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.