My dad’s ready to go for coffee and stands up and puts on his sports coat. His shirt has a few stains. His undershirt is yellowing. His fly is open. Does one tell one’s dad his fly is open? Aidan came home from school on Wednesday night not feeling well. Dizzy, he said. He didn’t have a temperature. His grandmother texted me pictures of his mom at a party and told me to give Aidan medicine and maybe go to the hospital. She worries like that. Aidan went to bed early and the next morning still wasn’t feeling good, no fever, but largargic. The other kids went to school and I worked from home to take care of him. Aidan didn’t do well in last semester’s final exam. Really did not do well. It turns out Friday was the make up exams for students who didn’t do well. He wasn’t sick, he was stressed. I am at a 70 person all hands meeting where my boss is trying to explain a change of strategy. He is the boss apparently because he talks a lot. Someone asks a question about the strategy he doesn’t have the answer too so I stand up to explain. I talk in bullet points. By the time I start my third and last bullet my thoughts are racing in different illogical directions and I have to slow down and reconstruct the bullet points in my mind from the beginning. My body is shaking when I finally sit down. I am 16 years old and washing dishes in my childhood home. For some reason my dad is in the kitchen after dinner which he seldom was. He hands me a dish. I try to make a joke about something, I forget what. He thought I was saying he had bad breath. He explodes and I think he’s going to take my head off. The food arrives for pizza party movie night. I frustrated with something and haven’t had a chance to clear the dinner table yet. I call the kids in to help with setup like I normally do. Aidan just opens the pizza box to take a piece. Elisa knocks over her soda onto the floor spilling everywhere. I get angry. Tell them they need to help. I don’t like it when I get angry. I am at work washing my hands in the bathroom. As I dry them I look at myself in the mirror. Nice shirt. Too bad it’s wrinkled as all get out. When did I stop pressing? ...

I wake up to a jet lagged haze feeling frisky and fat. Both confirmed I exit the bedroom towel wrapped around my waist and walk to the shower. The light in living room is on. Sabrina’s dad is sitting on the couch watching TV at 6am with the sound low. Apparently his hearing is good. Sabrina’s parents stayed at our apartment while we were in the US since the apartment they’ve been staying at doesn’t have an elevator and getting up the five flights of stairs is tedious for Sabrina’s mom (backstory: Sabrina’s parents come to Beijing during the winter months to visit their daughters and because Beijing has central heating). As we touched down the night before I had asked Sabrina not to let her dad cook for me as I’m particular about what I eat and I don’t want to have to be polite and eat what he makes. I was feeling particularly in need to control my food after a couple weeks of eating whatever I wanted in US. So of course as soon as we unpacked, Sabrina’s dad served us a full home cook meal. After dinner I went for a walk with Sabrina and she asked if I understood what her dad was talking about during dinner. I said no, that I wasn’t really paying attention. Normally I just zone out when conversation goes on in Chinese. He was trying to speak to me, she said, and was frustrated that I didn’t respond. I had no idea. ...

I think about anniversaries and sometimes they loom in front of me with the anticipation of accomplishment or dread. When I first started at Microsoft in September 2005 I remember picking my first Corpnet password. I read the policy saying it would need to be changed within 90 days. I told my cynical self that I will never need to change it. They would find out I was a fraud long before then. When I hit four years I started to notice the speeches they five year people gave. The 10 of them got to go up during and all hands and speak for a minute or so. I worried and planned what I would say for the next year. When the anniversary came there was something like 40 of us so there was no public speech. I got recognized in a team meeting which suited me better. I was, however, planning on leaving MS at that time so my words I don’t even remember. Always grateful for the employment I was burned out at the time. Or as I put it then it took too long to build stuff and I wanted to build things. So I took my gap year or more precisely gap 14 months. That caused the MS anniversary reward tracking mechanism to get a bit messed up. Four months after my return to MS and during a 60 person all hands I was surprise presented with my five year award. I sheepishly said I already had it. They let me keep the trophy anyway so I had two five year crystals. Because of my 14 month gap my actual 10 year anniversary was a bit hard to calculate. Ok, not that hard for a neurotic. Even one that works at MS. On the subway on the way home I wrote the broad outline of my “speech” – truths and motivations are for you to fine, believe in the best of people because then at least you will feel better – and calculated the date. The date came and I received an email asking where sent the crystal too. It arrived a month later and now sits on a chest in my bedroom next to the five year crystal and other MS trinkets I care about. No speech, no words of advice. Do I have something to say? Yes, but I’ll save that for another post. Does it matter what I say? Not really, but it does make me feel better. ...

Aidan goes into the restroom with a pair of scissors and starts to cut his hair. A few minutes later he emerges, unsuccessful, and asks if he can go get a haircut. I need one too, my homeless look not working so well this winter so I say “sure”. We recently moved so we don’t have a goto place to get our hair cut so we just head out looking since it seems every block in Beijing has a hair salon. Until you are looking for one. We do find one after a couple of blocks. It looks small and not busy so we look a bit more but end up going inside. A middle age woman greets us hopefully and Aidan asks if they can do a haircut. I have ask if they can do us together and she says sure and then she taps a young man sleeping in a chair who turns out to be my hairdresser. ...

It is a week before Christmas and Elisa asks me what I got Aidan for Christmas. She really wants to know and when I won’t tell her she tries to find out if I’ve already bought the present yet or not. And if not, what would I buy. She asks me over and over again over the next few days and then again on Christmas eve. She never does asks me what I got for Lydia. ...

It is just over a year ago and I’m trying to flag down a cab to send the kids to school. And it’s windy. And the temperature is below freezing. And there is freezing rain pelting the side of our faces. And the cabs are passing us one by one without stopping. It’s at that moment that I switched to Uber and from the next morning onwards booked cars from the comfort of our apartment or the building lobby. Didi had been around for some time before that with the ability to book taxis ahead of time. I occasionally did this, or had a friend do it for me, when waking up in a hard to flag taxi place but in my apartment downtown taxis were mostly available in the mornings except when you really needed them. Once I switched to Uber the I quickly became a convert. About half the price of taxis, can get a car anytime, and can track the kids progress when I sent them to school or to some event. Uber app was also in English and was easy for me to set up payment. Over the year the service started to get more expensive and it felt like the quality of the drivers stopped as we were constantly having to communicate our location despite GPS. One of the last times I used Uber to send the kids to school we were looking for a white car with 9X0 as the last three license place digits. We walked a half block to where GPS said it was, say the car, waved at driver and then tried to open the door. Door locked, we knocked, looked into the window which was tinted and tried to open the door. Still locked. Then the driver turned away. Turns out the place was P20. Uber still showed the car at the corner and when I called the driver he said he was coming. I cancelled and put the kids into a taxi. Uber lost to Didi in the competition here. For a while it was great as a consumer. Both sides so hungry for the market they were subsiding our rides. But when Uber lost the Uber App was replaced with a China and Chinese language only App. At which point I switched to Didi and it’s Chinese only App as well. Since we moved I’ve been taking Elisa to school using Didi (the elders kids school is a short walk away). The first day was similar to my first Uber day. Raining ice, winding, cold. I could not communicate well enough in Chinese with the Didi driver and needed someone to help me. Later I got the routine down and can take Elisa without help. After dropping off Elisa at school I then have a 10 minute walk to the subway so I can get to work. Fortunately a new service recently launched a couple months ago – 1 RMB bike rental where you grab a bike and drop it wherever you stop. There are actually two such services and now you can see bikes returning to the streets of Beijing. ...

It is the summer of 2005 and I’m heading out for a walk. A woman with a white skin looking down at a map looks up and notices me. And then walks up to me. She starts to speak French and I say I don’t understand. She switches to a fairly heavy accented English and apologies saying she thought I was French. The then asks where the Russian markets are. Apparently they used to be right here and she visited them a few years back but now she can’t seem to find them. I say I only know Yabao Lu, a few blocks away, but she says not that one. A few months later I was looking Google Earth and I used it’s time lapse feature. I went back in time for my apartment building. Back to 2001 or so. When what existed in it’s place was..you guessed it..russian markets. ...

Elisa takes my hand and asks we will ever move back to Chaowaimen. Her voice is tender and masking a sadness. We’ve become attached over the past four years to the apartment and our every other week routines. She asks if we’ll ever go back to UTown which has some of her favorite food and indoor playgrounds. I say yes. I wake up the next morning, after signing the contract for our new apartment, feeling sad too. I tell Sabrina on the way to work that I am sad but that I’m not afraid to feel it. That it will pass. We are moving maybe 10 minutes away to a slightly larger apartment with a better community and view. The larger apartment means Aidan gets his own room, which at 13, is better than sleeping on the living room couch which he’s done since I moved here. I know why I feel sad, or why my conscious brain thinks so. I feel sad because four years ago when I moved into Chaowaimen the apartment and my life were in tatters. My first night was spend on the last tenant’s filthy futon with a smell of musky tea (the tenant was literally a tea vendor). I got up that next morning and started to clean the apartment getting on hands and knees until the stains in the cracks were gone. It took much longer with many starts, fits, and stops for me. I may not be all the way there yet. Or as I’m want to say - I may not be out of the woods yet but I’ve stopped walking into trees. The moment things shifted was when I had the epiphany three years ago that I could keep the kids with me every other week for the full week with a slight change in their school commute. Since then on the weeks I have them we do everything together - everything being mostly meals. We built some of our own silly traditions like Friday night pizza party. But somehow it is about the rhythms. Waking them up at 6:50am, putting their lunch together, dinner time, shower time, sleep time. I somehow got closer to the kids during this time than when we were an intact family. I’ve seen their struggles as they wanted a reconciliation between their parents and when they finally let go of that hope. I learned to survive on my own because. For me, there were many dark nights on the weeks I did not have them. I did not always behave in admirable ways. I started relationships before I was ready, stopped them, and then started again. I found comfort in simple things done to excess. Slowly, very slowly, I started to move forward and find a human context. I rebuilt up my life in this apartment. Both my single life and my single dad life. And now the single man and single dad parts are reconciling. I will miss this apartment as home. ...

I am in front of the stove making pancakes. I’m not sure why I am making pancakes. I should say I’m not sure why I asked the kids if they would like pancakes. I should not have asked because I am stressed out about a work meeting early this morning that made me get the kids up early. I didn’t sleep well for many reasons and it’s effect is apparent. I am blessed and cursed with self awareness so I use the stress to focus on getting the kids ready and out of the house. But I also know that stress and lack of sleep and dehydration tends to make me less smart. Ok, stupid. ...

Lydia (12) is the first of the kids to arrive at the taco bar. She sits down next to me and says “nice haircut. You were aiming for 20 and got 70”. This a Lydia zinger, of which she has many. She means it as playful and it mostly is and every now and then crosses the line into harsh. Just like me. And her grandpa. Lydia’s gift for language goes beyond my kind of sharpness and just a pure multilingual fluency. It’s much more advanced than I had expected given I’m pretty much the only one besides her English teacher who speaks English with her. She gets that from her mom. No one knows where she got her gift to draw Elisa (8) is the next one to come through the taco bar doors. Elisa is caring, loving, sneaky, and outgoing when restless. I like to say she got the caring and loving from me but more like the caring and sneaky. When in turn I got from my mom and dad respectively. She will put her hand on my belly, call it her “pillow”. She will put things on the wall and deny it later or she will poke around my girlfriends things. When she goes to the playground, she is like her mom, always making friends especially with the boys. At lunch on this day, after we order, she asks to go outside and walk around. This is in part because she is that restless extrovert like her mom. It is also because she is sensitive to smell like her uncle and grandmother on her mother’s side. Aidan (13) is the last to edge his way down the chair. He is a snowboarder and wakeboarder. At once hip and cool and at once cautious. When I remind him of something – be careful where you leave your bicycle – he will be agreeing and slightly defensive with me. “I know, I know”, is his mantra. Aidan’s origins are perhaps the most complex to dissect. He is so close to his mom that sometimes it’s difficult to know if he is like her or if he is trying to emulate her. Like me, but at a different time, he was hurt when his mom found a boyfriend and stopped payed less attention to him. Like me, I believe he always wants to do the right thing but sometimes get tired of always having to be good and things come out in an unintentional way. Like when he ordered a full size basketball stand and shipped it to my small apartment. He really wanted to play basketball with me and thought it would be convenient but didn’t think though that I don’t have storage for it. ...