The Ends of Kinship. Sienna R. Craig
because the family passed that winter in Nepal’s capital. After various forms of gynecological complication, Dolma had a hysterectomy in her early forties. She is not the only Mustang woman I know to have gone through this procedure at that relatively young age.
“It is easier not to bleed,” she tells me. “But it feels strange to have the place where my children once grew taken out of my body. Now I just have this belly. It grows, even without a baby inside!” She pats her T-shirt, rubbing her hand across her girth. “If I were back in Mustang, I’d be doing enough work to make it go away,” she muses about the weight she’s gained since coming to New York. “But here, we just take little walks around the neighborhood.”
“Maybe you can take walks with the new baby in the stroller,” I suggest.
“Yes, we go to the park,” she answers. “I know how to get there.” Dolma has spoken to me in the past about the smallness of her New York world. After living apart from her husband for close to a decade—he laboring in New York restaurants, she laboring at home in Monthang—Dolma and her daughters came to the U.S. They arrived through the family reunification visa program, the same chain visa category that Melania Trump’s parents received and which her husband has sought to eliminate. Although Dolma speaks four languages, none of them is English. Her urban American life is circumscribed. She spends her days in this apartment, taking care of children who belong to other Loba women. It is an informal daycare arrangement, a new type of village-based labor exchange.
“When will you go back to work?” I ask Nyima.
“I am lucky. I can take two months,” she answers. “The family I had been working for is moving, but they’ve helped me find another family. The lady in that house also just had her first baby.” This new employer, like the previous one, is a white family living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
“So, you will both be getting used to being mothers and working,” I say. Nyima smiles, says nothing. Many women from Mustang make their living as caretakers for New York children, some as live-in nannies and others as daytime babysitters. They have entered into an enduring stream of economic and affective relations that combines the need, or desire, of many American women to rejoin the workforce after having children with the need that immigrant women have for reliable employment. The emotional labor that constitutes such work, and the negotiated intimacies that can ensue in these arrangements, can be at once rewarding and challenging.
This conversation with Dolma and Nyima attunes me to the shapeshifting nature of parenting and young childhood in response to the khora of migration. I think about the circumstances under which people are relying upon networks of extended kin to raise families between Nepal and New York. Grandparents as well as other elder and younger female relatives have certainly shared childcare responsibilities in the past. However, caring for other people’s children as an economic strategy in New York shifts the balance of care between New York and Nepal. This is not a situation unique to Mustang, of course, but it is changing how the work of parenting gets parsed between the youngest and the oldest in Mustang society.
Dolma and Nyima are fortunate that they live in the same city. For many young couples from Mustang, having the support of elder relatives to care for their children means sending kids back to Nepal, once they are weaned, often until they are school-aged. But this added work of childcare is coupled with other forms of strain on the elderly who remain in Nepal, particularly in Mustang. There, the work—of planting and weeding and harvest, of milking and making cheese, of repairing roofs and attending to ritual practice—continues, unabated. Money might be sent back to help hire laborers for some of these tasks, but the labor of raising children is not outsourced.
“The little one will stay with her grandmother,” says Dolma. “She will learn from the bigger kids. She will be so good. And when she goes to school, maybe her grandmother will also learn more than ABC123,” she laughs. This is a different sort of grandmother hypothesis.
As I think about Dolma saying her ABCs, I consider language. This strategy of sending young children on a global khora during childhood is also shaping the acquisition of word and gesture. Young Mustang-Americans may begin with Logé and some Nepali. They may learn to love their mother tongue as they learn to love the elder generation. They may even acquire the rudiments of written Tibetan or Devanagari in a Mustang daycare or an urban Nepali preschool before returning to New York, where they will enter the swiftly moving current of English and ESL. On the one hand, this strategy of sending young children who are born in the U.S. (and therefore have U.S. passports and the possibility to enact this khora with relative ease) builds a certain firmament of belonging. On the other hand, the transitions can be jarring for everyone. As illustration of these dynamics, two moments come to mind.
The first involves a grandmother I met in 2012, on a trail outside the village of Ghami. Her slight frame, already bent by age, was weighed down by a squirming toddler strapped to her back. She walked slowly, herding her two cows toward home. The woman fingered the front flap of her chuba, pulling a package of biscuits from the folds of fabric covering her sagging breasts—breasts that had undoubtedly nursed many children. She reached around and gave one to the child. Her expression was dull, exhausted.
The second example involves a friend from Lo who lives in Elmhurst, Queens. He is about my age. He has lived in the U.S. for eighteen years, during which time he has not been back to Nepal. His son spent four years of early childhood between Mustang and Kathmandu. When he arrived back in the U.S., he spoke no English. Three years later, he refuses to speak anything but English. “Don’t be hitting. Do now your school working,” my friend coddles his child in precise and imperfect English. He tries to ply his rambunctious boy off the iPad. He promises candy. He pleads. The child ignores him. This father works long hours, as does his wife. While there is no shortage of love in the household, there is little energy left to build boundaries of discipline and inter-generational respect, to cultivate family connection.
Dolma has made dal bhaat. She serves lunch on the heavy copper plates like the ones I once ate from in Monthang. We eat quietly, as an Indian version of American Idol suffuses the room with Bollywood ballads. Mouths pucker with the acidic delight of pickled radish, but Nyima avoids this relish for the sake of her child. “If I eat it, the baby spits up half the milk I feed her.”
Dolma and I nod, knowingly. “Yes,” we drawl in tandem. It has been a decade since the birth of my own daughter and almost two decades since Dolma’s youngest was born, but bodily memories remain.
“How was your labor?” I ask Nyima, who has finished eating and now picks up the child to nurse.
“There was no problem,” she answers. “The pains started in the afternoon, and I gave birth about twelve hours later. At first, I thought that I would want to have medicine for pain, but then I thought maybe it was not good for the baby,” her voice trails off.
Dolma cuts in. “There was no medicine for the pain in Monthang. Just some village friends giving massage and smooth words to keep going.”
“When the baby was close to coming out, I wanted the medicine, but the doctors said it was too late,” adds Nyima. Dolma had been in the room with her daughter, along with hospital nurses and the obstetrician on call. The nurse had cut the cord, swaddled the baby.
“What happened to the placenta?” I ask.
Nyima looks at me, befuddled. “I don’t know.”
Dolma understands my question. “It was not like at home. No earth burial. No river. They probably just threw it away.”
“Why is the placenta important?” Nyima asks.
“In the village, we say it needs to be taken care of well, so that the baby will not get sick or be attacked by nöpa,” Dolma explains.
“Really, people believe that?” Nyima responds.
“Yes,” Dolma answers. “Does it help? I am not sure. But if we don’t do this and then there is a problem.… I have seen that happen.”
Nyima