Julia María Schiavone Camacho's Zhong Yi

More rounds of this had pushed Xiaolong to his limit. “The zhong yi guess and count on luck. They can cause harm,” he’d blurted.

The air in the cramped dining room had thickened.

Since Xiaolong and I have always wanted kids, and we’re over forty with none, I’d considered going to the zhong yi.

But I’d felt socked in the gut.

His parents pushed too hard. Nothing he has done, his PhD, his work, seemed good enough to them. Their disapproval certainly hasn’t eased the challenges he’s confronted. As their firstborn and oldest son, he’s faced pressures that I have struggled to accept even as I’ve worked to grasp Chinese culture, which dovetails and clashes with my Mexican-Italian heritage.

In his large extended family, everyone our age, every last cousin, has a child. “Hello, Uncle and Aunt,” came the repeated greetings of children and grandchildren who’d been born in his absence, stirring a mixture of feelings in us. Owing to the one-child policy, most people our age have only one kid. A few lucky ones have two or more children.

So do my husband’s two younger siblings.

At a restaurant in downtown Lianyungang, I’d met Brother-in-Law’s two sons. A tall, handsome boy of thirteen, Yujun spoke fluent English. Too shy to speak to us very much, Xiangyu had terrified the family when he’d been born over ten weeks prematurely six years before. “Hello. How are you?” the boys’ mother asked me with a smile. She gave me a handmade red silk scarf by Refosian, a brand founded in 1862. Despite her friendliness and generosity, I recalled hearing about how she bullies my in-laws and complains we contribute too little. But if she resented us, she didn’t show it. We all chatted as platters of oysters and softshell crab and prawns and myriad delicacies appeared on the big, round darkwood table in our private room.

“Welcome to the family,” Da Ge, the oldest son of Baba’s oldest brother, had said to me at another dinner. His wife had squeezed my hands in her own and smiled brightly. Over fragrant jasmine tea and tender beef, pork belly, fried eggplant, and other treats, they and other relatives enveloped me in the family fold. I sensed a sweet gratitude that I’d made my husband happy.

Having at last brought me home, he beamed. A new light shone in his eyes. At the same time, Xiaolong—who’d grown tired of people mangling his name for over ten years and adopted the name Alex in the US—felt conflicted. Torn between worlds.

“He thought you agreed,” Mama shouted now. Our cousin had got up early—the zhong yi insisted on seeing you before sunrise, more nonsense to Xiaolong—and was downstairs, ready to take us. “How can you do this to him?” As Mama’s tone softened, I heard the pain in her voice.

And yet, I would not be dragged out of bed. My husband would not be manipulated.

While I tried to stop crying and go back to sleep, he joined his parents for breakfast at the gatehouse, where they had it out. Not just about the zhong yi. As they fought about money, our contribution to the family, and our life in the US, they got to a more honest place about the difficulties in his career, if not our childlessness.

When he came back to our room, he crushed me to him. He’d brought me zhou and baozi, rice porridge and steamed meat-filled buns, which I ate as he conveyed the exchange. He looked as bleak as I felt. “Is it our fault?” I asked. “Should we tell them about the miscarriages and failed IVF?” Our gazes meshed. No, we decided without words, still can’t bear to.

What if I had met my husband at twenty-six, instead of thirty-six?

When a pregnancy test had come out positive the next year, we’d hugged and laughed, and I’d cried. My heart had soared, until the first ultrasound.

I’ll never know if I would have miscarried in my twenties. Still, at low points I wonder how many modern women are miserable. We have too many choices. Too many pressures.

While in China, I had a job interview via Zoom with the college where I now teach.

After a quick, late dinner with the family, Xiaolong and I flew to Beijing that night.

The next day, in a Latin American history class at Bei Da, I spoke about the journeys of Chinese-Mexican families who were expelled from Mexico in the 1930s.

Afterward Xiaolong and I roamed Bei Da. He’d done a master’s in physics here. Having once been a Qing imperial retreat, the grounds comprised footpaths, gardens, a dark green lake, and weeping willows. Later we dined in an upstairs restaurant across the street from the university. Lingering at our corner table, we savored our juicy sweet-and-sour-glazed pork ribs. “Reminds me of hotpot night,” he said, and we shared a bittersweet smile. After the zhong yi row, we’d gone out to dinner alone. We’d added raw beef and greens and noodles to the boiling broth in a pan at the center of our booth and leisurely reveled in our hotpot.

In Beijing, we walked the hilly, wooded paths and gazed at the serene blue lakes of the Summer Palace. “It’s a growing trend,” Xiaolong told me, nodding subtly to the young women dressed from head to toe in traditional garb. They posed for photographs beneath plum blossoms.

We toured the Forbidden City. Taking pictures that I’d later show my Modern China and Asian Americas classes, we saw cushioned wood thrones once used by Ming and Qing emperors.

“I’m so glad you finally brought her to visit!” a Chinese-Manchu paternal second cousin told my husband, aiming a wide smile at me. “Try these,” she said, gesturing to the pan-fried buns by the platter of marinated lamb at our nook in a historic Muslim restaurant. An academic as well, she gave us a set of fine teas. And me, a silk scarf of red, green, and cream. “The colors of the Mexican and Italian flags,” my husband later remarked on the coincidence with a grin.

From the capital, we took a high-speed train to Tai’an, Shandong, home to Baba’s second oldest brother’s family. Da Ge, the oldest of this branch, also a college professor, told me, “Welcome to the family and Tai’an. Good to have you back here,” he toasted my husband, who rarely drinks alcohol. The fragrance of baijiu mixed pleasantly with the aromas of smoked meats, fried pancakes, and other delights that covered the long wood table at Da Ge’s home.

The next morning, the scents of zhou topped with shredded beef and salted duck egg filled the air, steam rising from our bowls and warming our faces, before Da Ge took us to hike Mount Tai. Halfway up, we drank green tea at an outdoor café. As we continued along the trail lined with pines and cypresses, I marveled at rock inscriptions in big red characters. Pointing to carvings on a cliffside, Da Ge said, “That’s a couplet,” and told a story of a Zhou emperor who’d come here to worship a deity. We visited shrines and temples. I prayed. We strolled among remnants of ancient structures. From the misty peak, we rode a ski lift down the mountain.

“We climbed those steep steps all the way to the top,” we boasted over dinner at the home of the second brother. The third brother invited us for lunch the following day. I relished our time with the brothers and their sister and her husband. “I’m so glad you married a Catholic wife,” their Christian mother told my husband. To me, “Pray. Keep your faith,” said the lady, the biological mother of only the youngest. The woman who birthed the others died tragically when they were children. Before we left, Da Ge gave us a history book that bears pieces of antique porcelains and embroidery and samples of granite and medicinal herbs from Mount Tai.

We returned to Lianyungang, where I felt raw and stretched thin. With our three-week trip to China half over, I longed to leave almost as much as I dreaded it.

We met the co-owners and toured the factory, which made parts for machines that produced clothing. We visited Brother-in-Law’s home, as well as the home his family would soon move to in a new high-rise building at the edge of the city. Though vertigo stopped me from getting too close, I glimpsed the urban skyline through a wall of windows. Another room afforded views of green hills. I took a walk with his wife in a park across the road from their apartment. Waving to a tall, older man, she called, “Baba!” She introduced me to her father, whose family lived nearby. I recalled hearing how he tells his older grandson not to be like my husband and take better care of his parents when he grows up. As the younger grandson rode his bike on a path that wound beside a stream, the adults chatted amiably. Father and daughter accommodated me by speaking English. Not for the first time, I wished I could carry a conversation in Mandarin beyond the simple phrases I’d learned in my language classes.

Soon my husband’s sister came from a nearby city to see us. “What did you do in Beijing?” she asked over a fresh batch of sizzling dumplings and goose eggs from Mama’s small farm outside the factory. Sister-in-Law’s calm presence paired with two-year-old Xixi’s curiosity lifted the mood at the gatehouse. When the whole family went out to pick berries in the country, Xixi held up a plump, juicy strawberry and called to us in her lilting chirp, “Look, Jiu Jiu and Jiu Ma.” Now she has a little brother, whom we see via WeChat face-calls and videos.

“Nephew! How good to see you and meet Niece,” Baba’s sister said from her hospital bed with a fond smile that touched us deeply. We had awoken at 5:00 a.m. to drive over three-and-a-half hours to Nanjing to visit her. After gathering in the waiting room, the family took turns at her bedside. Leaving Baba with only two of six siblings, she has since passed away.

On Tomb Sweeping Day, my husband took me to Donghai, his hometown, less than an hour from Lianyungang. At dawn, he and the other men of the family cleaned the ancestral tombs. Generally, only men go out to the gravesites on this day. But since it was my first visit, and I’m a foreigner, I got to come, too. I watched the men burn joss paper money to ensure our ancestors would continue to have a good afterlife. Grateful and moved, I remembered celebrating Día de los Muertos with my family in Arizona and Sonora.

After Tomb Sweeping, we assembled at a family restaurant. The extended family filled every table in the main area and side rooms. A familiar question repeated itself as my husband took me around to greet more relatives. “When will you have kids?” Despite the twisting in my stomach, I loved meeting our maternal grandfather, uncles and aunts, and more paternal family as well as seeing others I’d met before, including Tai’an Da Ge and his son.

At home, no one brought up the zhong yi again. But it hovered over us like the fogs at the top of Mount Tai.

Perturbed and overwrought, I was still unprepared to leave. That afternoon, we packed our things into the car of my husband’s high school friend, who would take us to a reunion and from there to the airport. He got into the driver’s seat, giving the family privacy.

We all stood on the gravel beside the gatehouse. As we said goodbye, as my husband fought to stay composed, a spike went through my chest. My eyes watered, a sob broke from my throat. Mortified, I blinked the tears back. But they kept coming. I took shallow, shaky breaths. My lips trembled. To my dismay, I couldn’t push any words from my mouth. My cheeks burned. Baba and Brother-in-Law smiled and looked a little awkward. My older nephew smiled softly. “There, now. Don’t cry,” his mother said and hugged me. My mind flashed to instances when I’d tried to sort out her genuine and contrived smiles, wondering if all she felt toward us was bitterness. How unfair of me, I thought, as compassion emanated from her. Mama clasped both of my hands in her own. Her eyes brightened. I could hear her own shallow breathing.

We were asking each other for forgiveness, working to bridge the ocean that divided us, or simply trying to move past the heaviness of the last few days.

My husband’s mother. My husband, the sweetest, most loving man. His smiling eyes make my breath catch and my knees weak. I feel warm and grounded and safe in his tight hugs. His pain reaches inside me and squeezes my heart.

His parents, his homeland. Soon the Pacific would separate us once more. Who knew when we would see them again?

Although we’d been married for over six years, this was our first trip to China.

When my husband had attended his grandfather’s funeral and his sister’s wedding four years earlier, I’d been home with my third pregnancy. In spite of the bad signs, we’d grabbed onto hope. He’d told the family I couldn’t miss work. He and I Skyped daily, my morning and his night, or vice versa. I gave him updates, the most wrenching one: I lost the baby. With Xiaolong still in China, my mother and stepfather visited me in New York. At a Mother’s Day mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, I’d bled and cramped in secret, praying and yearning for my husband.

On the drive to the high school reunion, I held onto him and he rubbed my back. We exchanged weighted glances. Why did we scorn something his parents believed in? Why couldn’t I have gone to the zhong yi? Mama and Baba, too, had felt wronged, their hurt as palpable as the warming April air. The reason began to sink in: We refused to let them help us.

The reunion, at least, would be lighter.

“It’s so good to meet you,” wife after wife said to me at the restaurant, before they and their children retreated to their own private room. As part of the couple of honor, and since I was new to the group, I dined with the husbands. Is it also because I’m not a mother? I wondered uncharitably. Over shrimp and trout and varied delicacies, as banter zinged across the table, Xiaolong’s high school friends showed us pictures of their kids, some of whom were playing games in the next room. One asked, “What about you? When will you have kids?”

After dinner, at the airport an hour away, Baba and Brother-in-Law showed up, unannounced, to see us off. It felt like another layer of forgiveness. I clung to it as we chatted with them while we waited to board. “Have a nice time in Shanghai. Have a safe trip,” they said. As we headed past security, we waved to them over our shoulders.

On the plane, Xiaolong and I slumped in our seats. We looked forward to spending the last leg in Shanghai. Surely, the college reunion would be light and fun.

After his buddies bore off my husband for a guy’s night, I read a novel in our room at the Westin Bund Center, courtesy of a mate who’d arranged the stay for everyone. Later, handing me the barbecued meats on skewers he’d brought back from dinner, Xiaolong said, “I can’t believe Stone came,” touched that a good friend had flown all the way from Gansu Province on short notice to see him.

The next morning, the hotel buffet delighted us. We gorged on youtiao, dumplings, baozi, omelets, bacon, scones, and other treats. At midday, we met a few friends for crispy duck. For dinner a close comrade and his family invited us to a Buddhist restaurant. “We wanted you to experience something unique,” his wife said, as waiters set down vegetarian fare in an array of colors, textures, and flavors. I prayed to a Buddha before we left. “In college we would’ve beat these suckers,” Stone groused to Xiaolong, who laughed as he caught the basketball at a game between the reunion men and a group of twenty-somethings. With the other wives, I stood on the sidelines cheering our team on. We wandered through gardens at Yuyuan and shops in the Old City. We strolled the Bund. Art deco granite structures towered over the snaky deep-green Huangpu River. Cherry blossoms, flowers, and wall gardens dotted the river walk. Across the water, the buildings of Pudong pierced the sky. At a seafood dinner, college friends showed us pictures of their kids. As she picked up a morsel of crawfish with her chopsticks, one wife said to me, “I have colleagues who’ve chosen not to have kids, and that’s all right.” She’s trying to make me feel better, I told myself. But I almost preferred the question that came up here, too, “When will you have kids?” One friend suggested to my husband, “You should take her to Nanjing to see this zhong yi…He’s the best. Meanwhile, she should avoid cold drinks…”

It is not only Xiaolong’s people. My Mexican mother, disheartened and frantic because none of her four children has given her any grandchildren yet, sends me remedies. “Mija. You have to try this one. Boil a fish head in broth…”

For Chinese, having grandchildren is even more crucial.

“Come back and do IVF in China. We’ll pay for it,” Mama offered, and Baba nodded, when we face-called them via WeChat from our home in Ohio.

Tears stung my eyes. Had they forgiven us? Were they asking us to forgive them?

My husband hugged me to his side, and we both nodded. “All right, the next time we visit,” he told his mother. Our way of offering and asking for forgiveness in return.

After we ended the call, Xiaolong and I traded sad smiles over what our mothers still did not know. Squandering precious resources and energy, we blew our savings on IVF—without a single viable egg to show for it. Wishing we’d skipped IVF, we are exploring alternatives and saving again. For us, longing for a child goes beyond culture and tradition. It fills my heart with light to know that our parents will adore our child no matter how we bring it into our home. When they find a way on nearly every call to remind us we have no kids yet, they only want to save us from a fate of reaching old age without children.