Santa and all that . . . heading into Rabbit Year

December 28, 2010

Like you, we’re in the midst of the holidays, which have always been a collision of cultures for me.  My father was a Russian Jew and my mother was Irish Catholic, so we were raised to be Confused; we were one of those families with a menorah and a Christmas tree, and the tree had a Star of David on top.  This year I dug a menorah out of a storage box (it apparently smuggled itself to Shanghai) and it’s on a cabinet with the Buddha, across from the tree and the Nativity scene.  We lit candles one night, and the boys blew them out as they sang “Happy Birthday, dear Jesus”, so the traditions continue to spin in the cusinart as the generations roll on. Christmas tends to dominate, since it's much more fun decorating the tree than trying to remember my Hebrew.  Of course Allison’s family is a big part of the blend now; that’s why we left carrots for the reindeer, and made all those terrific cookies.  We had to tell Kai three or four hundred times that he couldn't wait up for Santa Claus, though he claimed to hear the reindeer on the roof, and the usual subconiferous chaos ensued on the big morning.  If this Christmas had a theme, it was Thomas the Train -- Kai and Keegan now have a train table full of tracks, with Thomas, Percy, Cranky, Harold, and the whole gang, not forgetting Sodor’s patriarch Sir Toppam Hatt, a wise man if their ever was one.  Wiser than me, if he really runs that railroad -- I’ll have to spent the next five years figuring out how to put it all together.

For anyone wondering about the modeling job, Keegan did have a shoot, and I’m posting pics as promised, but the clothing company (which must remain nameless here) didn’t have outfits that quite fit our plus-sized American baby, so we think he looks like he busting out of everything, hysterically.  The outfits seem like they were designed by an anime fan on crank who just lost a bet and was way past deadline, but hey, that’s just my opinion.

Speaking of Keegan, he is now walking, so besides bursting out of bad pastel jumpsuits, he’s also bursting with pride.  This kid truly has a gift for happiness.  I love my son Kai like nobody’s business, but at this point in his young life he’s mercurial.  He can be ecstatic on minute, and the next he may sound like wolverines are eating his pancreas because we can’t find his chuppie. Keegan’s disposition is constantly set to Sunny.  Go into his room in the morning, say hello, and he flaps like a penguin ready for takeoff.  Yes, I realize penguins can’t fly, but Keegan doesn’t, so don’t tell him.

Keegan and Kai both enjoy hiding, although they’re spectacularly bad at it, since they think that if they cover their faces they become invisible.  In fairness I will say that Kai’s technique has gotten a little more refined lately; he goes behind a curtain or a couch to hide sometimes, but he always shouts out “I’m hiding back here!”, so it’s not like we have to release the hounds or anything.  My real favorite is when he brings me with him to hide.  We get under a blanket together and he whispers to me, “We’re hiding, Daddy!”  All conspiritorial-like.  Sometimes he says, “Keegan can’t find us.”  But sometimes he’ll bring Keegan with us to hide, too.  Then he’ll say, “Mommy can’t find us”, even if Mommy is in Phoenix or India or someplace.

Our friend Marija is visiting from SF, which has been a great excuse to do some of the touristy things in Shanghai like visiting Jing’an Temple.  It’s a golden shrine to the Buddha literally in the shadow of one of the most commercial strips of real estate  this side of Vegas, with Calvin Klein billboards in full view of the monks -- a great synechdoche of modern China.  We also just got back from a day in Suzhou, a beautiful excursion from Shanghai, where we strolled in the classical gardens and realized the profound value of an afternoon nap.

Of course I don't expect anyone but the true blog junkies to go through all the links to Kai and Keegan making cookies or opening gifts on Christmas morning.  Enjoy them, Grammy!  For the rest of you, I’ll be back in the new year.  2011, by the way, will be the year of the Rabbit (as of February 3rd, anyway). Kai's already got a head start.  He made friends with a bunny that a barber across the street from us keeps in a cage on the sidewalk in front of his shop, and we slip him (the rabbit, not the barber) a carrot every time we go past.  I think that means it'll be a good year for us.

Be well, and keep in touch!

Thankful

I’m a little behind with this entry because I have not yet received the time machine I was promised (along with 35 million dollars) by a promanant and hihgly placed reprisentative of the Nigerian gouvernment at the ministeriel level, in a resent and greatly urgent and personel important email communicacion.  But hey, as soon as that bad boy arrives in the mail, you can bet I’ll jump right in and straighten out this little chronological glitch.  In the meantime . . .

This morning at about 7 o’clock I brought Keegan downstairs, set him in a highchair, and went back up for Kai.  I knew Kai would be OK for a minute because he was absorbed in reading Kai’s Amazing Alphabet Adventures, which features his own likeness 26 times (google Shutterfly, moms and dads, Christmas is almost here), and even if he did go to the stairs he’s perfectly capable of walking down them, and I was only going down for a second so there was no need to close the gate, which has an annoying, sticky locking mechanism anyway.  All the inner dialogue occurred well beneath the level of conscious awareness, of course – it’s not like I made an excel spreadsheet of pros and cons.  Also beneath the level of my awareness, but a little closer to the surface, was the vaguely recognizable voice, the voice of a mouse as it turned out, that I could scarcely hear from the kitchen as I whisked the Keegan/highchair combination package to a spot close enough to the dishwasher to play with the magnets, but not so close that he could manipulate the buttons, an almost impossibly small niche.  What was that toy?  Oh, that Mickey Mouse fire-truck-ambulance thing, the one with Mickey and Donald and the crackling radio sound effects, I didn’t know that was upstairs, Keegan loves that thing, just yesterday he was riding it while Kai tried to pull him out of it . . . and then I was climbing the stairs and there was Kai in the Mickey Mouse ambulance at the top smiling down at me as he cleared the edge, still exuberant and not yet terrified, and I reached up and out as he flew over the steering wheel and I barely managed with a quarter-inch to spare to get my hand between his porcelain cheek and the hard wooden step and stop his fall as the ambulance tumbled past us both to the landing and crashed against the wall. He was shaken and racked with sobs but they were sobs of fright and surprise, not of pain, and they subsided as I held him and rocked him and stroked his hair, while my imagination treated me to a full visualization of what had not happened but almost had, almost, so close that any momentary further delay to tickle Keegan or pick up a magnet would have meant a smashed face and probably much worse, certainly a trip in a real ambulance with no Mickey or Donald to share the ride.

Ten minutes later we were all in the kitchen making oatmeal, and Kai wanted the blue spoon, no Daddy the blue one not the green the blue THE BLUE!  This is parenting.  It’s now 7:10 am, nobody cares how tired you are, and you cannot find the blue spoon.  But your children are alive, alive, and you did not screw up too badly.  This time.

This job is making me believe more firmly in God.  Yes, thank you very much, I know all about Richard Dawkins and his crowd, who say that God is an antiquated delusion, but they are attacking a straw man and they are as overly literal as the fundamentalists against whom they inveigh.  My God is not an old man sitting on a cloud directing traffic.  My God is not interested in helping the San Francisco Giants win the World Series (although they did win the World Series, by the way, and this cannot be mentioned often enough!).  Nor did my God lead me up the stairs in the nick of time to catch my son this morning, necessarily.  My God, glimpsed always indirectly, around corners, and called (usually in the privacy of my own mind) the spirit of the universe, is the God of Serendipity, the God of Jung and Einstein and Kant, the God of Buddha (who didn’t believe in God) and Baha’u’llah (who believed in all the religions, not one).  Sacred texts like the Bible and the Koran and The Art of French Cooking do not express the literal truth; they express a metaphorical truth, which is, for lack of a better word, far cooler – that nature bats last, that the universe tends toward the good, and that nothing is ever destroyed but only transformed (a highly scientific as well as a deeply spiritual idea).

Besides, no matter how crazy anyone’s belief in religion may be or seem – and I mean ANYONE’S belief, be it burning bushes that talk, or parting seas, or magical carpenters, or special God-glasses buried in upstate New York, or L. Ron Hubbard-as-God, or atheism, or you name it – nothing, nothing could possibly be more outlandish, more unlikely, than the idea that on a speck of dust flying through the limitless cosmos at speeds beyond thought, in the thinnest tissue of gas, creatures have somehow evolved who can make pizza and reflect on their own mortality – and yet this is the apparent reality we are dealing with, people.  So let us not be too hasty to dismiss wild speculation.

We put up our Christmas tree early because they had them next to the checkout at Ikea, and there’s a manger underneath that we got at a charity bazaar with a little stuffed camel and a sheep and a donkey, bearded Chinese wise men -- well, everyone’s Chinese in this one, including a little baby Jesus the size of your thumb, and the Angel of the Lord, the one who (in the STORY, which is a METAPHOR, yes, of course, I know, but it’s a NICE STORY) tells the shepherds about the birth of Jesus.  So our Angel of the Lord is hanging from a low branch of the tree to simulate flight, and Kai said to me, “Look Daddy, she’s flying over the house!”  I asked him if meant the Angel.  He said, “No, her!” and he pointed to a photograph of my mother, who died in 2006 (all of our ornaments are little, framed family photos).  Just a sweet coincidence, of course.  I took down the photo of my mother to fix the string and rehang it, as it was a bit low, but Keegan took it from my hands and started to kiss it, over and over.  I know, just a sweet coincidence, a good story.  Does it express a metaphorical truth?  Anyway, I thought so.  And the next morning, Kai didn’t fall down the stairs.  Because angels are watching over us?  That wouldn’t be very intellectually rigorous of me to suggest, would it?  But regardless, I would like to say right here online, in front of God and everybody as the saying goes -- thank you Mom, and Thank you God.

I was going to write about buying our Thanksgiving turkey from a man named Bubba, and about the arrival of our container of STUFF!! (Yay hooray!!  We have a BED, and balsamic vinegar and Cliff Bars and sweaters and and and . . .), but it’s now 9:55 pm and my coma is just five minutes away. Oh well, I’m sure that will all make fascinating fodder for my biographer at some point in the distant future, and I can visit him and tell him all about it, just as soon as my Nigerian friend’s time machine arrives in the mail!  Unfortunately the Chinese postal system is notoriously undependable . . .

Photo links! [No videos this installment due to technical difficulties.  Please stand by . . .]  Here's the rough cut from a Christmas card session, and, at no extra cost to you the blogee, a few shots of the boys helping Mommy pack, and attempting to stow away. 

Stay at home, Dad. Stay! Gooood Dad ...

Hard to keep up with the epic blaga, even at the sub-glacial speed of every couple of weeks. Allison has become the Road Warrior; she’s coming off a five-day trip to Japan, and another to Singapore and Malaysia; tomorrow she flies to Thailand, and between now and mid-December she has trips to India, Australia, and Phoenix AZ, each one about six days long. In one really tough stretch, she’ll be home for roughly 24 hours at a time, three times, in three weeks. If the travel sounds glam, just imagine the flights, and the time-changes -- and these trips include some red-eyes that pull into Shanghai at the start of a full workday for her. When I think of what she’ll have to deal with, I don’t feel quite so much like complaining about shopping or diapers or my grueling blogging schedule.

We keep telling each other this is temporary, that her travel schedule will cool off after an initial round of meet-and-greets, and hopefully that’s true, but right now we really have to savor the time we do get. When she’s home, the boys just want to gobble her up, and I think they would gladly crawl over the lifeless husk of my body if need be to get to her lap; when she’s away, my second-banana status ends, and my lap becomes the place to be in all of China. It can be an exhausting marathon, and like a real marathon it can bring moments of exhiliration and intense satisfaction. Every day, both Kai and Keegan stun me with their surprising wit, with the voracious pace of their learning, with their ability to fill diapers to the brim and beyond. A couple of days ago we saw a cat in a neighbor’s window, and I asked Kai what the cat says. Kai did a pretty credible elephant impression. I didn’t say anything, just looked at him quizzically. He told me, “The kitty cat thinks he’s a elephant, Daddy.” Keegie, meanwhile, has had his elephant impression down for a while, but he’s adding to his repetoire with chicken, cow, tiger, and bear sounds, plus a spectacular rendition of a giraffe, done with a neck-stretch. He seems to get a new word every day, and a few of them are Chinese, like “Hao,” which means “good,” and our favorite -- Keegan’s first word in Chinese -- “Hai Bao” which isn’t exactly a word, but the name of a ubiquitous, cartoony blue guy who is the mascot for the Shanghai Expo -- sort of a Chinese Gumby, but with a higher public profile than either Mao or Michael Jordan in their respective heydays.

The boys and I have been keeping busy with our weekly music class, pottery class, assorted playgroups, and research visits to schools Kai may go to next year, among other things. And now -- and this was just bound to happen -- the boys have been recruited as models. Yes, someone besides Allison has finally landed a job, and it isn’t me. We were approached at a party, a fundraiser thrown by an expat organization, with an offer to have some family photos taken for free. We thought it was a party favor of sorts, but it turned out to be the gateway drug to careers as little Marky Marks for our sons, who are big-time eye-candy here. We are taking it very slow, though, hoping the boys might earn themselves a little extra toy money, or, if things get really poppin’, who knows, maybe even a little college money. And no matter what, we are NOT buying them a chihuahua to carry around in a handbag. Keegan has his first gig on Wednesday, I believe for a catalogue. I’ll let you know how it goes.

At our various playgroups and classes here, I’m very often the only guy in the room. In my early days as a stay-at-home dad this summer in the Bay Area, it felt pretty normal and average (well, at least after a brief, initial decompression period, while the detritus of American Male Baggage fell away), to be the dad wearing the Bjorn and toting a pocketful of snuggle puppies; every other guy in town, it seemed, was pushing a Maclaren and had a chupie or two clipped to his shirt. Big deal -- let’s get past that and talk potty-training and the Giants, Man! Thank God I had that experience to temper me, because now the social reinforcement has been replaced by some chuckles, a few double-takes, and even the occasional punch on the street. Really -- a woman on Shanxxi Nan Lu punched me for carrying Keegan in the Bjorn without socks. I know this from her wild gesticulations in the direction of his feet, but I had no means of explaining to her that it was 80 degrees out, Keegan can’t walk, and I wasn’t going to put him down. It wasn’t a playful tap or a chiding jab, either; she hit me as hard as she could, I suspect, and she got her legs into the punch, throwing a right hook at me with all she had, which thankfully wasn’t much. Also, since she was four feet tall she hit me in the hip, but the point is she wanted to hurt me, because I was a man who didn’t know what he was doing, and I was endangering the life of a beautifully fat baby with my flabby, foreign, male ignorance.

It’s not nearly so bad with the expat women in the playgroups as it is on the street, but still, it’s clear there’s a range of comfort levels. Some of my fellow parents are chatty, warm, welcoming, and pay no mind to my gender, while others make little jokes, and a few studiously avoid me, though that could be my halitosis. Of course we could say that all of this is just the result of varying personalities and that gender has no part in it, but I think it’s a little from column A, a little from column B. Even the children react differently to me than they do to the other parents, but here the general trend is oddly positive. It’s hard to explain, but often several of the kids will key in on me, come up to me, watch me, follow me -- why? Because I’m a man, and because I’m the only man, and maybe, possibly, because they miss their dads, who probably have to do quite a bit of traveling. At one school I visited, not one but two boys called me “papa” or dada” repeatedly, and I was there for no more than 20 minutes. Allison, who’s seen this phenomenon in action a few times on the playground or in the playroom of Green Valley, says I’m the Pied Piper, but it makes me just a touch maudlin in a way that’s hard to explain, like when you pet a stray dog you can’t possibly bring home.

A reporter who was doing a story on playgroups for an expat magazine was at one of our regular stops this week, and asked me if I’d say something about my experience with the group; she was quite candid that she was asking me because I was the only dad, and she wanted to get that angle. I told her that I was grateful for the outlet for the boys and the chance to learn from the insight and experience of others, and that the moms generally and quickly realized that I was just like any other parent there. All of which is true as far as it goes, and yet the truth, as it can often be, is more subtle and elusive than it appears.

And speaking of things I do with my kids that are hard to explain, here’s a highly random video of an activity Kai and I happened upon accidentally that we call either “spinning” or “tunnel.” He’ll probably be telling his therapist about it one of these days. I hope that like me, he’ll decide that his parents were just doing the best they could with what they knew.

Before I close, I would be remiss if I did not add, in case you missed it, that THE SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS ARE THE CHAMPIONS OF THE WORLD!!!! OH MY DEAR SWEET GOD!!!! No matter where on earth you may be, when your team finally, really, improbably does it, it’s a beautiful thing.

I’m just looking for a credible Chinese artist to tattoo Edgar Renteria’s face on my tookus.

On things we lack, and all things orange and black.

October 31, 2010

[Take note of the Panda hat-China-Halloween-Giants tie-in in the photo on the left. Sometimes, it all comes together . . .]

Halloween isn’t scary. Chinese customs, now that’s scary. No, not costumes, customs. No, not traditions, I mean customs, the people who decide when and whether to let our stuff into the country. It’s been six weeks since we arrived, and we’re still living out of the suitcases we came here with. We have an air shipment of mostly clothes and toys, and a bigger sea shipment of everything else, including furniture, including our beds, and it’s all still “in transit,” and/or at the docks. So every night, the boys sleep in their travel cribs, which fortunately they love, and Allison and I sleep on a slab of concrete topped by a mattress pad that I suspect is only painted on. We have one knife and four plates, not counting the plastic stuff we got at Ikea (thanks, Sweden!). And I do so wish I’d packed more than one sweater back in September . . . we went shopping at the Children’s Market and got some new warm things for the boys, but Allison and I are holding out a while longer. Latest estimate, mid-November for the air shipment. But hey, no rush, customs guys! Take your time, go through that bag of shampoo bottles one more time. You can’t be too careful.

Green Valley, our International Mayberry, had its Halloween last night, complete with trick-or-treating. Halloween isn’t a Chinese custom -- they pay much more heed to Sweeping Your Ancestors' Graves Day in April (104 days after Winter Solstice, mark your calendars). But Halloween is actually getting somewhat fashionable in certain circles in China, and this place is an expat haven anyway. We did have some dynamite costumes in that shipment that the customs guys still need just a few more weeks to check (and that is NO problem, men! Mai Wenti! You’re just doing your job! And you do it well!); fortunately, Kai always travels with his Little Black Kitty Cat outfit, so no worries there, and we got a Tigger suit at the Children’s Market for Keegan so off-the-charts cute that it’s just not fair to all the other babies. We hit the mean streets of Green Valley (video) and raked in some really odd candy, like Cheerios coated with hard blue sugar, and gummy animals with nuts (an idea just bound to take off!). It turned out to be a pretty shmoozy event for grown-ups, a chance to meet some of the neighbors we hadn’t met, including a Mexican family we spoke Spanish with, a sweet and funny Belgian couple, and even an American woman from Philadelphia (I didn’t bring up the Phillies -- I thought it would be crass to gloat -- but GO GIANTS!).

Speaking of the Giants, the World Series is 2 to 1 in favor of the Team Torture as I write this, but anything can happen -- it’s baseball, that’s how it works. I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by baseball . . . I grew up on the northern edge of Chicago, 12 miles from 1060 W. Addison, so I don’t think I need to show you my childhood bona fides. I was in a bar on Huntington Avenue in October of 1986, a bar packed with rabid Sawks fans chanting “One moah strike! One moah strike!”, just before Bill Buckner stepped in front of destiny, and it went right between his legs. I fell in love with the Giants in 1989, went to opening day, and to the fateful third game of the World Series with the A’s, forever remembered as the Earthquake Series. And many of us can never forget 2002, with Dusty pulling Ortiz, Scott Spiezio, and that hell-spawn rally monkey. Yes, I have paid my dues at the church of baseball. Now, with torture or ecstasy teetering in the balance, I am fated to watch from afar, in a land without baseball. I have mlb.tv, so I should be able to watch live at breakfast, but the connectivity is so bad that the best I can do is KNBR on the radio via Internet (which I’m happy to have, don’t get me wrong, Kruk and Kuip!); on the mlb site this includes cartoon cutouts of batters, which make South Park look like Star Wars. But at least I know what’s happening. Kai and Keegan are Giants fans now, and Kai asks me every half-inning or so, “Did the Giants win, Daddy?” When they do, the boys throw their hands in the air with me and we dance around the living room, the only crazies for miles around who give a darn (aside from Mommy, who is with us in this as in all things). I have sworn on the cleanly swept graves of my ancestors that if they lose, I will smile and laugh and dance around the kitchen just the same, so Kai and Keegan don’t pick up my gloom. Maybe I can shield them from real baseball fandom for a few more years.

Go Giants! We can DO this!

Allison left for Japan this afternoon, the first of many business trips in the region, and the first time the boys and I have been on our own here in Shanghai. All of us miss her terribly, though the boys took it easy on me and we got through the witching hours -- dinner, bath, bedtime -- very smoothly. I read “Dear Zoo” a few times, distracted Kai with the Ipad while I put Keegan down (my standards have fallen abysmally), and sang a few numbers from Springsteen and Cat Stevens -- that usually seems to calm them. Putting Kai and Keegan to bed is so much more important than baseball that it helps me put little things like the World Series into perspective; baseball is just millionaires in pajamas, playing a silly game that has no genuine importance or impact on reality, as the deafening lack of interest on the rest of the planet will attest. My own little boys in pajamas count for a lot more, really.

Still -- come on Giants! Just two more!

How Green Was My Valley

October 18, 2010

Tonight before dinner, as the boys and I were playing in the backyard -- a great big one shared by ten or twelve families in Zone 4 and Zone 5 of Green Valley Villas (yes, the actual name of our block is “Zone 5”) -- Kai found a round plastic fan, a souvenir from the Singapore Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo. He was treating it like a frisbee, but he could only throw it about two feet. While he was doing this, he noticed the moon, and began trying to thrown this fan thing onto the moon. I thought that’s what he was doing right away, but he confirmed it by saying, “I’munna put it ona moon!” He fell a bit short, but that didn’t seem to bother him. He then reached out his hand, his left hand I noticed, and tried to grab the moon, to squeeze it with his fingers. He couldn’t quite reach it, so he said to me very simply, “Can you get it for me, Daddy?” I told him I would like to, but the moon was very high up. He waited a half-beat, no more than a second, before saying, “Could you go up on a ladder, and get it for me?” I told him I couldn’t, but that if I could, I would do it for him. I meant it, too.

Then I went over to pick up Keegan, who was trying to climb up onto a trampoline. Seriously. I don’t just have children, I have metaphors.

I want to try to tell you about Green Valley Villas, the “ villa compound” we’re living in. (Take a video tour here.) It’s a little, semi-permeable bubble of sorts where expat families cluster together so they can talk to at least a few other people in English or French, Norwegian or Japanese, and so their children are slightly less likely to be run over by taxis or buses than they would be on Nanjing Road. This place is truly an “international settlement”, which is what they called much of Shanghai in the 19th century when it emerged fully formed from the head of Tin Hau, or whichever City God was filling in for Zeus here in Asia. The residents have been here for two months or six months, some for two years or three, a few for six years or eight, fewer still for more than that. I’m getting the impression that the city comes in and absorbs people as they approach the decade mark. They come mostly from Europe -- Finland, France, Italy, the UK, Romania, Germany, Holland, you name it -- with a smattering from Singapore, Japan, Thailand, Australia, India. Relatively few Americans at this particular compound, or else they’re laying low; I’ve met more Canadians than Americans, by a score of 3 to 2 -- but then, Canadians are very prone to pronouncements like “Hi, I’m CANADIAN!” and often sport maple-leaf-themed clothing in an effort not to be taken for Americans, while Americans can get a bit sheepish trying to live down the legacy of imperial Texas that seems to cling to us like the looming funk of a mid-term election. We are, all of us, over-paying for rent -- or rather, the companies that employ us are overpaying, since housing is partly subsidized by the expat packages. Allison and I are paying pretty much what we paid in the Bay Area for housing, only here we have a bigger place, an indoor and an outdoor swimming pool, a gym, a playground, an indoor playroom, cleaning women who swoop in once a week to scour everything (we had no idea about this and the first time they showed up I came out in my towel, and thought that they -- or maybe I -- was in the wrong house), and a fair-sized army roaming the grounds on bicycles and armed with brooms, rakes, whistles, walkie-talkies, and hopefully not too many guns (we’re still trying to figure out why we hear shots a few times a week. Amazingly, we now hope there’s a shooting range nearby).

It’s a terrifically friendly place. We meet people easily and often, get invitations for playdates or drinks, and exchange information about ayis, schools, and where to find a Starbucks or a vacuum cleaner with people from all over the world, even a few from China, of all places! Many people here are learning Mandarin, or trying to, and there’s a can-do, we’re-all-in-this-together camaraderie in the air. The house itself, honestly, is just fine -- nice enough, certainly, but not spectacular. We looked at a couple of nicer houses among the dozen or more we toured with our relo agent, but we moved here because of the facilities, the community, and most of all, because this was by far the most kid-friendly, and kid-focused, of the places we saw. Everyone here has kids, and the children get to come and go between the houses as if they were living in some U.N. Mayberry. The U.N. may bery well be a good analogy -- it’s in New York City, but it is its own little international turf as well. Green Valley is in Shanghai, and China is still omnipresent here, but Green Valley is a little principality of its own within the city -- like I said, a semi-permeable bubble.

Be assured we do get out of the bubble frequently, just about every day. This weekend we headed to the riverfront site of the Shanghai World Expo 2010, to mix it up with just over a million of our closest friends, who also chose to attend that day. No, I’m not kidding -- imagine the entrance and exit gates for a place that holds ten Rose Bowls, and you’ll have some clue what it was like. But of course, you know all about the Expo already, right? What?! You’ve never heard of it?! Why, it’s just the most important event in human history, and the culmination of human civilization on Earth, that’s all! At least so it seems according to the hype machine in China, which is nothing if not relentless. Without question, the Expo is the largest and most expensive word’s fair ever, and we decided it would just be a shame to skip it, so we braved the crowds and craziness, loaded the boys into the double stroller, and dove in. We stood in stockade-like gates for about 45 minutes (we were extremely lucky -- the stroller, which works like a passport at times, gained us special entry to the shortest lines), and spent three hours or so cruising the country pavilions from the elevated road, and from street level. Some 242 countries and international organizations have a presence at the Expo, and we did little more than scratch the surface, but we did get a nice overview of the Asia, Europe, and South America sections. We mostly stayed outside and admired the tour-de-force architecture, since the lines for popular pavilions like China, Germany, and Canada were up to six hours (!). We snuck into a couple of places where the stroller allowed us to jump the queue -- thanks, Albania! (LOVE Albania! Seriously, I’m a big fan of this obscure yet fascinating country in Southeastern Europe. Don’t even get me started on King Zog . . . ) And a big thanks to the Chile Pavilion, where we ate a great lunch of empanadas, found a quiet nook to change diapers, and got a personal tour from a French girl from Lyon, working for the Chileans here in China, I have NO idea why --why the girl, or why the tour. But it was really cool nonetheless. (See the SHOCKING LINES and actually go INSIDE the ALBANIA PAVILION in a 2-minute video here!)

Besides the pavilions, the big attraction of the day at the Expo seemed to be us, and especially Kai and Keegan. As we passed through the crowd the boys set off a genuine stir that at times threatened to rise to the level of a riot. It’s no exaggeration to say they were photographed between 500 and 1000 times. Many people wanted to get into the pictures with them, touch their hair, their cheeks -- honestly, sometimes it gets a bit scary. People reach in, remove the passies from their mouths and reinsert them -- what could they be thinking? -- or try to pick them up, sometimes before we can stop it. Still, it would be a mistake, we think, to balk and try to pull away, because the kids would obviously pick up on that and it would only get more scary for them, so we tried to go with the flow, within reason. We also tried to keep rolling, since whenever we stopped, the flock of paparazzi would thicken considerably -- at one point, just outside the fair while we were waiting for our driver, a gaggle of women focused on Kai as if he were a Beatle or something; one younger woman who spoke English said repeatedly, “I love him!” Part of this seems to come from there being two of them, and two boys to boot, since China’s one-child policy has made this unusual -- very often we hear people saying “Liang ge!”, which means “two of them!” And inevitably, at an event like the Expo which has attracted untold numbers of Chinese domestic tourists, the novelty of seeing Westerners continues to fascinate the people from the provinces. How else to explain the people who want to pose for photos with just me or Allison? Although I tell her it’s obviously because she’s a hottie, which is also true.

On a quieter day last week, we celebrated Keegan’s first birthday with a private ceremony at our home, which featured the Ratner/Despard family tradition of presenting the one-year-old with a whole cake all his own, to tear to pieces at will. No real danger of the lad ODing on cake, since most of the cake ends up on the floor, but it was incredibly fun for Keegan, and a great show for us; the clean-up was well worth the entertainment.

Young Keegan Despard Ratner can now say” mama,” “dada,” “ball,” and “bye,” and make several animal sounds including cow, elephant, sheep, dog, fish, and my personal favorite, camel (“puh-TOHEY! puh-TOHEY!"). At 12 months, 1 week, 5 days and counting, he has yet to miss a meal.

It's come to this . . .

October 8, 2010

Writing in a blog about writing in a blog is, or at least should be, a criminal act; it’s reminiscent of those 70’s rockers who wrote all their big hits about writing all their big hits (I got an office, gold records on the wall . . .), or those rappers who bust all their rhymes about the money and b****es they get from busting all those rhymes. And yet, after just three weeks in China and just three blog entries, this is what I am reduced to -- metablogging. I can't keep up. I just do not have time to capture the extraordinary profusion of insanity, poignance, and insanity that seems to be flying at me daily. Did I mention the insanity? Here are a couple examples, chosen largely at random:

It’s common practice here to brazenly butt into the front of lines (“jump the queue” as my Dub cousins would say), and then pretend to be stone deaf if anyone protests. Queue-jumpers have no shame, and cannot be cluck-clucked into submission; I know this, after seeing them in action many times, and yet sometimes the astounding gall of it leads me to say something out loud, even though I know it’s nearly guaranteed to be incomprehensible, and a stone-cold lock to be ignored. I did this in the park yesterday, muttering, “Wow, you’ve got a lot of nerve” as a guy, his, wife, and three kids pulled aside a rope and jammed into the very front of a looong line for an animal show. To my surprise he turned and said in decent English, “We already wait long time in there,” gesturing with his shoulder to the cafeteria, then completing his shrug, and his excuse, with placid reserve as he pushed into the show. I wasted the next half a freaking hour of my life having an imaginary conversation with this weasel in which I brilliantly lambasted his rudeness, in a way that wouldn’t seem culturally ignorant on my part, or agro to my sons. In other words, I fantasized that I could do the impossible; I couldn’t. Don't ask me about the show; I missed it.

Allison and I don’t so much eat as we forage, attempting to retrieve edible nuts or berries in the forests of a grocery store or a restaurant. Even the simplest actions, like asking for a plate, or a bottle of water, are sometimes beyond our feeble powers of expression. We grunt, gesture, pick up objects and point, and frequently say what we think are words in Chinese, but these usually turn out to be amusing little animal noises or possibly rude farting sounds, judging from the array of smirks, guffaws, or blank stares they elicit. Is it any wonder that we prefer places with pictures of the food? Of course there’s not always much correlation between what we point at and what shows up at the table. Allison brought home some pho, which we love, from a Vietnamese takeout place near work; she ordered two of the same thing, as she thought, but when we sat down to eat it, hers had those yummy slices of rare beef on top of the noodles, while mine featured an assortment of animal parts that looked like the leftovers from a veterinary dissection class -- I’d try to describe it in more detail, but I actually like most of my readers. One night we went to the little restaurant at the villa compound we’ve just moved into (more on that in a forthcoming episode), because we figured they would speak a bit of English; we were mistaken about that, but the menu had English, and the meal was really good. The only problem -- it took them over an hour to start seving it, and by the time it came, the children were melting on the table. The man who cooked it showed up half an hour after we ordered, having obviously been roused from his bed at home when we arrived.

I’m afraid it sounds like I’m bitching, and that could be, maybe, possibly, because I’m bitching. I haven’t told you about the man who helped me pick up the double stroller and carry it over the bike racks blocking our path, or the neighbors who stop us to ask how we’re doing and coo over the boys every five minutes, or the amazingly juicy dumplings we got for nine cents each. I haven’t told you about Ikea, and I’m not going to, because my experience at Ikea was exactly, precisely identical to your experience at Ikea, right down to the little blue and yellow cake versions of the Swedish flag in the cafeteria, and it makes absolutely zero difference whether the Ikea is in Emeryville or Shanghai or, eventually, Neptune. That’s the whole point of Ikea. How strange that the Swedes have taken over the world -- but I digress. There is nothing, neither Ikea, nor China, nor anything else, that is either good or bad but thinking makes it so, as yet another Scandinavian guy once remarked. What China is like depends on my angle of vision, and while I know the same in true in San Bruno or Des Moines or New York City, the newness and strangeness of our life here at times makes me feel I’m looking through a kaleidoscope of shifting perspectives, one moment thrilled that I can understand three consecutive words, the next horrified by a wizened crone coughing up a knot of phlegm on my shoe. That’s the terror and pleasure of the life we've thrown ourselves into.

Here’s a link to a little montage of images from our first few weeks, mostly taken by Allison’s sister Elizabeth, now back home with Peter and the girls in Chevy Chase. We miss you, Liz.

Shanghai Daddy, now with photos (and video)!

September 26

Again, a swirl of impressions -- our driver Wong laughing as he explains that the buildings we’re passing are “old, old” because they only have 15 or 20 stories; in the last ten years no one would bother with anything less than 30 . . . a woman struggling to pull my son Kai from my arms in a museum so she can have a photo of herself holding him, and at the same moment a tour guide, complete with headset microphone, ignores the exhibits and chooses to make Keegan the focus of his presentation for an extended riff about God knows what . . . the common practice of men hiking their shirts up to their nipples for instant air conditioning . . . and perhaps more than anything, the cityscape, nearly beyond words, hallucinogenic, a blend of Jetsons and Star Wars layered over the remnants of a civilization thousands of years old, the parade of skyscrapers seeming never to end as you move from one district to another, every other building topped with striking or fantastical or whimsical or absurd features -- a ziggurat, a whirlygig, a windmill, a parapet, a series of medieval turrets, a dome of glass or light, an impressionistic sculpture with steel twisted into unimaginable curves ... honestly, I’ll need to go into training, as for a prizefight, just to start describing it . . .

In the meantime, here are a few slightly more concrete impressions from the last week:

Of course I realize chickens have necks, beaks, and feet, even though I’m not usually reminded of it down at the Safeway. Lots of people are happy to gobble these parts up, and, it turns out, chickens also have knuckles, or at least some knuckle-like appendages, that people love to eat. This is something you learn when you don’t carefully plan what restaurant you want to go to and you’re wandering Nanjing Road with your posse a little later than your normal dinner time. Allison, usually a very assertive person, always gives me the menu. Aren’t I lucky? At the place we stopped at on Sunday, I passed on the sauteed frog, the snakehead soup, and the two-kind intestines in favor of the chicken, but in retrospect maybe we should have given the frog a shot. Anyway, at least it was fun for the staff -- half a dozen of them came out of the kitchen to take pictures of Kai and Keegan.

We then made our way to the Bund -- really the starting point of Shanghai, where the European banks set up shop in the International Settlement, mid-19th Century, after the Opium Wars (I’m sure you remember all this from your History classes, right? Bueller?).

The crowds along Nanjing Road, Shanghai’s main downtown shopping street, and on the Bund, are roughly what you might expect at, say, the inauguration of a popular African American president, or a Cubs World Series victory parade. It’s a swirling mass of humanity, almost as amazing a sight in itself as the incredible skyline they come to see. The largest migration in human history is taking place right at this moment -- it’s the movement of tens of millions of people from the Chinese and Indian countrysides to the great cities of China and India -- to Beijing, Mumbai, Bangalore, and especially, to Shanghai. Anhui Province, for example, which has been called “the Appalachia of China,” has 93 million people in an area the size of South Dakota. In the last few years, millions of people have left Anhui, often for Shanghai. Many of these people were standing on my foot Sunday along the riverfront. And since most of the recent arrivals are totally unfamiliar with seeing living, breathing Westerners, we become part of the show for them. Liz took a photo of the four of us, and the crowd closed in behind her to take snaps of our family as if we were the Kennedys bunching together on the lawn at Hyannis.

We found out we should be able to move into our house around September 29th or 30th, which is great because our little 2-bedroom apartment at the Somerset Xu Hui is awash in open suitcases of clothes and toys. We have to get the boys out in the mornings to let them move around, so Liz and I decided to try the Shanghai Zoo in Hongqiao (near where we’ll be living). It’s not a bad zoo, though not very modern -- still using quite a few old-school cages with bars. The feature attraction is an elephant show with six trained pachyderms sitting up, doing handstands, playing soccer and basketball, and solving trigonomic equations. (Photos not enough? Check out the Elephant Show video.) I suspect it’s not for the zoologically correct among us, but it was a big hit with a raucous crowd of mostly kids and parents -- especially when hawkers came out to sell bags of carrots, which the elephants then reached into the crowd, several rows deep, to grab with their trunks and eat. In America, it was a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen, but in Shanghai, no worries. We then headed to (as we thought) the zoo cafeteria. Wow. This turned out to be an elegant “banqueting hall” with a white grand piano in the foyer, white linen-covered chairs, and a waterfall borrowed from the Bellagio in Vegas. The menu featured high-end delicacies like bird’s-nest soup and shark fin soup (I know, the irony), and the wine list included some astonishing selections like Chateau Petit Rothschild at several hundred dollars a bottle. I ordered a couple of dumpling appetizers and a fruit plate and we got out of there for 20 bucks, but the whole time we were trying to figure out what this place was doing in the middle of the zoo! Where the heck were the turkey sandwiches and corn dogs, and how did we get to this twilight-zone joint? It was enormous, well-staffed, and completely empty except for the four of us, so apparently we weren’t the only ones baffled.

When you have kids, you go to a lot of zoos, so believe it or not we’ve already visited Shanghai’s other zoo, too -- the Shanghai Wild Animal Park in Pudong, on the far side of town. We might have given it a pass for a while, but they happen to have a special temporary exhibition of pandas, not just any pandas but what was billed as ten baby pandas! That’s 10! Baby! Pandas! (And yes, there is Panda Video Action.) Even in China it’s not that easy to see pandas, especially young ones, and you’d normally have to go to Chengdu in Sichuan Province, thousands of miles west of here, to see so many. These pandas are in town for the Shanghai Expo (more about the Expo later), so we had to get our pandas while we could. I liked the park -- it’s better laid-out than the Shanghai Zoo -- but mostly we concentrated on hanging out with the visiting panda gang, and it was well worth the journey. The pandas aren’t really babies, they’re juveniles ( some of them had the telltale pimples of adolescent pandas, and I heard them cracking some pretty immature jokes, but they were hardly babies). But there really were 10! of them together, napping, lounging, munching eucalyptus, and looking adorable as pandas do, and Kai had a great time watching them. So did Keegan, when he regained consciousness from his coma-like nap halfway through our visit. Then we hit the inevitable panda souvenir shop and it was back to the car, and another coma for the boys on the way home to Puxi. Our driver, Wang, is a really great guy, and he’s giving me Chinese lessons every day -- now I can say “shee-shou jian zai na-li” (where’s the toilet?) and “tai gwee” (too expensive), among other things. “Panda”, by the way, is “shung-mao,” which literally translates as "bear-cat."

Next up -- it’s Ikea! Come on, of course they have an Ikea!

The adventures begin . . .

The True Adventures of Shanghai Daddy

[Apology/Disclaimer for the lack of photos: It's temporary. They're coming. We're working on it. In the meantime, you'll have to settle for the word-pictures created by my sparkling prose . . .]

September 12, 2010

It’s on. We’re in the 54th row of a jumbo jet taking us to the other side of the planet, leaving behind the pennant race, the burritos on Mission Street, and all the comforts of the U.S. of A. for an indefinite stay in the land of the Hu and the home of the Wen. My wife, an employment attorney, has taken a job in Shanghai with “a major international corporation”, so we loaded up the container vessel and we’re off, not to Beverley, but to the Somerset Xu Hui -- I don’t know exactly what that is, the Somerset Xu Hui, or even quite how to say it -- it’s an “executive residence” of some sort, probably in a high-rise. We’re supposed to stay there while we hunt for a place to live. I just wrote it in the space for “Intended Residence in China” on the immigration forms for all four of us. “Us” is me, my wife Allison, and our sons Kai and Keegan, currently and miraculously sleeping on the economy seats between Allison and me. OK, maybe not miraculously, I’m sure the Benadryl had something to do with it. Don’t judge us to harshly for slipping them a mickey. We figured they really, really needed to sleep, to start dealing with the 15-hour time change, and it’s tough for most of us to fall asleep on a flight, let alone a 2-year old who’s amped by all things airplane (“The plane is MOVING, Daddy!”) or an 11-month old who’s playing peekaboo with a dozen Chinese grannies at once. While they sleep, I dream -- of the future, and of what we’ve gotten ourselves into. I suspect the Clampetts were far more prepared for Beverly Hills than we are for Shanghai.

Months ago, even before we found out we’d be going to China, we’d already decided that I would be taking on the position of stay-at-home dad. I’m a teacher, my wife is an attorney, so you know who’s bringing home the cheddar. When we looked at the margin between what I was actually able to bring home as an experienced professional educator, and what we were paying to a very nice woman from Nicaragua to raise our children, it was so wafer-thin that I realized my career was in fact a hobby -- one more time-consuming even than golf or surfing the Internet. Incredibly, I could not afford to work. So when the school year ended, I moved from essays to diapers, and it’s been hard to tell the difference. Ba-dum-ching. Actually it’s been an amazing journey into the everyday and everyminute world of our sons, a Mr. Toad’s wild ride that I wouldn’t trade for all of Disney’s lands, but more of that anon. My wife is the adventurous type, to say the least; when she goes skydiving she prefers to wear her scuba gear so she can plunge right in and swim with the barracudas before windsurfing home. So heading to Shanghai for a new job seemed like a natural to her, and that’s why instead of stay-at-home dad, my new gig with the boys is now move-to-China dad.

And since what I normally do is teach and write, I’m going to give blogging a shot and try to share some of this experience with friends, my family, my former students, my erstwhile colleagues, and anybody else who gives a damn, has too much free time, and/or is waiting for the next page to load while reading this.

Of course, I don’t have time for this. I have younguns to rear, houses to hunt for, worlds to discover. Heck , I have roughly 11 more hours to learn Chinese, and I’m only on lesson 4. So why am I doing this? Because there are two radio stations competing for the same frequency in my head: one is KOOL, the progressive station where the new adventure we’re setting off on is cool, exciting, a nonstop flight to a nonstop thrill ride; the other is KSHT, with an all-talk format, broadcasting all my fears, all the time. Maybe blogging this back to the earth I once knew will help me stay sane, tune out KSHT, and keep KOOL in the midst of the changes that will, that will, rock me.

The kids woke up. My writing of this first installment has already been interrupted roughly 37 times for feeding, bouncing, wiping, snuggling, apologizing for, entertaining, raspberrying, and just listening to Kai and Keegan, as well as conferring, strategizing, and even (briefly) canoodling with Allison. Forget about China -- right now we have moved to this airplane, and it is where we live for the forseeable future. My approach for surviving the flight is literally to pretend that it is never going to end; I’ve ruled out checking my watch, and I’m trying not even to imagine the possibility that we may one day land, so as not to be driven mad by counting down my sentence like some Ivan Denisovich of the clouds. If I can trick my mind into thinking of this as a permanent condition, I think I’ll be OK. Besides, all we have is the present moment, right? Which, like gunpowder, pasta, and having only one child, is an idea which started in China. Or at the very least, it’s an idea often confused with having started in China, and for the often confused among us, that’s just as good.




September 17

“Whirlwind” doesn’t even come close; try typhoon in Hummel figurine factory with a side of wind tunnel and a double helping of jet lag. But that sounds like I’m complaining -- actually it’s been a lot of fun, and my putonghua (Mandarin) is already increasing exponentially. I can say “crazy people” and ”don’t need spicy for the kids,” I can count to 10 (although 4 and 10 confuse me, or I confuse them), and say a few other worthwhile phrases. I can say them, even if not just anybody would understand them. But hey, progress not perfection, right?

We spent the first, most jet-lagged morning at a freaky, government-required medical exam in order to be permitted a visa. After filling out medical histories in quintuplicate in a bizarre aquarium antechamber and then being thrust into robes, Allison and I and dozens of other foreigners were shoveled between a cascade of doctors, each in a different little room, each with a different instrument of torture, like a EKG machine from the 1920’s with bulbous rubber suction cups, or a greasy sonogram device that slid from kidneys to nipples and back again. Bedside manner was not a strong suit --think Kafka meets Timothy Leary in Mandarin. Results pending, keep your fingers crossed.

The next day and a half was a house-hunting jamboree, as our relo agent, Jordan, ferried us around a slew of potential new homes, most of them in what are called “villa compounds” -- basically little gated communities shoehorned into the urban jungle of Shanghai. Some were tawdry and dilapidated, some were quite nice if you could forget about the Howard Johnson’s/faux Versailles architecture. One place that’s apparently quite sought after, the Shanghai Golf Villas, we entered through an underground garage peppered with neoclassical fawn and satyr statues, and then realized that the houses were also largely underground too -- it reminded me of a mausaleum we saw in Japan once. By the second day, we’d narrowed it down to two choices -- a swanky cluster of highrises called Yanlord, or a little bubble of lawn with detached houses called Green Valley. Both have gyms, pools, clubhouses, children’s play areas and what not. Despite the allure of the urban-chic apartments, we chose Green Valley, largely because it’s easy to imagine the kids riding their bikes in the shady lanes without being sideswiped by maniacal scooter drivers. It’s got a more, well, OK dammit I admit it, a more suburban feel to it, and Allison says it’s more like where both of us grew up, but she’s being charitable. She grew up in Lancaster County, mucking out the barn. I grew up on the edge of Chicago looking in, so I’m the one with the suburban archetype lodged in my subconscious -- oh, the dark shame of it all. I think we’re already doing a swell job tossing the boys into the exotic cultural cuisinart of Shanghai, I couldn’t resist giving them a little bit of bubble.

The boys, by the way, are having a ball, and they are the darlings of society everywhere we go. On the street, most people just smile and coo at them, or gawk, but in restaurants they’re emboldened to approach, tickle, cheek-tackle in the Yiddish Grandma tradition, and even try to pick them up and swoop them off to the kitchen. Kai can say “ni hau” (hello), “zse zse” (thank you) and a couple of other words, so he has them eating out of his hand. Keegan doesn’t even need to talk -- they take one look and swoon. Hey, we agree, but we’re extremely biased. Still, it’s nice to have 1.3 billion people confirm your belief that your kids are adorable.

While Allison went to her first big meeting in Pudong today, her sister Liz and I took the boys to Shanghai Ocean Aquarium (Liz agreed to come with us for the first two weeks to help us get set up, and she’s been a godsend). Kai loved the giant underwater tunnel with its moving walkway, and we lucked into it being feeding time for the sharks -- a couple of divers were cramming fish and squid into some black-tips and tiger sharks, using enormous plastic toothpick-things (the divers, that is, not the sharks), so they wouldn’t eat the rest of the exhibits. There was a huge (what other size could it be?) poster of Yao Ming in the front, a public sevice-type of ad denouncing the killing of sharks for shark fin soup. (Yao’s old Chinese league team was the Shanghai Sharks -- get it?)

In other news, we now have phones that work (though I’m still on the learning curve with mine), and a bank account of sorts, and we bought a coffee maker at a store that made Costco look like an AM/PM Mini Market. Also I had something that may have been beef, or possible a duck’s pancreas, in my noodles at lunch.