Family

I am carrying Lydia as we walk back to our hotel in the English Bay section in Vancouver. My closest childhood friend Jose is a half block ahead walking with his five year old daughter. I am talking with his wife Sarah while Yang, Elisa, and Aidan are a half block back. This being an older neighborhood, a strip of relatively well maintained grass separates the street edge from the sidewalk. My left foot lands half on the sidewalk and half on the grass, something my ankle was unprepared for. It turns and gives way meaning I fall forward with nothing but Lydia to break my fall. I instinctively let go of Lydia as we near the ground and she lands hard. In the half second I had, I was able divert my fall away from her. A beat passes. Then Lydia is crying, a cry which is a bit of a relief since it means she wasn’t hurt that bad. I pull her close and wish her a happy birthday. ...

Having started my work day at 7AM and now finding it 7:30pm, I shut down my computer and tell my co-worker I won’t be checking email for the next two weeks. Looks of disbelief aside, I grab a taxi and meet Yang at a teppanyaki restaurant in Sanlitun. Charlie and a woman I refer to as laoshi (teacher) join us. For 198RMB each, we have all the food and drink we can handle which by the knots on my belt is a fairly decent amount. ...

With school on break for summer vacation, I no longer need to wake up promptly at 6am in order to walk Aidan to the school bus. So now when the alarm goes off, I tend to linger in bed for a bit longer and not get out of the house until 7AM when I make my five minute walk to Starbucks at Lido Square. For the past few mornings I’ve encountered a strange site. Teenagers, nearly all boys, walking in loose fitting athletics gear across Lido square, clearing heading somewhere, looking like it is for a workout. Two things are striking. One, there are many of them. Not five or ten, but more like 40. And I figure there are more than one troop because my arrival time at Starbucks has varied over the past week by as much as 30 minutes. Each trip, however, I’ve seen them. The second weird thing is that they are all overweight, bordering on obese. It is a fat camp. ...

In a few short weeks Elisa will hit the ripe old age of two and we will celebrate by boarding a plane from Vancouver to Beijing. Two, as most any parent will tell you, is the magical time with your child also known as the terrible twos. Terrible as in they are inconsolable, fussy, have grocery store clearing tantrums, and are prone to throw things. And I’m just taking about the parents, the kids are much worse. Both our older kids, Aidan and Lydia, were early adopters of the terrible twos, each showing solid signs at 18 months and in full swing by 20 months. Yang will say Aidan did not go through the phase and Lydia never left if; all I will say is that they both with through it, with Lydia stopping to spit on the roses. ...

I hear the piddle paddle of little feat on our bedroom’s faux marble floor. Elisa is gleefully chasing Yang as Yang makes her way to the restroom. Moments later, Yang is back to sleep but the piddle paddle continues. I lift my head up and see Elisa’s smiling face looking at me. I say Qù wán 去玩 (go play) to Elisa and she smiles, nods her head up and down, and grunts “ummm”. ...

It is 2pm and I am debating whether to ditch for the rest of the afternoon or not. I really need to write and I can seem to start a sentence. Maybe because I am on day five of an eight day consecutive work stretch, maybe it’s because I’m writing to the same level of challenge I had many years ago, but mostly because just because. I walk out to the 711 behind my office building and it is a glorious day. Bright sunshine, with interloping clouds to make it not too bright nor too hot. I buy a diet coke and m&ms and make my way back to my office. Stay or go. My irish (or is it catholic or is it sibling or is it middle class) guilt kicks in and I think it is too early to leave. True, I have been at the office since 7:20am, so technically, nearly a full day by most any standards except my own. But I really need to write, not write like I do in this blog, but write in a way that instructs our coders what they should write in order for them to write the code that makes our product what it is. I used to be one of those coders and miss that time and think what I do now would not be so useful to me if I was one of those coders. So I struggle with what is useful and what is not, and then next thing you know I checking email which is a complete waste of time. Then I decide that after a 1:1 I should keep with an intern, I will head out, on foot, and into the sunshine towards home. 4pm comes and I do just that. A quick subject only email to my co-workers that I’m leaving early leaving and then I am out. Onto the street, Zhichun Lu, headed east, head set on, listening to some old music that I recently rediscovered. This area of town doesn’t have a ton of foreigners yet on my walk, I encountered several, all white. First, late 20s woman, very fit, on bike and riding confidently. Then a series of old men, which is to say they are probably my age but looked a lot older to me. And they looked weird. One had orange hair. Another looked like he woke up on the street and hadn’t showed for days. Another was sun withered and smiled at me as I past. I was trying not to think of them as my future self-incarnated but the thought did cross my mind and linger for a block or two. Eventually, I walked into a subway station and took it to Sanyuanchao, my normal stop and then continued my trek home. Three of four or five times before, I had walked all the way from work to home. It isn’t actually that far – 9 miles as the crow flies – but long enough that I don’t do it often. It takes me 35 minutes to walk from subway station to home and I was enjoying some podcasts as I went. As I got close to home, three beggar women with three beggar children were walking in the opposite direction. The children looked oddly familiar. They had on old clothes that used to be Aidan, Lydia, or Elisa’s and which Lydia decided to give away a few weeks back. The beggar women smiled, didn’t asked for anything more, and recognized me as Lydia’s father. And then I was home. ...

The dentist is tell me to relax as she is poking me and asking me “does this hurt” when we both know that when she hits “the spot”, she won’t need to ask. She finally does with some kind of frozen Q-tip contraction and then for good measures verifies that it isn’t just one tooth that is causing pain, but two. It feels like a scene from Marathon Man where the Dustin Hoffman character is pursued to talk by a dentist with pliers. With the area of pain identified, I head for X-rays which are fairly painless but apparently not safe as the technician runs the triggering cord outside the office as he snaps the pictures. Then I sit and wait in the lobby while the film develops and the dentist figures out what it all means. I’m pretty sure what it will mean for me. ...

It is 6:32AM or there about and I leave the bedroom ready for a quick snack before taking Aidan to catch his shuttle bus. But Aidan is gone, having just left for the bus with Cui Ayi. I ask Yang’s mom Yihang why they left so early, that the bus won’t be there for another 10 minutes. She says “no problem, Cui Ayi can take him”. I say I know she can take him, but he will just be standing there and besides I actually like taking him. She repeats, “no problem, Cui Ayi can take him”. At which time I notice Lydia, standing on a chair, looking out her bedroom window for Aidan to pass below on his walk to the bus stop. ...

Lydia likes to draw and she works at it for hours at a time. As she’s gotten better at it, she asks for help less and less often which is good because her drawing long eclipsed anything I could do. We have drawings she’s made lying around our house and my office, her output is prolific enough and we are just lazy enough that we don’t capture them in a very formal way. Maybe someday we will regret that however I suspect not since we are such a transient tribe of five. ...

Last weekend was a three day weekend which I extended to four by taking Tuesday off. Some co-workers naturally asked where I was going but in fact there was no plan, just futz around, spend time with the kids and Yang, and decompress a bit. And the best thing about four day weekends is a three day work week the following week. So on the extra Tuesday I had off, I futzed around a bit, went to IKEA with Yang bought an unassembled chair that is actually comfortable so I can type these blog entries in style. We then planned lunch and immediately dismissed having lunch at IKEA. You might not think lunch and IKEA belong in the same sentence unless you are a termite, yet IKEA lunch is wildly popular here. In fact there were many more people in the IKEA lunch canteen when we left than the actual store. So we decided on a new place, a Belguim restaurant called Morel’s. Morel’s is not new to Beijing, we’ve noticed it since we moved her, but have never tried it. This would be the day. Yang’s friend’s Shirley met us there and for 88 RMB we got a three course meal, choice of beverage (beer, wine, cola), and coffee or tea. I ended up with two poached eggs on toast w/mushroom sauce, penne pasta, and desert. Around us were Europeans speaking French, none too skinny. It was a nice relaxed atmosphere, a fun experience, and reinforcing of why we live here. It made me glad I took the day off work. I noted as much to Yang. She said it was just a normal Tuesday. ...