Family

I am staring at the mirror and questioning. Questioning the value of gel. I thought it was supposed to make hair look better. Turns out there is a skill to it or at least a skill to making it look bad. Check. Last weekend I decided to go to a haircut place closer to where I live. Aidan helped a little bit with translation (“my dad wants a haircut”) and soon I was whisked away for a hair wash and then seated in front of a mirror staring at my wet, tossed hair. A man with cross between a Jheri Curl and a poodle on his head stood to my side and asked me something in Mandarin. Since he has scissors in his hand I figured he was the barber. I used my hand to show that I wanted my hair line to run above my ears. I thought everything else would be relative but he continued to ask more questions and I continued to point at other parts of my head until he gave up and just started cutting. This made me happy. At first. ...

I am maybe 10 years old, in my childhood home, and bored. It was the age of board games and toys that didn’t connect to the internet. Our family was lucky enough to have an entire closet full of games and toys, yet I was bored. Bored to death. Not uncommon for a 10 year old in those days. I remember the house feeling empty. Maybe my older siblings were out and my younger sibling was out with them. My dad wasn’t home, that I recall for sure. In my boredom I was looking for my mom which wasn’t in general the wisest thing to do when bored. I had been met with “how could you be bored, you have a room full of games” which to her seemed like a luxury. I’m sure it was a luxury to her, compared with her childhood. In any case, I didn’t find her in the kitchen or the living room so I walked up the few steps into her bedroom. She was there. Something seemed “off”. I’m not sure what it was. I asked something like “mom, are you ok?” to which she smiled that “I’m not ok” smile to which I said “mom, it will be ok” or something like that. My memory of the specifics are not real clear, truth be told. What was clear was she was in a down mood and I caught her in it and that somehow just by being in that moment with her I provided some relief. I then retreated down the stairs. Later that day I remember her thanking me. She would mention this event to others over the years as some kind of evidence that my heart was a caring one. Emotionally, it was about as vulnerable as my mom and I were ever to each other which is to say we were not generally very vulnerable with each other. My adult life and relationships with adult women have followed a similar vein, sans one, who is no longer with us. ...

Elisa comes to my room and asks for a story. I am her second choice as Aidan is consumed with a game on his iPad. Elisa sits down and I ask “A story?” to buy myself a little time. I am excited and happy that she asked me as I like the concept of being a story telling father however I really have no idea what story to tell. “Elisa”, I say, “this is the story of the jack rabbit and the bear” and I really have no clue beyond that. Elisa rests her head on my chest. ...

Elisa hands in her ticket which is scanned and returned to her. She walks through the gate and waits for me to do the same. I join her, we hold hands, and walk onto Main Street of Hong Kong Disneyland. Elisa in her taboo purchased snow white outfit (ie, not legit) and me in shorts and a Uniqlo superman tee shirt. There is Minnie Mouse under a gazebo with a line of kids waiting to take their picture. I ask Elisa if she wants to and she silently shakes her head no. Not the shy, I really want to kind of NO that I would have done at her age. Just a NO. We instead head up to the train station which is my idea to show her the whole park. We get on the train and make it half way around, to FantasyLand, where we depart. ...

My alarm goes off. It is 5:30am. It is Sunday morning. It is race day. I really don’t want to get up but I do and head to the kitchen where I make myself a cup of instant coffee. While my fever from the day before is gone, I feel like crap, and I know there is no way I can race today. The only reason I got up and dragged myself down to the kitchen at all was I wanted to see if this was my normal 5:30am feel like crap feeling or something worse. It was something worse. I went back to bed. ...

The entire Beijing Allios are sitting down together for a Sunday night dinner which is by itself a bit of a miracle. The fact that I cooked the meal is further evidence. And just to prove the gods sense humor my kids are about to consume the meal I cooked. I take the first bite of the pot roast which I didn’t cook in a stove top pot but in a crock pot. The meat tastes “ok” but not quite as tender as I had expected and certainly not as tender as my separate effort earlier in the week. The sauce, a spaghetti sauce meant to complement the accompanying bow tie pasta is bland. I say so out load. Yang, who is sitting to my left on this night says “It’s great, tastes good” which is a lie; not the first. I notice her plate is filled with the Ayi’s backup plan meal without a hint of pot roast or bow tie pasta to be found. ...

It is Saturday morning and I am barely alert when Lydia decides to tell me about the household politics behind the small iPad. In fact, the small iPad is not an iPad or anything Apple made except for the brand. And the brand is strong. The “small iPad” is actually a Google Nexus 7 tablet, circa 2012. I decided to give it to Lydia and Elisa when I bought the Google Nexus 7, circa 2013 version. And, yes, we are that spoiled. So back to the story. The main reason Lydia wanted to tell me about the small iPad politics is for the same reason all big sisters talk about little sisters – vengeance. ...

“On your left, on your left” comes the voice and I turn my head and see the oncoming bike rider. I am startled not by the voice but that someone would bother to call out. That someone would call out on this running/biking trail that connects Bellevue with Seattle over some lake they call Washington. I am not running to Seattle on this day, only about half way there and back, and it is a beautiful day. Sky is blue, temperature warm, air fresh. I run past a mom and her maybe eight year old daughter who are biking on the trail. The go in 200 yard segments. First the daughter bikes in front with the mom following and then the daughter stops and the mom keeps going for a bit at which point she stops and then the daughter starts riding again until she reaches the mom and then she stops. And then they repeat. They are being so safe. ...

It is Saturday morning and Yang tells me that we are going to Xie Dao (crab island) water park with Lydia’s friend’s family at 10am. I am 48 hours away from ending my oncall rotation and my initial thought is to play it safe and stay near an internet connection but it’s been a quiet week so I decide to just go ahead and go. Lydia’s friend’s parents are known to me as “Naomi’s mom” and “Naomi’s dad”. They have three kids, all girls, with a fourth on the way, also a girl. In the five years we’ve lived in our apartment Lydia’s been best friends with Naomi and then Naomi’s younger sister Emily. We’ve had a family outing with them maybe once or twice a year; mostly it is just the kids playing with each other. The Naomi family is moving back to France after seven years in Beijing and have sold their car so I drive them in one of our cars while Yang drives the rest of the Allio clan in the other. Stuck in traffic on the Airport Expressway on the way to Xie Dao my work ankle bracelet kicks in and I get an automated page from work saying there is a problem which needs my “immediate” attention. The voice response system doesn’t accept my acknowledgement so my backup is paged. My backup is also driving and the voice response system doesn’t recognize his acknowledgement either. This causes the incident manager to get paged, which is not a good thing. Knowing this, I frantically go nowhere in traffic eventually making it to Xie Dao which is a zoo. It’s not a water park, it’s a people park. I park and the families minus me head to the water park. I spend the next three hours hunched over the computer, in the suburbs of Beijing, trying to resolve the problem in Latin America which I eventually do. It is not my first wasted Saturday with the kids but my first for this reason and it’s not a good favorite feeling. ...

It is 6am Monday morning and I am finishing my breakfast when Lao Ma (Yang’s mom) asks me what I want for breakfast. Nodding at my plate I say that I already ate. She asks me if I want some eggs or a steamed bun. I say no. I get up and start to get ready for work. Lao Ma asks me how I will get to work and I say I will ride my new bike. She says it is raining. I look outside and say it is not raining. She says a big rain is coming. I say maybe not till later. In the hallway outside out front door I am tying down my backpack to my bike and Lao Ma suggests I take a taxi. She says it will be very fast to my office this time of the morning. I tell her that I want to ride to work and she repeats that the taxi is very fast. I tell her that I know the taxi is fast in the morning, that I’ve taken it many times. She reminds me that it is raining. I clumsily finish tying down my backpack and push my bike to the elevator. Somehow she got in front of me and is standing in front of the elevator door. Hey eyes light up with a great insight. She tells me that if it rains very hard then I can spend the night at her apartment, since her apartment is just a five minute walk from my office. I tell her “maybe” which means “no” and she repeats how hard will rain later and how close her apartment is to my office. I go from “maybe” to “we’ll see” which means “no”. ...