so rigidly enforced many years later, he and his decided to have another baby even when they had passed the optimal time for child-bearing. It turned out to be a girl. That helped mitigate their guilt and served as a memorial to their first daughter they lost to a senseless policy.
My sister accidentally got pregnant two years after she gave birth to her son. She really wanted to have a daughter. But, she worked for the government as an elementary school teacher. She would lose her job she loved, a job she had worked so hard to get, if she violated the policy. She had the pregnancy terminated only a few months before the due date. It turned out to be a baby girl. The brutality of abortion forever etched in my mind as she later recounted her experience.
Fully aware of what was ahead of us with this pregnancy, I wanted to keep the baby. My parents had urged for years before we left China that they wanted to have another grand-kid from us. Before we made final decision, I did not tell them about the pregnancy. I also remember someone who said that children have their own fortunes in life, totally separate from their parents'. God has plans for them that are different from the plan He has for the parents. The hardship the parents endure may become assets for children. Then, I thought of my own parents. They never went to school. They survived civil wars, Japanese occupation, the great famine and the Cultural Revolution. They gave me a life they could have never dreamt of. This baby might not be the person who would one day walk on the moon or cure cancer, but he or she, like every unborn child, deserved a chance for life.
I called Pat to tell her about the pregnancy. She sounded very happy for me and understood the dilemma we were in. I knew she was extremely disgusted by the idea of abortion, but she refrained from appearing too overbearing with her view on life. She just told me that we could always put the baby for adoption, if we could not afford to raise him or her.
There were no abortion clinic in Bowling Green. The nearest one were in Nashville, over 60 miles away. Nora urged me to make an appointment as the pregnancy became visible. I always made excuses for failing to do so and promised that I would try again.
One day, we got on I-65 south to see a church friend in a nearby city. As soon as we merged into the traffic from the ramp, many billboards were lined up on both sides of the highway. I had seen them so many times that I did not even care what they were about. I could not afford the things they were selling anyway.
But, out of the blue, I raised up my eyes just in time to catch the image of a lovely baby on one of the billboards. The lines below the baby read " If you kill the baby now, it is murder. If you kill the baby six months ago, it was abortion!" This message hit me like a giant stone and shook me to the core. What we were doing was plotting to kill an innocent baby! I felt the sense of sin engulfing me. On the way back, I slowed down the car and pointed the billboard to Nora as we exited the interstate. This was the moment we decided to bring the child to this world no matter how hard it would be. Even up to this day, I could not explain how I raised my eyes in that split second to catch the image on the billboard. When I told Pat later, she said it was divine providence. I could not convincingly dispute that as I could not with many other things in my life.
After we decided to keep the baby, I called my parents immediately to tell them about the news. We stopped by the health department to have the first check-up, schedule ultra sound and follow-ups. After the ultra sound, I called my parents again and told them it was a boy. They were so thrilled that they dropped the phone and told people who happened to visit them at the time. We also made an appointment with the social worker there as we were told that a pregnant woman might qualify for the W. I. C, a nutritional supplement program for women. infants and children, known as food stamp.
The food stamp provided us with about $80 a month for groceries. It really helped us to stretch the dollars in our dwindling bank account. Programs like this, help people in financial distress due to temporary circumstances to get back on their feet. I believe that this is one of the hallmarks of a civilized society. We were very grateful for the generosity of this country to us. And I was determined to find ways to pay it back.
After I knew that it would be a boy, I started coming up with a name for him. Jason Taylor, my classmate who served as the chapter President of Beta Alpha psi, was the person whom I deeply respected for his leadership and generosity. He had helped me in many ways and on many occasions ever since I stepped my feet on campus. It was him who took me to the Social Security Administration office in Bowling Green to apply for social security card. It was him who photo-copied the materials I needed for my term papers, often at his own expense. I wanted my son to grow up like him. So, I decided that Jason would be the boy's first name. The name also sounds like a word in Chinese which means outstanding life. I picked my English name as his middle name.
I was confined to campus during the entire first semester. Now, we had a car so we could explore the surrounding area. We first checked out some of the city parks, imagining putting Jason in the swing on the play ground. During the peach harvesting season, I came across a small U Pick ad on the local newspaper. I called and found out it was an orchard in Bowling Green. I wrote down the direction. Off we went to the orchard on the outskirt of the city to pick peaches. It was the first time that we ever picked fruits ourselves. After leaving town behind, our car snaked through small forests, passed little shimmering lakes and reflected colorful farm houses in the rear view mirror. The clear blue sky, the warm breeze, the dazzling sun and the peaches drooping from the trees were picture-perfect. Nora said she could feel that Jason was kicking around. He must be very happy to get out from the small and dingy apartment.
Pat was very happy when I told her that we had decided to keep the baby. She said that her daughter, Patience who dropped me on campus after I stayed my first night in Bowling Green on her couch, was a nurse. We could asked her for advices during the pregnancy whenever we needed them. Nora joined the group for new and would-be mothers in Dr. Troutman’s church. She got to know a lot of mothers we normally could not through Sunday services. They studied the Bible together, talked about how to raise God-loving children, and shared their moments of joy, frustration, anxiety and hopes during their pregnancies. Sometimes, Nora would cook Chinese dishes to share with them. Dr. Troutman and his wife Marlene also planned a baby shower in late February for Nora and Jason.
The winter between 1995 and 1996 came earlier than usual, and was very brutal. Temperatures dropped to sub-zero. Western campus was blanketed with ankle-deep snow. Nora is from the southwest part of China where it rarely snows. She was very excited to see the fair-tale scene and wanted to take some photos with the dancing snowflakes on campus. I was very mindful that a slip and fall could be fatal to the baby. So, I held her and bent my knees to reduce impact if a fall occurred. Luckily, we came home with great memories for years to come, but without any mishap.
Nora was still planning on going to graduate school in the fall semester of 1996 after the child birth. She had studied very hard even with the pregnancy for the language test, only available four times a year. The closest test site was on Vanderbilt campus in Nashville. She wanted to take it before the child birth. She signed up for the last test before the due date in mid December.
The day before her test, we braced the howling wind and light snow to get on I-65 to Nashville, As soon as I got the highway, my car started slowing down and I saw “out of gas” sign. I quickly drove to the right lane. The car finally completely stopped before I could pull it to the shoulder. I filled the tank the night before. What had happened? The “out of gas” sign came back on every time I re-started the engine. Then, I thought we needed to get off the highway and figure out what was wrong with the car. There wer not many traffic on the road. I stepped out of my car and waved to the passing vehicles for help. A red Pontiac had passed us and then I saw that it came to a screeching stop. After that, I saw the most daring action I had never seen, the driver drove the car backward on highway toward us. He stopped in front of us, knowing we were stranded, and asked us where we wanted to go. I said that we lived in Bowling Green, the exit he had just passed. We got on his car and he made a U turn at the next exit. Then, using a store phone, I asked one of friends to pick us up. Later, friends told me that when I filled the tank the night before, I did not tighten the cap. Water seeped into the tank and froze at the gas line inside the tank so no gas would flow into the engine. After we warmed up after a quick lunch, our friend drove us to Nashville.
The first winter blizzard in early 1996 was epic, disrupting air traffic and blocking interstates in a vast mid-western states. I planned on going to a job fair in Chicago, but had to cancel the trip. Since we decided to keep the baby, I felt that my family was taking roots in this new country. The responsibility weighed heavily on me. I had to re-double my effort to make it. I had gone to the career center on campus to get help on resume-writing and started to look for jobs. I prayed to God to seek his plan for us. If I could land a job that would sponsor a H1-B visa, we could stay. If not, we had to return to China. So, a job was the only thing on my mind, except the school assignments.
On February 8, we had a morning appointment with the county health department for the scheduled check-up before due date. Nora did experience more fluid than she usually did. But, we had no experience at all about child-bearing. When we got to the health department, the nurse said: “The water broke. We are going to have a baby tonight.” We were dumbfounded. We had been told that the due date was in mid March, five weeks away.
I quickly escorted Nora out of the door to our car. As I drove to the Greenwood Hospital in Bowling Green, the reality finally set in: I would be a father in hours. There would be a little one who would follow me no matter where I go. My life would for ever be changed. But, given our current circumstance, I felt more burden than joy and excitement.
After Nora was checked into a birthing room, it was already noon. I stopped by a KFC to grab a lunch on my way home. I wanted to take Jason’s first photos and recorded his first cry. I took the camera and the cassette recorder back to the birthing room in the afternoon. While Nora was lying in bed, Pat called to the hospital and said comforting words to Nora.
The doctor and nurses wanted a natural birth. But, Jason was not totally in the right position. I sat by Nora’s bedside as they performed the procedures to correct the position. Finally, the doctor decided to not to wait any longer. It was 5:00 am on February, 9th. The doctor made some cuts to bring the baby out of the womb. I recorded Jason’s first cry. I took Jason’s first photo before the nurse cleaned up the blood on his body.
Jason was born with jaundice and had to stay in a special room for observation while Nora was recovering in a ward. Jason was only taken out for breastfeeding a few times a day while he was mostly on formula. Richard, our pastor came to the hospital to pray for Jason and asked God’s protection and guidance over his life. He also prayed for Nora’s speedy recovery. I had attended his sunday services for many months, but never got to know him personally. That visit gave us a chance to get to know his family. He told us that he had three daughters. I said “What a blessing! I really want a daughter, too” He replied: ”Are you sure? In my family, every vote is 4 to 1.” We all burst into laughter.
After four days of observation, we finally could bring Jason home. Nora was still recovering from labor. One of her friend, Min went to the hospital with me. One of the nurses mistook her as Jason’s mother, and said Min and I were a nice couple. We quickly explained that Min was not the mother. I corrected her and said that Min was not the mother. She replied; “you two could sure make a nice couple. The parking lots were covered with heavy snow. After signing the release paperwork, I pulled the car carefully to the hospital entrance and carried Jason out of the sliding door and secured his car seat. When we got back home, I carried Jason to the bottom of the stairs. It was still snowing and the stairs were slippery. I took a deep breathe and started carrying Jason up stairs. I was so afraid of dropping him that I basically walked on my knees. The baby shower Dr. Troutman and his wife had set up, was held as planned. Jason went to his own baby shower.
A little over a month after Nora and Jason were released, I received a $4000 hospital bill in the mail. I was confused because in China, patients always have to pay the hospital before any medical care is provided. I called Patience to ask her about the authenticity of the bill. She told me that wasn’t the case in the United States. Medical professionals are obligated to provide medical services first, and would collect the payments afterward. She also said that she was going to call the delivery doctor to see if Jason’s birth was an emergency. Government would pick up the bill if it was. The doctor confirmed that before he stopped the hospital. The doctor wrote a statement a piece of scrap paper for me. The hospital bill was waived.
I hadn’t made any progress on job search at all. I never heard back from most employers I sent my resume to. I did get an phone interview with Cargill in Minnesota for an internal auditor position. After the hiring manager learnt that I was graduating as an international student, he never replied to my follow-up letter.
Nora suffered from the “baby blue” as most other new moms would. She felt stressed out and often burst into cry for no reason. One day, I handed Jason to me and said that she wanted to get out of the apartment for a break. A few minutes later, she returned home and said she got into an accident. She was a new driver and had not driven for weeks. She was trying to pick up something in front of passenger seat without stopping the car. She hit a big Mack truck. Dr. Troutman came over to take a look and drove it to a body shop his friend ran a few blocks away. We were told that the car was drivable now, but would eventually needed a new radiator. The repair cost was about $400. Our bank account only had enough money for the next rent.
A friend of mine who moved to Nashville not long ago, told me that a Chinese restaurant his wife used to work urgently needed some help. The owner and her boyfriend fled southern China to seek asylum in the United States just a few years ago. They did not speak much English at all. They had problems dealing with the local health department and had failed multiple inspections.
I had already applied for Optional Practical Training(OPT), a one-year work permit for graduating international students. The permit is for the graduates to apply what they have learned in school to the professional work in the real world. Most students have landed offers before their OPT kicks off so that they can prove their worth to their employers within the year. Then, the employer can decide whether they will sponsor their H1-B visa. I would be using the precious one year for my OPT, getting stuck in a restaurant.
I drove the damaged car to Nashville leaving Jason and Nora behind. I tried to stay on the right lane as much as possible. If the car broke down, it would have enough momentum for me to pull over to the shoulder. Jason’s birth had breathed new life to me, too. I said to myself that if I died now, I had already had a son to carry my family name.
When the restaurant owner knew my situation, she advanced me $400 to get my car repaired as soon as possible. To save the repair costs, she and her boyfriend took me to a car junk yard 30 miles away to find the proper radiator. I started to look at the reasons why they had failed the inspections. It was just some minor compliance issues: the way they stored the cooking oil and other ingredients, and the ventilation in the kitchen, etc,
The restaurant business was not doing very well. There were many office buildings nearby, but not many residential buildings. I told me to drive hard on lunch sales from the company employees in these buildings. We stopped by and put the menu in every break room we could access. I answered the phone during lunch time to turn every call into an order. Sales quickly rebounded. I also helped them to deal with issues in their lives. I went to their kids’ school with them to meet the school teachers. She even asked me to go with them when she was visiting her gynecologist.
When my car was in the shop, I needed to go back home to see Nora and Jason once a week. They drove 60 miles one way to send me home after the restaurant was closed. It was already midnight after they returned to theirs. The technician at the shop did his best to fix my car, but there was not much he could do. After the repair, the car still could not perform as well as before the accident. It sounded like out of breathe whenever it went up hill.
Even though I enjoyed a good relationship with the restaurant owner and her other employees, I must be upfront with them. I told them that I was looking for a job with a company that would sponsor my H1-B visa. They totally understood.
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