Basically, My Parents Are

Certifiably Insane

            by Jacob Schneider

 

            When my parents first told my siblings and me that they were going to adopt a baby from China, we were sure it was a joke. After all, they were old and already had three kids. I already shared a room with my brother. How would she fit into the house? Another baby? Who does that?

            Over a riveting game of Madden NFL Football (complete with pixilated cheerleaders), my fifteen-year-old brother, Nate, and I debriefed the night’s developments.

            “They’re not actually going to do it, are they?” he whispered.

            “No, I think they’re just trying to replace me.” It seemed like a reasonable explanation. The year before when a friend of mine left for college, her parents had bought a dog. But my mom is allergic to dogs, so I guess they decided a baby would have to serve as a stand-in.

            I figured that within a few weeks, they would have realized how crazy they were to even think about adopting a baby, but it seemed that they just got more excited. My dad found their old parenting textbooks in the garage (rotting from ten years of non-use) and my mom went bargain shopping at the baby store.

            The more excited they got, the more we resisted. My sister had a tantrum the night my parents tried to rearrange her room to cram in a crib (they ended up putting it downstairs). My brother chimed in, saying that there was no way he could practice his trumpet with a baby in the house (apparently, studies showed that babies liked music). I went for broke and pointed out that I couldn’t visit colleges if my parents were in China (it was decreed that I wouldn’t visit colleges).

            Three reasonable arguments shot down. In fact, it seemed that the more we tried to resist, the more resolved they were that they’d do it. They even seemed to derive some pleasure out of seeing us squirm. Every time I complained about how little sleep I get, my mom added, “And just think about next year with a crying baby!” Whenever a parent of a friend of mine lamented the impending empty nest, my parents would chuckle (loudly) that they wouldn’t have to worry about that for a long time. (Or maybe ever, I realized when my dad’s AARP card came in the mail.)

            It didn’t help that, Berkeley being Berkeley, everyone around us acted as if it were completely normal for middle-aged couple with three children to adopt a Chinese baby. “Well, all I can say is you’ll have to invite me to the bat mitzvah,” said one nonplussed family friend. She added that she could recommend a great developmental psychologist (should the need arise, of course). Another asked if my little sister would already be talking when my parents went to China to get her.

            “Not English,” responded my dad.

            “Good! I’ve always wanted to learn Chinese,” said the friend.

            My parents found other possessed Bay Area soon-to-be adoptive parents and they exchanged e-mails about such topics as “Dental complications common in Jiangxi province,” and “How to convince a skeptical Chinese bureaucrat that you’re not, indeed, going to sell your baby into slavery.” My mother excitedly regaled us with exciting tidbits such as, “Did you know that your sister is from a region of China known for particularly short people?” Which was, of course, reassuring considering the average height of Chinese women.

            The prospect of impending motherhood brought out my mom’s primal Jewish mother instincts. “Do you think she’ll like matzo ball soup?” she’d walk around asking. She’d volunteer me for a role play.

            “Have some cookies,” she’d offer.

            “No thanks.”

            “Okay, have some ice cream,” she'd insist.

            “No.”

            “Fine, if you must, have both.” And so my Chinese sister would be fattened up.

            Her neuroses engaged, my mom started dusting off the old baby books she initially bought when she was pregnant with me in the 1980s. It’s okay, though. They’re still relevant. “Don’t introduce babies to spandex until one year of age,” proclaims one chapter from Penelope Leach’s timeless classic. “It could prove hazardous to health.” My brother and I had to dispose of most of our wardrobes.

            But most significantly, it was through the build-up to the adoption that my mom found her true calling: Craigslist. Now I know that you’re probably thinking “Isn’t Craigslist the place where losers in their twenties read ‘Missed Connections’ in hopes that someone noticed them?” Well, yes. But it also happens to be perfectly suited to thrifty Jewish tastes. In fact, in the months since the phenomenon took hold of our family I’ve come to consider our entire lives up until that moment as simply preparation for Craigslist: the bar mitzvah parties snuck into for the food, the time my dad ordered several boxes of toilet paper by mail from Office Depot to get a free refrigerator (not to mention the time that he bought $250 of milk at Safeway to get a 5% coupon), the ticker in the corner of the desktop on his laptop with up-to-the-minute prices of fried chicken at KFC, Church’s, and Popeye’s.

            I guess I should have realized something was wrong when, on a friend’s recommendation, my mom decided to buy our new minivan on Craigslist. A simple search for “Toyota Sienna,” turned up several smoky pickup trucks, a “black market” body shop, and a dominatrix in the Castro specializing in “minivan-driving types.” Undeterred, my mom plowed on until she found a reasonably priced, only slightly foul smelling used minivan. The emergency brake light didn’t work, the car was plastered with “We love America” stickers, and the dashboard was draped with a disturbingly brown and rotten lei, but the price was right (and it was a definite step up from our old used minivan, in which the electrical system beeped madly whenever we drove over a bump and the lights hung down from the roof of the car on strands of old and exposed wire to create what we liked to call our “chandelier”). Despite my initial skepticism, I had to admit that my parents had scored a coup on Craigslist. That episode over, I was intent on returning to our only slightly abnormal lives.

            I should have known better.

            “Get in the car!” my mom ordered the next day when I got home from school. “Someone in Tiburon is offering an Ikea bookshelf at, get this, FIVE DOLLARS off the list price! But we’re going to have to make some time if we’re going to get it.”

            After a twenty-minute jaunt over the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge in which we shook two pursuing highway patrol car’s and cut off three ambulances, we arrived at the scene of the sale. A crowd of young white people with dreads and middle-aged Jews surrounded a small bookshelf in the corner of an apartment, salivating. “The back, like, fell off, but I kind of like it better that way. So this is, like, a double deal,” explained the owner, a women who was just reaching the age at which the tattoos she used to think were cute turned into large blue smears. My mom eyed the competition and moved in for the kill. “I’ll even buy it for $4.50 less than Ikea’s price,” she announced aggressively. The offer was followed by a round of shocked muttering throughout the crowd. One by one the people stepped back. “I just don’t think I can match that,” lamented one man, shaking his head in defeat, his gray, chest-length beard rocking back and forth like a pendulum. In celebration of her victory, my mom benevolently allowed us to listen to NPR instead of KPFA on the ride back (but only because KPFA had a fund drive going).

            It became a daily ritual: we’d come home, check the internet listings, frantically call potential sellers, and rush out to whatever far-flung suburbs the goods were at. In this way, we got my baby sister’s crib, six Baby Einstein videos at two-for-one, and several pieces of random furniture. Craigslist became a sort of religion for my mother. A lifelong agnostic and tortured Jew (is there any other kind?), the prospect of cheap furniture renewed her faith in God and brought out her latent revolutionary tendencies (which had lain dormant since she attended her last anarchist convention her senior year of college). “We’re sticking it to the man,” she explained on one of our missions. Apparently Ikea was the man, buying anything there was passive acceptance of the patriarchy, and valiant resistance was purchasing inferior goods at any and all opportunities. Just think of it as a redistribution of wealth. The Craigslist period went into hibernation when we ran out of space in our garage for the excess furniture, but I’m sure that as soon as we take inventory and receive new revolutionary marching orders, it will rear its ugly head once again.

            “So what about your little sister?” you might wonder. Well, my dad went to China for two weeks and returned covered in days of spit up with little Lia Fu Hao in his arms (my mom’s fear of flying prevented her from taking the journey). I’m sure she thinks we’re a little bit nutty, but she hasn’t asked for a return ticket to the Yichun Social Welfare Agency just yet, so we’re hopeful. Sometimes we like to imagine what her internal monologue must sound like. “Somehow I seem to have ended up with the most neurotic and crazy family I’ve ever met,” she must think. “They run around yelling at each other in a strange language I don’t understand. But they seem to have a few redeeming qualities. I guess I’ll stick it out.”