Family

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. ...

We are sitting outside at a plastic table watching the waves and eating Vietnamese cuisine geared towards tourists. We are the only tourist or eaters at this restaurant and the food is plenty good. A young boy hawking bracelets comes up to our table and like good hawkers anywhere assumes we are interested. I am not at all. Yang is totally. Which is why I guess we are a couple. Yang picks out four bracelets she likes which the hawker assures us is very high quality. He asks for 500,000 VND which my quick math tells me is about $2.50. I barter him down to 300,000 VND and he laughs and tells me that no way using American vernacular for no way. We settle on 400,000 VND. As I get the money out Yang does a quick double take which causes me to do a quick double take. $1 USD is 20,000 VND, not 200,000. Well, at least getting ripped off in Vietnam is cheaper than most places. ...

I’m just home from my late afternoon walk and I am in the bedroom getting to unzip my heavy jacket. “Boo!” goes a loud and sudden voice directly behind me which in fact scared me because I was certain I was alone in the room. After my heart came back down I realized it was Lydia and when I turned she was smiling with glee. I’m thinking in some way this is all my fault, not just because I am her father and everything is my fault especially if it’s not. I think it’s tied to our recent games on hide and seek. We play in the house with no special rules. Count to ten in Chinese or English with eyes covered and then go find the hidden ones. Well, the first time Lydia hid I found her to be an elite hide and seek player. After searching the house for 20 minutes I still had no clue where she was and I had to ask her for a hint. In this case, it turned out she behind a curtain standing on the window (inside) ledge which gave the impression the curtain was lying flat against the wall. Indeed I had early on pressed against the curtain and did not notice her. Other times she has been wedged into too small spaces even for her camouflaged her hiding place so well as to just blend in. Elisa on the other hand just runs to the coach and buries her eyes into her arms as then yells “I’m here”. As Yang astutely pointed out yesterday, Elisa thinks she is winning the game if she can’t see the person looking for her, not the other way around. ...

To say we have a lot to be thankful for would be the understatement of a lifetime. To celebrate and potentially tamper the enthusiasm a bit I continued my Thanksgiving cooking tradition. I laid out the dinner similar to past years – chips and onion soup mix dip, devil eggs, pot roast & bow ties, and desert. The twist this year was I decided to make pumpkin pie as well. The pumpkin pie was quite an experiment with me making it feel harder than it actually was, with Lydia and Elisa enthusiastically helping. Part of the pain in making it is that I could not find ready made crusts here so we had to make our own crusts, which turned out way better than I expected. The pie ended up being the major hit. ...

It is Thanksgiving weekend and we are staying at a big spa resort in the outskirts of Beijing. These resorts are massive and frequented by relatively few foreigners (I would see two other foreigners over our two nights there out of maybe 2000 people). I find these resorts a nice change of pace for a half day or so, tolerable for about a day, and ready to leave anytime after 24 hours. When we hit the 24 hour mark on this visit, I head out for a walk. It is cold, maybe 28 degrees and there isn’t a lot to see except for the resort and the surrounding neighborhood. The neighborhood is not really a city but is crowded nevertheless. Analogous to a city of strip malls. After 30 minutes or so in the cold I head back inside where it is very, very warm to the point we open windows to cool the air inside the hotel room. ...

I’m on my laptop trying to do a little work when Elisa pushes open the door and slides up next to me. “Baba, I want to play you”. She then says “no Dora. no iPhone. no little bit Dora.” She says this because in the past I’ve told her “No Dora" only to relent and use the computer to play “Dora the Explorer” games with her. She knows I cannot resist. ...

As Yang and I exit the hot pot restaurant in Chengdu I’m habitually checking something on my phone. I realize is a tantalizing annoying habit. I catch up to Yang and put my left hand on her left shoulder and then run it down to the middle of her back as I am want to do. A huff of a scream. A look up at me and then a full scream of fear and Yang runs away. Except it isn’t Yang as I flubbed the transition from phone to wife. A woman runs diagonally away from me and then stops and looks back. I apologize in my worst Chinese – which is my only variety – and seek out Yang to clarify. Luckily the woman doesn’t think I’m also harassing Yang – I should say luckily Yang didn’t take the opportunity to run off screaming as well. Once the woman saw my mistake she was good natured about it and just made sure to keep her distance from my wandering arm. ...