The First Beauty in the Village

BEIJING, China — I am writing these words as a love letter to my Chinese mother-in-law, an elegant woman now in her 80s, still with perfect skin, who remains the gentle life force that guides my wife and her two younger siblings.

And me. The unlikeliest of son-in-laws.

I can hear her now in the kitchen, chopping greens for my favorite dumplings and sour cabbage soup. She’s spent the morning at a desk by the living room window in the weak late-autumn light, reading the newspaper with a magnifying glass.

But now there is work to be done.

At Mama’s house, expect three meals a day, each lovingly made, with orders taken beforehand. Most still feature some culinary surprise from a woman with the kitchen skills to open her own restaurant. 

At restaurants, she’ll take a bite of some pricey dish and announce, “I can make this.” And she does.

This morning, her kitchen hairnet pulled over her forehead, she places slabs of steaming Beijing onion bread onto my plate, ignoring my wife’s complaints that she’s only making me fatter. 

She brews my coffee, rushing first to the pot when I rise to refill my cup. A Buddhist for decades, she maintains a vegetarian diet, but still cooks up our favorite pork and beef dishes, watching as we eat.

Once a month, as part of her faith, she buys a live fish — an eel or carp — at the local market, which she releases into a nearby canal. A commuted death sentence from a cuisine that thrives on its seafood. 

My mother-in-law is the main reason I return here each year. To see her smile, to watch the way she instinctively covers her mouth when she laughs. I tell my wife that, to me, her mother’s voice often sounds flattened, a bit like a duck.

My wife says it’s not proper to say such things. But it’s true. At home in San Francisco, I love eavesdropping on my wife’s weekly Friday night phone talks with her mother, who fills her in on the neighborhood gossip, what her grandson, relatives and little-old-lady friends are up to.

All in that delightful little quack.

Now that both my own parents are gone, my mother-in-law represents the closest thing I have to maternal love, the last bit of tender, sheltering approval I have left on this planet.

My mother-in-law gets my off-beat sense of humor. While her daughter angers at the inappropriate things I say, Mama laughs.

At her big, goofy American court-jester of a son-in-law.

Years ago, when we lived in Los Angeles, my in-laws helped us paint our kitchen. Mama’s section had a few goofs, which I insisted was because she had a glass right eye.

Her daughter fumed. Mama laughed.

On walks, I’ll spot a sidewalk sign ahead and when passing bang it with my fist when my mother-in-law isn’t looking, then bend over, yowling, holding my head. The first time, she rushed to my side, cooing in concern.

Now she just laughs at this clownish foreigner, who’s sixty-something going on six, who feels incredibly lucky just to have her in his life. Mama says it’s best I can’t speak decent Chinese because I’m such a teaser I would probably wreak havoc in the family.

Of all the upstanding young Chinese suitors my wife could have chosen, you have to wonder what crossed my mother-in-law’s mind when her daughter brought home a big-nosed, foreign bai gui, or White Devil.

She now says that I looked kind. But she later shook her head when she heard me endlessly compliment her daughter’s looks, insisting that she’d been taken in by my “sweet tongue.”

After all these years, Mama and I still do not fully understand one another; we hail from disparate cultures from far-away parts of the world. But we do not let mere words come between us.

An older cousin once joked that, growing up in rural China, Mama was the third beauty in the village, a good-natured knock on her looks. Each time it’s repeated, now mostly by me, Mama laughs like she’s heard it for the first time.

This year, I have taken to moving the portrait of Mama’s only granddaughter, a picture taken when the girl was just five, which hangs prominently in the living room. Mama dotes on this now-college-aged teenager, whom I insist is a self-centered little operator who wears far too much makeup.

When Mama isn’t looking, I’ll turn the picture upside-down. The next thing I notice, it’s been righted again. Mama never tires of our little game. Wait, while she’s in the kitchen, I need to go flip that picture again.

 Until recently, my mother-in-law travelled with my wife and I across China and the western U.S. She took long bike rides along the Venice Beach boardwalk in LA.

This year, we visit several swanky hotel lobbies for high tea, then walk the neighborhood to see the sights. Mama is half my size, and takes ten steps to my one, but when someone mentions she might be tired, she responds with elan.

“Who’s tired?”

Back in her career days, she worked in an ordnance factory that produced infrared and illuminating devices and later, I’m told, helped produce the chemicals to preserve Chairman Mao’s body, a waxen figure that lies in state under plexiglass in Tiananmen Square.

She fights to pay every restaurant bill and I have the rib bruises to prove it. We have talked about bringing her back to the U.S. so we can be closer, but she won’t have it. Beijing is her life. This is where her friends live, where her only son, his wife and her grandson live.

At 12, the boy is protective of his grandmother. But like his American uncle, he’s a rascal. Not long ago, we give Mama a prized iPhone 12 from the U.S. The grandson, whom we call “Little Monkey,” offers to help her with the apps. Then the monkey boy takes it for himself. 

“It’s too heavy for you, grandma,” he tells her.

So we buy Mama a new Chinese phone. She resists at first, like she always does with any gift; the old one is good enough. Slowly she relents as the salesman shows her the nifty features.

It’s the latest model and I think Mama is proud to have it.

“Today is a good day,” she announces.

The other afternoon, Mama and my wife and I walk to a place nearby to get our feet massaged. By the time we return to the apartment, the sun has set on another early December day.

We sit together at the dining room table, cracking sunflower seeds, laughing. When my stories get too ribald, my wife refuses to translate them, so I use my smartphone language app.

Mama laughs. 

Then I open a can of beer and toast my two favorite women in China, or the entire world for that matter: Here’s to my long-suffering wife and a mother-in-law who, for me, will always be the first beauty in the village.