Family

I am at The Den with my friend Steve and we have just ordered dinner and a beer. We’ve been meeting at The Den every Wednesday night for about a year. It is 2008, my third year in Beijing and Steve’s forth. Strangely enough the early years for an expat in Beijing are often the easiest. You are busy trying to learn the language, the culture, and the bustling city drags you along. There are waves of new foreigners in town that are having similar experiences and it is easy to feel connected. Opportunity feels limitless, even if no real opportunity is at hand. Everything is just so new that you feel renewed. At least the part of you that isn’t feeling homesick and isolated, for sure that is part of the experience as well. ...

It’s 7:05am and I take the elevator down with Aidan and Lydia. I get off at the first floor while they keep going to the parking garage. Off to school they go, off to work I go. I put on my respro face mask to help filter out the car exhaust and pollution. I put on my gloves to deal with the mid 30s “spring” mornings and then I’m off. Well, for about 50 meters when I have to stop, take out an electric key, and open the world’s most annoying gate that our apartment complete recently installed. A gate they installed to keep, I’m assuming hypothetical thieves out but in fact does a remarkable job at keeping residents in. ...

Aidan is out with Yang and somehow they know Elisa wants an Ice Cream. One of those three kuai McDonalds ice creams. What were called “frosties” when I was a kid. Yang buys it and Aidan holds it for Elisa. Aidan does not take a bit or even a small lick but concentrates on keeping the cone upright and the ice cream on the cone. It takes them a while to get home and involves a stop or two. When Yang and Aidan finally make it home Aidan walks through the door holding the ice cream for Elisa. Aidan looks a bit tired from the concentration it took to keep the treat in tact. Elisa meets them, sits down and takes the cone from Aidan. After Elisa takes a couple of licks Aidan asks Elisa if he can have a bite. “No” comes the definitive response. Aidan and Yang explain all the hard work Aidan did in getting the ice cream home. Elisa understands. Again, can Aidan have a bite? “No”. ...

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. ...