I’m in the den playing a Mickey Mouse game on the computer with Elisa when I hear Lydia making a fusing kind of noise from her room where she is also playing some kind of computer game. I get up, feeling lucky to have a place with a den and a separate bedroom for the kids but not so lucky as to enjoy whatever those rooms descriptions meant on the brochure. ...

I went to Hong Kong last week to change my visa type to a Z visa so that I could re-enter China and get a work permit and then a residence permit which replaces the Z visa. Why one needs to leave the country for this I’ve never fully understood, the principal seems that if you entered the country under a status that did not indicate your intent to work, then you need to get the proper status. It’s not unique to China but still seems pretty inefficient to me. The last time I did this was in 2005 when I also flew to Hong Kong, checked into a hotel, got my visa the next day and returned to Beijing that night. No plan adjustments this time outside of staying at a nicer hotel. ...

I am in the den listening to music and trying to get a little work on what is now a side project. Elisa walks in and climbs up on the chair next to mind and asks me if I am working. I say yes and she says she wants to play mickey mouse game. I say let me work a little bit first. She then moves across the room to the other computer where the music is playing. She comes back to my side of the room with her hands over her ears. “I don’t like this one song” she says in perfect english for a chinese person. ...

The woman in the window seat is standing and talking loudly to the people in the row behind her. This seems to always happen to me on planes. And not just when I am flying with Yang. On this day I am flying with Lydia to Harbin. Lydia is in the middle seat providing a buffer to the overly hyper middle aged harbin-ren returning home. I am I the aisle seat. ...

Elisa asks to listen to the Coldplay song Yellow and I oblige. Soon she is trying to sing a long in a low concentrated voice. She stumbles over most of the words but finds her footing on the words “beautiful” and “yellow”. Driving along with fireworks exploding in the sky and listening to the innocence in her voice it is difficult to keep a steady heart. For a fleeting moment, it is pure. ...

The mom lies across the row of seats in part to coax the three year old to sleep and in part because she is dead tired. The three year old tries but fails at sleep and is soon walking up the plane’s aisle looking for her father. When she finds him, she sits on his lap and watches the mini TV until it is almost time to land while the mother sleeps soundly. Fortunately their seats are separated by enough distance as not to hear the snoring. ...

It is January 5th 2006, the day after my 40th birthday 2006, and I was feeling a bit down. In part because because of turning 40, in part because the holidays had just passed and I was feeling homesick, but mainly because my birthday had passed and hardly anyone noticed. A quiet dinner with Yang, and phone call from my parents, and that was that. This wasn’t the first time I’ve felt this way and have learned its my deal mostly and how I can accept and deal with those feelings. Besides, those birthday blah feelings could just be a mask for feeling old, feeling cold, feeling far from home. Who knows, deal with what’s in front of you and move on. ...

Elisa says she wants to watch “that boy”. She leads me into the den where I search for Justin Bieber and from the list of music videos she picks one. The song called “Baby”. The video starts to play and then she says “baba, go now”. She wants to watch the video alone. As I leave I see Elisa immersed in the video, picture below. (lost image) This is her new routine, at least for the past couple of nights. I’m not sure what caused the three year old’s Bieber fandom or the need for privacy when consuming but I know the progression. It started when we were in the US last October and with Aidan’s iPad I showed Elisa a screen full of singer and band photos. We scrolled up and down the list but pretty much immediately she tapped on the picture of Justin Bieber and watched the video. This was pretty much all forgotten when we got back to Beijing until the song “Baby” came on during a cartoon. Elisa immediately dug out the iPad and asked me to play “that boy”. Vevo – the app used in the states is incredibly slow here so Elisa got incredibly frustrated, hence the switch to the computer in the den and the music video from a local site. ...

Yang and I are in the middle row of the tour van and our guide in the front seat turns around and rambles some mildly interesting facts about Ho Chi Minh City. That the city population swells during the day, that all the mopeds speeding around do create a lot of pollution but it gets blown to sea, and that he still prefers to call the city Saigon. After the Americans pulled out in 1975 and the North Vietnamese took control (literally hours later) the city of Saigon was renamed to Ho Chi Minh City and for years after using Saigon as an alias was strictly forbidden. In the intervening years the government has loosened up a bit and Saigon can be used informally especially when talking about the heart of the city (District 1) which is where Yang and I stayed. In our time in Saigon, reminders of the decades of war where always nearby if you cared to look for them but at the same time I was left with the overwhelming feeling how much better the progress of peace has been to this city. ...

I am playing UNO with Elisa and she is holding her own matching colors and numbers. She wins the game and I give her 10 RMB (kuai) as a reward. She runs out of the room with the waving the bill in her hand happily announcing to the house the she won “10 kuai”. Elisa has recently awakened to money and is quite happy to be given some even though she often leaves the loose bill lying around the house. She associates money with the ability to buy candy. Poor girl doesn’t know what she is getting herself into. ...