Family

I’m home after a short trip to the states and feeling pretty jet lagged. Ready to collapse. In the middle of this fog my son stands in the middle of the living room and performs a Peking opera song. I am a bit perplexed. I figure I am hallucinating or this is what he learned at school. I wonder how much of his school time is was dedicated to it. I think the hallucination might be the better root cause. Then I smile, thinking it is better than the song he learned before I went off to the states. The song that ended with “down with the american imperialists” or some such thing. Peking Opera is this super high pitched singing which allowed the songs to travel down the small alley ways of Beijing. Two nights later Aidan performs more Peking Opera this time sans singing. Not a huge loss on that front. ...

We are driving north towards what I call the “mega spa”. I refer to it as the “mega spa” because I don’t know its actual name. Not in English or Chinese. It is slightly north of the 6th ring road and will take us about 30 minutes to drive there. Our new GPS is telling us that I need to take the off ramp 4K ahead. Then 2K. Then now. It is remarkably precise…or so it seems…being it talks in Chinese I can’t actually tell. Yang bought me the GPS for fathers day but since all the instructions were in Chinese it sat around on a counter until Yang had time to set it up. Yang has had other things on her mind and in her womb recently. ...

I head out on a run (or as I like to call it – accelerated walking) and realize it is about time from Aidan and Lydia to get out of school. It is the rare workday that I am home early and an even rarer Friday. I had been in training across town and decided to work from home when a repeated wrong number call woke me up from my cat nap. In any case, I decided to run to the school to see if I could catch Aidan and Lydia. I walked into the playground and wandered a bit when Aidan came running up holding his jump rope. The one with a pink tint which seems weird. He gave me a demo of his jump roping skills. I think he made 10 loops. ...

I am driving. Aidan, Lydia, Elisa, and the mother in law unit are in the back seat. Yang is in the passenger seat. There is some type of conversation going on about the weather. I haven’t showered and somehow have ended up wearing with a black polo sweat shirt with dark blue sweats. My hair is uncombed, my face not just unshaven but unevenly unshaven. It is just then that I think this is an all together different type of expat life that most folks sign up for. ...

Aidan is starting to see my flaws and Lydia is starting to see my values. I’ll call this progress. During our vacation Aidan noticed a toy gumball machine. One of those put in a quarter, turn the handle a few times, and a round hard piece of gum drops down. But in this case, the gumball machine was not dropping gum, but rather small plastic egg enclosed toys. And it wanted four quarters, not one. Aidan is a bit of a toy addict and as soon as he spotted the pokemon gumball machine he was asking for me to buy him one. I first told him no, too expensive. Then I told him I didn’t have four quarters. He protested, at which point I showed him all the coins in my pocket. The problem being that I actually did have four quarters. So, now I was stuck buying the toy. But the pokemon gumball machine was jammed, it would not take my quarters. Aidan wanted me to try anyway, I tried to show him that it was broken. He settled for another toy from a neighboring gumball machine. ...

I’m sitting alone in our Beijing apartment having just returned from a two week US vacation. It feels large and empty and they dryer takes a long time. Yang and the kids remain in Fremont for a few more days. We headed out on our vacation with some trepidation. We are not used to watching the three kids by ourselves and it must be said that the main worry in this regard was me. In our 3.5 years in Beijing, I’ve cooked three times, done laundry 4-5 times, changed at most a half dozen diapers, given the kids a dozen baths, and washed dishes maybe once. It is a hard life, I know. Another worry we had was that one of the kids might get sick as they have on past trips. ...

Sometimes it feels like I live in a commune. Shortly before Elisa was born, three goldfish appeared in a small fish bowl in our bedroom. I’m not sure how they got there and I didn’t ask. Last Saturday morning at 6am, Aidan came into the bedroom, woke me up, and with sheer glee taped a drawing he made onto the wall. There are now drawings of his all about the house. The drawings are remarkable for two reasons. First, they don’t show a lot of…how do we say…talent. Second, they are happy pictures drawn by a damn happy boy. I never used to buy into the thinking that pictures drawn by a child give some deep insight into the child’s mental health. I thought they more or less just demonstrated what crayons the kid had that day or some random thought in his mind that had nothing to do what we adults consider happy or sad. ...

Well, I was thinking of making the switch to soy anyway. Best I can tell, here’s the deal, and its a bad deal. Dairy farmers were adding melamine to their milk in order to fetch a decent price. It might be because their milk was of low quality to begin with or because they were adding water to it. In either case, melamine helps give the appearance of higher protein, hence higher quality milk. This makes it really bad news, as the problem now lies at the source and all dairy products are implicated. ...

It is mid autumn festival day here and Yang says we should go out as a family some place. I guess it is tradition that we go look at the moon. And the nice thing is that with all the pollution controls still in place, we can see the orange moon clearly to the east. So we head to the new Solana Mall, to walk along its eastern most edge, where the modern shops and bars meet the lake at Chaoyang park. ...

Somehow one month has passed since Elisa was born. It passed so fast it seems memories could hardly be formed, yet formed they were. It passed so fast that one could be mistake the two points in time connected as one. It passed so fast that I never did take that extra time off of work. It passed so fast that the magic 42 days is almost here. It passed so fast that Yang was overheard wondering out loud “why stop at three?”. Because three’s damn plenty, that’s why. It passed so fast we barely noticed Elisa grow, but grow she did. ...