Family

It is Tuesday night and I get home from work a little after 7pm, 12 hours after I left home. I am tired and hungry. The kids have had dinner with Aidan and Lydia watching their respective TVs. Elisa comes up to me and wants to help make my dinner. We go to the kitchen where she helps scoop my premade chicken curry and beef chili. I nuke it for two and half minutes and ask Aidan if he’s done his homework yet. Aidan starts his homework and is immediately frustrated. To the point that he’s almost shaking and using harsh language. I work with him on some long division problems and try to remember myself how to do it. This frustrates him even more. The next night he is even more frustrated. Same with the next day. ...

The young, skinny waitress with a buzz cut came to take our order. Yang tells her we will have “the tree salad” and she says she doesn’t know what that is. I point at the menu and she copies down the Chinese characters for “the tree salad”. It is slightly odd that she doesn’t know what “the tree salad” is since this particular pizza joint is called “The Tree”. It was the buzz cut waitress’s first day on the job. Later, after she had a hard time knowing what a Guinness was and knowing what a diet coke was an experienced slender buzz cut waitress came to help her out. ...

Elisa sits in the dinning room chair as I put on her socks and then shoes. Elisa does not like to wear socks even as our apartment’s floor gets colder and colder with each passing winter’s day. I zip up her Angry Birds winter coat and we head down to the parking garage. On the slow walk to the car Elisa tells me she wants to hear the songs I like on the drive. This is a first. Normally she just wants to hear Coldplay’s “Yellow” as many times as I can bear it. ...

Aidan and I are walking through the Shougang Gymnasium parking lot when I call our ticket scalper. My Chinese is such that I can tell him we are at the west entrance and understand that he is at the south entrance. After that I am lost so I hand Aidan the phone. Aidan talks to him a bit and relays that the scalper is at the east gate. It’s a pretty small gym so we are at the east gate quickly and there are a bunch of folks milling around. I am the only foreigner so I am expecting the scalper to walk up to me. No luck. I call him again and Aidan says he’s by the fast food restaurants just inside the entrance. We go there and mill around. After a few minutes we call him again and I look for someone answering their phone. I follow a middle age man as he walks out of the gate and stares into the distance apparently thinking we are arriving by helicopter. He has a 10 year old chubby boy with him. I yell at him a hello and he sees us and we walk back inside. He says something to me that I only understand part of. Something like, if you are hungry have dinner since I don’t have the tickets. I call Yang who is forever playing tennis and in between games she calls back and talks with the scalper. He doesn’t have the original lower bowl tickets we had asked for but does have some upper deck tickets for double face value which Yang bargains down to 150% of face value. The scalper wanders into the fast food restaurant and suddenly slips me the tickets. I walk a few paces and hand him the money which makes him nervous because it is too exposed. No one notices buy him. ...

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. ...