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.