Aidan tells me he is not sleepy as I pick him up. Two minutes later he is asleep in my arms as we ride the Beijing subway eastward, towards home. The subway train isn’t as packed as it was on the way to the game when people forced their way in and off the train and young girls took took pictures of Aidan with their cell phones. But it was still crowded and Aidan is getting heavy so I was grateful when a stocky older Chinese woman ushered me towards a seat as she chased out the existing seat occupant. I sat and looked at my son sleeping so peaceful and thought this would be perfect if we had actually saw the game. Then decided the game was secondary anyway. ...

My cell phone rings and it is Aidan. He just off the plane and is waiting with Yang and Lydia for the stroller. He starts to tell me about his new lego toy and that he put it together all by himself. I am waiting just outside the gate, wearing my blue sweatshirt, hood on. My hair has been an out of control mess for about a week and it will be another day before it is orange, so I feel more comfortable hiding it. ...

It is about 11:30pm when I return to the hotel room in Tokyo, Asaka district. The day has been long and since I started out tired to begin with, I worry that sleep will not come easy. The restless night of the over-stimulated and over-tired may await. It then dawns on me that my son has turned five today. Or was it yesterday? Or is it tomorrow. Or both. I settle on both. Aidan is 17 time zones away and is 5000 miles away, with Yang in the Bay Area. He is probably awaking now, his first day of five. ...

It is Chinese New Year eve and we arrive at the small public square across the street from our home. The square is dark and empty. While Aidan and Lydia wait with anticipation, Yang asks the security guard if it is ok for us to set off our fireworks here. “Keyi, keyi 可以 (sure, sure)” comes the response. We make our ways towards the center of the square and light our sparklers. Its cold and dry and a bit windy so the sparkrs take a bit to light. Once lit, Lydia is waving and dancing and Aidan is stabbing and jaunting. Another group of people joins us on the square and they light fireworks that shoot maybe five stories high and explode in light. We quickly run through our meager supply and dash to the fireworks stand to buy more. I want to buy a box of high flying exploding rockets but don’t want to lay down they cash (40 USD). We buy some more sparklers. In an unexpected occurrence of common sense, the fireworks stand does not have any matches. ...

Even before the plane levels off and the seatbelt sign dings off, the middle aged Chinese woman sitting next to me is socializing with her friends. She thinks nothing to lean across my “space” to hand a snack to a friend sitting in front of me. Her voice is loud and it is hard for me to imagine her as a young woman. On my left is a large white man who looks to be in his mid fifties and his snoring slightly. The person in front of him as fully reclined his seat as has the person in front of me. I feel trapped, like a mouse must feel in a a glue trap. The thing is I want to pee. Need to pee. I’ve been holding it in for about two hours now – the flight sat on the runway for 90 minutes – and my bladder is about to burst. I check the barf bag in the seat back to see if it has a waterproof lining. It does not. I wonder why they still stock these on planes, do people really get air sick anymore. I mean, this plane, a 747 seats something like 400 passengers and weights a gizillion pounds. I squeeze my legs together a bit and try to listen to the Chinese conversing all around me. Their language sounds nothing like my learning mp3s. I decide to practice and say to my ritalin staved Chinese neighbor, “ni hao” which means hello. She smiles and responds in perfect English “Hi, first time to China?”. I take out the book I purchased specifically for the flight, Nicholas Spark’s The Notebook. I’m a voracious reader but with my work schedule this past year and my life blowing up the way it did, I haven’t touched a book. I am so excited to finally have time for a good read. I get 30 pages into and I am bored. At 50 pages anger sets in and I put the book down. I pick up the vomit bag, pull out my pen, and begin to write: > _Came home a little bit early last night, shed not a tear when turning out the light, no I don’t hurt like I used too… _ And I was off filling up every inch of the puke bag and then the inside cover pages of that horrible book. I stopped just short of writing on the notes page of the in-flight magazine. The words coming out like the anger of a teenage girl, fast and furious and I must say amazingly connected. But, I have a confession. The first sentence is the beginning of a Kelly Willis song called Not Forgotten You. It’s a trick I use when my anger compels me to write but said anger does not allow my brain to lay word on paper. I’ve been using this trick a lot lately. As I was tearing up the barf bag into small pieces the American man sitting next to me asked if everything was ok. I said yes, and that wasn’t a lie because I felt much better now. He then asked if I had taken Jesus as my savior and I told him no I hadn’t but that I had recently learned that Jesus has a pet cow – a pet baby cow – and I’ve been wondering if Jesus was really a Hindu. He said that wasn’t funny and I said I wasn’t trying to be funny and I could tell he was extremely angry and wanted to spit on me or maybe hit me. Instead, he took a deep breath, got up and walked towards the bathroom. I followed him. When he exited the restroom and saw me ready to enter he started to smile, thought better of it, and brushed past me. Maybe he was embarrassed about the stank he left behind. When I got back to my seat, I tried to step over the rotund American and accidentally stepped on his toe. How was I to know he had an ingrown toenail. The next nine hours to Beijing were not a lot of fun. I was written out, the in flight movies were horrible and barely visible, and the food a cross between healthy choice and Alpo. The Chinese woman spoke to me from time to time at seemingly random intervals. It was like having a five minute conversation spread out over five hours. > Her: “What’s your name? ...

I’m making my way to the subway and the song in my headphones goes “we are born to shimmer, we are born to shine, we are born to radiate”. Which is a good thing because it is damn cold here. Later, I am sitting on the coach, Aidan is directly across the small wooden table we have, in his small wooden chair. We are playing cards. He called me at work and asked to play when I got home. So here I am, developing a not quite five year old into a card shark. The game? WAR, five across. Which means we both lay five cards face down and then flip one by one. Whoever wins the best of five gets to keep all 10 cards. This is a nice balance between what Aidan can learn and what my boredom will tolerate. In the middle of the game, Yang’s mom Yihang comes downstairs, opens our large living room window and then sits near the window. She is trying to let some fresh air into the house. Which, I might add, works like a charm. How can I tell? Well, it is about 10(F) degrees outside and I am suddenly freezing. Aidan seems not to notice. Was I surprised? No, not really, but that’s a story for another day. ...

While Aidan is free with his affection, Lydia makes you earn it. Last summer I would come home from work and spot Lydia sitting on the couch, peacefully. Lydia’s response after the split second it tool to notice me? A joyous “baba’s home!”? Not exactly. In a flash, she would stand up and race to put on her ultra-man mask and completely cover her face. I did not take this as a particularly good sign. This was her regular greeting for me until she discovered the red plastic stick which she used to whack me. I tried to take it as a sign of affection. Not necessarily positive affection, mind you. ...

I wake up on the floor lying in a nest of my two remaining blankets. The floor is hard and cold and left my left shoulder and hip feel a bit numb, like frozen jello. I get up, shower and throw my washcloth, soap, razor, and toothpaste into the large plastic lying in in the center of the living room. One last trip to the trash bins out back, tossing the remnants of this apartment including the blankets. Then I’m back inside, taking one last look at place. This small, small place with the young Korean girls next door playing their college music and the couple who make love life clockwork above. I didn’t know a man could finish for that long. I walk into my kitchen, the one without an electrical outlet and no ambient light. I take a final wizz in the bathroom. I look at where my futon used to be and thought of happier days, and then think about sadder days. I feel a clustering of tears but before they splatter throw on my backpack and lug my suitcase out the front door. Door locked, keys slide into the manager’s box, and I’m out of the building. Across 51st street and up to the safer BART station, Rockridge, wheeling the suitcase the whole way. I fantasize about a phone call from someone, anyone, trying to convince me to stay. But there is no one, and if there was a someone, our time has long since past. I made sure my friends know my parents were taking me to the airport and I made sure my parents know my friends were taking me. I’m not sure why I did this, outside of it is my nature. My recoil to the thought of anyone doing something for me is only secondary to the recoil of asking someone for help and being rejected. I am moving to Beijing in order to write. No one understands this since I have never published anything before. But it’s not that I don’t write. I write every day. Have been since I was thirteen when I tried to talk to my dad about nothing all that important but more importantly as an adult and he still treated me as a child. He could only talk down to me or tune me out. So I tuned into a notebook, drawing and writing my way through high school, then college, then work. I have cases of journals which no one knew about and no one ever saw, except for a soul or two that I let in. Three friends at a time, no more, I would say. But if truth be told, it wasn’t the difficulty of finding three worthy friends, it was the difficulty of finding three interested people. Jane was one of the few interested and worthy, at least I thought so, and then she became disinterested but still worthy and then over time I realized she was neither worthy or interested. Yet this realization did me no good. I had fantasies of turning my notebooks into Augustan Burroughs esq memoirs but I lacked both the patient and his talent. I somehow helped the sheer volume of my writing would somehow make up for a sheer lack of talent. I couldn’t take my notebooks with me to Beijing and I didn’t trust anyone with them, so I had them digitized by strangers and stored on a portable hard disk I’m taking with me. After they were digitized I tossed them in the recycle bin, more for the words than the paper. The United line at SFO is crazy busy with what appears to be ill suited luggage and ill suited couples. The ill suited luggage is of the form of square boxes held together with string and duck tape. The ill suited couples are middle age white men with slightly younger, but worn, Chinese women. Who am I to say, right? I mean it could be perfectly fine luggage. Finally my turn in line and I worry that my one way ticket will cause me some special scrutiny and at first these seems so, but in fact it was just because the attendant could not locate my visa. Given that my passport had never been used before I wouldn’t think it would be that hard. My visa in order – officially I was going to teach English – my bag was checked and my boarding pass printed. Coach, row 33, middle seat. On through the security gate, a mother of three trying to keep her kids from causing an Airport evacuation. There is a large troop of 60ish women waiting for the flight 888 to Beijing. They are talking about making sure they brought toilet paper since restrooms in China were famous for being paper free. I wondered if this was true. They call my row and I line up with my fellow travelers when an elderly Chinese couple walks directly to the front of the line. The women taking the tickets points them back to the line, which only seems to harden their resolve and after a couple of times of being told “no, wait your turn” they simply try the other line where the attendant lets them pass. I board the plan without looking back. Never look back. I am going to be a writer. A published writer. An an English teacher. ...

One of the things I like about being a parent is the consistent discovery of my children’s astonishing humanity. As corny as it sounds, this humanity gives one a purpose and a strange desire protect the child against any corrupting force. This story is a series of anecdotes about Aidan’s humanity. We are driving to IKEA, well I am driving since Aidan isn’t quite five. Aidan is in the back seat. I bribed him to come with me with the promise of an ice cream cone which I know they sell at IKEA for one kuai (about 15 cents). Aidan is asking me for to play my Chinese lessons (http://chinesepod.com) on the car stereo because he enjoys it more than the music and some of the lessons have proven quite funny in the past. When we listen to them I think he learns more English than I learn Chinese. Aidan, in fact, has recently started to help me with my Chinese learning. I can ask him how to say “car” in Chinese and he will pronounce it for me, but not as one would expect a child too, but slowly and with perfect tonal pronunciation so that I may repeat. His pronunciation is far better than any Chinese teacher I’ve had. And if you don’t know anything about mandarin know this; tones and context are very, very important. Through this process Aidan is learning that his father is tone deaf and has the memory of a stone. ...

About every third day Aidan will refuse to go to school. When this occurs we follow a series of well thought our strategies such as “sure, you can stay home” or “how about we buy you chocolate”. You can tell we are strict disciplinarians. Actually, after some discussion and only implicit bribing Aidan tends to relent and go to school. Aidan and Lydia at school. Aidan is slightly outnumbered. ...