Big in China

by Alan Paul

  About a month after we arrived, the same sixty-foot container that had been filled up on our little dead-end street in Maplewood pulled up in front of our Riviera house to be unloaded by an army of Chinese workers. It was humiliating to watch these guys lug in box after box labeled “toys.”

  The kids immediately grabbed their bikes and took off. Jacob zipped around a little too fast, while Eli plodded along a little too slowly on his training wheels. When guards ran down from their post to push him out of a stall three times on one ride, Eli looked at me with a sweet smile and said, “Good thing they have guards in China.”

  I was unable to liberate Eli myself because Anna was teetering behind me on a rickety Chinese bike seat that we would have scoffed at in Maplewood. She sat back there waving at anyone who looked her way. Many of the Chinese people we passed—within the compound, mostly the guards and sweet-natured lady street sweepers—looked at curly, blond-haired Anna in awe, smiling as if they had seen a magical apparition.

  Chapter 4

  Beautiful Sorta

  I quickly saw the advantages of living in Expat Land. It was a kids’ nirvana, with friends around every corner, excellent playgrounds, and far more freedom for my children to explore on their own than they had in New Jersey. Becky and I also found an easy comfort zone, with an indispensable support network of interesting, international friends helping guide one another through expat life.

  It was like living in a college dorm, but with kids and money. Everyone was in the same situation, thousands of miles away from our extended families and old friends. Close friendships developed quickly, as we became one another’s families, celebrating milestones, sharing holidays, and watching one another’s children.

  Dulwich College of Beijing had students from more than forty countries, all of which were represented in the compounds. It was common to see white-haired Swedish kids running the streets side by side with the children of the South African military attaché or the ambassador from Equatorial Guinea, both of whom were our neighbors. It was diversity of a very peculiar kind, with a sameness of status that overwhelmed the cultural differences.

  Young, single expats and older empty nesters tended to live downtown, so the compounds were filled with young families at the same stage of life. Most of us were around forty with young children, and everyone was successful enough at what they did to be sent to China. Because most people in Riviera were on an expat package, there was an overriding sense of equality. We all lived the same fake rich lifestyle, with daily domestic help, drivers, and kids in private schools.

  In the United States, investment bankers, teachers, military officers, journalists, diplomats, economists, analysts, oil company executives, geologists, government civil servants, private equity investors, and GE salesmen would have lived in vastly different homes and towns. In Beijing, we all lived side by side, in the same houses, drove the same cars, and had kids attending the same schools. Our circle of friends quickly became more diverse in broader ways as well; we had never hung out with so many people who attended church every Sunday or who had a wide range of political views. None of these things mattered.

  We all met up every Saturday morning on the soccer pitch as our kids played in the Sports Beijing program, which became an important social outlet, helping all of us feel more rooted. The kids bonded with schoolmates and neighbors, while coaching Jacob and Eli’s teams made my presence in Beijing matter to more than my family. I was paired with Scott Kronick, a native of Flint, Michigan, who had been in Beijing for fifteen years and who became one of my best friends.

  Together, we plotted to keep up with the soccer-mad Europeans and to communicate with our team, which always included at least one player who spoke little or no English. I quickly wore out my German, French, and Korean vocabularies, limited to about four words each.

  While I had fun wrestling with all this, Becky watched Anna run around the track and hung out with other parents in a thriving social scene. We cemented friendships that would last throughout our stay. With so few attachments and responsibilities, everyone was open to meeting new people. One day Becky chatted with the American mother of one of my players, a schoolmate of Jacob’s. They were also China freshmen, newly arrived from a posting in Switzerland, and by the time the game ended, we had dinner plans. By the end of the night, we had terrific new friends. Nothing ever happened that spontaneously in New Jersey, where plans always seemed to be scheduled a month in advance.

  For Becky, Beijing proved to be an ideal place to work hard and play hard. It was a place where you could text a friend to see if you could get together at the last moment. She was fond of quoting our friend Jim McGregor, a former Wall Street Journal bureau chief who welcomed us to Beijing with these words: “This is a place where adults can still have fun.” We were all freed from things that took so much time back home: yard work, home maintenance, cooking, cleaning, harried commutes. Though she worked long hours, Becky suddenly had time to really get to know people—time she didn’t have in New Jersey, where balancing family life, a demanding job, and an hour-long commute was a full-time juggling act that left little room for anything else.

  Having a staff was wonderful—primarily because of all the time it freed up—but it also took some getting used to. I was suddenly an employer running a small shop, overseeing two and a half employees—a cook and a house ayi we inherited from Rebecca’s predecessor and a third ayi we hired primarily to take care of Anna.

  One day I walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water and the whole staff was there. Mr. Li, the cook, was sitting at the table, groceries by his side, reading glasses perched on the end of his nose, checking his expenses. Yu Ying Ayi was standing at an ironing board folding laundry. Ding Ayi was spooning yogurt into Anna’s mouth.

  There were all kinds of bizarre dynamics between the three of them that I vaguely knew about but willfully ignored. One ayi was a Beijing native who had graduated from high school, and she could apparently be brutal to the other, a rural, illiterate peasant whom the other Chinese staff considered lazy. They remained pleasant to one another in front of us, but Kathy Chen knew the real scoop and said that we were making a mistake by not making clearly delineated job descriptions.

  She was probably right, but I couldn’t bring myself to get too involved, because overseeing a domestic staff felt weird, stilted, and uncomfortable. People in the United States thought that the Chinese were gearing up to bury us, but we were living like nineteenth-century British tea plantation overseers in India.

  To compensate for our mixed feelings, we grossly overpaid everyone, making us either very kind employers or total patsies. We had paid everyone what they asked for: 25–50 percent more than the standard rate, which still added up to about half of what we paid a single nanny at home. I realized just how cushy the Monday–Friday nine-to-five jobs working for us were when I asked the nice young girl who worked at the nearby expat grocery store if she ever got a day off, since she was there every time I shopped. “Yes,” she replied with a smile. “Two days a month.”

  Some of our neighbors considered our household understaffed because we did not have help before 9:00 a.m., after 6:00 p.m., or on weekends. When Becky went to Taiwan for a couple of days, I struggled getting all three children to school each morning. I had to let Jacob ride off by himself and accept that Eli and Anna would be late. I got them up, dressed, fed, cleaned, and out the door, with lunches and completed homework in their backpacks by myself. To me, that was just basic parenting, but others thought I was crazy.

  I ran into a veteran expat on the playground leaving school and related my frenzied morning.

  “Why didn’t your ayis help?”

  “They don’t start this early.”

  “Well, change that or hire another ayi just for the morning.”

  “No, we’re not used to that. We don’t need another person buzzing around our house at seven a.m.”

  �
�Get over it.”

  We didn’t want to get over it, in part because those sometimes-difficult morning hours were also solid family time.

  There were dangers to compound life as well. You are removed and living in a bubble, which whole crews of expats never pierce, spending all their time being driven around with one another, rarely interacting with any Chinese person not on their payroll. I was determined not to let that happen to us.

  Every weekend, we tried to get the kids out of Expat Land, which extended to the international schools that the Chinese government banned their citizens from attending. The need to get into the real China more was reinforced on an early trip to Fundazzle and that legendary ball pit. Eli ran up to us perplexed. “Hey,” he said. “Everyone here is Chinese.”

  When we visited the Beijing Zoo, I anticipated the decrepit concrete cages and sad-looking animals, but I was surprised to discover that our three blue-eyed, light-haired children were prime attractions. People were staring at us, pointing, whispering, and smiling. Two-year-old Anna and her giant liquid blue eyes and tousled hair elicited the most reaction, but her brothers were also crowd pleasers. At the monkey house, three people touched Eli’s hand and face, which he surprisingly didn’t mind. Jacob recoiled when several people reached out to touch his impressive shock of curly blond hair.

  We bought ice cream and as we sat eating our cones, a whole family stood right in front of us, gawking. The father, a cigarette dangling out of his mouth, was joyously laughing and trying to talk to Anna. He approached me, asking something in loud, fast Chinese and wildly talking with his hands. I nodded my head, correctly guessing he was asking for permission to take a picture of my daughter.

  He shoved his four-year-old over to stand awkwardly next to Anna, took the picture, thanked us, and walked away grinning.

  Two ladies stepped forward and asked to take a picture, speaking English, again clicking away, then thanking us profusely. A large crowd now surrounded us in an ever-growing ring. We had our backs against a wrought-iron fence, as people pointed and took pictures. Eli laughed. Anna was sheepish but unfazed. Jacob was starting to freak out. “Let’s get out of here,” he whispered in my ear. We rose and walked away, smiling and waving.

  Moments later, an old, grizzled man in a Chinese army jacket looked my kids over, then turned to me and counted on his fingers, “Eee, Ahr, Sun” (1–2–3), before smiling wide, giving me a thumbs-up, and coming over to warmly shake my hand and pat me on the back.

  I tried to explain to the kids why we were such big attractions, telling them that we simply looked different, and explaining China’s one-child policy and how that made a three-child family a special sight. As soon as I said, “In China, people are only allowed to have one kid,” Eli’s eyes grew fearful; I understood that he was worried that we were going to have to get rid of him and Anna. “That’s only for Chinese people,” I quickly added.

  Clearly, we all had a lot to learn.

  We kept pushing out, sometimes even prompted by the kids. One day, Jacob came home from second grade perplexed.

  “Why haven’t we been to the Forbidden City or Tiananmen Square?” he asked. “They are two of the most visited, famous tourist sites in the world.”

  We headed for Tiananmen that weekend, drawing attention the moment we arrived. Rural residents were always particularly interested in our family, and Tiananmen, like the zoo, was filled with Chinese tourists. Whole tour groups clad in matching red baseball hats followed us, waving, smiling, counting up our three kids with glee and repeatedly snapping pictures of Anna. She was becoming a popular cell-phone wallpaper.

  Jacob was fascinated by massive statues made from potted flowers depicting various balls used in Olympic sports—ping-pong, tennis, volleyball, and soccer, with the Olympic “One World, One Dream” logo spelled out in giant letters, in both English and Chinese. I wanted to draw everyone’s attention to another Olympic marker. Across a wide boulevard, in front of one of the many monolithic government buildings that surround the square, was a clock counting down the days until the 8-8-08 Opening Ceremony. It read 1,046.

  “That,” I said to my family, pointing across the street, “is how many days we have left in China.”

  It seemed like an awfully big number.

  Chapter 5

  Say What?

  On one of my first days in Beijing, I listened to Kathy Chen and Mr. Dou engage in an animated conversation with dumbfounded admiration for any foreigner who could master Mandarin. I heard no words—just a series of guttural sounds. The experience left me shaken, simultaneously determined to learn Chinese and questioning whether I could ever do so. It felt like I had as much chance of learning how to communicate with dolphins.

  I decided to follow the lead of Theo Yardley, my neighbor, friend, and China guide who spoke the language brilliantly. I enrolled in twice-a-week, two-hour classes at her downtown language school, which was popular with journalists and embassy employees. I was paired with two French women. After struggling through two classes, I longed for a friend to share this crazy experience with.

  The next week, Theo talked me into attending a welcome coffee in our compound clubhouse. I put up a fight, certain that I would be the only man there. But as soon as I walked in, the chipper Australian chairwoman of the welcome committee grabbed me by the arm and dragged me across the room, past packs of women sipping coffee and eating “biscuits.” Finding her prey, she triumphantly introduced me to Tom Davis, the only other male trailing spouse anyone knew about. She had correctly guessed we would be happy to see each other.

  Tom had also quit his job—as a Seattle insurance underwriter—to move to Beijing when his wife received a promotion. We were thrown together by circumstance, and my initial impression was that I didn’t have much in common with this dry, quiet bespectacled Montana native.

  But Tom’s face lit up when I told him about the Papa John’s–sponsored expat softball team I had stumbled onto, and I promised to see if I could get him on. Tom was by my side a few days later when we returned for a doubleheader at a still-unfinished compound just down the road from Riviera. The field looked spectacular, with a well-manicured outfield and a glistening brown infield, but it felt completely wrong. The infield was topped by several inches of loose, soft dirt. It was clearly the work of people who had studied pictures of a baseball field but had never actually stood on one.

  After squeaking out one win over a Chinese team and getting clobbered by a U.S. Embassy squad led by Marines with bulging, tattooed biceps, Tom and I walked home together. Both slightly unsteady on hamstrings tweaked by running through the sand, we laughed about the field and how it seemed like an apt metaphor for China, where many things were not quite what they seemed. When Tom said he was looking for a Chinese class, I smiled and said I had him covered.

  Tom’s wife, Cathy, had a company driver who dropped her at work then came back to take us to class. Chatting in the back of that Buick minivan during our regular commute, we realized that we shared many of the same passions, talking effortlessly about the mountains of the American West, fatherhood, World War II history, and the Pittsburgh Steelers. He had fallen in love with my hometown football team as a kid in a Montana mining town, relating to their blue-collar appeal.

  I began looking forward to these rides, and the more I got to know Tom, the more impressed I was. He and Cathy had two daughters, Shealyn, then five, and Sudha, four. They adopted the latter from India knowing that a birth defect necessitated the amputation of both her feet. I thought this elevated them to sainthood, but Tom was very matter-of-fact about it.

  “They don’t ask you to adopt a disabled child right away,” he explained. “It is a long process and first they decide you can probably handle it and then they introduce the idea.”

  We spoke often of going on more outings together—we were particularly excited about hiking on the Great Wall—but Tom was fully committed to being home when
his girls got off the school bus every day at noon. This was almost a quaint notion here, in the land of ayis.

  Mandarin has four tones, and the right word said with the wrong tone, or inflection, can have a radically different meaning. So it made sense for the school to spend many hours merely practicing the proper expression of tones before teaching any vocabulary. It also made for some gruesomely boring lessons. We rotated through cubicles and teachers, many of them young women looking at us blankly as we grew exasperated. Some seemed intent on having us mimic not only their pronunciation but also their pitch.

  We spent entire classes saying “taaaa” in an absurdly high voice, though I was sure that my goal was not to sound like a twenty-two-year-old Chinese woman. Then, one day Tom and I walked into a small classroom and found a quiet, studious young man with a brush cut sitting behind the desk. He seemed at once more serious and less rigid than anyone else we had encountered, and we immediately felt more relaxed and confident.

  Yechen, who was twenty-nine, had just returned from five years teaching at a prestigious British university, so he spoke much better English than his colleagues. He was also happy to toss the syllabus and intuitively guide us into a comfort zone. He jumped back and forth in the book so we could start learning some vocabulary, and when one of us stalled on a sound, he moved on, instead of hammering us with our failures, as the others did.

  I hired Yechen to translate a Slam interview with basketball player Sun Yue. As soon as we climbed into a cab, Yechen told me that he hated the school and would soon be quitting. Tom and I hired him, and we began private lessons at my dining room table a few weeks later.

  Yechen said he was going to start over from square one and he was going to teach us characters, insisting that you can’t really understand Chinese language or culture without them. He brought in textbooks from the British university. He also suggested we get out and interact with people as much as possible, soaking in the language and getting more of a feel for its natural usage. This was easy for me, as I was already eagerly exploring both downtown and my immediate semirural neighborhood.