Seven days in Beijing and we feel our brain fog finally lift. Our spines stiffen, and the moisture returns to our eyes. Our bodies accept that we have switched sides of the planet. I give my past self, the one that wrote me my much-needed note, a mental high five. I made it through Beijing. Onward.
It’s the start of the second week of our journey, and it already feels like we’ve been gone for months. We fly to Xi’an, seven hundred miles southwest of Beijing, the country’s ancient capital, and check in to a guesthouse near friends through Kyle’s work, Americans who moved from Portland several months ago. This new apartment feels like a palace compared to our Beijing studio, with three bedrooms and a separate kitchen, and there is grass outside the building where the kids can play with other children both native and foreign. They head downstairs while Kyle and I put sheets on the mattresses; then he scrambles eggs in the kitchen, the air wafting a familiar smell of home. I smile and sigh in relief at this smattering of homeyness, then head outside to watch the kids.
The blacktop and patches of grass where the children play are surrounded by identical concrete apartment buildings, a village square in this city of five million people. I join a towheaded mother who is watching the game of tag and introduce myself. Her name is Ashley, she hails from North Carolina, she has four boys, and she reads my blog. They have lived in China for several years now, for her husband’s work, and it is a thrill for them when they meet other English speakers. Her boys excitedly shout game rules in both English and Mandarin, gather our kids and their neighbors like mother hens. The children play until dinnertime; Ashley and I swap stories about expatriate parenting and homeschooling and good green bean recipes, and we could be anywhere in the world having this experience, but we are in the ancient city of Xi’an in central China.
We will take the bus in this city, mostly, and our friends explain which bus number goes which direction. On the day we visit the Muslim Quarter in the city center, we board a sweaty bus and show the driver our destination written in Mandarin script. Curious eyes bore through our bodies and faces, shamelessly scrutinize our hair, the shape of our hips, our children wearing only shirts and shorts because it is still hot even though it is technically autumn. An old woman stands next to me and yells at me in Mandarin, pointing to the kids’ bare legs and shaking her head. She chastises me the entire ride downtown, pointing her finger at my face. The bus driver pulls over to a stop and tells us to get off the bus; we have arrived at our destination. We instead walk five more blocks, passing three more bus stops before entering the archaic city wall that marks the entrance to the quarter.
This is the original city center, perhaps the center of the entire world at the height of the Silk Road. It is here where the trade routes began, where merchants vagabonded westward, through Persia and Jerusalem, possibly passing a living, breathing Jesus on their way to Constantinople and Venice. Xi’an was once the most vibrant cosmopolitan city in the East, and now it is home to one of the world’s oldest mosques. It is also the ideal place to buy art, which is my souvenir of choice, both for future use and because it packs easily in a tube strapped to my pack.
We walk through the covered bazaar, pass booths of wooden frogs, jade necklaces, and political posters of Mao, and stop at a table where a man is selling his oil paintings for a few dollars each. I buy three, scenes of children playing in the snow in front of village pagodas, and roll them into our plastic architect’s tube. We walk by a stall where a woman is selling scrolls, tall and thin cuts of silk papered with designs of flowers and trees, and Tate asks for one for her room. For the sake of our bags and budget, we have told the kids they may have one souvenir per continent.
“Are you sure you want this to be your souvenir for Asia?” I ask her.
“Can she write my name on it in Chinese?” Tate asks.
We ask the woman in slow English, and the woman smiles and nods, asks, “What is your name?”
“Tatum,” she replies.
“I am sorry . . . I do not understand,” the woman says. (We have inadvertently saddled our daughter with a name that confuses more people than we suspected, something I swore I’d never do due to my own personal experience.)
“Tatum,” my daughter says again, slowly. “T-A-T-U-M.”
The woman pauses, repeats the letters, picks up her pencil, and scribbles on the side of her newspaper. “What do you think?” she asks. “The letters sound similar to your name. You say it Te tai mu.”
“Does that mean anything?” I ask.
She thinks for a moment. “In a way, it means ‘Caregiver of peace.’”
“I like that,” Tate says.
In Old English, Tatum means “Cheerful bringer of joy.”
The woman dips a brush in her inky black pot and paints three Chinese characters in the upper right corner of a painting of cherry blossoms. She blows it dry, rolls up the scroll, seals it in a purple square tube, and asks for a photo with the blonde-haired recipient. Tate smiles as the shutter actuates.
We walk away holding hands, me and my cheerful bringer of joy, a caregiver of peace.
That evening, we meet Ashley and her boys at a park for an afternoon playdate and let the kids run back and forth on bridges that pass over a massive pond full of koi fish. From the other side of the pond, I see locals stop to photograph our children. Sometimes they will pose next to them, as though we are family friends, and sometimes they ask first. Most of the time, they pull out their phones and steal photos paparazzi-style, cooing over hair and eyes. Our children are objects of beauty, born with blond heads for strangers to freely touch.
We have dealt with this for two weeks, and will still have one more week before we leave China, but Ashley lives here; this is her local park, nearby is her local supermarket, and these are the people among whom her family lives. I ask her, “How do you deal with this without going insane?” My mother-hen instinct is full throttle as I watch a third group of strangers pose with my kids.
“It is incredibly hard,” she says, “easily the hardest thing about living in China. My kids have learned to say, ‘One photo? One quai’ in Mandarin.” (Quai is the equivalent of “buck” in American English.) “At least they earn some decent money that way.”
A Communist worldview means no concept of the individual, in which your rights end where my body begins. Groupthink is the modus operandi; the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. On our flight from Xi’an to Guilin, in southeast China, Tate and I sit next to a woman whose eyes light up with eagerness as we take our seats. Over the two-hour flight, she asks us about our travel plans, what Tate is reading on her Kindle and may she read with her, too, where we are staying next, and would we like to meet for dinner at a restaurant sometime soon. I’m an introvert and have to take deep, managed breaths to make it to the flight’s finale with a courtesy smile still on my face.
It is dark when we arrive in Yangshuo, a small town nestled in the peculiar karst mountains fifty miles from the Guilin airport and our final stop in the country. Our home for the week is a family room in an inn tucked into trees and the cadence of crickets. Yellow lights glow from the front door as our taxi pulls through the entrance, red lanterns sleepily twisting in the midnight breeze. The next morning, we open our curtains and are smacked with the side of a steep hill, one among hundreds and drawn by God the way a child draws mountains, an unsteady conglomeration of the letter u upside-down. They seem fake, a clichéd background in a motel room painting of Asia. The sky is not yellow-gray for the first time in weeks, and the pink horizon makes my eyes ache.
Unknown to us when we booked our transpacific flight, it is Golden Week in China, their national holiday that covers seven full days, during which everyone takes a week off of work to travel across the country to visit family. We take a tuk-tuk ride into town, where red flags with yellow stars flap in cadence on banners stretched across streets and booths sell plastic light-up trinkets and paper-thin sarongs. We pop into a market to find snacks and only recognize prepackaged chicken
feet, shrink-wrapped and glazed with an orange coating. The thump thump thump thump of a bass drum from a troubadour pelts my ears. I push my way into a stationery store, buy postcards, borrow a pen and scribble hello to some family and friends, then hand them back to the cashier, who promises to put them in the mail. I wonder if I have just thrown away ten dollars.
Outside the store, irrepressible floods of people halt all semblance of walkability, and the five of us hold hands. My overworked senses beg for mercy.
I think of Ashley in Xi’an empowering her kids, and it frees my mothering instincts to take over in fierce protection of my kids’ bodily ownership as they say no to the camera flashes. Reed forcibly poses with locals on holiday in their own family photo, but he shrugs his shoulders and says, “I guess it’s okay, Mom.”
In China, strangers unabashedly read over my shoulder on the bus when they see me with an English book. Twentysomethings pull my kids onto their laps on the metro. English speakers interject themselves into conversations between Kyle and me, give us their two cents about where we should go and what we should eat, ask why we are there.
We take a tuk-tuk back to the inn and stay there for our final few days in China. Kyle watercolors and I write; the kids work on their school and play foosball in the game room. They swim in the pool while I park poolside in the private backyard, and though there is a school field trip group staying here, as well as gatherings of extended family for holiday reunions, it trumps sharing my one square foot of bodily occupancy on Chinese streets.
Finn climbs trees and names one Steve, and after dinner one night, we stay in the inn’s restaurant and play Uno while Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton croon from the speakers about islands in the stream. Sail away with me to another world; and we rely on each other, ah ha. Kyle and I laugh, surprised at this song playing in the southeast China countryside.
Back in Beijing, an English-speaking local made chitchat with us at the diner downstairs from our apartment, where we suspect Tate got sick from the sesame rolls. Kyle asked him if he was a native of Beijing, and he replied, “No, I’m from the south. It’s a tiny village of only one million people.” I smiled and said, “I’m also from a village of one million people.” In North America, a million feels like too many people. In Asia, it is a village of neighbors and friends.
Starting this global trek in China serves well as our starting point on the opposite side of Western civilization, one of the world’s oldest cultures providing us with fresh context. When Captain Cook landed on the Australian continent, China had already existed for thirty-seven hundred years. When Gustave Eiffel erected his giant Tinkertoy in central Paris, the Chinese had already given to the rest of the world paper,1 umbrellas,2 earthquake detectors,3 and rockets.4
As in China, famous landmarks in other parts of the world will become the bookmarks in our travel log, the check-marked paragraphs between pages and pages of walks down nameless neighborhood streets and jet-lagged descriptions of cheap local noodles for dinner, where the bulk of our days are lived. All cultures teem with creativity, on display both via inconceivable monuments and in the flawless blend of two spices. I want to see the birthplace of all of it, the homes of humble geniuses who make our lives better, more interesting. I am grateful for our time in this country and its people who have stretched me emotionally, mentally, physically.
The best souvenir China bestows on me is on our last day in the country, in the late evening in the Yangshuo inn’s backyard. I am floating in the pool with six-year-old Reed during a starlit swim. Timid in the water for years and reticent to swim without a life jacket, he quietly, uneventfully lets go of the edge and swims out to the pool’s center, stars shimmering and karst hills shadowing in the rippled water. This is my child, who is labeled by many as developmentally different. He is fraught with sensory issues, and a frequent question mark hovers over him as we navigate parenting waters. He has already tried mango ice cream in Beijing, and now, he is swimming.
“Hey, buddy—do you realize what you’re doing?”
“Yeah,” he says between exerted breaths. “Yes. I guess I can swim now.” And so he can.
3
HONG KONG
As a Westerner, I tend to lump Asian ethnicities together as one mass of people. Of course, they are vastly dissimilar from one another, like peoples in all pockets of the world, and this is the great downfall of the human race: we tend to homogenize those who differ from us (I hear many Easterners think all Americans look the same). Asia is a behemoth continent, and an hour-long puddle jump of a flight within its geographic boundaries whisks us to wildly different social mores. For the first time since departing the United States, there are seat belts in the Londonesque taxi that takes us to our home for the weekend. We are on the twenty-fourth floor of a high-rise, and still more architecture towers above us. Welcome to Hong Kong, the most vertical city in the world.
We are graced with a light show from our living room windows, incandescent squares blinking and neon stripes dancing, a wall of man-made structure. There is no room for sky and stars.
I tuck the children into their new beds and Kyle ducks out into the rain and into a supermarket; he returns with jars of peanut butter and jam, a loaf of bread, some apples, a bag of oatmeal, and a small packet of brown sugar. We will only be here a few days and don’t want to overload on groceries, but Hong Kong is expensive, and we cannot afford to eat out every meal. The imports in the plastic bag look foreign and global. Western.
We wake to the sound of city, of industry. Despite its proximity, our transition from Chinese village to Hong Kong—the financial leader of Asia—is jolting. Asian script on storefront signs outside looks similar, but it clashes with the praxis of buying and selling inside. I have walked on Communist sidewalks for only a month, but my capitalist tendencies are sore from lack of use. The commercialism of Hong Kong is a workout. It is a mash-up of old-world British Empire and modern Asian sensibility, and it is one more city to add to the list of cities where I am three years behind sartorially.
We stroll through Admiralty and SoHo and Mong Kok districts, and I am consistently seconds late with my camera as I am witness to a coruscating kaleidoscope of color and fabric combinations. I momentarily abandon my family to chase after an Adonis of a man; I want to document his royal blue Italian suit. Like many cosmopolitan men, he is most likely popping by the bank before his dentist appointment and simply tossed something on before leaving his flat this morning. He sports an oxford shirt and tie, pants cut three inches from the top of his ankles, and leather shoes without socks. In the American suburbs he would look entirely out of place. Here, on the cobbled streets of Hong Kong, he looks just right, quintessentially debonair. From these mean Hong Kong streets I also learn that a man can pull off a button-down gingham shirt, salmon-colored bow tie, mid-thigh-cut khaki shorts, and flip-flops.
Hong Kong is completely cool, straddling the Western world and its preeminence as the wealthiest spot in Asia. She fully embraces who she is. She is the older cousin in town for holidays, whom you awkwardly admire from across the family table. She is quirky; she is fun; she is serious; she is not to be taken lightly. She is into art.
We are here during a large-scale protest against its Chinese-run government, and this makes international news; but the mobs are calm and confident. We walk through protesting crowds, and locals smile, play cards on the curbside, chat in assorted languages with beer and coffee in hand. Several young people knit. It is the hippest protest I’ve witnessed. Tate asks me if people are waiting for a parade to start. The protests give me brief maternal pause, but the friendly nature of the situation soon evaporates any concern. Our kids barely notice the crowds with a political bone to pick after a month in congested China.
The biggest mistake we make in Hong Kong is not staying long enough, but this is the consequence of planning our trip’s first leg in advance, before leaving home. Some travel decisions must be made in faith with the hope that wisdom we collect in Asian street markets will
help us make right our early wrongs. This is mishap number one. If in doubt, always spend more time in Hong Kong.
We eat peanut butter sandwiches and cheap noodles for lunch, oatmeal for breakfast, and apples from our packs when we are peckish. We ride a roller coaster on the edge of a cliff that graces us with a two-second view of the ocean, and we watch a panda named Ying Ying munch on bamboo and scratch her back on a tree. We window-shop; we replace the reeking watch Tate vomited on in Beijing. I stop trying to take photos of the fashion-forward scenery and instead I simply enjoy the view: cotton-candy hair, iridescent pants, men in granny sweaters, power suits with short-shorts. We are overwhelmed at all we do not see, cannot do. Then we return to the airport and board another two-hour flight. Onward to Southeast Asia.
4
THAILAND
Your first impression of Thailand depends upon whom you ask. There are beaches; there are brothels; there are noodles; there are durian, a round, spiky fruit that smells like a noxious gym sock. There are rain forests full of banana trees and elephants. Bald monks hug smartphones and Starbucks cups, varying shades of orange fabric draped over their skinny bodies. An aging American man who stayed after the Vietnam War runs a bar with billiard tables for the tourists; he holds fast to his tight-skinned wife, a woman years his junior. A family of six rides a motorcycle; five smoosh together, back to chest, and the youngest rides in a plastic bucket, his mother holding the bucket to the side of the motorcycle by the handle. There are dentists and doctors with degrees from Europe and North America who choose to practice their vocation here. There are almost one hundred English-speaking private schools in the country for expatriate children.
And this temporary home comes with some familiarity.
In 2007 we stayed in the northern city of Chiang Mai for two months. We lived in Turkey at the time, and after I was diagnosed with severe depression, it was suggested that we visit this medium-sized city tucked into the mountains and misty forests of Southeast Asia as therapy. The perplexingly sizable expat population includes therapists and psychiatrists who speak English and can prescribe low-cost antidepressants with aplomb. It is cheaper to fly across five time zones and rent a house for two months than to travel back to the States and deal with health insurance, wait times, and medical red tape.
At Home in the World Page 4
