Grammy and Poppy Come to Shanghai

I only ever met one of my grandparents.  I have memories of Mama Rae, my dad’s mom, making us delicious Jewish food down in Savannah (hey, it’s possible), and of my dad breaking her ceiling while trying to fix something in her attic (he was never very handy). Sadly, the others all died long before I had the chance to eat their cooking or break their ceilings. Maybe that’s why I have a special fondness for seeing my sons with their grandparents. We recently had a chance to do some serious intergenerational bonding because Turk and Barbara Despard, Allison’s parents, came to Shanghai to stay with us for three weeks.  Kai and Keegan absolutely reveled in Grammy and Poppy’s adoration, and it was good to have two completely independent outside evaluators come in and confirm our suspicions that our sons are gorgeous, brilliant, and adorable.

Turk and Barbara got here in time for our big Easter egg hunt, a great opportunity to shmooze with our friends and neighbors, and watch Kai, Keegan, and half the neighborhood take off on a sugar high, fueled by the full suitcase-loads of American (i.e. “safe”) candy carried into China by our mules, Turk and Barbara. We had a little photo shoot with the boys in the backyard, after they recovered from their binge. Grammy and Poppy did a wonderful job of fitting into our routines with the boys, like bedtime reading, and they developed some of their own, like the straight-up bribery that all grandparents are entitled to by divine right -- daily presents. That’s right, Presents. Every. Day. One of these was the inflatable pool complete with slide they very kindly lugged with them from the U.S. which is still getting very regular workouts from the boys, and looks like it will be a huge boon through the summertime.  They also brought us baseball equipment --  bats, balls, gloves, and a tee -- (God bless you, Turk and Barbara!), and I had the pleasure of getting Kai and Keegan up to the plate for the first time. Kai spent the next two days saying “I’m the batter, Daddy!” They are likely to be drafted in the early rounds in roughly 2025.

I’ve often said, if you judge by the number of people snapping pics of them wherever we go, Kai and Keegan are some of the leading tourist attractions in China. For their grandparents, though, this is the literal truth.  They did take short day trips to Suzhou and Hangzhou, two places it would be criminal to skip (an old Chinese expression has it that “In Heaven there is paradise, on Earth there are Suzhou and Hangzhou") but aside from those brief detours, Grammy and Poppy were all about the boys. For instance, when we hit the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum (one of our regular stops but not exactly a magnet for tourists), Grammy came along, and when Grammy and Poppy visited the Shanghai Museum, probably China's most prestigious, Kai and Keegan joined them, despite the total lack of climbable art. We did get them to go on one overnight adventure by bringing the kids along -- all six of us drove three hours outside of town into the highlands of Moganshan, which is where Shanghai’s elites used to escape the heat back in “the day” (that would be the 20’s and 30’s). It’s Shanghai’s rough equivilent of the Hamptons (or is it the Catskills?). We stayed in a stylishly rustic bungalow (that word choice is especially for Peter Guida of Bethesda Bungalows, call today for low rates!) at a place called Naked Retreats. Our driver Wang asked nervously if we’d really be naked, but no, they’re just trying to get some cred with the green crowd. Highlights were hiking in the fabulous bamboo hills, chatting up the locals picking tea, just hanging out at our cabin in the woods and climbing the 17,000 stone steps, and best of all, going fishing with Poppy.  The boys loved it; they’re still playing “fishing” with wooden sticks on the rug upstairs. I’m pretty sure the last time I went fishing I was wearing a Webelos badge, but my skills are still razor-sharp -- I landed one monster that weighed in at nearly an ounce. (Don’t worry, we put them all back.) 

The lowlight of the trip was the spill Keegan took when he got out of the car and tried to run down a hill fast, before we could grab him. The poor little guy scraped his nose, and he looked like he lost a bar fight.  Amazingly, after the first few minutes, it didn’t seem to bother him.  And now, after a couple of weeks, he’s alllllmost done looking like W.C. Fields. So if you notice it in the photos, that’s our story and we’re sticking to it.  Fortunately, before that happened, Allison had the foresight to do a glamorous Green Valley Photo Shoot with Grammy, Poppy, Kai and Keegan -- pshwew! Glad we got that in before the nosedive. When we got home from Moganshan after another three hours in the car, the boys wanted to hit the kiddie pool again -- I got in with them, and  the photos and video may be used as  the “before” pictures in a series of weight-loss ads in the near future.

We went out for some great dinners with Turk and Barbara after the boys were down for the night, with the ayi as babysitter; shortly before they went home, we all treated ourselves to Mr.and Mrs. Bund, a high-end French Restaurant on, where else, the Bund -- Shanghai’s best place to be fabulous. Turk and Barbara loved the balcony over the Huangpu River, with its view of the hallucinatory Shanghai skyline.

Grammy and Poppy are back in the USA now, recovering from their adventures; Kai and Keegan miss them and talk about them, wondering where they've disappeared to, and not always understanding why they don't just pop over for a snack, or to deliver More. Daily. Presents. (Kai did tell me yesterday, though, that he used to eat strawberries when "we lived in a different world, but now we live in this Shanghai world." How right you are, son. So, maybe he does understand.) But their visit is indelibly carved in all of our memories, and we'll be reciprocating this summer with a trip to their new home near the ocean in Delaware (or as I like to call it, Delawhere?). We look forward to seeing you, Grammy and Poppy...

Lots more to say -- I want to post again soon about the adventures of HuaHua, the dog who came and went and came back, sort of. And about the crazy diet we're trying, and Shanghai subway, and the Dinosaur Train that Allison made, and and and ... but that will have to wait a bit. I need to get this baby out there. Monthly blogs are the absolute minimum, I think. You can't have a quarterly blog. That's not a blog, that's a newsletter.

Congratulations to my erstwhile students and colleagues who are wrapping up the school year, and especially those who are graduating.  I think of you, and hope you are well. Sending love from Shanghai...

Hong Kong Nostalgia

Shanghai and Hong Kong have been compared, and have been competing, ever since the Opium Wars.  Hong Kong is old school, established, buttoned down, cool and reserved -- Hong Kong knows it’s got it.  Shanghai is on the rise and on the make, flashy and trashy, trying to prove itself, to the world and to itself. Hong Kong is San Francisco, Shanghai is L.A. (but without the movie business --that’s in Hong Kong). Hong Kong is Nancy Kerrigan, Shanghai is Tonya Harding.  Don’t remember them? OK, then Hong Kong is Colin Firth, Shanghai is Charlie Sheen.  

Hong Kong was also our home for two years; when we left, Allison was seven months pregnant with Kai. So when we went to HK for a week at the beginning of April, it was our first time on the old stomping grounds with the boys, our chance to introduce them to friends from those days, and to show the boys a little slice of the city where their mother once removed their father’s kneecap as he attempted to drive between a cliff and a row of double-decker buses... ah, good times, good times.  We also got a peek at how the other half lives, and I don’t just mean the Hong Kong/Shanghai divide.  We stayed with our friends the Sistersons, who have three daughters, and since we have two sons, we combine to make a near-Brady Bunch situation (I know, no third boy, no symmetry... also two sets of parents, it’s not  perfect analogy, but let’s just roll with it).  We are so extremely happy with our guys, we generally don’t imagine what it’d be like if we’d come back from the chromosomal slot machine with girls instead. Tanzin, Taylor and Jamie gave us a window into the world of princesses, ponies, and pink (although Taylor would tell you she doesn’t care for princesses.  Hey Taylor, start your own blog, all right?  I’m working here.)

Houseguests are like fish in that, after three days, you’ll probably want to throw them out. It is to the great credit of our friends John and Simone, and the Sisterson girls, that they hung in there for six nights, and we truly enjoyed ourselves with them.  The Sisterson girls and the Ratner boys meshed beautifully.  Kai and Keegan were lost in wonder and admiration at these exotic, older women, ages 3, 5, and 7; For Tanzin, Taylor, and Jamie, being with the boys for a week was a bit like having living dolls move in with them. In the evenings the girls would vie to get in the tub with Kai and Keegan, or read with them, or share their bedroom, the one that the boys evicted Jaime from for a week. Taylor and Tanzin both asked every night, “can I please sleep with them?” I told Kai and Keegan they would hear this request many times in the future, and they’d have to be judicious about when to accept it; for now it’s probably best that we settled for reading together.  Tanzin and Taylor taught the boys a new way to go down stairs, called “bump bump”, that they now want to play in Shanghai too. In the video version, I love how the Barbie sleeping bag creates a trompe l'oeil illusion that Kai has Barbie's legs.) Tanzin even gave Kai piano lessons, free of charge. 

Oh, and we did leave the house a couple of times.  Hong Kong has a Disneyland, but it’s a bite-sized little portion of Mouse, and it really doesn’t measure up to its American cousins, except maybe for the crowds.  That’s why we went to Ocean Park, a locally-brewed Hong Kong amusement park and aquarium that the Sisterson girls, and now our boys, think is fabulous. Actually, Allison and I liked it quite a bit too, so much so that the boys had a very late nap that day.  It’s a great place to walk through a shark tunnel, peep on a panda or two, listen to a faux-Jamaican band, ride a frog hopper, and maybe grab a snack of Haagen-Dazs or some chicken feet -- all in typically hyperactive cultural-cuisinart Hong Kong style.  Props to the mascot Whiskers the Seal (and Jamie’s boyfriend!) for showing us a good time.  On another day, we hit the beach at Big Wave Bay -- Hong Kong is not exactly Malibu, but the low-key beaches are a blast for the kids anyway, and there’s nothing quite like watching your children happily munching on fistfuls of sand.  Allison actually had to go into the HK office one day (those corporations are slave-drivers), and the girls all ran off to some activity they referred to as “school”, so I took the boys across one of the world’s most picturesque harbors on the Star Ferry to the Kowloon side, and we strolled down the Avenue of Stars in Tsim Sha Tsui (just like in Hollywood but with Li Tit and Fung Bo Bo instead of Clark Gable and Bette Davis). The boys really liked the boat traffic on the harbor, and the goofy statues of Bruce Lee and movie equipment.  As always, they were the subject of many dozens of tourist photos. When I asked a guy to take our picture on the waterfront, he happily obliged, with my camera, his camera, and his girlfriend’s camera. On the way home, we shot our own film on the Star Ferry (destined for straight-to-DVD), and stopped off at IFC Mall for more fabulous views.

A major highlight was visiting with friends. Our old trainer and pal Lap Fong, one of the sweetest guys in Hong Kong, came by to meet the boys, as did Allison’s friend Barbara.  We met Wai Quen and Danny and their kids, Mattie and Hugo, in Victoria Park, and walked to dim sum in Causeway Bay, where Danny made sure I got my share of fried foods, meatballs, and goose.  We had pizza in Stanley with Christine and Jason Brueschke and their boys, Thane and Leiden, though we had sadly (but temporarily) left our camera in an undisclosed location, so we have only a couple of hazy shots I took with my phone (the Stanley video was made with the Flip).  My favorite is this unintentional video of us assembling for a photo, to be taken by the ten-year-old daughter of Christine’s friend we happened to run into.  The little girl noticed and thoughtfully pointed out to me that I had my phone camera on the wrong setting.  Ouch. Wow, just wow.  We had a great visit with Tim and Mari Dose Brantingham, Miya and Thomas, and it’s a true tragedy that we neglected to take any pictures, not only because the kids are cuties, but also because I would love to show your their high-rise complex, Bel-Air in Pokfulam.  The apartments are genuinely lovely, the facilities are terrific, the views superb, but the decor... well, take the Bellagio in Vegas as a starting point, throw in the neo-classical rooms at the Louvre, a little day-glo Kandinsky and Picasso, a few bad nights in the Village, maybe some Keith Haring, some Botero, and a soupcon of Timothy Leary, and you have the Bel-Air.  There are many, many places in China where you can find such, let’s say, eclectic blendings of taste, but the Bel-Air is an outstanding example.  Tim said he wished he could be on the decorating committee, and I hope he gets his chance.

Looking out over the city from the Sisterson’s patio in Bamboo Grove, our old home, it was easy to be nostalgic about Hong Kong. It is, or at least it seems, easier than Shanghai; as a British colony until just over a decade ago, HK is part China, part London.  With its spectacular cityscapes and its surprising amount of green space (thanks to the rugged and impossible-to-develop coastal hills), it’s also part Manhattan, part wilderness.  But the practical reality is that we live in Shanghai, and we’ll be here for quite a while.  I don’t want to spend my time wishing myself away; I want to embrace the sprawling, cacophonous city we call home, speak its language, learn its nuances. If I can just figure out those tones, and find a decent bagel, I think I’ll be all right. 

The Internot, the Other Great Wall, and Talking the Talk

It’s been some time since my last confession. I don’t remember these booths being so small... but OK, let’s get down to it.  I haven’t been blogging.  Let me explain...

As you may have noted from the title of this blog, I live in China, and China has the slowest Internet connections in the world. I mean, we are trying to catch up to Greenland.  That’s not good.  And, Shanghai has the slowest connections in China.  Why is that?  Great question, since it’s the most modern and the most Western city in the country, but the infrastructure can’t keep up with the exploding population. Shanghai has at least 20 million people, but only two wires, a pink one and a green one, and the green one is broken. And, our house has the slowest connections in Shanghai. No I can’t prove that, I just know it.  So it’s tough getting online at the best of times.  I’ve started to refer to it as the Internot (Noun -- A theoretical system of communication that you can never log onto). And then, there’s the GFWC, the Great Firewall of China. The government sees fit to protect its people from potentially, shall we say, confusing information by blocking such sites as the one you’re now reading this on.  So, we use circumbendibus routes to go around it, which means the all the tiny little bytes have to fly to the other side of the world and back before they appear magically on my screen, and by the time they get here, they’re usually pretty tired.  We were using a service with the unfortunate name of Viscosity, which suggests the very sluggishness that it indeed provided; we just switched to another, higher-priced alternative, which so far seems to be an improvement.  All of which is to say that, even if you have dial-up, maybe you should thank your lucky stars for your blazing dial-up connection.

The other big reason for my recent spate of non-blogging is that I’ve been working on learning Chinese, also know as Mandarin, or Hanyu, or Putonghua, or Zhongwen.  It’s notoriously difficult for Westerners to learn Chinese; usually people say this is because of the tones, and it’s true that the tones are extremely hard to hear or say clearly. Every word has not just a phonetic sound but an inflection assigned to it, so depending on how you pronounce it, a sound like “ma” can mean “horse”, “mother”, “same to you, buddy”, or “I want to massage your uncle”.  A deeper problem, though, is that there are a pretty limited number of sound combinations that make up words -- only about 1600, I’ve been told, whereas English has well over 6000. This in fact is why the tones are used to separate the limited number of available sounds. The result of this is that an extraordinary number of words sound alike, even without accounting for the tones. One small example would be the words “zuo”, meaning “left” and “zou”, meaning “do”, “sit”, and “walk”, not to mention “zui”, zai”, and “zao”.  But there are a phenomenal number of overlapping pairs, trios, or clusters of words like this -- xia/xian/xiang/sha/shan/shang, or wa/wan/wang/hua/huan/huang/guan/guang, or -- well, the hits just keep on coming.  So yeah, the tones are brutally hard, but the base sounds the tones are intended to distinguish are, I think, even tougher.  

Then of course, there’s pinyin.  Pinyin is the system of transliterating Chinese characters, or hanzi, into Roman letters, the ones you learned from Grover and Big Bird (Elmo was of no help to me personally at the time, but we have since made up our differences and he is living upstairs on my sons’ toy shelf).  I should be grateful for pinyin, because without it I would have no chance, but I’m not a good enough person to be grateful for it.  Instead I curse its creators, a team of sadistic Russian linguists who apparently meant it as a sick practical joke, or a booby-trap to lure later generations of capitalists into years of mind-shattering confusion. In pinyin, “zh” makes the sound “j”, “q” makes the sound “ch”, “x“ equals “sh”, “c” is “ts”, etc. The effect of pinyin is to add an extra layer of muck to an already complicated process --  I translate the pinyin into English sounds in my head, then into Chinese sounds, and then try to say the sounds with the right tones, to the dumbstruck incomprehension of waiters, ticket-sellers, and passersby throughout the city.  And we didn’t even get to the vowels, oh my God, I can’t talk about the vowels --this is a family blog.

And while we’re not talking about things, let’s not talk about Chinese grammar (think American Indians in John Wayne movies), Chinese syntax or sentence structure (i.e., “I tell story give my kids listen”, or “I this today evening before want”), or vocabulary (there is no Chinese word for “yes” or “no”.)

And there isn’t just one Chinese language, of course; To say “the Chinese language” is like saying “the European language.”  Putonghua or “people’s language” is an attempt by the P.R.C. to unify the speech of 1.4 billion people so they all talk like they’re from Beijing; as you might expect, it’s only partly successful, and the people in Shanghai can usually speak it, but they’d prefer to use Shanghainese. Unless they’re from somewhere else (at least as likely here as it would be in Las Vegas or Phoenix), in which case they might speak hunanese or guangdonghua or sichuanese, or you name it.

Allison’s metaphor for learning Chinese is “water on a stone”.  In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell says it takes ten thousand hours to master something; I’m averaging ten hours a week, so I should be fluent in roughly 2031.  I started with a computer program called Fluenz (a competitor of Rosetta Stone), and switched to a tutor about six weeks ago.  My tutor, Jesy, is great, but it’s still slow going.  Allison, because of her pesky job and all, has had limited time to study, but nonetheless she made it through the first thirty lessons on Fluenz, and the big coup is that this week, her employers are sending her to an immersion program at Berlitz, so she’s studying Monday to Friday, 9 to 4:30.  It’s only Tuesday, but she’s improving rapidly, though I think she’s a bit dizzy from exhaustion.  Kai and Keegan, meanwhile, are just picking it up along the way, with basically no effort.  Allison and I are debating whether to put them in local Chinese schools or in an international (i.e., private, lots of expats) school.  I dread the inevitable day that the two of them are chatting away, and Allison and I have no clue what they’re talking about.

We went to a talk at the Shanghai Literary Festival by Deborah Fallows, the author of Dreaming in Chinese (which is a terrific read if you want a short, fun take on the language).  Her core thesis is that, since language inevitably shapes thought,  just attempting to understand the language helped her to better understand the people and the culture.  So, despite the daunting challenges and the unlikely prospect of complete mastery of Chinese, she found the study of it to be richly rewarding; I hope, and I suspect, that she is right.

Now, for all the people wondering where the heck are all the links to the cute people, this paragraph is for you.  When not absorbed in linguistic study, we did find the time to try out a new park, Zhongshan Gongyuan, where I was unable to get our new shark kite airborne (yet), but we did get to see lots of people balancing sticks on their heads, so that made up for it.  We’re no longer freezing, but it’s often rainy these days, so sometimes we head across the river to our favorite museum in Shanghai, the Science and Technology Museum.  Kai and Keegan love the children’s area (video); a diagram of their time there would look like one of those neighborhood maps from the “The Family Circus” where Billy takes little Barfy on a walk. (Who could forget Barfy?  Don't answer that, it's rhetorical.) We’ve also been doing treasure hunts, where I hide clues around the house and the boys try to find them, in the spirit of Dora, Blue’s Clues, and Barbara (Grammy) Despard. Two notes for anyone attempting to watch the video: Kai has a heart taped to his shirt to cover up Oscar the Grouch, whom he does not like; and, the videographer, Allison, was carrying Keegan, and he isn’t missing any meals, so you may need a motion sickness tablet during the staircase sequence. And when we can’t motivate the troops to get to the park or the museum, we can always fall back on going into the backyard in our pajamas to splash in the puddles. 

That’s all for now -- I’ll try to be more diligent.  We’re going to Hong Kong for the first week of April, since Allison has some time off (an early Happy Sweeping Your Ancestors’ Graves Day to everyone!), and I’ll definitely blog about that.

This Party is Blowin' UP!

So we (and by “we” I mostly mean my 1.4 billion neighbors) recently celebrated Chinese New Year, which is far, far too big a deal for one night -- try most of the month of February.  The amount of fireworks was something I never could have believed or imagined; it made the 4th of July seem like a 3-year-old with a wet pea-shooter.  Although there were ebbs and flows, it went on basically 24/7, and on peak days like the 2nd, the 7th, and the 17th, it was stunning, war-zone level crazy. Explosions would start at 5 a.m,. and last until 4:58 a.m. the next day.  People believe that to have wealth and fortune in the coming year, they basically have to blow up their houses.  I don’t quite get it.  Imagine if every man, woman and child in the city where you live decided to blow off a brick of M-80’s every time they stood up or sat down, for two weeks straight -- yeah, roughly like that.  I realize you will think I'm exaggerating; if anything, I’m understating it, because me not know words to describe it.  In the mornings we would see teams of street-sweepers piling up gigantic, swimming pool-sized mountains of red fireworks paper.  At times we’d hear dozens, sometimes even hundreds of explosions, large and small, every minute, from every direction.  

Thank GOD, the boys actually dealt with the noise just fine for the most part, aside from a few night wakings.  Allison hit on the brilliant idea of telling them the fireworks were good luck, a happy sound, and every time we’d hear loud ones during the day we’d  all say “Happy New Year!” cheerfully, Kai and even Keegan included, in his way.  We tried to make a game of it, and miraculously, it worked, this transparent scam actually worked.  Please excuse my cultural ignorance, but to the people of China I would like to say -- good God y’all, what are you thinking?  The money that must go into this . . . wow, just wow. And in the name of bringing wealth and good fortune, too!  Well, when you already own America, what else do you need to do with your cash, I guess?  But as I believe I previously mentioned, WOW.

On the plus side, the holiday also brings sweet, sweet extra vacation time to everyone except stay-at-home dads (it’s one of the two annual “Golden Weeks” in China), which means Allison and the boys and I got to go around doing fun, touristy things for a week, things we’ve been meaning to do, like putting the kids in a laundry basket and dragging them all over the house, you know, stuff like that.  One morning we headed to the Flower, Bird, Fish and Insect Market to check out the crickets and other assorted critters.  Crickets are raised for fun, profit, and for the noble sport of cricket-fighting in many countries throughout Asia, and there are dozens of old guys in the market just hanging out with their crickets, talking cricket with their cricket cronies.  Kai was curious to look at the crickets in their little glass jars or bamboo cases, but both he and Keegan found the birds, turtles, and especially the bunnies more appealing, really. (Yeah, I know, bunnies don’t quite fit into the market’s stated mission, but this is the Year of the Rabbit, so bunnies sell.  The bilingual hipsters are all saying “ Happy Tu Year,” because “tu” is “rabbit” in Mandarin.)  

Another day we went to Qibao, a traditional village that used to be miles from Shanghai,  but is now on the outskirts of the megalopolis, still retaining its village identity.  Well, except that it draws in jillions of tourists who outnumber the villagers. Most of them are Shanghai-ren, city people who think the village is "ke ai," cute, and some are  people from other provinces who miss their own villages.  Pretty much none of them are Westerners, except for us, on the day we went, anyway.  That always means we become part of the tourist experience for a sizable chunk of the crowd, who head home with snaps and videos of Kai and Keegan climbing on rock sculptures or begging us to try food that might be candy, or maybe larvae, we don’t know.  But hey, fair’s fair, we’ve got pictures of them, too.  This place was really fun -- weird, overcrowded, but really fun, with some of the more bizarre snack items I’ve seen, even for China (I accidentally bought some gooey squid balls), and a cricket museum, and plenty of randomness, like an old couple making puffed rice in a blast furnace (we bought some for 3 Yuan, 50 cents, and the boys loved it so much we’re still finding it in the couch).  We checked out the surprisingly lovely buddhist/confucian temple, too.

The biggest score of the holiday was our visit to the China Pavilion, a building so spectacularly popular that, though slated to close at the end of the Shanghai Expo on October 31st of last year, it has been kept open through Spring in the interests of national pride and the almighty Yuan. It looks like an upside-down pyramid (or ziggurat, really, for you Mesopotamian anthropologists out there), and it features a 180-degree-screen movie promo for modern China; an enormous moving mural of the country’s history; and an amusement-park-style train ride that’s part It’s a Small World, part propaganda, part 8th Grade Science Fair in Muncie, Indiana, and all Shanghai.  It was terrific to be able to see the Pavilion, which we missed on our one visit to the Expo because otherwise it would have been the only thing we could have seen.  However, our absolute favorite thing about visiting the Pavilion is that we didn’t have to wait in line.  Maybe that just shows you how petty we are, but it will also give you some sense of what a major coup it is to dodge a queue like this, in the most populous city in the most populous nation on earth.  And we didn’t just cut in at the front, either!  It was legit.  Our magical secret?  The baby stroller.  The staff ushered us into the special green lane reserved for party chairmen, widows of revolutionary martyrs, visiting popes, and Kai and Keegan.  That’s why, in the pictures, you see the unfathomable mob of people on the left, and the open lane on the right where we’re gleefully marching past.  Incredibly, almost no one else seemed to have figured this out (I won't say no one, because we did see one family with what I think must have been a nine-year-old they'd forced to sit in a stroller for the day).   There’s no way we could’ve gone through the Pavilion otherwise; we’d have turned back for nap-time after a few hours of nothing-but-jostling.  But instead, we got to take in the whole place, we found a great dumpling place across the street, and we got home in time for naps!  Parents, I hardly need to tell you what a miracle this is; it’d be like parking your RV right in front of Lincoln Center and being asked to move up to the front row so your toddler can get a better look at Yo-Yo Ma.

We didn’t spend every day of the holiday being tourists.  We got in a good dose of cozy, domestic fun and snuggle-time, too.  We took the boys out to fly a kite in the big field at the back of the compound (or anyway it’s the closest thing the compound has to a big field). I’d gotten them a bird kite, like the ones we saw at Cheng Feng Park (and yes, this is the same kind of kite I got hit in the head with), and we went out to get it airborne.  Mostly this involved me running around the field panting, but I’m proud to say we did get her to stay aloft for several minutes, despite the almost nonexistent wind, and even prouder that Kai experienced holding and flying the kite on his own; the thrill in his eyes was simply gorgeous.  Keegan didn’t hold the kite, but he had a blast running around and trying to eat grass anyway.  Once, the kite was eaten by a tree branch, and Kai said “Daddy, can you make the bird come out of the tree?”  I did, which to me felt a bit like winning an oscar might feel, I imagine.  On the whole, we got away with it in fine fashion, as I often do, but here’s a hot insider tip: if you want to fly a kite, pick a day with at least a little bit of wind.

One afternoon after nap our friends Patricia and Richard and their boys Raphael and Issac came over, and my gorgeous, multitalented wife whipped up a batch of cookie dough, setting us all to cutting out and decorating a slew of bunnies, fish, dinosaurs, stars, houses, and gingerbread men.  In the old days before kids I used to be chief decorator, but now I’m a lackey and general factotum for Kai, Keegan, and in this case their buddies, too.  We made and ate some quality cookie products; I wish I could share them with all of you.  I’m sure Bill Gates or Steve Jobs is working on making that possible at this very moment, but in the meantime you’ll have to settle for pictures.  Maybe by the time I write the next blog post . . . 

Daddy, can we go back to Thailand?

One of our dreams and motivations in moving to Shanghai was that we’d be able to take the boys on international adventures, so Allison and I were very excited about our trip to Thailand with Kai and Keegan.  As the day approached, though, what really thrilled us was simply the idea of getting warm.  Shanghai is freezing.  I grew up in Chicago (OK, OK, Des Plaines), and I know cold, and Shanghai’s got cold down.  In Chicago, however, people know it’s going to be cold, and they plan ahead for it with handy items like central heat and weather-stripping and, you know, insulation.  In Shanghai none of this seems to have occurred to anyone, so Thailand served as an emergency thermal blanket for the whole family, and a fine blanket it is.

We flew through Bangkok to Phuket, which is not pronounced like that, and you know it (it’s really Boo-KETT). We survived the flights by toting an enormous supply of toys, books, and snacky-treats in our overflowing carry-ons and letting the boys watch multiple episodes of Dora the Explora on the portable DVD jobee (even Keegie can now say “Dora,” “Boots,” and “map” -- I used to have standards, but I think I must have left them in the seat-back in front of me.)  On landing we headed for Kamala Bay, north of Patong, where we quickly settled into a rhythm of beach-buffet-pool-beach-restaurant-beach-nap-beach-massage-beach-restaurant-pool-beach. Oh, sometimes we’d mix it up and do beach-pool at the end.  I’m exaggerating, but only  a bit; this was life in the slow lane.  If there was a difference between Phuket and heaven, I couldn't figure it out. There are very few people in the world I’d want to spend all day every day with, and they were all there in Thailand with me.  The boys certainly agreed -- heaven for them is when we’re all together constantly, and they can splash each other, eat sand, and have ice cream for dessert.

Kamala Bay was a sleepy Islamic fishing village little more than a decade ago, but like the rest of Phuket it was too beautiful to stay a secret, and now it’s filled with freezing Finns, shivering Swedes, and expat exiles like us.  The waves were really mellow on our part of the beach, but for the swim-diaper set, even a little can be a lot. To keep the boys safe at the beach, we’d dig big holes in the sand (video), trying to find just the point where the waves will slosh in as the tide comes up, and make a pool that gradually disappears into the ocean.  Allison is really good at picking the right spot.  It’s a fun sport, and it also provides a handy mountain of sand to build castles, climb up, slide down, or throw back into Daddy’s swimming hole.  When the hole was gone, we’d walk the boys out a long way in the warm water of the Andaman Sea.  Just about every time, Kai would say he didn’t want to go in, and then of course he’d say he didn’t want to get out (did I mention Kai is 2?)  He comes around if you tickle him, and then chase him on the beach; Kai is very specific about how he likes to be chased.  He’ll feed me my lines, saying, “Daddy, will you please say, ‘Oh Kai, I’m gonna GET you?’”  He also likes to turn himself into various animals, such as Little Black Kitty Cat, or Baby Duck.  It’s important to keep up with the changes, too, or else you’ll be petting a cat only to find out it’s become a kangaroo, which can be disorienting.  We met up with some actual little black cats (watch the epic cat-on-cat action here) (and yes, they generally look siamese), and came across a crowd of locals bringing in a catch of fish on the beach, that Kai was glad to help out with.  We eat mostly at restaurants with sand for floors, and the food was generally fantastic.  Want to know where to get some great Thai food?  Thailand.   As in Shanghai, the boys drew a lot of attention from the locals, who were consistently friendly, even adoring toward Kai and Keegan. We'd take slow walks back along the beach at sunset (here's the video version), stopping for a swim on the way. Back at the room, the guys sometimes hid in the cupboards to escape the paparazzi, like the Beatles in A Hard Day's Night.

We had just a couple of brief excursions away from the beach:  We took the boys for an elephant ride, which was thrilling at times -- Keegan spent the whole hour explaining in Keegan-talk to Mommy that there were elephants!!! behind and in front of him, not noticing as much the one he was sitting on.  Kai knew very well that he was on an elephant; at one point, though, when we had to cross a road, the driver hit the elephant with a stick to direct him, and poor Kai was just mortified.  (Even I was surprised, since the blows would have killed a man.)  I had to hold and soothe him for at least ten minutes (Kai, that is, not the elephant, who shrugged it off better than Kai or I), and I had to tell the elephant driver he was never, ever to hit an elephant again, and if he does, I’m going back to Thailand to give him a big time-out.  The Director's Cut of the elephant video cleans up real nice and whitewashes the seamy stuff, but to be frank, I wouldn’t recommend this activity to parents, despite its obvious appeal.  After the fact, sadly, I learned of more responsible ways to visit Thai elephants, where you can see them, feed them, and learn about them from people who treat them with the great respect they deserve; given another opportunity, that’s what our family will do next time.

Our other excursion was a drive to two beautiful Buddhist temples, Wat Phra Thong and Wat Phra Nang Sang (video) in Thalang. These were terrific, and surprisingly unvisited; I guess most people don’t want to pry themselves away from the beach, which is understandable, but these lovely temples were well worth it, and Kai and Keegan actually had a blast looking at the giant statues, shaking fortune sticks, lighting incense, and knocking over various bells.  Both of the boys know Buddha on sight and say his name when they see him.  In Keegan’s case I suspect it’s because he recognizes Buddha’s hauntingly familiar physique from his trips to the mirror.

We don’t imagine we’ve seen anything of the depth or complexity of Thailand, a nation of 65 million with a rich cultural heritage; someday we’ll go beyond the fabulous beaches to see more of the country, but for now, with our little guys, the fabulous beaches will just have to do.

We’re back in Shanghai, freezing once again; I’m literally shivering next to a space heater as I type this, so no need to be jealous.  In fact, if you live in San Francisco, or even in well-insulated Chicago, or Nome, you can gloat.  A few days after we came home, Kai said to me at lunch, “Daddy, I want to go back to our house in Thailand!”  Mommy and Daddy know the feeling, Kai.  But at least we’ve had a moment in the sun.

This is how we roll

A Tale of Two Haircuts


My first haircut in Shanghai was at an overpriced mall salon -- I paid more than US $30 (much higher than my great barber Don on Polk St.) to have  a “supervising hair technician” cut the left side half an inch shorter than the right.  He said, “Duibuqi (sorry), it come back.”  Yeah, but I won’t.  

Next time I asked a couple of neighbors where they went. The first guy, a Norwegian with a buzz cut, said he got his done on the street corner for 15 kuai (about $2.50). I wasn’t quite ready for that, and besides it’s freezing on the street corner -- almost as cold as our house.  A French guy with a soupcon more style gave me the name of a salon next to the big French grocery store, so I went in to try my luck.  The stylists there all have assistants, who in turn have assistants, so a gaggle of flunkies greeted me at the door, and I said  “dian tow-fah,”  an expression I’d learned two minutes earlier from our driver, Wang, meaning “haircut.”  This was a critical error, because now all the flunkies thought I was perfectly fluent in Chinese and began chatting away, asking me what I thought of Expo, or Yao’s latest injury, or if I wouldn’t mind sharing my mom’s meatloaf recipe. I have no idea.  I told them I spoke very little Chinese, but I said it in Chinese, so they didn’t believe me and my doom was sealed.  This has happened to me quite a few times. A lot of people seem to think language binary, an on/off switch -- you speak Chinese, or you don’t.  One expat I met said it’s people who’ve never learned, or tried to learn, or even imagined learning another language, so they don’t consider the enormous grey area between no Chinese, and Dr. Sun Yat-sen.

Anyway, I was led upstairs and shown a menu of options, in Chinese of course.  Well, except for a bit of Arabic, which I could read -- this consisted of the numerals #1, #2, and #3, with prices.  I chose the middle one, for 99 Kuai, or about 15 bucks.  I thought that seemed safe, but  I was wrong.

I spent most of the next hour with a salon assistant I’ll call Da Shou, or “Big Hands.”  Da Shou did things to me that I had to tell my wife about, just to make sure I hadn’t broken any vows. She did things to me with a q-tip that I’ve never even done to myself. It was mostly just a massage, but as I write that I can imagine I’m saying it to the judge at night court.  Da Shou was rather shockingly free of boundaries about handling customers.  She gave me a chest massage that was, well, more personal than anything I’ve gotten from a stranger since high school.  When I looked up in surprise and alarm, she met my eyes in the mirror with a frank stare and what could only be called a saucy smile.  At this point my inner dialogue is saying, “Relax, you uptight Westerner, this is normal, it’s just how they do things here.  That's how they roll -- don’t be a prude.”  Was I on the Chinese version of Candid Camera?  There were a few other people in the large room getting pre-haircut massages too, though none of the other masseuses appeared saucy -- bored, more like it.  Da Shou then began giving me an arm rub for which she found it necessary to place my hand directly on the geographic center of her lap, and exerted a little downward pressure. Another look of alarm from me, another frank look and saucy smile, extra sauce, from Da Shou.  Before you think this is a letter to Penthouse, I’ll tell you that I “ahemed,” pointed to my watch, and asked “Zhe ge shi tow-fuh ma?” or, “This is a haircut?”  Da Shou then stood up and reached for a a copy of Chinese Vogue, which she dropped in my lap with a mild smirk.  A few minutes later the “stylist” finally appeared, cut the right side half an inch shorter than the left, and I got out of there.  

I’m due for another haircut. I’m going to the street corner with my 15 kuai, and I’m leaving my coat on, too.




Three Elephants and a Lute Player

On a more pastoral note, I’ve been bringing the boys to the Shanghai Zoo in the mornings sometimes.  It’s just a few minutes from our house, and in these winter months there are very few people competing with us to see the lions, giraffes, gorillas or pandas. We’re often the only ones watching a group of zebras or elephants or what have you, and the boys love to be up close and personal, where the animals can give them frank stares and saucy smiles.  Keegan did his fine elephant impression for me in front of three big pachyderms, so I did mine in turn for him (my elephant is notoriously good, you’ll have to trust me); I was amazed to watch all three of the real elephants raise their trunks toward us and take several steps back, as if in deference.  A strange sight to see.

There are a few other people in the zoo in the early mornings, actually, but they aren’t there to see the animals.  Senior citizens can get a monthly pass to come in before 8 a.m. for almost nothing, and they do come, and they stay; they socialize, practice tai chi, sing, dance elaborate group dances, play mahjong or cards, or just hang out.  They show little or no interest in the zoo's permanent residents; they absolutely love to coo at Kai and Keegan, though.  The last time we were there, we made a slight wrong turn on the way to the pandas and came across a man playing the erhu, that two-stringed Chinese lute with a gourd at the bottom.  He was really good, too, so good that I brought the boys up closer to see him play, and he just lit up with a smile and started playing songs he thought they’d like, which meant “Happy Birthday,” and he was right -- Kai especially loves “Happy Birthday” and often sings it and blows out imaginary candles on no occasion whatsoever.  The lute player asked me where we were from -- I barely understood him but I caught the word “guojia” which means “country,”  and I told him we were “meiguo ren,” Americans.  So then the guy started playing “Clementine”, which I thought was very impressive. You know, the miner, the 49er . . . a perfect San Francisco song, and apparently the one American song he knew. Hey, I’m a sport, I know the words, so I started singing it.  As I did, the lute player's fan base, a clutch of seven or eight Chinese grannies, came over to us, having spotted Kai and Keegan, and moved in for the kill, pointing, cackling, trying to get the boys to dance with them.  They loved  that I knew the words to the song in English, and they all started singing it in Chinese.  The lute player then started in on Chinese songs I didn’t know, but it was fun to hear the old women sing and watch them strut their stuff, and we stayed with them for a couple of numbers before we headed off to find the pandas again.  If the boys had been a few years older they might have been mortified by a dozen aspects of this spectacle, but as it happened, they seemed to enjoy it just fine.  In fact, Kai has been asking me to play that song on the ipod for days, and I put it on “repeat” for him -- he calls it “Lemon Time.”

For photo and video fans, the linked visuals were not made at the zoo, but at another park, Cheng Feng Gongyuan, where we enjoyed a long walk around the lake, I got hit in the head by an eagle kite ( a great way to meet the kite fliers), and we discovered a rinky-dink amusement park that the boys thought was as cool as Disney World.  Check out the car-boat on the lake -- I think it’s a Dodge Dart.


A special shout-out to ALL of my former students at Capuchino High School.  I do not miss grading or planning, but I do miss teaching, because I miss you guys.  Now, stop playing around on the Internet and go do your homework!  (Yes, even those of you who have graduated from high school, AND college, this goes for you, too!  Get busy.  I mean it.) All best thoughts and love to you, my fellow Mustangs. 


We're going to Thailand tomorrow!  Yay!  It's WARM in Thailand!  I'll be back on the blog in a couple of weeks.