Maybe that hurt was less dangerous, maybe it wouldn’t result in a child being killed, but when it happened in her childhood, she wanted to disappear. Sometimes she wanted to die. She hated the sight of her own face in the mirror.
Susanna won’t know how to comfort Harriet if anything like that happens. She’ll deliver platitudes about racial equality, but she won’t be able to say, It happened to me too. I survived. You’ll survive. She won’t be able to say, This is our family. Everything Susanna knows about Chinese culture comes from books and movies. Without her real mother, Harriet may grow up hating the Chinese part of herself.
* * *
Racism practice has strained friendships. Roxanne has been telling Frida that she doesn’t understand.
“You can’t,” Roxanne says. “I don’t care how much you’ve read about intersectionality. You won’t have to worry about Harriet getting shot. You can take her anywhere. She’ll never get hassled.”
When Isaac is older, Roxanne will have to teach him how to handle himself around the police. She can’t ever let him play with toy guns or weapons or make gun shapes with his hands.
Frida has no room to argue. She is to Roxanne as Susanna is to her. The most palatable kind of Asian. Academic class, not business owner, not restaurant owner, not dry cleaner, not greengrocer, not salon worker, not refugee.
The lessons have made her feel ashamed for desiring another white man, but only white men have ever pursued her. She’s moved in white worlds, has only had two Asian lovers, both of whom she attempted to turn into serious boyfriends to please her parents, one of whom thought she was too damaged, another who thought she was too negative, both of whom felt she wouldn’t get along with their mothers or bear healthy children because of her depression. She shouldn’t have told them about taking medication. Shouldn’t have mentioned seeing a therapist. When she was younger, she used to think that if she ever had a child, she’d want that child to be entirely Chinese, but she didn’t realize how difficult it would be to find a Chinese man who wanted her.
She’s started fantasizing about another baby. A clean slate. Though she worries that a bad mother plus a bad father would produce a sociopath, that the new child would contain all their negligence and selfishness and bad instincts, the new child might also be just fine.
Loneliness has its own strange, insistent heat. She hasn’t thought about the bell tower even once since meeting Tucker. She no longer dreams of murdering her counselor. She’s regained her appetite. Watching her comfort Emmanuelle on the playground, Tucker said, “You know. I think you’re a good mother, Frida. I really do.”
* * *
July ends with joint evaluations at the mothers’ school. In their classroom, Frida is paired with Colin. The fathers have to take several turns so all the mothers can have partners, though only their first turn will count.
After they shake hands, Ms. Russo starts the clock. At the first station, their dolls fight over a truck. Buoyed by her new happiness, Frida outtalks and outsoothes Colin. Emmanuelle outshares Colin’s doll.
At the second station, Colin’s doll kisses Emmanuelle on the cheek without first getting permission. Frida and Colin deliver speeches on appropriate and inappropriate touching. After this month of playground fights and unwanted touching and racial bias, Emmanuelle has a short fuse. She smacks Colin’s doll in the face. She apologizes for hitting, but only after eight prompts from Frida. Frida steels herself for another month without phone privileges.
Things get uglier at the race-and gender-sensitivity station. Emmanuelle calls the boy the N-word, he calls her a chink. He calls her a bitch, which he pronounces with a spray of spittle. The children are separated. They listen to lectures about respect and equality.
During his lecture, Colin forgets to mention the need for respecting women. Frida talks about the ramifications of slavery, the effects of institutional racism, how mass incarceration is an extension of slavery, how there aren’t enough Black lawmakers and judges, how power begets power, what a difficult life the boy will have just trying to grow up, trying not to get shot by police or jailed for misdemeanors. She talks a good game, far better than Colin, who, though he speaks about the struggles of Asians in general, can’t narrate a corresponding history of the Chinese in America. He doesn’t know that Frida is Chinese. He’s never asked.
When they’re finished, Colin bursts into tears. “Thanks a lot, Miss Ivy League.” He accuses Frida of fucking things up for him. He thinks the instructors programmed his doll to be extra aggressive today. The instructors tell him to collect himself but don’t cite him for swearing.