As I was driving home from the hospital at midnight, it occurred to me it had always been a sign: in the days and hours leading up to his birth, I’ve been reading Ulysses – Dedalus’ (Telemachus’) journey to search for his father, or rather, Bloom’s (Odysseys’) journey of the day leading to the meeting with a son he didn’t know he was going to have. In the hour before his birth, as Dongdong squeezed my hand the hundredth time driving her nails deep into my palm, I watched her thrashing the last bit of her strength into the baby as it inched toward the first second of his living day, I was thinking, I’m going to love her for the rest of my life. As at that time, the baby was still largely a murky concept to me, I didn’t know what to expect of it, all I wanted was for this pain to end soon for her. When I first saw his/her face, my mind went blank. Here he/she came, facing me with the eyes closed tight, oblivious of my existence. The nurse took hold of him/her, and I saw him, the full length of a being, still holding his breath. And intuitively I held my breath too, waiting to exhale with him, the first breath of his life. In a couple of second he opened his mouth, hesitated for a bit, then there it came. My son, living and breathing on a mid-summer night. And he was moving his fingers already, individually, surprisingly dexterous. The nurse put him on a tray. I stepped in to take a closer look at him, his face seemed a bit unfamiliar to me, as he opened his eyes, and I tried to take it in, this is the manifestation of my gene, my father’s gene, who was waiting thousands of miles away with equally bated breath. I called home and said “Dad, I got a son.” And Mom later called me back and said Dad’s eyes were brimmed with tears when he heard that. I went back to look at the baby again, not to search for any trace of the lineage, just to take a good look at him. For a baby he has distinctive features, inky pupil, an arc for a nose, rather big ears and smooth skin, nothing like the wrinkled skin I’ve been reading about. He cried a bit, but soon got tired of it, and when the nurse put him in my arms, he yawned.
Wang Maomao 