Coming to America

Door to door, it was 32 hours from our house in Shanghai to Turk and Barbara’s place in Delaware: drive to Pudong, 12-hour flight to LA, 4 hours in LAX, red-eye to DC, rent a battleship (plenty of luggage and car seats), stop at Nordstrom’s (Hey, there was a sale! And we knew the boys would fall asleep as soon as we got in the car. Of course, we were wrong). Then the drive to Delaware, or as I call it, Delawhere? The boys love airplanes with a burning white-hot intensity, and they did a fantastic job on the trip, but maybe, say, 24 hours would be enough.

In fairness to Delawhere?, it wasn’t really the point.  The point was to be with family, and on the beach, and in this regard Lewes Delaware and environs served brilliantly. Turk and Barbara have a beautiful new place, designed and handsomely appointed by Peter Guida, big enough to absorb scads of cousins -- and they were gracious hosts. The beaches at Cape Henlopen and Rehoboth have fewer rocks and more tickly crabs than New Jersey -- I even wrote some advertising copy for Delaware, on spec, which they can use if they like -- “Delaware! It’s not as bad as New Jersey.”  (Come on New Jersey, you know we love you . . . how could we not? There is no other state I’d rather drive through.) Kai and Keegan just live to play in the sand, and they adore their cousins, so the combination is unbeatable. We tried to get some organized photos at Cape Henlopen, some family shots, group shots, etc. Here’s a bootleg behind-the-music video of the shoot.)  I’m not sure if the stronger Christmas card candidates for Grammy and Poppy come from the whole-family-massed-on-the-shore series above, or the pile-on-Poppy’s Jeep collection. Tough call; feel free to cast your vote. (Yes, you can drive on the beach in Delaware, as long as you pretend you’re shore fishing.)  My favorite shots are probably just the boys running around, climbing on castles, splashing, hunting for crabs, dolphin-spotting, and generally goofing off at the beach.

One crazy day, we decided to take the ferry from Lewes to Cape May to see Betsy, Joe and JP.  The four of us, plus Liz, Lindsey, and Natalie, drove on early in the morning, and off in the afternoon, poorer in rest but richer in experience -- 8 hours door-to-door for 32 minutes on the beach. We brought a little gift, a race car ramp in a gift bag, for JP, who is a year or so older than Kai. Betsy nudged him to thank us when we gave it to him, and JP said, “Thank you, but I already have it, and you should have wrapped it.” (Sorry Betsy, I know you were mortified, but believe me, we understand! We’ll try to do better next time, JP.) Well, at least we got to say hello . . . next year, we’ll stay overnight. Brace yourself, Aunt Margot.

Another highlight was driving to Philadelphia on the night of July 28th to see the Reigning World Champion San Francisco Giants take on the Philadelphia Phillies, who are also a professional baseball team, although I am not sure what a Philly is. Turk and I had gotten great seats months ahead, and we got to watch Big-Time TimmyJim Lincecum beat the Phils 4-1. Boyd and Meghan and their four wonderful kids, Mack, Bridget, Jeb and Hill, big Phillies fan all, were on the deck above us, and we visited back and forth. I wore my Giants cap, taking my life into my hands among the fan-base that famously threw snowballs at Santa Claus one Christmas during an Eagles game (Turk is proud to say he was actually there). In the top of the second, Pablo Sandoval belted an opposite-field homer inside the left-field pole, and I stood and cheered in naive excitement. Two or three thousand people turned to glower at me, and I quietly sat down and re-corked my champagne. But they did let me live. Thank you, Philadelphia! These people take their sports seriously.  On the way home, Hill, who is five, said earnestly, “I bet the Philly Phanatic is crying right now.” Sorry, Hill. But ever since that night, the Phillies are crushing all comers, and the Giants are struggling. The roller coaster of the baseball season still has a ways to go, and these two teams may meet again. If they do, I’ll be watching from the safety of Shanghai.

After a week or so of this summer idyll, Allison and I did something we haven’t done for well over three years -- we went away together, without the boys, leaving them with Grammy and Poppy, Aunt Liz and Uncle Peter, Lindsey and Natalie, while we went gallivanting around New York City (well, we did park in New Jersey). New York City, if you haven’t heard of it, is the best city in the world, and the worst city in the world, in the same place, at the same time, and the trick is to stay on its good side, which has nothing to do with east and west. We pretty much managed to pull off the trick, which involved wandering through SoHo and the Village, running in the park, hitting some museums and Broadway shows, and visiting with New York friends like Patrick, Rob, and Martha, Joe and Loretta (forgot to take pics, dammit!).  Starved for English-language culture in Shanghai, we splurged on shows. Here are the capsule reviews:

The Winter’s Tale (by the Royal Shakespeare Company, popping over from London), at the Park Ave. Armory, b/c Lincoln Center is being vacuumed): Smokin’. Dynamite.  See anything they do.  Goofy at times, big and bold, worth it. (Spoiler alert -- I get it now! Paulina had Hermione stashed in the back room for 16 years!  The statue bit was just a gag!) Or as Patrick said, “late-career romance crap.”  Loved this.

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying: Very strong revival, although I suspect Daniel Radcliffe’s film career may have influenced his hiring. (He can act, he can dance, he can’t really sing. But hey, the crowd adored him.) John Larroquette was hysterical. Big bonus: old friend and B.U. classmate Ellen Harvey was in the show, and she is terrific in it. If you know Ellen, or even if you don’t, check her out on ellenharvey.net.   We had a little visit with her afterwards -- great to see Ellen strutting her stuff on Broadway!

Billy Elliot: A wonderful movie, an OK musical. It has some strong moments (i.e. “Individuality”), but the show of the year in 2009 looks a bit tired in 2011.

Amateur Night at the Apollo: Yes, as seen on TV. This show is silly, sweet, and so much fun -- by all means, go see it! Every Wednesday night. Harlem looks better than I’ve ever seen it, too. Thanks to Bill?

Harlem Gospel Choir, the Gospel Brunch at B.B. King’s club on Times Square: These guys are high energy, tight, and sounded great. The sausage and grits were plentiful. A highlight: Allison and Patrick pushed me up on the stage to LIE and pretend it was my birthday, so I (along with 8 other “birthday boys and girls” and a tableful of tourists from Osaka), could rock out to “Celebrate” by Kool and the Gang. Both acutely embarrassing and extremely fun. Burn the negatives, people.

New York being New York, the hits just kept on comin’. We went the Met, and MOMA too. We rode the Staten Island Ferry across the harbor with Raja, who came down from Boston for a day, especially to see Allison. We strolled through Central Park and dined at the Boat House, where Carrie and Mr. Big fell in. (The Bolivar pics are especially for you, Marija!) We ate bagels, pizza, street dogs at The Umbrella Room, and some more upscale cuisine, too -- though I think our favorite meal was grilled steak on Martha and Rob’s patio overlooking the city, with the whole family. Why I love Martha: we’d brought a box of pastries form Little Italy, and Martha said, “I hate Italian pastries! I’ll get more wine.”  This of course obligated me to eat more pastries. You get no BS with Martha.  Thank your lucky stars, Mr. Keefe. 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch in Delaware, the boys were busy with Grammy in the kitchen, Farmer Poppy in the garden, and Aunt Liz, Uncle Peter, Lindsey and Natalie on the beach. We were able to enjoy NYC only because they were in good hands -- we still missed the boys tremendously, and we called and skyped with them often, but we knew they would be OK, and we owe a great debt to our family for making our New York adventure possible.

After a few more days on the beach, we left our shampoo in the shower, our shoes under the bed, said so long to Delaware, and headed off to Chicago. New York to me is a glamorous star; Chicago is an old friend I’m happy to see. Allison also lived there for more than a decade, so it’s an important family-and-friends stop for us. We stayed next to the John Hancock building, and I love seeing the boys look up at it in wonder.  It was a treat seeing BJ, our dear friend (and the woman who married us!) at the Children’s Museum on Navy Pier -- Keegan gets her name confused with DJ Lance of Yo Gabba Gabba fame and calls her BJ Lance, but he loves them both. Along with my brother Jonathan, my sister Lisa, brother-in-law Charlie, and their kids Noah and Sam, we took the boys to the Field Museum. It’s Chicago’s dinosaur heaven, but we also appreciated their special exhibitions on whales and horses. (By the way, Allison and the boys are inside the heart of a whale in a few of the pictures -- we’ve had some other, more troubling theories put forth as to what body part that might be.) An epic walk from the Field to Buckingham Fountain, the Millennium Park Bean, the Daley Center, and the underside of Marilyn Monroe, turned most of us into the zombies you see lying on the ground at the concert in Grant Park later.  The next morning, our appetite for classical music revived, we were treated to a sidewalk show by my nephew Noah, the noted violinist. We cruised the Chicago River with the Kai and Keegan, whose passions in life include boats and free cookies, so they loved it; Allison and I appreciated the spectacular architecture -- OK, and the free cookies. We wanted to take them on the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier, but Kai and Keegan at this point in their lives are, um, risk-averse (which is an awesome trait, to a parent), so we rode the merry-go-round instead, and that was enough to thrill and exhaust them.  Allison and I traded off going out in the evenings a couple of times, so she was able to get in some girlfriend bonding-time (at least that’s what she says she did, and she does have these photos). We also got to see our friends Nora and Matthew and their kids Sophie, Eli, and Theo, while we ran around the Lincoln Park Zoo (we need to take more pics of grown-ups now and then, but I do love the hatching-from-eggs series). And we stopped off at the Rainforest Cafe for a final US supper with my dear friend (since third grade!) Lisa, complete with animatronic alligators and a giftshop bigger than most entire restaurants. I love this country!

As Allison so aptly said, the trip was great, but it wasn’t restful. We need a vacation to recover, especially form the jet-lag.  Here we are on the way home, trying to lull the boys into a trance with some videos of Dinosaur Train. It didn’t work. This time it was Chicago-Shanghai nonstop, only 24 hours door-to-door, but somehow it felt longer. The boys didn’t want to sleep for the first 15 hours or so; it made me miss red-eyes. But now we’ve been back in China for almost a week, we’re settling into a good rhythm, and the boys are each starting a little dollop of preschool, something I’ll blog about next time (this blog is already as long as the trip! If anyone actually makes it through all the links, you’ll trigger a golden-ticket coded message and win a prize Willie Wonka would be proud of).  Thanks to everyone we saw on our visit to the US, and to those we didn’t get to meet up with, I’m terribly sorry, and I hope we can do better next time, because we will be back. That’s a fine country you have there.

Turning the big 3 -- oh, my!

A man only turns 3 once, and when you do it, you want to celebrate in style. Our newly minted 3-year-old, Mr. Kai Despard Ratner, was intimately involved in the planning stages of his dinosaur birthday bash, choosing the frosting color of his stegosaurus cake (“I want blue, Mommy, a blue stegosaurus one, with chocolate!” He knows what he likes.); selecting the appropriate attack weapon for the stegosaurus piñata (an orange Giants wiffle bat); customizing his gift list – you name it, he was in on it. Well, it was actually Mommy and Daddy who made the piñata, and Mommy who made the awesome cake, and Daddy who got the decorations, etcetera – but without Kai to superintend, I’m not sure we could have pulled it off. (Here, for the truly committed, or those on a long conference call with the "mute" button on, is the youtube version of the party.)

My favorite part was the piñata – this thing was quite a project. We had hours of fun boiling the paste and layering newspaper strips onto a balloon that then popped, leaving us with a pile of gooey Shanghai Daily News; we started over again, got the shape, added paper plates for spine plates, and spiky tail,  then waited a week or more for the creature to dry in the sauna of summertime Shanghai.  In the course of the week Steggy came to look like he’d had botched liposuction surgery as the balloon sagged and died within his once-cavernous depths. We started to cover him with green crepe paper, but this turned out to be more time-consuming than we could deal with after long days of working and parenting – it felt like we were attaching individual blades of grass to make the whole outfield of AT&T Park using a toothpick. So Steggy just got a green landing strip down his back, and some eyes and a mouth. We stuffed him with candy and tiny dinosaur-themed toys we’d somehow managed to track down. When the time came to actually bash him open, though, Steggy proved a far worthier adversary than we expected.  His long struggle against the Shanghai heat had toughened his hide to the strength of, well, a genuine stegosaurus. Kid after kid socked the tar out of him to no effect. I stepped up to the plate and managed to draw blood, candy that is, from the great beast, but in the end I was forced into an act of pure savagery, disemboweling him with my bare hands and showering his entrails on the floor in front of the children, much to their delight. 

Why did we spend so much time on an event that Kai will certainly not remember by the time he hits 4?  Because it was fun, that’s why. Not just for him, but for us. Dinosaur parties for 3-year-olds are a blast, and I recommend you throw one soon. Kai was just over-the-moon happy all day long, reveling in being the star of his show, but actually quite sweet to his brother and to his little friends.  I did tear up a little bit when I saw a piñata on sale at a party store for 99 RMB (it was a horse, but we totally could have modified that thing into a stegosaurus in 10 minutes) – still, it was all worth it to see Kai blissed out.  Here's our man almost blowing out his candles in front of his adoring fans, and here he is is his Buddy The T-Rex regalia, with a special guest appearance by Keegan.

Both Kai and Keegan are in just full-on adorable mode right now. Keegan calls out requests for his favorite bedtime songs (“Moonshadow, Daddy!”), and then sings along, tossing in every other word. Kai’s imagination is soaring; when we go in to him in the morning, he’ll have prepared an assortment of treats that he serves to us when we unzip the crib tent – things like purple coffee with whipped cream, which is pretty hard to find in China, so we appreciate it.

Our big project right now is packing -- we leave for the Meiguo, AKA The United States of America (perhaps you've heard of it?) in a mere 24 hours. I'd love to rhapsodize further, but I truly can't, I've got to go find my running hat, and my other sunglasses, and pack my shaving kit, and and and... you get the idea.

Here, then, in the obligatory grab-bag paragraph with the links I didn't fit in above.  If I had a decent editor, and a staff, and an salary, I'd do it all in higher style, but you get what you pay for.

Our friend Sally Thornton stayed with us for a couple of days on her way to Anhui Province and Beijing; Allison and Sally hit the mean streets on a bike tour of Shanghai, and lived long enough to take a few pictures of it. We also went with Sally to Yu Yuan, and the boys and I were mesmerized by staring into the rocky ponds of the old garden. Come back any time, Sally!  It's a great excuse to eat more ice cream. When not wearing a dinosaur suit, Kai can usually be found either watching Yo Gabba Gabba, asking to watch Yo Gabba Gabba, or dressing up as a character from Yo Gabba Gabba; here he is as Plex, the Magic Robot (please don't ask me to explain that). And yes, Keegan loves YGG just as much as Kai, if not more so. They share many passions, including squirting each other with water.

I'll see a few of you in America -- I wish it was ALL of you, more than I can say.  Love and best thoughts to you, and I'll be back on the blog in August.

T.I.C., you know?

Remember Blood Diamond, the movie about the dirty diamond business in Sierra Leone?  The hardcore mercenaries would grunt at each other as they killed old colleagues and say, “T.I.A,” short for “This Is Africa,” i.e., that’s just how business is done here, so don’t expect any mercy, civility, or human decency. We have the “T.I.C.” version of that here in China, and you hear the expression often enough around Shanghai.

 It usually references a slightly less brutal reality than the African version: rip-offs in shops, kafkaesque bureaucratic absurdities, and the like. Occasionally T.I.C. can mean truly harrowing and even deadly business, though. A recent rash of horrible scandals in the food industry makes Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle look like an expose of dirty tablecloths down at Appleby’s: for instance, people have been caught putting melamine, a plastic, yes a plastic, into milk as a filler, sickening and killing thousands of children; farmers were coerced into feeding poisonous additives to pigs to drive up their weight and their profits; and watermelons have been exploding all around the country because of the noxious chemicals used to enlarge them. Government officials have been embarrassed by the scandals, and many of the perpetrators have been executed (no wrist-slapping here), and yet the scams and the scandals continue, so desperate are some people to make a few extra kuai on each item they sell.  We don’t buy milk or yogurt unless it’s imported, and we buy meat and chicken from a local French butcher we can trust, but we still can’t be sure about all the food, all the time.

Sometimes T.I.C. can be so ridiculous it’s comical, even wonderful. A friend of mine, Lara, told me about trying to rent a rowboat at a lake west of the city. Behind a long row of twenty or more ticket counters, she saw only one clerk, and approached her at counter number 15. After she managed with some difficulty to get across what she wanted, the clerk told her that the rental was only handled at counter number 4, so she walked down the row to counter number 4, while the clerk got up, walked along on the opposite side of the glass,  and sat down at number 4, facing her. She, the clerk that is, then stared blank-faced at Lara as if she had no idea why she was there. So Lara again struggled to express her desire to rent a boat, to which the woman then said that such requests weren’t handled until 11 o’clock -- and since it was before 10 a.m., she’d have to wait. When Lara told me this story, laughing so hard she nearly cried, she naturally ended it with, “But T.I.C., you know?”  There are loads of stories like this: at the zoo one day, I tried to buy a ticket to a kiddie ride, some plastic dolphins that go around in a pool of very iffy, probably brackish water. The ticket booth lady shrugged and gestured to the empty seat next to her, telling me it wasn’t her job to sell the dolphin tickets. She then went back, quite literally, to doing her nails and reading a magazine. She sold only the caterpillar spiny ride tickets. The dolphin ticket lady was across the way, chatting with the guy who runs the car ride, maybe 20 feet from us. Did I mention that there are only three rides in this little nook?  Or that we were the only customers? Or that we waited 10 minutes for the dolphin lady to come back? Or that my children, aged 1 and 2 years, do not have an excess of patience? Or that in the entire history of the Shanghai Zoo, there has never been a single moment when it was necessary to have an employee dedicated only to selling tickets to the dolphin ride, and another employee sitting right next to her specializing exclusively in caterpillar spiny ride tickets? But of course, T.I.C., you know?

Which leads me to the story of Hua Hua.  We were having brunch one Sunday at a place I always call “waiguoren lu”, which means “foreigner street,” and people, i.e. taxi drivers, actually know what I mean and take me there, although the place has a real name, something like “Hongmei Cultural Pedestrian Model Street,” but I don’t know how to say that in Chinese. Anyway, as the name implies, this street has a bunch of foreign restaurants, and a bunch of foreign customers. A local animal rescue group sets up shop there once a month to find homes for strays, and this was their day. So Allison decided to take the boys over just to have a look, you know, a perfectly innocent look. Well, someone in our little group came back to the brunch table with shining eyes and said,”oh pleeease, can we take her home?  She is soooo cute, and we neeeeed her, and she will be sooooo much fun, and we can all help take care of her, canwecanwecanwe??!!” That, of course, was Allison, just after meeting Hua Hua, a sweet, lovely mix of Chau? Collie? and other?  The boys, especially Kai, also seemed excited about the prospect, swept up in their mommy’s enthusiasm.  I guess I must have been swept up too, since I skipped my traditional pros-and-cons list and two-week meditation retreat to think it over. Thankfully I at least told the dog whisperers that we would take Hua Hua home on a trial basis only, for a week or two, to see if she was a good fit for our family. I really do love dogs, and I wanted it to work. And if you could just have seen Allison’s face!  So the next thing we knew, Hua Hua was in our living room, and then, six hours later, Allison was on the way to India for a week of business travel; I had a new baby on my hands, to go along with the other two.

Hua Hua means “flower,” and it’s a very common name for dogs here, sort of the Chinese version of Spot or Fido. Allison wanted to call her Daisy, and Kai was all for calling her Sodor (that’s the island where Thomas the Train lives, for the uninitiated). Somehow, though, Hua Hua stuck. She really did turn out to be a sweetie, despite the fact that she chewed up a few dinosaurs and got up every morning at 5:30, even before Keegan. She was housetrained, frisky, and fun, and like most dogs and Harvey Fierstein, she just wanted to be loved and be part of a family.  The biggest problem, aside form the increased workload and poopload, was that Keegan was afraid of her, and didn’t understand that her licks and nibbles were just invitations to play.  Kai too was soon on edge around her, and despite the fact that both boys were also fascinated by her, it was soon clear that it was getting worse, not better, and that Kai and Keegan just weren’t ready. When Allison got back from India, she could immediately see and understand the situation -- we just couldn’t have the boys feeling frightened in their own home that way, even though we understood Hua Hua meant no harm.  If it was going to work with any dog, it would have been her. We were just on the verge of calling the adoption people and pulling the plug on the project when our neighbor Patti, who lives just around the corner here in Green Valley, stepped in and told us she wanted to adopt Hua Hua!  After a trial period of their own, Patti and her two daughters, age 10 and 11, have decided to make Hua Hua a member of their family, and a companion to the mutt they already have, Dumpling.  This is the best off all worlds for us; we were able to help Hua Hua find a family, we didn’t have to foist her back on the dog-rescue people, and we can still see her and learn that dogs can be our friends. In a few years, when we’re sure the boys are ready, we’ll try again, and hopefully Hua Hua can help us to get there.

So what does this have to do with T.I.C.?  Well Shanghai has a new law that people can only have one dog, and all dogs have to be registered, and get a chip implanted, etc. Violators are subject to having their dogs immediately impounded and euthanized, as in killed, as in, in front of their very eyes.  We heard a couple of grim stories about this, and Patti was loath to take the risk. We were prepared to register Hua Hua and have her “hang out” with Patti and her family until the last trumpet, but at the last minute we discovered this was unnecessary. Why? Because for some mysterious reason, that law just doesn’t apply to foreigners -- go figure.  Hua Hua now has some kind of diplomatic immunity, and we can see her whenever we want. This is a somewhat rare but wonderful positive example of T.I.C. 

I wanted to give you more examples of T.I.C., like the universally ignored traffic laws (you know how you have to yield to oncoming traffic before you make a left turn on green?  Well, congratulations, you know something that NO ONE in all of China is aware of!). But as often happens on blogworld, I’m way past deadline, and I need to wrap this baby up. For that reason, we’re now going into Full Lurch Mode, as I transition to . . . 

The Obligatory Paragraph With All the Links to the Cute People!  Here it is!  Woot, as we used to say back in America in the old days.  Be forewarned that internal transitions will NOT be a feature of this paragraph. In fact, this is the last one. I swear, I’m not hooked. I can quit any time. I just don’t WANT to quit.  Here are the boys eating traditional Dragon Boat Festival foods! For actual pictures of Dragon Boat Festival (a party for a suicidal poet who is not eaten by fish), you’ll have to wait till next year, on account of monsoon rains.  Here are the boys hanging around at home.  (Hint: if you only have time to click on one link for the rest of your life, it should be this one.  These pics are so cute, it's not fair to all the other babies.) Here are the boys celebrating our driver Wong’s birthday with a panda cake! (No actual pandas were harmed in the making of this blog. A warning, however -- camera phone in use. Only Wang and Grammy need to click.) Here’s Kai at his school, in photos taken by his teachers over the past semester, with a special guest appearance by Keegan at the zoo field trip (I said I couldn’t chaperone unless I could bring Keegan, and they fell for it).  And here are the boys looking quizzically at fish heads, turtles and wounded geese at a  freaky street market we mistakenly believed would be a charming farmer’s market!  The best part was the cupcakes from a Western bakery -- yum! See, I promised, no transitions!  Wait, is THIS a transition?  Drat!!

Kai’s birthday is just around the corner on July 2, so I’ll definitely do at least one blog in July before we visit this mysterious West we’ve heard tell of.  Hope you are all well . . . let us know how the summer is going!

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.