Emiko at 18 weeks and 6 daysDearest Emi,
Many Asian cultures place a huge importance on boys. A wife has done her duty only after she's given birth to a healthy baby boy. Chinese families in particular throw huge parties to celebrate the birth of a child - as long as it's a boy. Once a male heir has been safely delivered, then it's considered okay to have a girl.
Me? Not so much.
Just so you understand, our family's ethnic heritage has become pretty watered down over the generations. My maternal grandmother, Marian Kim Gee Chew, was actually born in San Francisco and was later sent to China as a young girl during the Depression, making me a fourth generation Chinese American.
On the Japanese side, your great-grandparents immigrated to this country sometime in the early 1900s from Tottori prefecture on the southern island of Honshu. All eleven of their children, including 'Jiichan, were born in California so I'm considered a sansei, or third generation.
That means you, Emiko, are a fifth generation Gee in the United States and fourth generation Japanese American, or yonsei.
So while we eat jook on cold, winter days and clumsily roll sushi for New Year's, we observe precious few traditions and can barely count to ten in either Chinese or Japanese. It's little wonder that the whole emphasis on bearing a male child had little impact on me.
Long before your daddy and I even started thinking about having a family, I knew I wanted a girl. I grew up with a sister, and lots of aunties on both sides of the family. Later, after Auntie Sharon had two girls, Noriko and I were always taking Christina and Liana to the movies, shopping, museums and the San Francisco Ballet's "Nutcracker Suite." Years later, when my mom's long-lost half-brother, Uncle Ronnie, tracked the family down, three new cousins were added to the mix including one boy, Ronnie Jr. From then on, every Christmas and birthday we were mystified as to what to get him. We'd never had to shop for a boy before! Never mind by the time we met him Ronnie Jr. was well into his 20s.
Hearing Grandma Jacque and Grandpa Brian tell stories about your daddy and Uncle Justin didn't help matters. As little boys they wreaked havoc on their home in Yuba City, from knocking doors off their hinges to shooting water from the garden hose into the bathroom, where neighborhood kids had barricaded themselves. One time, they tried dragging a ladder across the front yard to climb onto a neighbor's roof, only to get caught by Grandma Jacque.
Your daddy said he didn't care either way. "There are pluses to boys, and there are pluses to girls," he'd say. But after we heard your heartbeat for the first time, he became convinced we were having a boy. "He kept squiggling around, remember?" he said.
Once we got through the first trimester and I could breathe a little easier, I became consumed with trying to find out whether you were a boy or a girl. During lulls at work, I'd search the Internet for telltale signs, wives' tale or not, that would give me some indication. I hunted down an old e-mail from a friend, who'd sent me links to several web sites claiming to be able to predict the sex of a baby using the Chinese lunar calendar. All I had to do was plug in the year of my birth, month and year of your conception. I was carrying a boy, according to all three sites.
Unconvinced, I consulted Western opinion. Since I wasn't even showing yet, it was hard to say whether I was carrying high or low. My hair seemed to be growing slower than before, and I was craving sweets. There was even a site that had an entire Old Wives' Tales quiz. When I was done answering all 10 questions I found out I was going to have ... a boy.
But those were all just myths, right? One day the newspaper I work for published a wire story about a recent study that showed a woman's diet prior to conception may affect the sex of her baby. The theory was that women who ate foods rich in potassium and did not skip breakfast were more likely to have boys. There was scientific evidence to suggest that male embryos require more nutrients than female embryos to survive. The old wives' tale about eating bananas if you want a boy may actually have some merit. Hope at last! I jumped on this potential lead. I have never liked bananas, so I rarely eat them, and before getting pregnant I frequently skipped breakfast.
But the study was hardly conclusive. At our appointment with the nurse practitioner, I asked her if there was any correlation between heart rate and the baby's sex. A few years back, my old high school friend, Marylou, was expecting her first child and was told the baby she was carrying was likely a boy because of the rapid heart rate. Supposedly, boys' hearts beat faster than girls'. And indeed, Marylou's son, Sevrin, was born in the spring of 2005.
But according to the nurse practitioner, there was no scientific way to determine the baby's sex based on heart rate. I wasn't terribly surprised. Although a Google search yielded plenty of mothers' blogs and pregnancy forums that claimed otherwise, I'd also found several studies online showing minimal difference between boys' and girls' average heart rates.
The nurse practitioner explained that the doctor wouldn't be able to determine the baby's sex until about 24 weeks into the pregnancy. So I marked my calendar and settled in for the wait.
As it turned out, we only had to wait until late June, just days before our eighth wedding anniversary. I was 18 weeks and six days into my pregnancy by then, and Dr. Chan had decided to perform another ultrasound. I had gone through an AFP screening, a simple blood test, and was relieved to learn that everything was normal, ruling out the likelihood of birth defects.
Your daddy and I were feeling pretty good as we waited for Dr. Chan in the exam room. Although we thought it was too soon to find out your sex, I was excited. It had been two-and-a-half months since the last ultrasound, and I knew you'd made great strides since then. You'd grown from an amorphous lump roughly the size of a shrimp, to a tiny baby with actual hands and tiny fingers, feet and toes. I was very eager to see your progress.
Unlike the two earlier, vaginal ultrasounds, this one was abdominal like on TV and in the movies. Dr. Chan started by spreading a clear gel, then pressed the ultrasound wand into my pelvis. I craned my neck to look at the computer screen, where two, seemingly disconnected white blobs floated against a dark backdrop. "Which one is it?" I asked.
Dr. Chan laughed. "What do you mean? There's only one. Did you think you were having twins?"
Sure enough, as the image became clearer I realized the two shapes were actually connected and that one was your head and the other your torso. Soon I could make out a teensy fist, occasional flashes of thigh and once I even saw your nose. But for the most part, all I could really see were discombobulated body parts.
Dr. Chan measured your femur and estimated you were about eight to nine inches long, just the right size for a hapa baby with a mother who never quite reached 5 feet. He also measured your head and took a look at your nose, declaring that from everything he could see you were perfectly normal.
"Do you want to know your kid's sex?" Dr. Chan asked. You, however, had other ideas. After several attempts to get a good view of the proper area, he told us you weren't cooperating. Not only did you refuse to open your legs, you also kept moving away and frequently threw your hand over your face as if trying to hide. Eventually, he managed to get you to open up and told us we were having - a girl!
He pointed to a series of three vertical lines and explained that it was your labia. "But don't go buying all pink stuff, yet," he warned us. "Whenever I've made big mistakes, it's always been saying it was a girl, when it turned out it was a boy." Still, he said he was 80 percent certain you were a girl.
I was ecstatic! As soon as we left the doctor's office, I was on the phone calling my parents and sister to tell them the good news. Later that day, we poured over your ultrasound photos, which your daddy had scanned into the computer. They were grainy, but we could see your tiny fist in one image and the oval shape of what I thought was the top of your head in another. "Why did you send that one to your parents?" I asked, indicating the head shot. "You can't really see anything."
"What are you talking about? That's her face. See her eyes and nose? She looks like an alien." He pointed to the screen and suddenly your sweet face became clear. It was as if you were staring right at us. I burst into joyful laughter.
"She does NOT look like an alien," I protested, still laughing. "She's beautiful."
Me? Not so much.
Just so you understand, our family's ethnic heritage has become pretty watered down over the generations. My maternal grandmother, Marian Kim Gee Chew, was actually born in San Francisco and was later sent to China as a young girl during the Depression, making me a fourth generation Chinese American.
On the Japanese side, your great-grandparents immigrated to this country sometime in the early 1900s from Tottori prefecture on the southern island of Honshu. All eleven of their children, including 'Jiichan, were born in California so I'm considered a sansei, or third generation.
That means you, Emiko, are a fifth generation Gee in the United States and fourth generation Japanese American, or yonsei.
So while we eat jook on cold, winter days and clumsily roll sushi for New Year's, we observe precious few traditions and can barely count to ten in either Chinese or Japanese. It's little wonder that the whole emphasis on bearing a male child had little impact on me.
Long before your daddy and I even started thinking about having a family, I knew I wanted a girl. I grew up with a sister, and lots of aunties on both sides of the family. Later, after Auntie Sharon had two girls, Noriko and I were always taking Christina and Liana to the movies, shopping, museums and the San Francisco Ballet's "Nutcracker Suite." Years later, when my mom's long-lost half-brother, Uncle Ronnie, tracked the family down, three new cousins were added to the mix including one boy, Ronnie Jr. From then on, every Christmas and birthday we were mystified as to what to get him. We'd never had to shop for a boy before! Never mind by the time we met him Ronnie Jr. was well into his 20s.
Hearing Grandma Jacque and Grandpa Brian tell stories about your daddy and Uncle Justin didn't help matters. As little boys they wreaked havoc on their home in Yuba City, from knocking doors off their hinges to shooting water from the garden hose into the bathroom, where neighborhood kids had barricaded themselves. One time, they tried dragging a ladder across the front yard to climb onto a neighbor's roof, only to get caught by Grandma Jacque.
Your daddy said he didn't care either way. "There are pluses to boys, and there are pluses to girls," he'd say. But after we heard your heartbeat for the first time, he became convinced we were having a boy. "He kept squiggling around, remember?" he said.
Once we got through the first trimester and I could breathe a little easier, I became consumed with trying to find out whether you were a boy or a girl. During lulls at work, I'd search the Internet for telltale signs, wives' tale or not, that would give me some indication. I hunted down an old e-mail from a friend, who'd sent me links to several web sites claiming to be able to predict the sex of a baby using the Chinese lunar calendar. All I had to do was plug in the year of my birth, month and year of your conception. I was carrying a boy, according to all three sites.
Unconvinced, I consulted Western opinion. Since I wasn't even showing yet, it was hard to say whether I was carrying high or low. My hair seemed to be growing slower than before, and I was craving sweets. There was even a site that had an entire Old Wives' Tales quiz. When I was done answering all 10 questions I found out I was going to have ... a boy.
But those were all just myths, right? One day the newspaper I work for published a wire story about a recent study that showed a woman's diet prior to conception may affect the sex of her baby. The theory was that women who ate foods rich in potassium and did not skip breakfast were more likely to have boys. There was scientific evidence to suggest that male embryos require more nutrients than female embryos to survive. The old wives' tale about eating bananas if you want a boy may actually have some merit. Hope at last! I jumped on this potential lead. I have never liked bananas, so I rarely eat them, and before getting pregnant I frequently skipped breakfast.
But the study was hardly conclusive. At our appointment with the nurse practitioner, I asked her if there was any correlation between heart rate and the baby's sex. A few years back, my old high school friend, Marylou, was expecting her first child and was told the baby she was carrying was likely a boy because of the rapid heart rate. Supposedly, boys' hearts beat faster than girls'. And indeed, Marylou's son, Sevrin, was born in the spring of 2005.
But according to the nurse practitioner, there was no scientific way to determine the baby's sex based on heart rate. I wasn't terribly surprised. Although a Google search yielded plenty of mothers' blogs and pregnancy forums that claimed otherwise, I'd also found several studies online showing minimal difference between boys' and girls' average heart rates.
The nurse practitioner explained that the doctor wouldn't be able to determine the baby's sex until about 24 weeks into the pregnancy. So I marked my calendar and settled in for the wait.
A face only a mother could love
As it turned out, we only had to wait until late June, just days before our eighth wedding anniversary. I was 18 weeks and six days into my pregnancy by then, and Dr. Chan had decided to perform another ultrasound. I had gone through an AFP screening, a simple blood test, and was relieved to learn that everything was normal, ruling out the likelihood of birth defects.
Your daddy and I were feeling pretty good as we waited for Dr. Chan in the exam room. Although we thought it was too soon to find out your sex, I was excited. It had been two-and-a-half months since the last ultrasound, and I knew you'd made great strides since then. You'd grown from an amorphous lump roughly the size of a shrimp, to a tiny baby with actual hands and tiny fingers, feet and toes. I was very eager to see your progress.
Unlike the two earlier, vaginal ultrasounds, this one was abdominal like on TV and in the movies. Dr. Chan started by spreading a clear gel, then pressed the ultrasound wand into my pelvis. I craned my neck to look at the computer screen, where two, seemingly disconnected white blobs floated against a dark backdrop. "Which one is it?" I asked.
Dr. Chan laughed. "What do you mean? There's only one. Did you think you were having twins?"
Sure enough, as the image became clearer I realized the two shapes were actually connected and that one was your head and the other your torso. Soon I could make out a teensy fist, occasional flashes of thigh and once I even saw your nose. But for the most part, all I could really see were discombobulated body parts.
Dr. Chan measured your femur and estimated you were about eight to nine inches long, just the right size for a hapa baby with a mother who never quite reached 5 feet. He also measured your head and took a look at your nose, declaring that from everything he could see you were perfectly normal.
"Do you want to know your kid's sex?" Dr. Chan asked. You, however, had other ideas. After several attempts to get a good view of the proper area, he told us you weren't cooperating. Not only did you refuse to open your legs, you also kept moving away and frequently threw your hand over your face as if trying to hide. Eventually, he managed to get you to open up and told us we were having - a girl!
He pointed to a series of three vertical lines and explained that it was your labia. "But don't go buying all pink stuff, yet," he warned us. "Whenever I've made big mistakes, it's always been saying it was a girl, when it turned out it was a boy." Still, he said he was 80 percent certain you were a girl.
I was ecstatic! As soon as we left the doctor's office, I was on the phone calling my parents and sister to tell them the good news. Later that day, we poured over your ultrasound photos, which your daddy had scanned into the computer. They were grainy, but we could see your tiny fist in one image and the oval shape of what I thought was the top of your head in another. "Why did you send that one to your parents?" I asked, indicating the head shot. "You can't really see anything."
"What are you talking about? That's her face. See her eyes and nose? She looks like an alien." He pointed to the screen and suddenly your sweet face became clear. It was as if you were staring right at us. I burst into joyful laughter.
"She does NOT look like an alien," I protested, still laughing. "She's beautiful."
