Starting a family in China can be a unique adventure, especially for cross-cultural couples. A native of Denmark, Simon Gjeroe shares his own foray into the world of parenting with his Chinese partner through his new book Made in China: A memoir of Marriage and Mixed Babies in the Middle Kingdom, which is published by Earnshaw Books.
It’s my pleasure to introduce you to this book through the following excerpt.
You can learn more about Simon Gjeroe and Made in China: A memoir of Marriage and Mixed Babies in the Middle Kingdom at Simon’s website. The book Made in China: A memoir of Marriage and Mixed Babies in the Middle Kingdom is available at Amazon, where your purchases help support this site.
The first time I really started to consider my life as a prospective father was when I was around twenty-two or twenty-three years old. One day, as I was staying in a small village in the southern province of Guangxi, I chanced upon an old soothsayer from the Yi ethnic minority who I still remember vividly. She stood only about 1.5 meters (less than five feet) tall, had more wrinkles than a Chinese Shar-pei puppy, and only a few crooked teeth left in her mouth, all stained a reddish-black, dyed from years of chewing betel nuts. She wore a big black turban with her white hair sticking out, and a cape over a simple blue and reddish set of clothes. Around her neck, dangling from her long earlobes, and wrapped around her wrists were elaborate and lovely pieces of silver jewelry. I believe (maybe naively) that I was the first foreigner she had ever set her beady black eyes on. She looked directly at me for a while and then took my left hand and turned it over and looked at my palm with a concentrated look on her face. Then she started to tell me what my future would be. Maybe because of the betel in her mouth or because she spoke only limited and broken Chinese, and my Chinese was very far from perfect at the time, I did not understand that much. However, what I did understand was that I would live to be 88 years old, and father no less than four children. After she finished predicting my future, almost to underscore her divination, she spat a red chunk of saliva on the ground dangerously close to my feet and left.
Fu and I had been trying for children for some months (Fu had long since given up smoking), even before we were married (please don’t tell anyone), but since nothing had really happened and considering we were both already in our mid-thirties, we began to wonder if everything was okay down there. This included me visiting a very local hospital to have ‘my everything’ looked at thoroughly, while struggling to keep the door closed to prevent people from peeking in. Ultimately, I was prescribed something probably derived from a poor dead animal or a fast-disappearing exotic forest somewhere in Southeast Asia. It wasn’t fair on my little boys to stand trial on such a hot and humid August day in Beijing anyway.
Then I did what probably quite a few Chinese, but very few foreigners, would consider normal. I invited a couple of friends out for a meal at the local restaurant called Guolizhuang, which translates into something like “the contents of the pot will make you strong”. Here we were shown into a small private room for a dinner consisting of mainly animal genitalia, which, according to Chinese beliefs, should increase male potency. To be more precise, a set menu which had been given the poetic name “The Essence of the Golden Buddha” was presented to us and it included not only ox, sheep and dog penis and testicles, but also a floating turtle and a sprinkle of seahorses. To my surprise, it was really tasty, although the dog penises were a little like eating a really old gummy bear. The waitress politely explained that our female companion should avoid eating the testicles, because it could give her both a deeper voice and even a beard. But she added that the penises would be fine for her to eat.
Harmless or not, I have to say that I was very sceptical to begin with, but I must admit that for the next twenty-four hours after we had finished our exotic meal, I have never felt so energized. I might sound weird, but I really felt like a ball of pure energy was streaming out from my belly and through my whole body. Animal genitalia or exotic forest plants, whatever the reason, something happened down there and just one month after our December wedding, Fu came to me one day with the delightful, but shocking news that she was pregnant.
Many thanks to Simon for sharing this excerpt! You can learn more about Simon Gjeroe and Made in China: A memoir of Marriage and Mixed Babies in the Middle Kingdom at Simon’s website. The book Made in China: A memoir of Marriage and Mixed Babies in the Middle Kingdom is available at Amazon, where your purchases help support this site.
Another AMWF couple in the news:
Chris Sheng and Courtney Stodden.