The Birthday Party

         Our kids hadn’t been at their school too long when we started to hear the rumors.  I was lying in bed with Will one night, asking him what his favorite part of the day was.  I do this, because Will is definitely a glass half full kind of guy, and if you just ask him how his day was, you’ll get a list of grievances half a mile long. 

That particular night, he paused a moment then said, “Nothing, because of Leyton.”

It took me a minute to figure out that Leyton was a person.  “What about Leyton?”

“He’s always kicking me,” Will said.  And then he went on to deliver a list of perceived slights by this character Leyton, who apparently found it funny to step on the back of Will’s shoe as he was getting on and off the bus, or to kick him in the shins when they were playing soccer during recess. 

Later, I mentioned this to Ellen and she seemed surprised as well.  Neither of us had ever heard of Leyton.  The next night, I asked Will about him again and got the same catalogue of grievances. 

“Did you tell your teacher?” I asked. 

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“And?”

“She just said to try to ignore it,” and then he spun into some vague answer that I couldn’t quite follow. 

“Did you try asking him to stop?” asked Ellen from the next bed, where she’d been cuddling with Lucy and obviously eavesdropping.

“I told him it hurt,” Will said.

“Did it help?”

Will gave a groan that said, clear as day, “Of course not.”

“Did you try kicking him back?” I asked.

“Paul,” Ellen said from the next bed.

“Well,” I responded.  “What’s he supposed to do, spend all year getting bruised?  The teachers aren’t helping.”

“That’s not the answer,” Ellen said. 

“Yes it is,” I whispered in Will’s ear.  “Give him a good shot, right in the shins.”

Then the next night, I had another thought:  “What’s Leyton do after he kicks you?”

Will sighed.  “He laughs.”

“A mean laugh?”

There was a pause, then Will said, “Not really.”  Another pause.  “More like he thinks it’s funny and thinks I’m going to laugh too.”

Ah . . . memories of third grade came back, when I had such a massive crush on Laura Rich that I did the only thing an eight-year-old boy could do:  I hit her with a stick. 

“Maybe he wants to be your friend,” I said to Will.

Even in the dark, I could feel him staring at me like I was insane. 

“Seriously,” I said.  “Try being nice to him.  Play with him.  See what happens.”

 

That was the first clue.  The second came when we were meeting with Will’s teacher for our annual conference.  “Will’s one of the best behaved students in his class,” she told us.  “I sometimes worry that he doesn’t get enough attention.  You know:  because of the other boys.”

We must have looked at her blankly, because she frowned, then went on.  “Not that they’re that bad, mind you.  Not bad enough that I qualify for assistance,” she continued under her breath.

Ellen leaned forward.  “I’m not quite sure we follow.”

Will’s teacher sighed.  “Take Thomas, for instance.  He’s very smart.  Very smart.  And most of the time he can control his temper.  But say the wrong thing or catch him in the wrong mood, and WHOOMP!  Next thing you know he’s ripped off all his clothes and he’s trying to bite anyone he can get his teeth on.”

Twenty minutes later we were in the Lucy’s classroom, meeting with her teacher, when she named a classmate of Will’s:  “And I’m sure you’ve heard about Mark.”

Ellen and I gave each other a glance.  We were still spinning from Thomas the naked, flesh-eating nine-year-old. 

“Um . . .” I said.  “Not really.” 

And she went on to tell us about how Mark’s mom was sick with cancer.  We’d heard about this, about how she’d had to fly back to Malaysia for treatment, about how Mark had missed a few weeks of school.  Lucy’s teacher, though, gave us some new details, however—like how, for instance, Mark manages his anxiety by goading all the girls on the playground to beat him up. 

You heard me.  All of them:  older, younger, Anglos, Asians, didn’t matter.  He’d prod them until they were good and angry at him, then let them pile on him and stomp the living whoop out of him.  Including Lucy.

“We just keep an eye on him,” Lucy’s teacher said.  “Mark’s very smart.  We all understand he’s going through something difficult here.  But we keep an eye on him.”

 

Everything really fell into place when Ellen bumped into Leyton’s mom one day at a PTA meeting.  In recent weeks, Will had stopped mentioning anything involving kicking, and has even mentioned Leyton’s name in the context of having fun at recess. 

Ellen mentioned the latter to Leyton’s mother, who looked slightly pained.  “I hope he’s behaving?” she said. 

Of course, Ellen said.  And then Leyton’s mother went on to explain how this was Leyton’s third school in four years, how it was the only one he liked—scratch that: the only one he didn’t have fits about going to. 

When Ellen reported all of this to me that evening, we spent a minute or two staring at the kitchen floor, trying to figure out what was going on.  Then, just like in some crappy movie starring Nicholas Cage, all of the pieces shifted into place:  Leyton, Thomas, Mark, the small class size, the high male-to-female ratio, the repeated comments we’d heard from parents about how they’d chosen this school because the academics weren’t so cut-throat.

“Wow,” said Ellen, breaking the silence.  “We’re sending our kids to a school for troubled boys.”

 

Not really, of course:  as far as we know, no one's pulling switch blades or selling crack next to the water fountain.  And we’ve yet to learn of rubber bits in the mouth and electrodes to the temples or secret “time-out” rooms from which students reappear, pasty and thin, six days later. 

 It’s more a place that attracts kids who aren’t very happy in typical, ultra-competitive HK schools.  The academics at our kids’ school are tougher than at any school we’ve ever encountered in the States—Will regularly comes home with four sheets of complex multiplication or division problems, all in addition to English, Putonghua, and the rest—but they’re nothing compared to some private schools that’ll kick out a third grader for failing to delineate Pi to the 15^th decimal.

But even so,, all of this caused us to start being hyper-vigilant—or paranoid, if you prefer.  If Lucy was in a particularly barometric mood one day, I’d gently ask if anyone had touched her someplace they shouldn’t have.  To which she’d respond by giving me a weird, frowny look, before running to her mother to ask if Daddy had had too much caffeine again.  If Will came home and mentioned that one of the boys—Mark, it turned out—had pulled up pornography on the classroom computer, we were quick to assign it to the nature of the school, rather than to the that nature of nine-year-old boys with access to a computer and a four-letter word for the female bosom.   

And when Will came home, two weeks before his birthday, and declared that he wanted to invite a bunch of boys over for a party, Ellen and I nearly knocked each other over inquiring who, exactly, he meant.

“Steve,” he said. 

“Great,” we responded.  Steve had already been over for a play date, and had impressed us by not only carrying his used dishes to the kitchen counter, but polishing my black work shoes and rocking the baby to sleep. 

“Peter.”

“Fantastic.”  The son of the one of the professors on campus. A nice kid. 

“Gordon.” 

Dandy.  Gordon did archery with Will, and was as polite as the Dickens.  And we all know how polite Dickens was, especially when he first cheated on and then abandoned his wife and the mother of his children to run off with her sister. 

“Oliver,” Will continued.

Never heard of him.  But as long as he cleared the criminal background check, fine. 

“Leyton.”

“Are you sure?” Ellen responded.

“Thomas.”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I think four is just dandy.  Maybe we should stick with four?”

“And Mark,” Will concluded. 

Ellen and I glanced at each other.

 

But what are you going do?  These are your kid’s friends, after all.  And as messed up as some of them might be, my guess is none of their dads keeps a blog. 

So we put the invitations in the mail, strapped bars across the windows, and hired seven security guards to spend the afternoon sitting on the patio. 

Just kidding, of course:  these days everyone e-mails invitations.

The party began with a treasure hunt.  My idea.  Ellen wanted to contain it to our flat, but I had other plans.  Borrowing from Mr. Blain, the kids’ charismatic but fanatical physical education teacher, I was going to run those six boys (Oliver and Peter couldn’t make it) all over campus, wearing them down to submissive little lumps of clay. 

Standing outside our apartment on the eighth floor of the building, I went through the list of rules: 1) Stick together; 2) Be careful; 3) Collect all the clues so there’s no litter; 4) Do the clues in order; 5) No snorkeling. 

Blank stares. I felt my face begin to burn. 

“What’s snorkeling?” asked one of the Chinese boys.

You’d think after four months in this country, I’d know better than to try a joke with a cross-cultural audience.  Especially one full of nine-year-old boys. 

Then I realized someone at the back was, well, if not cracking up, at least snickering.  “Snorkeling,” he said, when I looked at him.  “It’s funny.  We’re not going swimming.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Mark.”  He was handsome, with clear eyes and a broad face.

I gave the rest of the gang a significant look.  “Mark,” I said, “knows enough to laugh at my jokes.  Mark gets extra cake.  Learn from Mark.”

The first clue sent them down to the playground outside the building, where they found a mathematical equation that ran them back up to the third, then the fifth, then the eleventh floors (I’d forbidden using the elevators; I’m sure Mr. Blain would have approved). 

Every clue they found, Leyton would insist, “We need to go up on the roof!”   Then he’d scrambled up the green railings that rim each floor of our terraced building, and start to make his way to the terra cotta tiles of the floor below.  Every time, the rest of the boys called him back and they continued with their hunt. 

When, after the eleventh floor, they needed to hustle back down to the tennis courts, I figured I was safe, and lagged behind.  Five minutes later I arrived outside the courts to find Leyton two-thirds of the way up the chain-link fence protecting the grounds, the rest of the group trying to guide him down. 

“Just jump,” someone said.

“I can’t,” said Leyton, fingers locked to the fence.

“Why not?”

“I’m afraid of heights.”

After the tennis courts, it was back up to six.  Then back down to the swimming pool.  As they searched the bleachers for the next clue, Mark threw me a sidelong glance.  “I bet we have to go up again after this.”

“Clever boy,” I said.  Then sent them back up to 12.   After that, it was down to two, then up to seven.  There, sweaty and red-faced, they discovered that the last hint sent them back to our flat.  They banged through the front door, the whole lot of them insisting they wanted water, cake, and a nap, not necessarily in that order.

Lunch was a quiet, albeit surly, affair.  Afterwards, enough of them woke up to have a rousing balloon fight on the terrace.  And they seemed to enjoy the game Ellen had organized for them involving blow torches, straight razors, and life-sized Gang of Four blow-up dolls. 

The part that really got me, though, was when it came to the presents. 

To begin with, there was Mark, who brought his gift in a shopping bag.  “We weren’t able to wrap it,” he said, matter-of-factly.

I was about to make some sarcastic crack (I enjoy being cruel to children) when I suddenly remembered:  Mark was the one whose mother had cancer.  Cancer that was bad enough that she’d flown back to her home country to get treatment.  I closed my mouth.

It was a wonderful gift, actually:  four historical action figures, all generals of a sort—Jeanne d’Arc, Napoleon, Zhang Fei, and Guan Yu.  Plus a professional quality sketch pad and colored pencils.  We’d had to leave Will’s art supplies in the States when we came over, and I knew he’d missed them.  I wasn’t sure if Will had mentioned that to Mark or not, but after watching this kid in action for two hours, I was sure there wasn’t much he didn’t pick up on. 

Then there were the cards:  most of them were handmade, and they were elaborate.  Gordon’s, for instance, featured hand-drawn pictures on the front and back as well as the inside flap.  The note itself, written in precise handwriting in 17 different colors, said:

Dear Will:

Happy Birthday!!!  You one of my best friends at _____ and you are the first classmate to invite me to a birthday party in this school.  I’m so happy that you invite me to your birthday party.  I’m glad to meet you.  I wish you have the best birthday ever. 

And then it was signed and dated. 

Sure, there were hitches.  Thomas didn’t so much give Will his gift, as open it himself, then sit in a corner and read it for ten minutes before reluctantly handing it over to our son.  Following that, he spent most of the rest of the party playing with one of Jamie’s toy planes, flying it around the room, muttering about Kim Il-sung and Pyongang.  He mentioned 1959 as well.  I still haven’t figured out what that was all about.  I’m just happy he kept his clothes on and didn’t eat anyone.

 

That night, lying in bed with Will, I asked him what his favorite thing that day was.

“My party,” he said. 

“What part?”

He paused for a second, then said, “The presents.”

“Not the treasure hunt?”

Under the sheets, he punched me in the hip.  “Dad,” he said, turning it into a seven-syllable word, “that treasure hunt sucked.”

I laughed.  Then I took a deep breath and asked a question that’d been nagging me all day. 

“Does Mark ever talk about his mom?”

Will didn’t say anything for a moment.  Even though it was dark, I could feel him staring at the ceiling. 

“Sometimes.”

“Does he ever talk about how she’s doing?”

“No.”

Now I didn’t speak, not sure where to go from there.  Will lay silent for a bit, then said, “But we know she’s dying.”

I looked at him.  “How do you know that?”

 He named one of the teachers, who’d mentioned it in the context of talking about her own family, a number of whom had died from cancer.

“Are you sure?” I asked.  “I mean, about Mark’s mom.  Because you know, sometimes things get mixed up when one person tells another, then that person tells someone else.”

“No,” he said.  “I heard it.  I was there.”

I thought about this for a bit.  Then I thought about Mark, his intelligent eyes, his bright laugh, the way he glanced down for a moment—but only a moment—when confessing his unwrapped gift.  And I thought about how, exactly nine years and two days ago, I’d held Will in my arms for the first time, feeling the bend and flex of his ribs as his tiny lungs drew in air and then let it out again.  And I thought about how, at that moment, these words had entered my head, in no particular order:  Holy crap.  And:  Wow.  And:  Oh my god.  And:  I can’t believe he’s mine. 

And I thought about how, at that moment so long ago, it had never occurred to me that I might possibly not be around to see him play in his first baseball game or go to his first prom or register his first sax solo or wax his first car or graduate from high school or get married or have kids of his own.

Or turn 10.

And then, if there’s a word that’s stronger than “cling,” and darker than “fear,” and purer than—what? “Fire”? “Water”? “Hope”? “Blood”?—If there’s a word that’s all these things but even closer still to the bone, then that’s what I did that night, in that room, with my son, in the dark, exactly nine years and two days after he was born. 

Knowing

In reality, the kids' school is everything we’ve ever dreamed of—albeit in a surreal, Salvador Dali, William S. Burroughs kind of way.

Actually, that’s not entirely fair. I think the truth is that when you get to choose a school and you get to pay for it yourself (albeit with US Government funds, delivered in strangely sequential bills—and since when has John Ashcroft been on the fifty?), I think you’re a bit more fussy about it than you are with a normal school. Because, see, when you send your kids to the local neighborhood school, which most people do, it is what it is and that’s where they go and you don’t really think about it too much, assuming the third grade teacher isn’t named J. Jones, and keeps making out-of-context jokes about grape Kool-Aid.

When you’re paying for a school, though, there’s an undercurrent of choice. “I could reduce you to eating cat food,” you find yourself tempted to hiss into the ear of your son’s teacher. “I can buy and sell you.”

Even though, of course, it’s not true, since every international school in Hong Kong has been fully booked for nine months, and it’s either your present school or one on the border with China, where the boys seem to mysteriously disappear every time a black limousine arrives just beyond no-man’s land.

But nonetheless, there you are, feeling just a tad bit hyper-critical, running your finger along the vinyl blinds looking for chalk dust, counting the number of math assignments proportional to reading assignments, calling your daughter’s teacher at 4 AM and saying, “You’re not going to wear that pink sweater again, are you? Because it makes you look gouty.”

Or, for instance, you judge the parents of your classmates. Not me, of course, but you and other people like you. Because I would never do that. Especially at the first Parents Association meeting. Which was last week. Tuesday, to be exact.

To be honest, it was a very nice meeting. For one thing, the kids’ school is small enough that all the parents were able to go around the room and introduce themselves. For another thing, one of the mothers made some of those peanut-butter cookies, you know the kind, with the crossed hatch marks on the top? Man, those are good.

What was interesting were the different things the parents said while introducing themselves. No one, for instance, came right out and said, “This was the only school in Hong Kong we could get into,” or, “It cost less than the others, and we love our children, but not that much.” Instead they made up bogus reasons about a solid curriculum, and teachers who care about the kids, blah, blah, blah.

Actually, the two most cited reasons were: A) that this was a religious school; and B) that this school was slightly more laid back than the others.

The first of these, I have to admit, made Ellen and me slightly uncomfortable. Though we’re both offspring of highly moral and spiritual people—and our fathers aren’t half-bad, either—neither of us has ever developed much of a tolerance for so-called “evangelical” Christianity. The reasons for this are manifold, and I won’t go into them here for fear of offending most of the state of Virginia, but by-and-large it comes down to the fact these people are often judgmental, that they generalize, and that they’re all going to hell.

The second thing needs a bit more explanation. Secondary school in Hong Kong is more or less based on the British system. In the UK, students all take a monster exam at the end of their fifth form (roughly around the age of 15 or 16). Those who do well enough get to go on to sixth form, more exams, and the chance at University. Those who don’t do so well get thrown into a meat grinder and fed to giant canaries that live under the Thames. I am not making this up.

At the end of sixth form, the remaining students take A-Level exams, the outcomes of which determine what university they get to go to, if any, and what they’ll get to major in.

In Hong Kong, it’s pretty much the same, only: a) there are fifth-year exams and seventh-year exams, meaning kids don’t graduate from secondary school until the age of 19-ish; and b) the pressure to succeed in Hong Kong is extraordinary.

Not that the British don’t also feel pressure. One need only look at the number of successful Olympiads the UK has produced in recent years, to understand that meeting and exceeding high expectations is clearly part of British culture. In Hong Kong, though, the pressure is not just high, but extraordinarily high.

If you ask around, you’ll get lots of answers as to why this is. One friend told me it’s because today’s families are smaller than in the past, so parents pile all their hopes on one or two children, instead of 6 or 12.

Another colleague mentioned that Hong Kong is an evidence-driven society, so kids are pushed hard to receive certification in whatever they do, to bear proof of their success. In some ways this ties in with the perception—often forwarded by Hong Kongers themselves—that the culture is obsessed with name brands, with visible evidence of their success. If indeed this is the case, then good grades in major exams, or attendance at not just any old university but the BEST university, might explain how important these exams have become.

Because they are important. I realized as much not three days after I arrived and noticed the handsome face of Allen Chiu staring at me from the back of a bus. Allen was maybe thirty, and definitely geek chic, with his white shirt and bulky glasses countered by carefully tousled hair. What’s more, he clearly found me attractive. I knew this, because he was pointing a finger at me and saying, in both Cantonese and English, that I should “Be Part of the A Culture.”

My first thought was that he was biologist, interested in recruiting people for experiments with giant Petri dishes. Then I saw the Xi sisters on the side of another bus, looking equally glamorous and smart with their stylish quaffs, thick glasses and silky smiles. “Damn,” I thought. “I have to switch into the natural sciences.”

But then the next week I was reading the paper and came across an article on “Cram Schools,” test preparation programs run by “charismatic figures with trendy names” for which parents would pay thousands of (HK) dollars, with no guarantee of results. Apparently these programs have taken on an almost status symbol quality, with students begging their parents to send them to the trendiest schools tutored by the hunkiest or sexiest of the uber-geek supermodels from the bus ads. All, again, with no guarantee that the program would provide any results.

Think of it this way: yes, getting a great exam score is a status symbol. But status can also be gained by having a cool tutor. Even though that tutor might not help you get a good score—which itself, just to repeat, is a status symbol.

So the end is a status symbol. And so’s the means. Even if the means don’t get you to the end.

Kind of makes you feel just a wee bit better about the US’s messed up values system, doesn’t it?

All of which I mention, remember, simply because: a) it’s really funny; and b) it helps you understand why parents at the first Parents’ Association meeting would mention how they liked the school because it seemed to place less academic pressure on students.

All in all, this meeting allowed Ellen and me to walk away from the school that morning feeling pretty good about our decision to send our kids there, especially after I’d stuffed 42 of those peanut butter cookies into my back pack.

If only things stayed that simple.

Last Friday was “Curriculum Night,” the HK equivalent of “Meet the Teacher Night” in the US. The evening started with a bang when I discovered a refreshment table where they were serving these mini chocolate cakes. As if that wasn’t fantastic enough, when I bit into one of those little suckers, the taste of banana flooded my tongue. Yes, folks, that’s right: chocolate and banana. Is this a great school or what?

I was busily stuffing cakes into the pockets of my cargo shorts, cursing myself for forgetting my backpack, when my son’s teacher approached and said, “So you’re a teacher, right?”

I sort of grunt-nodded, afraid if I spoke I’d spit banana-chocolate crumbs all over her face.

She grinned. “Yeah, I was surprised when I got your e-mail and there was an ‘edu’ at the end. I actually applied to the school you teach at, but they didn’t accept me.”

I managed a muffled “Really?” trying to look interested, when really what I was thinking was if Ellen would maybe help me with the cakes if I told her about the magic bananas in the middle.

“Uh-huh,” the teacher said, then gave me a blushing grin: “You see, I’m not actually certified to teach in Hong Kong.” Then she went on to talk about something else, Will’s work in class maybe, or fashion magazines, or where she might have left her mushy little brain that she’d be inclined to mention to the educator son of one of her students that not only was she not certified to teach in this country, she’d been REJECTED FROM THE ONE SCHOOL SHE’D APPLIED TO!

Sorry about the caps. And the exclamation point. In reality, I guess, this isn’t probably as bad as it seems. After all, she’d only recently come over from Canada, and surely she’d been certified, there—certified to teach, I mean. And for what it’s worth, Will likes her a great deal and seems to be learning stuff in her class, so that’s a good sign, right?

Right?

All of that said, at the very least what this did was start the evening with a bit of a tail spin.

Don’t worry, though. It only gets better. And in case you haven’t yet caught on to my use of sarcasm, by “better” I really mean worse.

It started when Lucy’s teacher, having completed her review of the year’s curriculum for the Kindergarten class, showed the attending parents the class website. There was the teacher sitting on a chair in the comfy corner, reciting numbers and nouns and talking about eating your vegetables and holding hands when crossing the street. And there were all her cute little students, gathered around her like so many baby bunnies, all round faced and smiling, eyes bright, chubby little hands waving in the air.

Except for Lucy. Who looked like she’d just drank a quart of anti-freeze. And then sat on a hot waffle iron.

No biggie, I thought. Maybe she was just having a bad day. Or a bad hour even. Because, you see, when Lucy comes home from school she rattles on about learning Putonghua, about playing football during recess, about the funny things her teacher said that day. Just this afternoon, I wasn’t in the door two seconds when she was tugging at my briefcase, showing me a worksheet she’d done that day, unscrambling “-at” words and spelling them in the right order. She then went through the list, sounding out “cat,” “sat,” “bat,” and even “flat.” The only two she got mixed up were “hat” and “that,” and the hell if I was going to correct her.

So no biggie I thought. Just a bad hour, just a bit of underdone potato, to quote that Dickens guy. Thirty minutes and a good bowel movement and she’d be back to her usual perky self.

Only she wasn’t. Every picture showed the same thing: all those chubby little bunnies, looking chubby and little and bunnyish and cute and engaged and learning and all-American despite being from places like Finland and Malaysia. And there was Lucy, forearms on her knees, face somewhere between grim and disengaged.

Nonetheless, I didn’t panic. I know my little girl. She’s full of spirit and goofiness and vinegar and salt and humor. This is a kid whose favorite dish is Phad Thai and who learned to swim when she was three.

Once the orientation had ended, I approached the teacher and handed her the contact sheet she’d asked us to fill out. “So how’s it going?” I said.

Even then, I suppose, I expected assurances. “She’s doing fine,” her teacher would say. Or at worst, “Well, she started off a bit rough, but she’s coming along.”

What I got though, was a dip of the eyes as Lucy’s teacher brushed the cake crumbs off the sheet I’d just given her and said, “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that.”

Forgive me for saying this, but if you don’t have kids you might not understand why these few simple words made my heart slide down my chest and somewhere between my stomach and whatever it is that allows us to get up in the morning and have enough faith to imagine the world as a kind place.

“Oh?” I squeaked.

“She seems . . .” Lucy’s teacher bit her lower lip, trying to choose her words carefully. This was a woman who, I should add, I trusted entirely as a professional. Though only 27 at the most, she was clearly a natural in the classroom—firm but caring, funny but able to communicate ideas in a way the kids would understand. She’d only been at the school for 2 years, and already she was the curriculum director.

“She seems so serious,” is what she finally came out with. “I don’t think I’ve seen her smile once in the classroom.”

My mouth must have hit the floor. Lucy? The little girl who Will once said was funnier than the entire cast of Chicken Little put together?

Then she met my eye. “What’s she like at home?”

I stuttered. “A—a goofball. She’s—an absolute nutjob.”

The teacher looked just shy of stunned. “Really?” Then she gestured toward the bulletin board, where all the kids had hung pictures of their families, with strands of yarn leading to where they’d come from. Lucy’s picture showed our family on the VMI parade grounds on the 4^th of July. We’re sprawled on the grass, just having finished a dinner of barbequed chicken and coleslaw. Will’s doing cross-eyes and Jamie’s sprawled across Ellen’s lap, squirming like baby squirrel. Lucy is behind Ellen, two fingers behind her own head, giving herself bunny ears and grinning at the camera.

“When Lucy brought this picture in,” her teacher said, “I thought, ‘I’ve never seen this person before.’”

If it’s possible to break a sinking heart, that’s basically what happened at this point. I said one or two disconnected things, thanked the teacher, shook her hand, and stumbled out into the humid night. Kids were running around on the Astroturf playground, shouting in the dark, waiting for their parents. I took a seat at one of the benches along the wall and tried to get my head around it. Lucy was happy at home, I knew that. And she was happy about school. I knew that too. Nothing like this had ever happened in Lexington, at least as far as I knew. On the contrary, her pre-school teachers had always loved her, saying she was the perfect student, obedient but funny, goofy but the first to sit on the floor at the appropriate time and be quiet for the teacher. What was going on?

There were, of course, the obvious answers: she’d just started school. She’d left the only home and the only friends she’d ever had, and moved to a new country. Her grandfather had died. Her mom had been gone for a long time. The food was different. It was hot. Old ladies kept touching her hair when we were riding the subway, or standing in line at the grocery store, or sitting on a park bench minding our own business.

But still. This wasn’t the girl I knew. I couldn’t picture the kid I knew sitting in a classroom, with a teacher she loved, being miserable.

I was glad Ellen was still in with Will’s teacher, and that it was dark. I needed time to let my thoughts settle down. Leaning back, I looked out over the field. The PE teacher, a tall Scot with a slight stoop to his back, was playing kick the can with maybe ten of the kids. An empty water jug stood in the middle of the field, barely visible in the few streetlights that made their way into the back courtyard. Mr. Blain patrolled the edges of the Astroturf, his gangly arms dangling, his polo shirt soaked with sweat, squinting against the lights to spot the children. They skittered along just out of his sight, ducking behind hedges and beneath playground equipment, oversized geckos in bright shirts and bare feet. One small boy in a yellow shirt seemed particularly adept at slipping below his gym teacher’s line of sight, and sprinting toward the transparent jug without getting caught. Twice while I watched, he flew across the pavement and onto the turf, speeding toward the water bottle and sending it spinning into the air with a swift Pfooft! all before Mr. Blain could catch him.

What I didn’t know then was that, two days later, this little boy would run in a 3.5K foot race around the peak on Hong Kong Island, and that he would get second for his age group and gender. I also didn’t know that Lucy and Will would run in this race, this despite the fact that: a) Will hates to sweat; b) Lucy has never run a race in her life, and c) Ellen and I did everything we could to keep the two of them from participating, repeatedly mentioning the early hour—we had to get up at 6 AM—the heat, the fact that lots of people there would have run races before and would be taking it very seriously. None of this worked, of course; if anything, we caused the two of them to root deeper into their determination.

Nor do I know that Lucy will run the race faster than either her brother or her mother, placing second for her age and gender—better even than the speedy little boy in the yellow shirt. This despite Lucy’s wearing sparkly purple basketball shoes that are flat soled and definitely not designed for running 2.25 miles.

I know my little girl. I know her probably better than any of my children—Will’s too much like Ellen and still a mystery, and Jamie—well, Jamie’s insane. Plus he can’t talk. But Lucy? I get her, see in her the energy and joy and passion and jealousy and hunger I felt when I was a child. I know her.

But even so. There’s plenty I don’t know. I don’t know when she’ll fall in love for the first time. I don’t know when she’ll get her heart broken, or how she’ll respond. I don’t know what she’ll choose to do for a living, or where she’ll decide to live, or what kind of mother she’ll be. I don’t know if she’ll struggle with alcoholism or anorexia or cutting or an inappropriate affection for boy bands (or worse, Nickleback). I don’t know if she’ll ever fulfill her wish to dye her ash-blonde hair black, or if she’ll wear too much makeup or if she’ll get good grades in school. I don’t know what kind of car she’ll drive or if she’ll even care or if she’ll insist on having the latest model. I don’t know where she’ll see her most beautiful sunset, or what music will make her close her eyes and sway, or what books she’ll read that she’ll want to carry with her for the rest of her life. I don’t know when she’ll die or how—though I do know I’d better not be around for it, or there is no God, and that’s all there is to it.

And I don’t know what she feels like when she’s sitting in her kindergarten classroom and her teacher is talking about nouns and verbs and two plus two and holding hands while crossing the street. Nor do I know why the little girl who makes everyone laugh just by walking into the room doesn’t smile when she’s sitting there listening.

So what do I know?

Well, it sounds corny, but here’s the truth: sitting there in the humid dark, watching that slightly stoop-shouldered man running in his stocking feet and sweaty shirt, chasing those ducking kids who were screaming and laughing in the dark as the little boy in the yellow shirt sent that water jug arching into the air—Watching that? Seriously? What I knew was that everything was going to be okay.

And that’s what we think of our children’s school.