Ni hao, Huzhao; or the year of the Tiger

Pardon me while I burp.

Not me personally.

I mean burp little Huzhao, my 1-week-old son.

What a difference one new stranger can make in our outlook on life. It’s almost like being visited by an angel. A week ago, I was worried about the whole world, but today the whole world is englobed in a tiny round face that doesn’t know anything about worry.

Of course, being a grown-up, I know all about worry, and the last week has provided plenty of it. If you never appreciated the tenuousness of life before, I strongly encourage you to bring a baby into the world. Set your nerves on steel, grit your teeth, and hold on tight. As every parent knows, anything can happen, and often will.

A wished-for pregnancy is the greatest gift in the world, but also burdens you with the greatest responsibility, and can result in the greatest pain.

My wife River and I have been through all of that. Obviously, none of this would have been possible without her. She has been a wonderful companion, and a source of strength through hard times. I’ll keep the details private, but the truth is, no matter how strong your marriage is, you can be sorely tested by the physical, emotional and spiritual changes that pregnancy will bring.

If you are lucky, the end result of your perseverance, of course, is Huzhao, or someone equally as precious.

Huzhao (pronounced “WHO Jow,” by the way, where Jow rhymes with How) came into the world at a sprightly 5 pounds, 11 ounces, and three weeks earlier than normal. Despite his small size, he has well earned the right to his name, which is derived partly from the Chinese word for tiger.

As most of you know, I traveled more than 5,000 miles to meet my wife, and then she came across the ocean from China to marry me. Our hope all along has been to join together two cultures, two traditions and two lives into a new family. It’s been a long 2 1/2 years with lots of ups and downs, but we’ve seen some real growth, too — growth in understanding, growth in patience, and now growth in our family.

Huzhao joins my children Carmen and Meredith at home, and he is definitely the BABY brother. Meredith is 10 and Carmen is 14. People ask if I am ready to start over at my age, and I ask them, “Start over at what? Life?” Having a new baby is just as natural as taking the next breath, and just as refreshing.

 From the time I heard him cry out with his first breath in the operating room, I knew that Huzhao was a fighter, and a blessing. Of course, I should acknowledge here that baby Huzhao has the temperament of a lamb despite his fierce name. Perhaps it is because he has the calm strength of the tiger, and perhaps it is just because he has nothing to fear. It is Hu that actually means tiger, and there are many reasons why we chose that name for our son. This is the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese calendar, and that animal is a symbol of strength, cunning and natural beauty.

It was particularly strength which River saw in our son when he first started kicking in the womb, and that’s how he got the nickname Tiger. He may be known by that name in school later, but we wanted to keep his heritage alive for him, so we chose to honor both his spirit and his Chinese family by naming him Huzhao. That’s because his mother’s official English first name is Yuzhao, the English version of her Chinese name Zhao Yu. In the Chinese style, Zhao is her family name, so Huzhao will carry that name forward to the next generation along with my last name.

Ultimately, Huzhao, like any newborn, is a mix of the innocent and the all-knowing. It seems like every baby is a Buddha, living in the moment perfectly, all about “being here now.” When a baby cries, it’s not because he is worried, but because he is hungry or has some other pain. It’s all about reality right now, not what might happen later.

I’ve mastered a bit of that trick myself, despite writing about the world’s woes on a weekly basis in this column. There is more to life than the mess in Washington. There is also the mess in the house and the mess in the diaper. To a large extent, wisdom consists in knowing which mess you can actually clean up and getting down to it. For now, curing tummy aches and changing dirty diapers are my priority, along with attending to the needs of my dedicated, loving wife and my older children. Keeping family as the center of your world means you can never be too far off center.