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.