Beijing Tai Tai

by Tania McCartney

  On a recent roasting day in the kitchen (no, the gas burners weren’t even on), Ayi did what she’s been asked never to do: she adjusted the air-conditioner in the kitchen, either closing the vents or turning it off completely. And she didn’t do it once. She did it several times, unashamedly ignoring my requests for her to desist. After years of asking her not to do this, I was already poised and ready to mentally implode.

  I calmly explained to her, for the umpteenth time, not to do this. If she was cold (!?), she should go and put on a cardigan.

  Now, let me just explain something to you before I allow this corker of a story to unfold. I know Ayi is elderly. I know Ayi is set in her ways. I know Ayi has deeply embedded cultural edicts that believe, accurately or not, that air-conditioners are the spawn of the devil and will quite literally strip the skin from your body via a series of pox-like welts, and then will unhinge themselves from the wall and come after your entire family and kill them all.

  So, in light of this firmly entrenched belief, I never have the airconditioner on high, and even if I did, this useless machine could never cool down our kitchen. In fact, its cooling effect is so pathetic that you have to hold a hand beneath the vent to even feel the pale ribbon of air. Nonetheless, being such a nice furen, I always adjust the vent so the air flows down the wall instead of directly onto Ayi, who freezes into a block of ice the moment the machine whispers into life.

  So, today, after having my tolerance severely compromised by Ayi’s flagrant disregard for my ‘authority’, it was with much amusement (and nausea) that I saw her head to the kitchen to start dinner, but not before hauling up the legs of her pants and wrapping them in plastic bags to protect her shins against the Arctic snowstorm that had become our kitchen floor.

  Before you think I’m a monster, I cannot reiterate enough how not cold my kitchen was this day. Stinking hot would be a good description. So the plastic bag thing—well, I completely ignored it.

  This really pissed Ayi off. After about twenty minutes of her pottering in the kitchen with her crunchy plastic bags, and receiving not an ounce of attention, I began to notice, from my perch in the living room, a change of pace. Maybe it was the plastic bags constricting her movement, but she gradually, ever so slowly, began to hobble, with the occasional glance up at me to see if I was watching.

  I wasn’t.

  So the hobbling got worse. Hobbles became limps. Limps became lopes. Lopes became great hulking lurches across the kitchen, and by the time dinner was served, Ayi’s grand performance came to a flourishing finale as she carried a dish of mi fan (rice) to the table and promptly clutched at her chest, stumbled sideways and crashed into the wall.

  Now, I’m not a completely heartless furen. For a split second, I panicked and ran towards her. ‘Oh my God,’ I thought to myself, ‘I’ve killed her. She’s really dying.’

  Stupid me.

  ‘Ayi! I’ll call an ambulance! What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Oh, nothing furen,’ she gasped, ‘I’m fine, don’t worry about it.’

  It was when I repeated the same question and she responded with the same answer five or six times that I really started to get angry. And as she recovered herself to reveal to me the source of her sudden and shocking illness, I knew I was dealing with a manipulator more brazen than a chocolate-seeking child.

  All I can remember thinking, in the moments before the great reveal, was this: ‘If she says it’s the air-conditioner, I am going to have to open my front door and pick her up and throw her through it. I will not have any other choice. It will be beyond my physical control.’

  So. I watched her recover. I watched her push away from the wall and straighten. I watched her look me brazenly, straight in the eye ... and as I saw her arm straighten and that hand lift from her side ... as I saw her fingers curl into her palm, leaving her index finger pointing straight ... I knew exactly where that finger was headed. It was headed straight for that air-conditioner, and sure enough, that’s where it landed.

  But before Ayi could even get the words out of her mouth, over three years of sheer frustration rose up and burst out of my voice box with such ferocity that the kids dropped their chopsticks clattering to the floor.

  ‘Geeet ooout!’ I screamed. ‘Get out of my house!’ I hollered. ‘Get out of our lives, our home, our house! Now! Get out! Get out! Get out!’

  Well, I’ve never seen so much back-pedalling in all my life. So much recanting diarrhoea came out of that mouth, the room filled instantly with the stench. But through the haze of blinding rage, through the sheer frustration over why she was doing this to me yet again, I could not even hear what she was saying. I instead flung myself around the kitchen uncontrollably to prevent myself from physically grabbing those scrawny arms, picking her up and throwing her out the door.

  But she wouldn’t leave. She said she had to clean up the dishes. She pottered. She avoided my eyes. She was totally physically recovered from her stroke/heart attack/seizure and simply got back to work. I trailed her, screaming at the side of her head like a drill sergeant but she still refused to move. I called downstairs and asked security to come and remove her, I was so enraged.

  That’s when Xiansheng walked through the door and calmed me down.

  Ayi indeed went home, but not before insisting she clean up the kitchen. Xiansheng told her to come in tomorrow so we could tell her whether or not she still had a job. What pissed me off the most was that she happily sang out ‘Zai jian, furen!’ Goodbye, Madam! when she left, as though fawns and bluebirds were prancing around the living room and I was sitting among a ring of daisies smiling sweetly.

  I, in reality, was a ragged wreck, having just taken five years off my life and pushed my pelvic floor 5 centimetres lower from that screaming fit, not to mention the stress and strain of three accumulated years of frustration. For me, every drama Ayi has ever put us through has been totally unwarranted. I have quite literally been reduced to begging her not to give me mafan (trouble) because I’m too busy and too much in desire for peace to deal with it. It seems no matter how much I beg this woman to lay off, she couldn’t give two shits how her drama terrorises me. It’s almost a game to her.

  I don’t want her here anymore. I really, really don’t. I want a happy home not a home governed by this perilous pensioner.

  The Nine Hundred Lives of Ayi

  Xiansheng talks sense into a frantic furen

  Well, she has survived another day. You knew she would, didn’t you?

  Last night, Xiansheng talked some ‘sense’ into me. He said we only have six months to go, that Ayi’s work performance is still good, and that perhaps I could take a different tack. I could tell Ayi that if she continues to give me drama, she will be sent home on the spot and the unworked hours would come out of her pay. Smart move. Money talks. Especially with the Chinese and most especially with ayis.

  I cannot express the relief this great idea has brought me. My writing has taken off, I’m busier than ever and this is one of the most wonderful times of my life. It’s also our final half-year in Beijing—the last thing I want to do is let Ayi ruin that for us. I don’t have the time nor wherewithal to find another (potentially worse) ayi. So this stupid furen is keeping her, and this scurrilous woman continues on in a job she quite simply does not deserve.

  Little did I know that very soon a tragedy would occur that would grab small dramas by the throat and really put things into perspective.

  China is Still Trembling

  Sichuan’s earthquake rocks Beijing

  The earthquake in Sichuan province has rocked all our lives in some way. Not only am I thankful my children are still alive (many mothers’ children are not), I am also thankful they were riding in the school bus and didn’t feel a thing when the quake shook this enormous land so deeply. I can imagine my daughter would never enter our building again if she had been inside when it occurred, and that would have caused all sorts of inconveniences.

  I happened to be walking home with a friend
when things got rumbly, so we didn’t feel a thing, but when I got home, I was greeted by a stark-raving mad ayi, maniacally acting out feng! hen da! charades, swooshing her arms around our apartment like a bogged helicopter.

  ‘A big wind?’ I asked her. ‘Inside the apartment?’

  ‘Yes, Madam!’ she wailed, making tornado-like gushing sounds, ‘Blowing everything from side to side!’

  ‘Did you have the windows open?’ I asked with a wink, ‘Where do you think the wind came from? Up the lifts and through the front door?’ (Please remember, at this stage I had no clue as to the tragedy unfolding 1500 kilometres away.)

  ‘I don’t know, Madam, but it was a big wind! The whole building swayed!’

  I nodded empathetically, was sorely tempted to make a ‘coco loco’ sign with my finger, then went to the computer to face a barrage of emails: ‘Did you feel that?’ ‘Did the earth move for you?’ ‘Am I going mad or did my building just turn on its side?’ ‘Tan, are you okay?’ Turning pale, it didn’t take me long to work out what the ‘feng, hen da’ was. Alas.

  So, when the kids came in minutes later, I was thankful. Not only because they were safe, but because they weren’t in a swaying, rocking, 26[th] floor apartment when the quake happened. Seems overindulgent being so glad about this when parents in Sichuan province are pulling children from the rubble. It’s just too heartbreaking.

  As one blog-watcher commented: God bless China.

  Sibling Rivalry

  How a sisterly situation could turn green

  My darling Jie Jie has been in Beijing almost a year now and when she first arrived, it was happy happy joy joy. The kids had another bloodline proffering to pounce on and I had someone in town with relationship ties delving into a past greater than two months. We ate, we drank, we scoured Beijing, we shopped, we sighted landmarks, we shared cultural activities and family jokes. It was a glorious time.

  It is with regret, however, that I have to reveal that things soon soured.

  It was when Jie Jie and Smoothie began to travel. I mean really travel. First it was around Beijing. Unfettered by small, demanding children, they woke to endless, vacant weekends, unscathed by soccer practice and ballet recital and music lessons. Great, cavernous holiday weeks lay like puddles at their feet, wailing to be jumped in, with jaunts to Pingyao, Datong and Harbin.

  Then they got really serious. There were clunking overnight trains and gritty hostels, trekking through lime-green rice fields and facing giant Buddhas on the edges of churning rivers, followed by cable cars to mountaintops and petrified forests topped with monasteries made of matchsticks.

  Pretty soon, it stretched to Japan (one of my favourite places on earth) during blossom time (my aching heart), and soon it will be a four-week odyssey through the United States via such places as San Francisco (choke), Vegas (gasp), a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon (oh, the agony), New Orleans (sob!), overland to Chicago (I can’t bear it any longer) and New York (that’s it! I’m ruined!), just to round things off.

  I put on a happy face. I help them plan. I loan them maps, give them travelling tips (nice ones). But, oh boy, does it hurt. I wave them off with a grin akin to the face developed after days of Chinese water torture. I blow kisses through the clenched teeth of an insatiable, travel-lusting maniac. Then I close the door and slump against the wall, turning a nice shade of lime green.

  Ella skips by, flipping her pigtails and says, ‘What a pretty green, Mum!’ then asks when we’re going back to Phuket. The dreaded bikini, five-star beach resort and cocktail hour by the pool again??

  Bah humbug.

  Our Family’s Must-See Travel List

  Kid-friendly destinations are the only way

  When we first came to Beijing, we made a Must-See Travel List, which included, in no particular order, the pandas in Chengdu, the terracotta warriors in Xi’an, the ancient sites of Yunnan, the beach at Beidaihe and a cruise of the Yangtze River to see the three gorges before all was flooded into oblivion. List items ticked so far? Zero. Our family has seen quite a bit of China, yet our original list remains curiously untouched.

  Is this because when you get settled in Beijing, your Travel List priorities change? You quickly realise it’s not so easy travelling in China with small kids. You also get new entries sneaking in from every side. People start raving about their family-friendly travels and you slowly get sucked into the Highly Recommended vortex. You start poring over maps, flicking through tomes of lime-green tea fields in the south, toothpick temples clinging to cliff faces in the north, seasides from the 1950s in the east, and dust-laden markets reeking of sandalwood in the west. China is full to bursting with so many contrasts, so much beauty—how can one ever decide what to see in the space of a few short years, especially when one has kiddliwinks to consider?

  So, now that we’ve seen a bit of this enormous land, we’re returning, interestingly, to our original list. And, frankly, the thought of leaving China without seeing these original list entries is panicking me a little. We are turning our minds fervently to the retro coast east of Beijing—namely a weekend of sailing with the Beijing Sailing Centre. I’ll be pulling memories out of a 30-year-old skill-bank to effect this long-forgotten sporting activity so keep your fingers crossed they don’t find a sunburned family of four drifting up on North Korean shores two weeks later.

  The three gorges cruise was always on shaky ground thanks to a spate of mama huhu (so-so) reports, but, like the pandas, we’re wondering if not seeing this will be the mistake of a lifetime (I have romantic notions of my children telling their grandchildren about the day they held a now-extinct—God forbid—giant panda, and sailed the Yangtze before it swallowed half of China’s ancient past).

  Xi’an is a definite weekend trip (once summer subsides)—so easy to do from Beijing. And, let’s face it, how would it really be possible to leave China without eyeballing the real warriors (as opposed to the supposed real warriors shacked up in miniature at Ya Show market)?

  Chengdu. A bit harder to talk about. For a while there, we were so overloaded with Olympic mascot Jingjing and other panda-mania, we were kind of avoiding bothering the black and white fuzzballs altogether. Then, just as we decided it was time to make a move and go to Chengdu, then on to the landscape marvels of Jiuzhaigou, the earth decided to tremble and cause terrible tragedy in that God-forsaken place. Now, not only do we feel sick over the calamity that’s shaken Sichuan, we also feel an ache that travel may be restricted there for a long time to come.

  Yunnan—that’s still on the cards. My husband has been lucky enough to see loads more of China than us three stuck-at-home-bodies, and this has been one of his favourite places. Kunming, Dali, Lijiang, Tiger Leaping Gorge, the Tibetan highlands, Shi Lin (Stone Forest), the ethnic minorities—what’s not worth seeing in Yunnan?

  So, we’re plotting. We’re trying to carve a trip into our rock-solidly busy Beijing life. By hook or by crook, I’m heavily invested in this before the call of Australia starts echoing across the Pacific Ocean and into the China Sea. Oh, and add to that original Must-See List some new desires to see Chongqing, Shaolin, Longmen Grottoes, Datong, Suzhou, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Macau and Guizhou.

  Hmm. I hope I’m not being too ambitious.

  The Kids’ Fashion Snob

  What is it with Beijing’s fashion choices for kids?

  Oh, the bedazzlement. How overcome I was when I first saw the kids’ clothing available in China. The sequins, the lace, the ruffles and frills. The neon, the mesh, the English-language slogans in chronic need of a sober proofreader. And let’s not forget the collection of pilfered Disney characters, Bobdog and Hello Kitty emblazoned on pant legs from here to Middle Kingdom Come. Oh, the devastation. I knew kids’ clothes were cheap here and sadly, I soon found out why.

  You see, I absolutely adore kids’ clothing; always have. And like many things in life, the more beautiful, the higher the price tag. When we first came to Beijing, my kids wore expensive designer duds. I was w
earing ten-year-old jeans and owned two pairs of shoes but my kids looked like fashion models. Their designer t-shirts alone fetched a price that would have any tai tai feigning a faint at Ya Show.

  Any sane person knows it’s quite ridiculous what real designer clothing costs, yet I happily went without so I could gaze upon my kids in their gorgeous photo-shoot ensembles. Yes, I adored the white clouds of French linen, the trendy patterns, the retro designs. I was, indeed, a kids’ clothing aficionado, a wannabe clothing designer for little ones.

  Alas, when you go to live in a different country, over time your kids tend to grow and their expensive designer duds become tighter and smaller, and the reality of having to hit the real Beijing clothing world gets closer and closer, and eventually you just have to succumb.

  Maybe I succumbed because Beijing taught me how utterly blindsided we are by clothing prices in the West. Maybe it was actual reallife emergencies like when my daughter had no shoes that fit and her legs stuck out of her pants like Huck Finn. But I did it—I began trawling the markets, the neighbourhood stores, the department stores and slowly, very slowly, among the Garfield tutus, I found some finds.

  Happily, things have improved even more in three years, with a spate of gorgeous kids’ shops opening in the past twelve months alone, all offering adorable clothing. Nonetheless, I have to admit a part of me has grown somewhat fond of the range of kitsch Chinese kids’ clothes. Yes, Ella owns a pair of Betty Boop tracksuit pants and yes, Riley has a few pairs of polyester Chinese pyjamas.