Life imitating fiction

Hi I'm Toni Song, freelance musician and fledgling author. When my family and I lived in China for awhile I took up writing fiction just for fun. As I wrote about my character Sasa, a Chinese woman living in America, I never imagined that my own life would start to mirror that of my character. It did and this is my story.

Our trip from America to China as a family went smoothly. I was concerned that my pre-teen son, Ed, would not like plane travel. He loved it and was super excited for our 14 hour flight to China after our 6 hour flight to Canada. Once we landed in Beijing, China we went to our hotel to rest before going on to the city we were headed to, Zhengzhou. Zhengzhou is about 3 hours south of Beijing, and while I considered it to be a big city, there were fewer foreigners in the city. We became instant 'rock stars' once we landed in China. People would take pictures of us or stand next to us and snap a selfie. Me, I'm a petite Black woman, my then husband a taller White man adopted by an Asian American couple and our beautiful son a mixture of both of our cultures. My ex, Ed, and I had our troubles in marriage, but I never thought our marital issues would result in what was to happen. Ed, was to teach at a university and our son Ed and I were just along for the ride. I homeschooled our son, so we were able to take the time to travel and let him see and learn about a culture other than his own. One that he had heard of from his paternal grandparents.

Shortly after starting at the university, Ed. Sr's, boss approached me about teaching also for the university. This was a big change of events, my job had always been homeschooling and being mom to our son. My job in America was about teaching music and homeschooling. I didn't have skills in teaching English. But they only wanted me to teach spoken English so with the encouragement of my husband, I accepted the job offer on the condition that one of us be home with our son. That could be arranged. I'd teach my son in the morning and his father would be at the university. After lunch, I would teach and we would then have evenings and weekends as a family. This sounded perfect. The university, was a distance from our house and we needed to take the 'school bus', our schools way of getting the teachers, both foreign and Chinese from teacher housing to the campus. On the school bus were Chinese teachers who on other days rode the bus with my husband. Often other women who spoke English would tell me how much they liked my husband, and I got the feeling that their liking him was not as plutonic as I had been lead to believe. Soon I realized that he was having affairs with a few of the women we worked with. When I confronted him about this, he denied and said that coming to China was a way for us to have a new start in our marriage. However, he did express a desire to investigate an intimate relationship with Chinese women. I couldn't see how we could have a new start if he was looking for a new relationship.

Eventually he said to me that he wanted to stay in China. I too had fallen in love with the country, his next words changed my mind and life...forever. "I need to marry a Chinese National so that I can stay in China forever even after I'm too old to teach school." I was shocked, we had a child together, we had come here as a family and we had a life. Why was I hearing this from the man I was married to? He contacted his lawyer in America to see how to divorce while in China. We moved into our own apartments and started the task of creating two lives where there was once one. Custody battles are never fun, made worse when custody is awarded to one parent and the other refuses to listen. I was given custody of our son, my ex had started dating looking for his new mate, before our divorce was final. He found a woman who lived on the other side of China. His plan was to move to her city taking our son and not allowing me weekly visitation. I'd see my son on holidays and that was it. I was told that phone calls could happen, but they didn't. My calls went unanswered. Eventually, my ex and his new wife moved back to America. My son lived with me for 6 months before his father asked for him to come to America to be with him. I remained in China to finish my teaching contract, but the connection with my son soon became more strained. In my story of Sasa, she lost custody of her child to her American ex and decided to go to China, the land of her parents and try to make a life for herself there. It is my hope that my life will continue to mirror that of Sasa.