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.