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.

Santa and all that . . . heading into Rabbit Year

December 28, 2010

Like you, we’re in the midst of the holidays, which have always been a collision of cultures for me.  My father was a Russian Jew and my mother was Irish Catholic, so we were raised to be Confused; we were one of those families with a menorah and a Christmas tree, and the tree had a Star of David on top.  This year I dug a menorah out of a storage box (it apparently smuggled itself to Shanghai) and it’s on a cabinet with the Buddha, across from the tree and the Nativity scene.  We lit candles one night, and the boys blew them out as they sang “Happy Birthday, dear Jesus”, so the traditions continue to spin in the cusinart as the generations roll on. Christmas tends to dominate, since it's much more fun decorating the tree than trying to remember my Hebrew.  Of course Allison’s family is a big part of the blend now; that’s why we left carrots for the reindeer, and made all those terrific cookies.  We had to tell Kai three or four hundred times that he couldn't wait up for Santa Claus, though he claimed to hear the reindeer on the roof, and the usual subconiferous chaos ensued on the big morning.  If this Christmas had a theme, it was Thomas the Train -- Kai and Keegan now have a train table full of tracks, with Thomas, Percy, Cranky, Harold, and the whole gang, not forgetting Sodor’s patriarch Sir Toppam Hatt, a wise man if their ever was one.  Wiser than me, if he really runs that railroad -- I’ll have to spent the next five years figuring out how to put it all together.

For anyone wondering about the modeling job, Keegan did have a shoot, and I’m posting pics as promised, but the clothing company (which must remain nameless here) didn’t have outfits that quite fit our plus-sized American baby, so we think he looks like he busting out of everything, hysterically.  The outfits seem like they were designed by an anime fan on crank who just lost a bet and was way past deadline, but hey, that’s just my opinion.

Speaking of Keegan, he is now walking, so besides bursting out of bad pastel jumpsuits, he’s also bursting with pride.  This kid truly has a gift for happiness.  I love my son Kai like nobody’s business, but at this point in his young life he’s mercurial.  He can be ecstatic on minute, and the next he may sound like wolverines are eating his pancreas because we can’t find his chuppie. Keegan’s disposition is constantly set to Sunny.  Go into his room in the morning, say hello, and he flaps like a penguin ready for takeoff.  Yes, I realize penguins can’t fly, but Keegan doesn’t, so don’t tell him.

Keegan and Kai both enjoy hiding, although they’re spectacularly bad at it, since they think that if they cover their faces they become invisible.  In fairness I will say that Kai’s technique has gotten a little more refined lately; he goes behind a curtain or a couch to hide sometimes, but he always shouts out “I’m hiding back here!”, so it’s not like we have to release the hounds or anything.  My real favorite is when he brings me with him to hide.  We get under a blanket together and he whispers to me, “We’re hiding, Daddy!”  All conspiritorial-like.  Sometimes he says, “Keegan can’t find us.”  But sometimes he’ll bring Keegan with us to hide, too.  Then he’ll say, “Mommy can’t find us”, even if Mommy is in Phoenix or India or someplace.

Our friend Marija is visiting from SF, which has been a great excuse to do some of the touristy things in Shanghai like visiting Jing’an Temple.  It’s a golden shrine to the Buddha literally in the shadow of one of the most commercial strips of real estate  this side of Vegas, with Calvin Klein billboards in full view of the monks -- a great synechdoche of modern China.  We also just got back from a day in Suzhou, a beautiful excursion from Shanghai, where we strolled in the classical gardens and realized the profound value of an afternoon nap.

Of course I don't expect anyone but the true blog junkies to go through all the links to Kai and Keegan making cookies or opening gifts on Christmas morning.  Enjoy them, Grammy!  For the rest of you, I’ll be back in the new year.  2011, by the way, will be the year of the Rabbit (as of February 3rd, anyway). Kai's already got a head start.  He made friends with a bunny that a barber across the street from us keeps in a cage on the sidewalk in front of his shop, and we slip him (the rabbit, not the barber) a carrot every time we go past.  I think that means it'll be a good year for us.

Be well, and keep in touch!

Thankful

I’m a little behind with this entry because I have not yet received the time machine I was promised (along with 35 million dollars) by a promanant and hihgly placed reprisentative of the Nigerian gouvernment at the ministeriel level, in a resent and greatly urgent and personel important email communicacion.  But hey, as soon as that bad boy arrives in the mail, you can bet I’ll jump right in and straighten out this little chronological glitch.  In the meantime . . .

This morning at about 7 o’clock I brought Keegan downstairs, set him in a highchair, and went back up for Kai.  I knew Kai would be OK for a minute because he was absorbed in reading Kai’s Amazing Alphabet Adventures, which features his own likeness 26 times (google Shutterfly, moms and dads, Christmas is almost here), and even if he did go to the stairs he’s perfectly capable of walking down them, and I was only going down for a second so there was no need to close the gate, which has an annoying, sticky locking mechanism anyway.  All the inner dialogue occurred well beneath the level of conscious awareness, of course – it’s not like I made an excel spreadsheet of pros and cons.  Also beneath the level of my awareness, but a little closer to the surface, was the vaguely recognizable voice, the voice of a mouse as it turned out, that I could scarcely hear from the kitchen as I whisked the Keegan/highchair combination package to a spot close enough to the dishwasher to play with the magnets, but not so close that he could manipulate the buttons, an almost impossibly small niche.  What was that toy?  Oh, that Mickey Mouse fire-truck-ambulance thing, the one with Mickey and Donald and the crackling radio sound effects, I didn’t know that was upstairs, Keegan loves that thing, just yesterday he was riding it while Kai tried to pull him out of it . . . and then I was climbing the stairs and there was Kai in the Mickey Mouse ambulance at the top smiling down at me as he cleared the edge, still exuberant and not yet terrified, and I reached up and out as he flew over the steering wheel and I barely managed with a quarter-inch to spare to get my hand between his porcelain cheek and the hard wooden step and stop his fall as the ambulance tumbled past us both to the landing and crashed against the wall. He was shaken and racked with sobs but they were sobs of fright and surprise, not of pain, and they subsided as I held him and rocked him and stroked his hair, while my imagination treated me to a full visualization of what had not happened but almost had, almost, so close that any momentary further delay to tickle Keegan or pick up a magnet would have meant a smashed face and probably much worse, certainly a trip in a real ambulance with no Mickey or Donald to share the ride.

Ten minutes later we were all in the kitchen making oatmeal, and Kai wanted the blue spoon, no Daddy the blue one not the green the blue THE BLUE!  This is parenting.  It’s now 7:10 am, nobody cares how tired you are, and you cannot find the blue spoon.  But your children are alive, alive, and you did not screw up too badly.  This time.

This job is making me believe more firmly in God.  Yes, thank you very much, I know all about Richard Dawkins and his crowd, who say that God is an antiquated delusion, but they are attacking a straw man and they are as overly literal as the fundamentalists against whom they inveigh.  My God is not an old man sitting on a cloud directing traffic.  My God is not interested in helping the San Francisco Giants win the World Series (although they did win the World Series, by the way, and this cannot be mentioned often enough!).  Nor did my God lead me up the stairs in the nick of time to catch my son this morning, necessarily.  My God, glimpsed always indirectly, around corners, and called (usually in the privacy of my own mind) the spirit of the universe, is the God of Serendipity, the God of Jung and Einstein and Kant, the God of Buddha (who didn’t believe in God) and Baha’u’llah (who believed in all the religions, not one).  Sacred texts like the Bible and the Koran and The Art of French Cooking do not express the literal truth; they express a metaphorical truth, which is, for lack of a better word, far cooler – that nature bats last, that the universe tends toward the good, and that nothing is ever destroyed but only transformed (a highly scientific as well as a deeply spiritual idea).

Besides, no matter how crazy anyone’s belief in religion may be or seem – and I mean ANYONE’S belief, be it burning bushes that talk, or parting seas, or magical carpenters, or special God-glasses buried in upstate New York, or L. Ron Hubbard-as-God, or atheism, or you name it – nothing, nothing could possibly be more outlandish, more unlikely, than the idea that on a speck of dust flying through the limitless cosmos at speeds beyond thought, in the thinnest tissue of gas, creatures have somehow evolved who can make pizza and reflect on their own mortality – and yet this is the apparent reality we are dealing with, people.  So let us not be too hasty to dismiss wild speculation.

We put up our Christmas tree early because they had them next to the checkout at Ikea, and there’s a manger underneath that we got at a charity bazaar with a little stuffed camel and a sheep and a donkey, bearded Chinese wise men -- well, everyone’s Chinese in this one, including a little baby Jesus the size of your thumb, and the Angel of the Lord, the one who (in the STORY, which is a METAPHOR, yes, of course, I know, but it’s a NICE STORY) tells the shepherds about the birth of Jesus.  So our Angel of the Lord is hanging from a low branch of the tree to simulate flight, and Kai said to me, “Look Daddy, she’s flying over the house!”  I asked him if meant the Angel.  He said, “No, her!” and he pointed to a photograph of my mother, who died in 2006 (all of our ornaments are little, framed family photos).  Just a sweet coincidence, of course.  I took down the photo of my mother to fix the string and rehang it, as it was a bit low, but Keegan took it from my hands and started to kiss it, over and over.  I know, just a sweet coincidence, a good story.  Does it express a metaphorical truth?  Anyway, I thought so.  And the next morning, Kai didn’t fall down the stairs.  Because angels are watching over us?  That wouldn’t be very intellectually rigorous of me to suggest, would it?  But regardless, I would like to say right here online, in front of God and everybody as the saying goes -- thank you Mom, and Thank you God.

I was going to write about buying our Thanksgiving turkey from a man named Bubba, and about the arrival of our container of STUFF!! (Yay hooray!!  We have a BED, and balsamic vinegar and Cliff Bars and sweaters and and and . . .), but it’s now 9:55 pm and my coma is just five minutes away. Oh well, I’m sure that will all make fascinating fodder for my biographer at some point in the distant future, and I can visit him and tell him all about it, just as soon as my Nigerian friend’s time machine arrives in the mail!  Unfortunately the Chinese postal system is notoriously undependable . . .

Photo links! [No videos this installment due to technical difficulties.  Please stand by . . .]  Here's the rough cut from a Christmas card session, and, at no extra cost to you the blogee, a few shots of the boys helping Mommy pack, and attempting to stow away. 

Stay at home, Dad. Stay! Gooood Dad ...

Hard to keep up with the epic blaga, even at the sub-glacial speed of every couple of weeks. Allison has become the Road Warrior; she’s coming off a five-day trip to Japan, and another to Singapore and Malaysia; tomorrow she flies to Thailand, and between now and mid-December she has trips to India, Australia, and Phoenix AZ, each one about six days long. In one really tough stretch, she’ll be home for roughly 24 hours at a time, three times, in three weeks. If the travel sounds glam, just imagine the flights, and the time-changes -- and these trips include some red-eyes that pull into Shanghai at the start of a full workday for her. When I think of what she’ll have to deal with, I don’t feel quite so much like complaining about shopping or diapers or my grueling blogging schedule.

We keep telling each other this is temporary, that her travel schedule will cool off after an initial round of meet-and-greets, and hopefully that’s true, but right now we really have to savor the time we do get. When she’s home, the boys just want to gobble her up, and I think they would gladly crawl over the lifeless husk of my body if need be to get to her lap; when she’s away, my second-banana status ends, and my lap becomes the place to be in all of China. It can be an exhausting marathon, and like a real marathon it can bring moments of exhiliration and intense satisfaction. Every day, both Kai and Keegan stun me with their surprising wit, with the voracious pace of their learning, with their ability to fill diapers to the brim and beyond. A couple of days ago we saw a cat in a neighbor’s window, and I asked Kai what the cat says. Kai did a pretty credible elephant impression. I didn’t say anything, just looked at him quizzically. He told me, “The kitty cat thinks he’s a elephant, Daddy.” Keegie, meanwhile, has had his elephant impression down for a while, but he’s adding to his repetoire with chicken, cow, tiger, and bear sounds, plus a spectacular rendition of a giraffe, done with a neck-stretch. He seems to get a new word every day, and a few of them are Chinese, like “Hao,” which means “good,” and our favorite -- Keegan’s first word in Chinese -- “Hai Bao” which isn’t exactly a word, but the name of a ubiquitous, cartoony blue guy who is the mascot for the Shanghai Expo -- sort of a Chinese Gumby, but with a higher public profile than either Mao or Michael Jordan in their respective heydays.

The boys and I have been keeping busy with our weekly music class, pottery class, assorted playgroups, and research visits to schools Kai may go to next year, among other things. And now -- and this was just bound to happen -- the boys have been recruited as models. Yes, someone besides Allison has finally landed a job, and it isn’t me. We were approached at a party, a fundraiser thrown by an expat organization, with an offer to have some family photos taken for free. We thought it was a party favor of sorts, but it turned out to be the gateway drug to careers as little Marky Marks for our sons, who are big-time eye-candy here. We are taking it very slow, though, hoping the boys might earn themselves a little extra toy money, or, if things get really poppin’, who knows, maybe even a little college money. And no matter what, we are NOT buying them a chihuahua to carry around in a handbag. Keegan has his first gig on Wednesday, I believe for a catalogue. I’ll let you know how it goes.

At our various playgroups and classes here, I’m very often the only guy in the room. In my early days as a stay-at-home dad this summer in the Bay Area, it felt pretty normal and average (well, at least after a brief, initial decompression period, while the detritus of American Male Baggage fell away), to be the dad wearing the Bjorn and toting a pocketful of snuggle puppies; every other guy in town, it seemed, was pushing a Maclaren and had a chupie or two clipped to his shirt. Big deal -- let’s get past that and talk potty-training and the Giants, Man! Thank God I had that experience to temper me, because now the social reinforcement has been replaced by some chuckles, a few double-takes, and even the occasional punch on the street. Really -- a woman on Shanxxi Nan Lu punched me for carrying Keegan in the Bjorn without socks. I know this from her wild gesticulations in the direction of his feet, but I had no means of explaining to her that it was 80 degrees out, Keegan can’t walk, and I wasn’t going to put him down. It wasn’t a playful tap or a chiding jab, either; she hit me as hard as she could, I suspect, and she got her legs into the punch, throwing a right hook at me with all she had, which thankfully wasn’t much. Also, since she was four feet tall she hit me in the hip, but the point is she wanted to hurt me, because I was a man who didn’t know what he was doing, and I was endangering the life of a beautifully fat baby with my flabby, foreign, male ignorance.

It’s not nearly so bad with the expat women in the playgroups as it is on the street, but still, it’s clear there’s a range of comfort levels. Some of my fellow parents are chatty, warm, welcoming, and pay no mind to my gender, while others make little jokes, and a few studiously avoid me, though that could be my halitosis. Of course we could say that all of this is just the result of varying personalities and that gender has no part in it, but I think it’s a little from column A, a little from column B. Even the children react differently to me than they do to the other parents, but here the general trend is oddly positive. It’s hard to explain, but often several of the kids will key in on me, come up to me, watch me, follow me -- why? Because I’m a man, and because I’m the only man, and maybe, possibly, because they miss their dads, who probably have to do quite a bit of traveling. At one school I visited, not one but two boys called me “papa” or dada” repeatedly, and I was there for no more than 20 minutes. Allison, who’s seen this phenomenon in action a few times on the playground or in the playroom of Green Valley, says I’m the Pied Piper, but it makes me just a touch maudlin in a way that’s hard to explain, like when you pet a stray dog you can’t possibly bring home.

A reporter who was doing a story on playgroups for an expat magazine was at one of our regular stops this week, and asked me if I’d say something about my experience with the group; she was quite candid that she was asking me because I was the only dad, and she wanted to get that angle. I told her that I was grateful for the outlet for the boys and the chance to learn from the insight and experience of others, and that the moms generally and quickly realized that I was just like any other parent there. All of which is true as far as it goes, and yet the truth, as it can often be, is more subtle and elusive than it appears.

And speaking of things I do with my kids that are hard to explain, here’s a highly random video of an activity Kai and I happened upon accidentally that we call either “spinning” or “tunnel.” He’ll probably be telling his therapist about it one of these days. I hope that like me, he’ll decide that his parents were just doing the best they could with what they knew.

Before I close, I would be remiss if I did not add, in case you missed it, that THE SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS ARE THE CHAMPIONS OF THE WORLD!!!! OH MY DEAR SWEET GOD!!!! No matter where on earth you may be, when your team finally, really, improbably does it, it’s a beautiful thing.

I’m just looking for a credible Chinese artist to tattoo Edgar Renteria’s face on my tookus.