Bearing Children

In spite of Dante’s vow to himself not to marry Jade, he did. Her father paid for her to attend graduate school at NYU. She slept on a futon on the floor in an East Village dive with Dante and his brother Nik, for a while. Eventually they moved from the East Village to Jackson Heights, Queens.

They had their first child when Dante was in graduate school getting an MA in Asian Studies. It wasn’t an easy pregnancy for anyone involved. Jade didn’t like the college town they were in and spent a chunk of her pregnancy back in Taiwan. There, she could see Chinese doctors and have tiger balm rubbed into her belly by her father.

Charlotte was born after a long labor. Dante walked with Jade around campus for most of the day to encourage the baby to rear it’s face to the world.

Charlotte arrived late at night. The nurse asked Dante if it bothered him that his baby looked Asian. What an odd question to be asked moments after you have participated in miracle of bringing a life into the world. Maybe they always asked fathers in bi-racial births that question.

In the end, it was Jade who was profoundly unhappy being married to an American guy with half-white children. She eventually, after the divorce, moved across the country and seldom saw her children.