On a drive through to Beijing countryside to the Great Wall, we stopped for eggs and honey. We somehow ended up leaving the farm stand with a puppy in our backseat.
For the last year or so, my daughter has been pestering my husband and me for a dog. I felt for her. As a kid, I’d always wanted a dog but no amount of pleading with my immigrant parents would let them see that there was any benefit to having such an animal in our house. For many immigrants like my parents, things are measured in usefulness and utility and a dog fit into neither category. My parents were always busy with work; we had no household help; and a dog would get in the way of more important things. Like homework.
So after my daughter continued to pester me for a dog for weeks, I made a deal with her — if she made her bed every day, for an entire year, she could have a dog. She made her bed dutifully, most days. Her brother started making his bed. There were several moves over the course of this last year — from China, we went on an extended vacation to the States over the winter holidays and ended up staying there for the first six months of the pandemic. The kids shared a bed in the various temporary homes in which we stayed in the States, which made it easier for them to complete the chore. And just as the year mark on this deal hit, we came back to China.
So not long after we returned to China, we found ourselves driving through the Beijing countryside one weekend. We’d forgotten to stop at the farm stand where we usually paused, and instead we stopped at another stand just before a mountain pass. My husband kept the car running while I hopped out to buy some organic eggs and honey. A gregarious middle-aged farmer offered me a taste of the honey that he harvested across the road. My husband looked on impatiently from the car as I conversed with the farmer. After I’d purchased a jar of honey and some eggs, I encountered the puppy, bouncing around in front of the stand, play fighting with a kitten.
“That’s a cute puppy,” I said to the farmer.
“Do you want it?” he asked. “Because if you don’t, I might have to get rid of it.” He ran his finger across his neck, making an imaginary slit.
My husband heard that from the car. He got out. He went to the stand, picked up the puppy, held it up above his head and looked it squarely in the eyes. The puppy, a peppery brown short furred male with floppy triangles for ears, looked back calmly.
The thing was, even during the entire bed-making year, I never thought I would actually get the kids a dog. My mother knew I wasn’t serious and she’d warned me — she’d told me early on, if you make a promise to the kids and you don’t keep it, they won’t trust you anymore. It wasn’t that she wanted me to carry through with the promise; she just wanted me to stop making the promise. Realizing that she was right, I put a clause in the deal with my daughter that if she failed to make her bed on a given day, that the year would start all the way over. I figured that would get us to college.
But when a farmer tells you he’s going to have to kill a puppy, after you’ve promised your daughter a dog, after a year of bed making, after many months of enduring hardships during COVID-19, it’s fate knocking.
We asked the farmer how much he wanted for the dog. “Nothing,” he said, crossing his arms. “It’s yours.” He explained that there were puppy mills in the area, and that the females of such litters were snapped up for breeding purposes. The males, like unwanted daughters of the countryside, were cast aside. Someone had dropped off several puppies, all male, with this farmer, and he simply didn’t have the wherewithal to take care of three.
So that’s how we got our pup, who we’re still in the process of naming …
