Homecoming

Père David’s deer were once found all throughout the basins of the Yangzi and Yellow Rivers. Standing at almost four feet tall and weighing over three hundred pounds, they are known to be surprisingly strong swimmers.

Though endemic to China, Père David’s deer was named not for the land they roamed, the features they possessed, or even the unwilling sacrifices they made to the humans who hunted them to near extinction, but instead the French missionary Armand David, who sent the bodies of three deer to Paris. There, a French biologist named the species after the missionary, even going so far as to refer to him as Père (Father) David, as if the man had done something holy—and what can possibly be holier than a foreigner taking credit for what had been there all along?

When your mother flew to China to visit her grandfather’s grave, you wondered what would happen if she were to die there. You didn’t wish for it, obviously; you were sick with dread. You just couldn’t imagine what it takes to ship a body home.

You were thirteen and anxious. The grandmother of your best friend Tia had passed just before the end of the school year. You and Tia had known each other since kindergarten and had held so many sleepovers, you both knew where the plastic bag of plastic bags was kept in the other’s cramped apartment. Until that May, however, you had only seen her cry once before: the day she had lost her first jade bracelet.

As a child, you had begged your mother for a bracelet just like Tia’s. Your mother replied that you were not responsible enough. You would lose it, she said, or else crack it on the edge of the table.

She was right, and you knew it and hated her for it.

In the sixth grade, after outgrowing her third jade bracelet, Tia told her mother she didn’t want a fourth. She, like everyone else, believed that four is bad luck. That was therefore the year you used your parents’ money to buy Tia a friendship bracelet for her birthday.

You wore yours long after you and Tia had stopped speaking.

Père David’s deer is the only living member of the genus Elaphurus. Yet though it survived what killed most of its relatives, the Père David’s deer was never truly safe. By the late 1800s, the deer population had plummeted, due in no small part to vicious overhunting. Remaining individuals were taken out of China and into France and Germany, where they were able to safely and successfully breed.

You are many things. Primarily Japanese and Chinese. Most people assume you are either one or the other. You have never felt much like either. You have spent your whole life embracing your European roots.

I’m not FULL Asian, you always told your classmates, because in your mind, this made you better than they were. This was also when you informed your parents that, once you mastered French, you would move to France tout de suite. You started studying the language in the seventh grade and began planning a year abroad before reaching high school.

In the early 1900s, British nobleman Herbrand Russell purchased a handful of Père David’s deer from the Berlin Zoo. He kept his herd at his Woburn Abbey Estate. Later, in the 1980s, the duke’s great-grandson donated the deer’s descendants to China in the hopes of having them returned to their ancestral grounds. Every living Père David’s deer is a scion of the duke’s original herd.

Your great-grandmother, Feifei, left China when your grandmother was young, fleeing Hua Feng, your great-grandfather, in search of a brighter future. She claimed she never regretted it, but you know she spent the rest of her life missing Asia. Your grandmother, meanwhile, born Jing Yi but known to most as Priscilla, did not share her mother’s sentiment. After marrying a white man, she took his last name and pretended she had lived in America all along.

The gestation period of a Père David’s deer is not unlike that of humans, lasting for roughly nine months. Most times, a mother will produce only one offspring. Three out of every four calves are born in April.

You too are an only child born in April. April first. The day of fools. You do not like mentioning this to anyone and, as a child, irrationally blamed your mother. If she had held you in, or pushed you out a little faster, perhaps you would not have been born a joke.

The hooves of the deer make clicking sounds when the animal is in motion. In this way, it is similar to the more popular reindeer.

You grew up loving reindeer, especially those belonging to Santa Claus. You believed in him long after your classmates learned the truth. Later, when ruminating on everything that broke you and Tia apart, you realized she had known for years. Had been waiting for you to figure it out.

Young Père David’s deer are precocious, maturing soon after birth.

You are not precocious. You are constantly behind.

You were late to walk. Late to speak. Late to laugh. Everyone gets the punchline before you’ve processed the joke. You still wanted to play ponies even when your friends did not. You knew nothing about pop music and preferred your mother’s songs.

That being said, you did not like everything she did.

In your early years of high school, she started watching old reruns of Chinese dramas with titles littered with embarrassing words like Love and Life and Fate. Worse yet, most of the shows she watched featured main characters barely older than you. You often found yourself wondering if entering a state of arrested development could somehow be genetic.

Because Père David’s deer have existed in captivity for so long, there are several risks associated with reintroducing them to the wild. They may, for example, fail to develop methods of avoiding parasites, such as grooming, leading to poor hygiene.

This is what happened to you when you finally left home.

You were eighteen, and though you did not move to France immediately after graduation, as you thought you would in middle school, you did get away. You made it to the East Coast. Pennsylvania. A state you could not even spell until the age of sixteen.

You soon realized, while jumping at the sounds of unfamiliar things called radiators, you did not know how to care for yourself. You left hair in the shower, and everyone knew it was yours because you were the only girl in your hall with hair that long and black.

You had never been in a place with so few people who looked like you. Back home, you and Tia had resembled half the rest of your class. Of course you had advertised the parts of you that were European. If you didn’t, you would be just another Asian face in the crowd.

Despite having spent your adolescence wanting solitude, you found yourself horrifically isolated in Pennsylvania. You stopped curling your hair, then stopped brushing it too. One night, you took your scissors out of your pencil case and hacked off most everything to rid yourself of the tangles.

Your roommate reported you to the RA, who then insisted on walking you over to the counseling center. You smiled and thanked her for taking you there.

Then, once she was gone, you left without making an appointment.

Another concern regarding the reintroduction of Père David’s deer to the wild is that these creatures may have lost adaptive survival behaviors. They will not know how to defend themselves in the real world. They may come face to face with a predator and fail to realize they are in danger.

After being sent home from college for essentially losing your mind, you spent the next few months growing your hair back out. You then applied for jobs that did not require a degree. You told your mother you didn’t want to go to school again.

You started working at an office with people older than you. They took you out drinking, even though you were eighteen.

Eighteen’s the legal drinking age in China, your cute coworker pointed out, and you were too ecstatic that he was speaking to you directly to care that his hand was somewhere it definitely shouldn’t have been.

Some believe eating the meat of a Père David’s deer will render the consumer essentially immortal.

Even now, after everything, you wonder if you have tasted this deer’s meat. That would explain why you keep on living, even when everyone around you is dying.

You are not afraid of death; you are afraid of being left behind. Of watching the people you love finding peace without you.

Sometimes, you think everyone in the world would be happier without you.

The lifespan of a Père David’s deer is roughly eighteen years.

You often think you only lived until eighteen. Then you died in a way no one else recognizes. You’re a walking corpse, shipped home and paraded around, bearing the name of someone who may not have contributed to your death but is inextricably tied to you nonetheless.

One day, your mother asks you if things are going any better. You tell her not really. Things are going, and keep on going, but there’s no better here.

This is when she books your flight to China. Just the two of you; your father still can’t look you in the eye.

Despite understandable qualms about the release of Père David’s deer back into the wild, a study published in 2011 suggests the deer have not forgotten their roots entirely. When researchers played the barks of domesticated dogs, deer born in captivity did not respond. Upon hearing the roars of wild tigers, however, they exercised more caution, their behavior remaining erratic for a noticeable span of time. It is thought that they heard echoes of what their ancestors had faced.

In China, you are a stranger. A nobody. A foreigner. You do not know the language. Your years of French do you no good.

Yet when your mother takes you to a dollar store near Fort Street Mall, you recognize the white-rabbit candies you and Tia once shared. Her mother always had half a dozen packages in the pantry. You lost track of the number of times a part of you hated Tia for having everything you didn’t. The only reason you never wished her mother could be yours instead was because if she were, you would have been full Asian.

It is February. In a few months, you will turn another year older. You remember, rather suddenly, that in traditional Chinese culture, a baby is considered one year old at birth. You do not agree with this. You have never felt younger than you do when your mother takes you to a lion dance for Chinese New Year, your breath catching, then flowing out of you with the beat of the drums.

Your mother asks if you remember when she visited your class for Chinese New Year. You say you do. You remember watching as your classmates made Chinese lions out of brown paper bags. Your mother brought candied lotus roots and coconut, and for the next week, every time you sat on the rug, you would find another few granules of sugar between the fibers.

Your mother says something else. You lose her words to the noise. You shout, WHAT? in a voice louder than the one you used when your coworker took things too far. Then, you were quiet. You weren’t sure you had spoken at all.

Your mother repeats herself and asks if you’re having fun.

You don’t know how to answer. You feel closer to tears than laughter.

She then alters her question: do you know how much she loves you?

Those studying Père David’s deer often worried that the small population and limited breeding options would lead to a catastrophic genetic bottleneck. To their surprise, the captive population has continued to increase, and no genetic issues have been noted thus far. This, some say, suggests that Père David’s deer are incredibly adaptable.

You consider yourself many things, but adaptable is not one of them. You do not do well with change.

That’s what you thought. Yet isn’t this change? Isn’t this both different from what you’ve known and just familiar enough to make you feel as though you are coming back to something?

Yes, you tell your mother. You try to say more, to explain, but your throat closes, as if you have swallowed too many white-rabbit candies at once. Your eyes fill with tears.

For a moment, it seems as though she does not understand. The time between her question and your answer feels as vast as the distance between China and France.

Smiling, she takes your hands and squeezes them both.

You pause for a moment. You then squeeze back, echoing what you know, and maybe even what you don’t, immortalizing everything that can never truly die.