We grabbed lunch in the Beijing airport on that trip, and I remember the hotel’s breakfast the following morning: fish and rice, and an eggplant-colored hard-boiled egg called a century egg. Ask me what I am least in the mood to eat when I wake up in the throes of jet lag, and I will tell you fish, rice, and a discolored, fermented, weeks-old egg.
We walked up the Great Wall with our friends, dripping with sweat from the humidity, and arrived at the top at closing time, which meant we stole only a few minutes to look around, then rushed back down to our taxi. The vendors taunted us with their Great Wall–emblazoned T-shirts and paperweights, and we joked that if the original Huns somehow made it over the wall today, they’d never pass the elderly women shoving copyright-violating guidebooks in their hands.
Beyond this, I don’t remember much of my first taste of Beijing. Clearer in my mind is our trek outward, into the wild west of China on the other side. There, in Ürümqi and Kashgar and the Gobi Desert, near the border of Tajikistan and Afghanistan, China’s land-scape becomes more like its Central Asian neighbors’. It is here that I had my first and last sip of fermented horse milk tea. This is where I witnessed the extreme geography of Asia: the tallest mountains in the world lying neighbor to one of its biggest deserts. And it is here that I first slept in a yurt.
Our friends decided it would be a cultural experience to spend the night with a traditional Kazakh family in the Tian Shan mountains of western China. We chartered a boat across the Tianchi lake, hiked several miles over moss-encrusted stones, and met our host family for the evening. She was middle-aged with teenage sons, a workhorse of a woman who silently eyed us while we partook of her culinary know-how. She slept that night with her boys in a makeshift shelter nearby while we slept in their dry yurt. The rain began at dusk and didn’t relent till the middle of the night. The heavens poured out so much water that nothing left in my pack could be classically defined as dry.
The yurt was dark but comfortable, and every rug, every bit of the tapestried walls, every teacup and sack of grain was a mystery to me. It resembled a movie set starring an unshaven Brad Pitt wandering the Himalayas. The woodburning stove in the middle kept us toasty through the night, but I shivered with exhaustion as I slept.
The next morning, after tea and breakfast, Kyle strapped on his backpack and trekked up the mountain for a solo walk, searching for quiet apart from the crowd. From my vantage point, mountain goats peeked out from boulders, the green grass shimmered with dew, and below, out and beyond, lay a mirrored-gray lake tucked into the nooks and crannies of low-lying clouds. At the base of the mountain, I sat on a wet log, ignored the group chatter around me, and clicked a mental snapshot, long and slow: this world is huge; it is majestic; it is worth exploring just for the sake of knowing it. Above me, somewhere, wandered a man who felt the same way and who also thought it a good idea to marry me. As I looked up the mountain, I considered it—maybe we’d have kids, and we’d unearth the hidden paths and mysteries of this grand world together.
Robert, our first guesthouse host of the year, picks the five of us up at the airport and drives through Beijing traffic to our apartment, a concrete building planted at the end of a gray alley canopied by a thousand electric wires. This is not his real name, of course, but he gives an English name to his Western guests to make his life easier. The lobby is sparse, and the minuscule elevators lead us to the fifth floor, where ten bikes perch against the scratched, unpainted concrete walls, lined up like delivery boys waiting for their next errand. The apartment door closest to the elevator is wide open, and its innards have been turned into a call center, six dark heads bobbling above makeshift cubicles from which the clattering of keyboards can be heard. The matted office carpet down the hallway is so stained I’m not sure where to step.
Robert unlocks a door. “Here we are.”
I know generally how our place will look because of the Internet listing, but it is still disorienting to see it in person. There are two double beds, a couch with an extra blanket, a bathroom, a kitchenette, a washer, and a clothes dryer all sandwiched in a room the size of my Oregon kitchen. Robert tells us he is a native of Beijing and is happy to give us ideas of what to do and see during our week there. Our only two official goals in Beijing are to show the kids the Great Wall and to begin the process of jet lag recovery, and we know the latter is best accomplished with sunshine and fresh air.
He scribbles a list of suggestions in Kyle’s notebook, most of which we already know: the Temple of Heaven, Tiananmen Square, a kung fu show. On the left he writes them in English; in the middle he writes in pinyin Chinese, a bastardized Mandarin employing the Roman alphabet, which helps native English speakers pronounce the language. On the right, he writes rapid-fire in Chinese characters, which we can show taxi drivers.
“Is there a place to buy food nearby?” I ask. There is, he says, and he draws a map on another journal page that points the way to a mall with a food court and supermarket down the road. He recommends the twenty-four-hour diner on the ground floor of our apartment building, tells us to try their sesame rolls. Then the only person we know in Beijing bids us well and leaves.
For the first time since we left my parents’ house in Austin two days earlier for breakfast tacos before our flight, the five of us are on our own. I feel like a squirrelly teenager away at college for the first time: apparently, I am a grown-up in charge here.
Hunger outweighs any desire to shower away the airplane funk and collapse into bed. So we leave our backpacks piled on the couch and follow Robert’s map out the building, turn right, and begin our week-long investigation of our neighborhood nestled in Beijing proper. This is a business district, gray office buildings sandwiched together and studded with shops on their first floors; there is a wide concrete pavilion along the road that serves as the evening hangout spot and children’s playground. A yellow-gray haze of smog rests on the tops of buildings, pauses to catch its breath or ours, thick and lifeless. Most of the small shops are now closed for the evening, but we find the mall with the food court. We choose a restaurant where the waitstaff appears friendly enough, and we order with our fingers from the menu. We slurp eye-wateringly spicy soup and bowls of perfectly round white rice scoops. The kids whisper requests for cups of water, and Kyle signals for someone from the staring throng of waitresses. “Shui?” he asks with a smile. The woman nods, hurries to the kitchen, then returns with a tray of piping hot water in handleless teacups. We forgot to add the ping bing to the shui to indicate cold and bottled. Steaming hot water—this the default, and we will forget it routinely for the next three weeks.
We are in China.
Novelist Anthony Doerr says that jet lag is “a dryness in the eyes, a loose wire in the spine.” Two days ago we sat in Austin traffic on the way to the airport. Now we are navigating crowded, pallid Beijing streets, loose-wired spines, death grips on the boys’ hands, and wondering aloud to no one in particular if street-stall grapes are safe to eat. I take melatonin capsules and strap on my eye mask at night, force my body to sleep after first forcing it to stay awake four hours longer than it wants. At three in the morning, I hear a sound in the corner of quiet rustling and the rapid shifting of paper scraps, like a mouse. I pull up my eye mask, and Finn is rummaging through the near-empty refrigerator, looking for an afternoon snack. I call him back to his pallet on the floor, where he prefers to sleep tonight instead of the couch. He is soon talking in his sleep: “Wait wait!”
Jet lag is punishment to a body already in culture shock, forcing you to sacrifice desire for the necessary: you may want to find solace from reading a novel in bed, but you’ll regret that decision later at three in the afternoon, when your body taunts your poor choice with shaky legs and heavy eyelids while standing on a crowded metro, strangers’ armpits too near your nose. The earliest European explorers endured months on a ship with seasickness and a vitamin C deficiency in order to touch Asian soil. Jet lag is our modern-day scurvy.
I question our sanity by our t
hird day here. I’m enamored of the earth’s diversity of climates and cultures, and I want a drink of all of it. But China is a struggle for me, with its Communist worldview a battering ram against my overzealous democratic autonomy. I knew this about China before we landed here, so a few weeks before we left I journaled a note to my future self, as a hammer to break the glass in case of an emergency (the emergency being, of course, questioning our sanity and considering a trip to a coffee shop to grab some Wi-Fi and book a return flight home):
You’re in China, which is hard. But you can do hard things. You won’t be here long. This month is the foundation for the year. Lean in to the struggles; give thanks for the easy times. Hard doesn’t mean wrong. You’re on the right path.
I need this note. Instead of an emergency hammer, it is a life preserver. It keeps me away from the coffee shop’s Wi-Fi, and tonight we find Italian food for dinner instead. The kids watch cartoons on the restaurant’s television, and Kyle and I have a miniature date. I’m grateful for the wisdom of my past self.
We walk back to our apartment, bellies full, and sleeping four-year-old Finn loses a flip-flop in the Beijing night as Kyle carries him in his arms. He’s down to three shoes for the year until we buy him another pair. That did not take long.
We will only be in the capital city for a week, only to acclimate to the time change, to adjust to this side of the planet. It feels heavier here, the majority of the world’s population tilting the earth’s axis to the east, and I can feel the wobble in our collective rotation.
Today, in the supermarket produce section, abundant piles of pink dragon fruit sit in baskets next to apples and red lettuce. In the afternoon, schoolchildren in blue skirts and red neckerchiefs run to the store nearest our little neighborhood and leave with cellophane-wrapped snacks and cotton candy–colored drinks. Blonde women in line at the supermarket speak Russian, as does the woman in a power suit next to me on the metro. Several miles away, officials are planning their bid for another Olympic Games.
“Mom, whenever I blow my nose, it’s all black,” Reed remarks.
“My eyes itch here,” says Tate. We’re leaving a park for the evening and heading back to the apartment, and the gray sky is only slightly yellower than the concrete skyline.
The five of us are eager to leave the city, if only for the day. We need a literal breather.
There is a large Chinese edifice—complete with an urban leg-end about visibility from space—so well-known that it’s used as the national landmark for the entire country. Tourist trap it is, but it’s a solid excuse to escape the sallow city pollution, with its dull, stinging scent of metal and exhaust, and to engage with trees. Before we left for China, we asked the kids what they most wanted to see in our first week. All three independently said the Great Wall. Midway through our week, we hire a van and driver for the day, per Robert’s suggestion, and watch as the window’s view morphs from high-rises and hordes of businessmen in gray suits to dirt and grass. While the driver weaves through city traffic and then suburban villages, we listen to an audiobook about the wall, about Qin Shi Huangdi, the emperor who commissioned the construction, and about Mongols and ancient dynastic leaders with god complexes and paranoia. Our driver does not speak English, and he smiles and nods at us through the rearview mirror.
The Great Wall is an intimidating barrier of stone and fortitude, a staggering example of what humankind (and a steady dose of slave labor) can accomplish without modern technology. It is our springboard into history, how ruthless dictatorship and a reasonable fear of barbaric invasion leads to an impressive architectural marvel of stone and size. We climb up and down stairs that roll with the hills; it’s a stroll down a cobblestone sidewalk twenty-five feet above ground, and I hold the backs of shirts as my children lean out watch holes to check our height. We take First Day of School photos, even though it’s not technically the first day of school. Our blonde children pose for other photos with Asian tourists. We then queue for a toboggan ride down the hill, the most enjoyable method of egress for children leaving the wall and returning to the parking lot. The man governing the slide warns the Westerners in line, “No yeeeehaaaaaw! Be quiet. No America here.”
Finn sits in front of me on a plastic toboggan with wheels and a brake handle, and we glide away from the line of tourists in what could be a pleasure ride on a winding aluminum path through the forest, were it not for the timid woman on the slide in front of us, hand brake pulled and eking us down the hill at such a snail’s pace that even Finn is impatient. Tate, our oldest and in the sled behind us, escalates her annoyance at me with every careening, inevitable crash into the back of ours.
The Great Wall is a masterpiece, and the kids sketch it in their drawing books as it fades in the van’s rearview mirror. Our driver takes us to a farm-to-table restaurant in a nearby village. There, I sample pumpkin ice cream and the kids eat spaghetti. It’s surprisingly delicious. Beijing’s countryside is a welcome respite to city life, an exhale to a metropolis pace and population. I call our first field trip a success.
Jet lag is harder to shake than we anticipated. The next day I share a phone conversation with a friend in America while standing on our apartment balcony overlooking a behemoth piazza with weeds sprouting through cracks, strangers’ underwear drying outside the surrounding windows. Inside, the kids build a fort out of blankets and pillows on one of the beds. We wash our first load of laundry for the year and toss in the guesthouse’s two towels. Kyle stirs oatmeal on the hot plate while the kids wrestle in the fort.
Tate joins me on the balcony and says, “China isn’t what I thought it’d be.”
“What did you imagine?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she admits. “Maybe more red and dragons.”
China is one of the countries she was most excited to visit, so I wonder what’s playing in her head. Does this year already smell like disappointment to her? Will there be an unavoidable sullying of childhood imagination, where dragons fly Asia’s skies and lions dance with zebras instead of eat them on African savannas? I secretly love that she’s disappointed, because it means our nine-year-old’s childlike spirit is still intact.
We force ourselves to stay awake with an evening trip on the metro to Wangfujing snack street. The asphalt shimmers, reflections from lantern lights swinging above collecting in puddles from the spray of booth operators on either side of alleys, booth operators who pour out buckets of ice melt that keep their edible creatures fresh. These narrow alleys house family-run booths of anything imaginable on a stick: starfish, seahorses, turtles burned to a crisp, impaled scorpions still wriggling for life. These are the original food trucks. Vendors shout their wares, hoping to entice us with charred lizard and raw spiders. Reed panics, begs us not to make him try them. We buy corn on the cob.
At an alley’s dead end, a woman painted with a white face, pink eyes, and black villain eyebrows trills Peking-style opera into a distorted microphone on a small stage. Her peacock-like hat sprouts blue and gold triangles; she wears a polychromatic silk robe and flutters a yellow fan besotted with red roses. It is for the tourists, and we listen briefly until we end up with headaches from her shrill voice.
The kids do not normally care for McDonald’s, but they are hungry for the familiar and beg for hamburgers. We sit at our second-floor booth, nibbling fries and watching out the window as throngs of bodies inch through Wangfujing—teenagers carrying shopping bags emblazoned with European brands, tourists taking photos of St. Joseph’s Church, planted by Jesuit missionaries in 1655. The McDonald’s speakers play loud American pop. Reed wonders, out of curiosity, if there are any Panda Expresses nearby.
Tonight I take more melatonin and lie awake, restless on our mattress that burrows deep into my shoulder blades and hips. I pull back a sheet corner and my suspicions are confirmed: it is a slab of plywood covered in quilt batting. On the floor next to me, Finn mumbles something about hiccups, eyes twitching beneath his eyelids. I hear the showerhead drip, drip, dripping fro
m the bathroom.
The next few days wane in the September breeze, warm gusts that blow out the last of summer humidity and foreshadow autumn. We visit the Temple of Heaven, take in a kung fu show, and find American-style pancakes at a trendy café, where the kids begin their schoolwork for the year with spiral notebooks and math problems. We take the metro to Tiananmen Square and watch children fly kites with their grandparents, then bottleneck in line with the other tourists across the street to squeeze through the entrance to the Forbidden City. Tate moans and holds her stomach, asks to leave, swears she will be sick. Concrete blares light from the sun with no shadow for respite; throngs of pushing bodies are everywhere. We swim upstream through the crowd, pass the gauntlet of locals selling folded fans and windup toys on upturned cardboard boxes outside. There is no trash can, and I have forgotten to add a plastic bag to my day pack, a travel habit I cultivated when we lived in Turkey and I was pregnant. Ten feet from us, in the dirt next to the sidewalk, a little boy defecates on a piece of cardboard held by his grandmother.
Still no shade, still people pushing forward and backward.
We hold hands, the five of us, and speed walk to the metro station. Tate keeps quiet, seals her lips shut as sweat bubbles on her forehead. We enter the train, hold on to the rails, and she vomits violently on the floor as the doors close. A sympathetic woman hands me tissues to mop up the mess, and Tate holds out her offending damp shirt from touching her skin, says cheerfully she feels better already. I apologize in English to the people around us. Our metro stop arrives, and we exit the train, wind through our neighborhood sidewalks full of men and women in power suits, then up to our apartment.
The smells of the city, the train, Tate’s retching have attached to us. We run our second load of laundry.
At Home in the World Page 3
