Christmas in Hong Kong
20 Jan 2012 7 Comments
I don’t know why, maybe there’s a romantic sound to it or something, but I wanted to go to Hong Kong for Christmas. Another one of those, “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” sort of things. Nathan, my bus driving, photo-taking, film-making friend, needed to pick up some film that he had dropped off in Hong Kong earlier in the week, and we were planning to go to a nunnery afterwards and enjoy the ethereal sound of chanting floating over the tranquil grounds. Things started off peacefully enough, after a lazy Christmas morning at home.
Athena retrieving her stocking from the balcony on Christmas morning.
The photo place was closed when we first arrived, and we wandered around a bit looking for lunch. We wound up in an Indonesian restaurant, after a sales critter, speaking comfortably good English convinced us of the great bargains to be had. We took an elevator to the eighth floor and it opened right out onto the restaurant. The restaurant was tastefully put together in deep purples, dark woods, and gold fringes. Athena proceeded to have a minor meltdown. We slowly coaxed her into the booth we’d been seated at. The Indonesian waitstaff smiled toothily at us and looked on with mild interest. Once Athena had calmed down a bit and agreed to sit next to me on the booth, we ordered, with the patient assistance of the waitress, who described in completely incomprehensible English what the dishes on the menu were. We had an incredible meal, despite having little or no clue what we were eating. None of us had ever had Indonesian food before, and now I intend to eat more of it every chance I get.
There was a narrow alleyway that had been turned into a shop just off the road we walked up and down to get to and from the photo place. It seemed to be run by a woman and her husband. Fruit in styrofoam boxes, bottles of water, soft drinks and chips lined the alley walls on low plywood tables. On one side of the entrance to the alley, the woman stood by this little metal stand that had two waffle irons, and a pitcher of batter perched on it, with some evil looking tongs hanging off of its side. Athena wanted to buy cherries, but having no ready means of washing them, and not wanting to have to carry them around all day listening to her caterwaul about not being able to eat them RIGHT NOW, I persuaded her to be content with a waffle-thing. We watched the woman coat the iron with batter, shut it, turn it. Steam escaped. She opened the iron and skillfully loosed what looked like a bit of bubble wrap made out of waffle batter using the evil looking tongs. Athena was quite pleased with it.
After we’d picked up the photos, Athena informed us that today, Christmas Day in Hong Kong, was the day, preordained by the powers of the universe at large, that Athena was going to get her new shoes. Not being entirely aware of what we were in for, Nathan and I said to ourselves, each other and Athena, “OK, we’ll get your shoes, and then we’ll go to the nunnery.” Thus began the shopping expedition that, only by some Christmas miracle, didn’t end with Nathan hopping on the next stateside-bound plane out of Hong Kong.
Athena taking a spin with Santa on his motorcycle.
What Hong Kong on Christmas amounts to is a colossal sale day. First we wandered around in a mall that we could not persuade Athena to leave for a painfully long time. There was every indication that this mall had absolutely nothing catering to the under-five set. We went to another mall and I asked the concierge where to find children’s shoes. We were directed to this monstrous complex known as Harbor City. Imagine all of downtown Seattle as a shopping mall. Now imagine each square foot packed with 13 people, all taking full advantage of the sales. This was Harbor City. Our crowd surfing began in earnest as the daylight receded and we were thrown into a dusky grayness. Lines of people waited outside of Gucci, and other designer stores. Streams of people moved forcefully inside the malls, and once caught up in a stream it was difficult to get back out. Somehow we managed to make it down into the labyrinthine children’s section, where we found a Stride Rite. Athena got her two pairs of shoes.
It was as dark as it ever gets in Hong Kong when we emerged into the open air feeling shell shocked. No nunnery for us. But the terminal for the Star Ferry was at hand, so we rode across Victoria Harbor to Wan Chai, looking at the Christmas lights, and marveling at how choppy the water was.
After a ride on the tram, sating the needs of two transit geeks, we stopped at a Starbucks for a blood sugar boost and then began the journey home. Athena spent most of the ride home playing her version of Rock Paper Scissors with Nathan. Athena would say, “Rock, paper, scissors,” and then watch to see which one Nathan would put down before selecting her own winning hand shape. Then she would laugh mischievously and say, “Let’s play again.”
Christmas lights!
Athena snapped a shot of her new red dress shoes, which she spent the rest of the evening admiring.
Waxing Pathetic
13 Jan 2012 4 Comments
My legs were painfully red, but still attached and mostly hairless after the two women were done. The pot of wax, which had entered the room quite full, was nearly empty. The concept of a bikini wax was completely foreign and repulsive to them, which was just as well. I can’t imagine that the heat lamp method would be any more effective there than it is on one’s legs.
Athena asked if she could have her nails done, and the technicians graciously complied. She picked out red for her fingernails and purple for her toenails. The bottle of purple polish defied all attempts at opening it, and the technician presented Athena with two different colors to choose from, in bottles that would open. Athena was so pleased with herself for getting her nails done by somebody other than her mother, that she put up no fuss about it. They gave us little cups of tea and took lots of pictures of Athena.
We stopped at 7-Eleven on our way back to the apartment, and Athena got a mango Slurpy with a red twisty straw. She slurped happily away, occasionally holding her nails up for inspection, and despite the raw feeling of my butchered legs, I felt that the evening had been a rip roaring success.The Haven of Hong Kong
12 Jan 2012 3 Comments
In the midst of NaNoWriMo and the genesis of the never-ending sinus infection, I got the undeniable urge to get the hell out of Dodge. I wanted to be among Friends of the capital F variety (as in Quakers, for those of you who don’t spend Sundays sitting in silence), and I wanted to have a day off from Mainland China. I decided we would attend the Hong Kong Monthly Meeting of Quakers. Athena and I got up early on a Sunday morning, loaded up the pink Walmart stroller, and set off for the Metro station. I had planned the trip out on the computer, and thought I knew what I was doing and how long it would take to do it. Things were going along fine until they weren’t anymore and Athena was throwing a sort of continual fit of the “I’ve been dragged out of bed too early” variety, and I managed to miss a stop, and become generally flustered. Athena had chosen this day to experiment with the effects of biting me, and was hanging from my hand by her teeth while striking other passengers with her purple polka dotted umbrella.
We were on the right train now but we were running half an hour late, and I was struggling to keep my head from blowing right off. Julian, the clerk of Hong Kong Monthly Meeting, was going to meet us at the station at 10:00. The stress of the situation was mounting in my snot-clogged mind, and by the time I had disengaged Athena from my hand and wrenched the purple polka dotted umbrella from her grasp I was fighting back tears of frustration and general despair. A woman standing next to me, who had boarded the train at the same stop we had, asked me if I was okay. She spoke with an American accent, and had two children with her. “You look like you’re about to cry,” she said, not unkindly.
“That’s because I am,” I said, and promptly burst into tears.
She gave me a hug.
This was not a moment I was expecting to have in the constant hustle and anonymity of Hong Kong, and it was immensely comforting. We talked for the rest of the train ride. She and her husband have five children and attend The Vineyard. They had been running an orphanage somewhere in China up until last year, and are now working with an aid group in Hong Kong. We got off the train at Central together, and she pointed us toward the right exit for Statue Square, where Julian would have been waiting for us forty minutes earlier. I had detailed directions to the Meeting, which is held in the David Kwok Room in the annex of St. John’s Cathedral, in an email from Julian. I carefully read the email on my iPhone and we set off. Athena was somewhat wigged out by what had transpired on the train and not wanting me to burst into tears again, was on her best behavior for the time being. The next time I looked down at my phone to confirm the directions in the email, the email had gone with no hope of retrieval. All that was left of it was a title in the trash. This left us at the Cathedral without much of an idea of how to get to the David Kwok Room. We went into the cathedral bookstore and asked the teenager behind the counter if she knew where the David Kwok Room was. She was sorry, but she didn’t. We wandered around the cathedral. I was trying not to feel frantic and failing miserably.
When I was just about to give up, we stumbled across the annex and there, on a little plaque, was a sign for the David Kwok Room. I bustled Athena and the pink Walmart stroller up what seemed like never-ending flights of stairs, parked the stroller next to the door of the David Kwok Room, took what I could of a deep breath through my painfully congested sinuses, and went through the door.
The room was silent. I took an empty seat in the circle and tried not to sniffle too loudly. Athena proceeded to rummage around in the backpack for snacks and coloring gear. A boy about Athena’s age sat quietly on a couch outside of the circle. I couldn’t quite get my breathing back to normal, and my nose was dripping pitifully. I took out a tissue and pressed it to my nose. Tears worked their way out of my tear ducts. I felt noisy, and sweaty, and gross. Anything but centered.
After all hearts were clear, the tea and coffee emerged and people chatted with each other. Julian introduced himself to me, and mercifully overlooked my tearstained and snot-streaked face. Athena and the boy, Julian’s son JohnJohn, began to play wildly with the cushions from the couches, after having spent the Meeting casting shy, sidelong looks at each other. It rapidly became apparent that Athena and JohnJohn are cut from the same cloth. A group of us went out to lunch at a nice Vietnamese restaurant. Athena and JohnJohn sat next to each other, and kept themselves amused by blowing bits of coconut juice into each other’s hair and sloshing peanut sauce all over the tablecloth. I sat between an American man, who has been living in Hong Kong for well over a decade, and a visiting professor from England. Julian, JohnJohn, Athena, and Jessie, JohnJohn’s mother sat across from me.
Listening to these guys talk was thrilling. I am used to hearing people use presidential administrations as time markers, as in, “Oh, that was during the Reagan years, when ….” Or, “I remember when Kennedy was in the White House, and ….” These guys were using Chinese history as their marker: “Strange times, that was during the Cultural Revolution.” Or, “Oh, after Mao but before Deng.” Julian has been in Hong Kong for verging on two decades. “So you were here for the changeover,” I said, excitedly. “Ah, yes, I was here for the Hangover,” he said, and chuckled. The American described being in Shenzhen during a tour of China he went on as a graduate student in the ’70s, “It was all rice paddies.”
After lunch, Julian and Jessie invited Athena and I to join them for their Sunday outing with JohnJohn, which we happily did. First there was a stop at a coffee shop, the appeal of which was based solely on their offering of blue vanilla gelato. Athena and JohnJohn ate this with gusto, sharing a waffle cone bowl of it. And then we went to the zoo, which is free in Hong Kong. To get to the zoo, we went up the world’s longest escalator. (No … really. It is the world’s longest escalator.)
At the zoo, JohnJohn asked his mother for a Fanta. Athena went over to the stand where Jessie had bought the Fanta and noticed that they had the same kind of Lifesaver popsicles we had gotten on our previous expedition to Hong Kong. She was very excited, so I got one for her and one for me. JohnJohn, who had contentedly been slurping away on his Fanta, caught sight of Athena with her Lifesaver popsicle, and exclaimed, “Mummy! Mummy! I want a colorful ice lolly too!”
JohnJohn managed to get quite a bit of his colorful ice lolly drizzled down the front of his shirt, and it was deemed necessary that they go back to their apartment for a change of clothes. Athena and I were invited to join them. We all piled into a taxi. Athena and I were ushered up to their rooftop garden, which Julian tends with great devotion. Pots of roses and bougainvilleas and plants that I don’t know the name of (being botanically rather illiterate) line the walls of the roof, creating a little oasis in the urban jungle. Athena was exhausted, so she cuddled up on my lap while we watched JohnJohn ride his new bike around and around the palm tree that serves as centerpiece to the garden. The children had chocolate milk, and we drank tea and munched on nuts and dried fruit for a snack.
I needed a haircut and had been planning on stopping by the place in Causeway Bay where Billy works his magic. Julian said that there was a salon just underneath the apartment, and that, as he needed a haircut himself, we could take the kids and go down there together. Which we did. Athena and JohnJohn terrorized the hairdressers, corralling all of the stools in the hair-washing room and locking the bathroom door with the key still inside, while Julian and I had our hair cut. It was fantastic.
Athena and I left for Shenzhen that night feeling restored. I had been nearing the end of my rope here. Frustrated with teaching, and parenting, and the day-to-day difficulties presented by living in a country that runs on little pieces of paper and red-inked rubber stamps. It was a reality check of the best kind.
The colorful ice lolly from our previous trip. I didn't manage any pictures on our first venture to Meeting, and the camera was set on "video," so Athena didn't manage any still shots either.
Nogogo
07 Jan 2012 4 Comments
“Hello, White-knee?” She speaks in a husky voice with unintentional Valley Girl overtones, and without waiting for an answer she continues, “This is Helen from Nogogo.” I manage a sort of salutary grunt while experiencing a flashback to being called “Whitey” by my sixth-grade classmates, most of whom were African-American, after they discovered that my first name is Whitney. Helen goes on to tell me that they are out of Frosted Mini-Wheats but they’ve got a bunch of Banana Nut Cheerios, or that they don’t have the Progresso Chicken Rice and Vegetable soup but they do have Tomato Basil soup, wouldn’t I like to switch to that? I get these calls just about once a week, when I order from Nogogo, Shenzhen’s answer to Amazon Fresh. Athena and I don’t use cow’s milk, and Nogogo is the easiest way to get hold of fortified soy milk, so when we’ve been eating dry cereal for a day or so, I go online and order.
I look forward to my weekly chats with Helen. Last week she called me three times, making discovery after discovery about the unavailability of various items in my order. When we order from Nogogo, I usually get chocolate cupcakes for Athena and me. They are sold as “Chocolate Muffins,” but there is nothing muffin-like about them. So last week I ordered the chocolate muffins and after a while, Helen called. “Hello, White-knee?” She drawled, “This is Helen from Nogogo.” She told me they could only send one chocolate muffin my way, and wouldn’t I like to also try raisin muffins? Oh, sure, why not? She called back fifteen minutes later, “Hello, White-knee?” The routine started again. We negotiated about cereal for a while and she hung up. Five minutes later my phone rang again. “Hello, White-knee?” I was in near-hysterics at this point, and wanted to echo her accent and cadence back with “Hello, Hell-ahn?” but refrained. It turned out that they didn’t have any chocolate muffins, and only two raisin muffins. I said to send them on over.
Later that night, Athena and I were sitting in the apartment watching my bus-driving, photo-taking, film-making friend, Nathan, who was here visiting from Seattle, scorch some rice for dinner, when the outer metal door of my apartment rattled fiercely. I opened the door to the Nogogo delivery guy for our enthusiastic exchange of Hellos and Nihaos. He handed me the groceries, I handed him the money, and there was a flourish of Bye-byes and cheerful waving.Nathan, Athena and I set about investigating the raisin muffins. They looked like they were trying to crawl out of their wrappings, blobs of sickly yellow not-quite-muffins forming strange Kewpie-inspired swirls that reached out to us imploringly. Nathan looked disturbed, and Athena vehemently declared that she wasn’t going to eat one of those. We ate dinner with them sitting on the table out of the same compulsion that makes one stare at the snakes in the reptile house. After finishing dinner, Nathan gingerly tore off a very small piece of the “muffin” and handed it to me to try. I hesitated and then, deciding to get it over with quickly, popped it in my mouth and chewed. It tasted like a very plasticky, eggy yellow cake and contained no hint of raisins. Watching my reaction, Nathan quietly set the piece that he had torn off for himself back on the table.
Nathan left for Seattle the next day, leaving his raisin muffin untouched on the kitchen counter. I sat down with it, determined to find out if there was any reason to call it a raisin muffin. I gallantly ate through to the very bottom of the little sickly yellow cake and discovered five of the tiniest raisins I’ve ever seen. I am looking forward to the return of the chocolate not-remotely-a-muffin.
The Never Ending Sinus Infection
08 Dec 2011 9 Comments
There is a rapidly expanding family of cockroaches living in my laptop, giving new meaning to the idea of one’s electronics being bugged. I think they must like the warmth the computer provides, especially now that the temperature has actually dropped. It has been sampling the 40s at night for the past few days, providing an explanation for the quilted pajamas and electric blankets I saw on our last journey to Walmart. The bugs trip around on my computer, scurrying beneath the keys, trotting out of the fans as they fire up. I squish some of them. Some of them are too fast to catch up with. When Athena is awake and watching she points at them as they meander up the screen, “Bug, Mom, bug! Squish it! Squish it! Squish it!” This is when she is not busy building what she tells me are apartment complexes for the bugs to live in out of clothespins or purposefully dropping a bit of her dinner on the floor so the bugs won’t get too hungry. When I spill something, she says, “Oh, don’t worry about it, the bugs will get it,” like I used to tell her when we were living in a house with dogs that really would come and get it. The bugs probably don’t bother me as much as they should. I find them kind of fascinating.
On the eve of the launch of NaNoWriMo, I launched into what seems to be a never ending sinus infection. I am no stranger to sinus infections, and frequently I can get over them by rinsing my sinuses out and avoiding foods with milk. But this infection dragged on through all of November, and all hope of squelching it on my own vanished. With prompting from my mother, who looked like she was maybe going to crawl through the Skype connection to throttle me if I didn’t get a move on, I faced my fears of medical treatment in general and going to a Chinese hospital in particular, and proceeded with a visit to the doctor. I asked the Amazing Ayi for help on Monday, not being in any way up to deciphering the process on my own. Athena came with us, getting to satisfy her inexplicable and frequently expressed desire to go to a hospital. The AA called the Beijing University Hospital before we left the apartment. They said that they weren’t giving out numbers for appointments anymore, so we flipped through my copy of The Comprehensive Shenzhen Pocket Guide (which has handy sections on pretty much every aspect of expat life in Shenzhen) until the AA spotted an acceptable hospital to try. She called the Second People’s Hospital of Shenzhen, and they said that yes, they were still giving out numbers. We piled into a taxi and were off.
The hospital was teeming with people. A man walked by me with his neck completely wrapped in gauze sticking up from his stripped hospital pajamas. He looked like a Dr. Seuss character. We went to the registration desk and the AA gave them a form with my name, gender, and chief complaint on it. The registrar’s reluctance to believe that I am a woman sent the AA and I into a bout of hysterical laughter. Athena was quite taken with the nurses in their cute uniforms. They have not abandoned the starched winged affairs of the variety worn by my grandmother when she graduated from nursing school in the 40s, though the nurses here sport uniforms in pastel pink and blue, and some of them wear big red sashes with yellow characters emblazoned on them a la Miss America.
I paid the registrar roughly US$1.00 and we were sent to the Ear, Nose and Throat department where we took a number from another winged nurse and sat down to wait. I watched other patients wandering by carrying printouts of pictures that had just been taken of their ears, noses and throats. The AA looked more closely at the ticket that the winged nurse gave us and we moved to some seats by the door of the examining room I’d been assigned to.
We went in after another patient tottered out clutching pictures of her ear, nose and throat. The AA told the doctor that I have a sinus infection. The doctor motioned for me to sit down. I did. She pulled a reflective metal thing that looked like a miniature satellite dish with a hole in its middle over her eye, scooted forward, put some instrument up my nose and took a look. Then she looked at my throat. She grimaced, shook her head, and said, “How long?” “A month,” I answered. Her grimace deepened into a scowl. She made a few notes on my chart, wrote a prescription for a killer course of antibiotics, and told me to come back if I wasn’t feeling better in a week. We went to the cashier and I paid roughly US$40.00 for my antibiotics. I then watched as the AA negotiated the lines at the pharmacy, behind a bank of windows adjacent to the bank of windows the cashiers sit behind. I noticed that other sick people had come with someone else to help them make it through the lines, too. You have to be very hawkish about getting your order into the pharmacist, as your place in line doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’ll get a turn at the window if you’re not aggressive about it.
The smell and taste of antibiotics now permeates my whole head, and I feel as if I could sleep for a week.
Pile-o-pills ... Mmmm.
Return from NaNoLand
06 Dec 2011 7 Comments
I have made it through NaNoWriMo very nearly unscathed. I am a winner! Athena got really excited when I told her this, and even more excited that we were going out for dinner to celebrate. She asked me if I had written my novel faster than everyone else, if that’s why I was a winner. I explained that in NaNoWriMo you’re a winner when you finish. She seemed mildly disappointed but regained her high spirits when she asked if we could go to RBT for dinner and I said yes. RBT is home to the large, green-blue, jelly-laden monster of a smoothie that is garnished with popcorn and a sprig of fresh mint.
There is a little gift-wrapping place just outside of the RBT in Book City, one of the countless malls that dots the city, and they had a sign hanging above what looked suspiciously like a printer. The sign said, in English, that they provide business services. Athena and I sauntered over to the desk after our dinner and I pulled out my thumb drive. I awkwardly said, “Nihao,” for that is really the only way to speak Chinese, awkwardly, and then asked in English, “Do you print?” while waving the thumb drive around and pointing at the printer-looking thing. The woman nodded. I handed her the thumb drive and sat down across from her at the desk on this darling little orange swivel stool. Athena sat in the Pink Walmart Stroller next to the stool. The woman plugged the thumb drive in and we bounced our heads around in the universal sign for “Waiting for things to load on the computer.” I glanced down to find that the Pink Walmart Stroller and its occupant had vanished from my side. Swiveling on the stool I located Athena, who was nudging herself along with the toe of one of her Crocs. I got up and pushed her back to the counter. I pointed to the document that I wanted printed on the thumb drive and the woman opened it. It took a while to load. Athena abandoned the stroller and began running laps, sprinting up a ramp and then jumping down the four stairs at the entrance to the mall behind me. The woman’s eyes bulged, threatening to fall right out of her head when she saw the length of the document I wanted to print. She called her colleague over and they spoke to each other for a while about the crazy white woman sitting in front of them. Athena executed another flying leap from the top of the stairs, landing gracefully at the bottom.
“All?” the colleague asked.
“Yes, please,” I nodded.
A flourish of consultation, and then, “Two-sided or one? Because …” and she pointed at the page number (194) in the corner of the document.
“One-sided,” I said confidently, wondering if there is some reverse Heimlich maneuver that one uses to stuff peoples eyes back into their sockets. They gulped and started giggling as the first woman executed the command to print on the computer. The other brought over the first page of the behemoth print job for my appraisal. I nodded approvingly and the women left, giggling inanely, to watch the printer spew out page after page. At one point they both scurried to a cupboard to get another ream of paper, and, giggling nervously, loaded the paper tray with it.
I now have a satisfyingly thick manuscript sitting on the only shelf in the apartment that is too high for Athena to reach, or really even notice.
Wingless Fairies and Drunken Englishmen
14 Nov 2011 12 Comments
Athena snapped a shot of her beloved but now empty swimming pool.
Athena and I watched the draining of the swimming pool in our apartment complex, more poetically referred to as a “Garden” by the Chinese, at the end of September. This ended our nightly swims, much to Athena’s chagrin and my ill-concealed relief. When we walk to our Metro station, Xiangmihu, we cut through the courtyard in our Garden, and Athena always trots up the steps to the gate of the pool to check on the water level, or lack thereof. There is something a little disconcerting about seeing this gaping, unnaturally blue chasm sitting there. Swimming pools full of water are creepy enough: the eery reflections of lamplight, the uncomfortable feeling of wearing a swimsuit in public, and that unshakeable childhood fear of there being a resident shark. Yesterday afternoon we saw some boys skateboarding in it.
Two weeks ago I was told that Athena was supposed to start wearing her kindergarten’s winter uniform, despite the temperature’s disinclination to dip much below 80 degrees. I dutifully stuff her into her long-sleeved blue shirt, and black pants with blue accents on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and her long-sleeved pink shirt on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I was expecting some protest from her, but Athena has acclimated to the tropics and the the odd phenomenon of humans imposing the seasons of a temperate climate where there are none. I am inclined to think that this comes of Shenzhen being a newer city. Millions of people have not been living here since the dawn of time. In fact, the city has only really taken off in the past few decades, and all of the people who have moved here have brought their seasonal wardrobe changes with them. It is now very much autumn in the estimation of Shenzhen’s population and Athena, making it difficult to prevent her from wearing tights and sweaters when we go out. I am afraid she’ll overheat. My arguments against sweaters and tights are weakened by no longer being able to use, “Look outside, nobody else is wearing sweaters and tights.”
The temperature has almost caught up to the people’s wardrobe now. Almost. Really, we are in jeans-and-t-shirt-with-the-occasional-hoody temperature bracket, which makes the babies dressed for winter in Siberia and women wearing fur stoles still a tad ridiculous. The Culture Club occupies one of the storefronts in our building. It is a place for people to come and practice their English, and listen to music that was at the height of its popularity while I was in 6th grade. There is an Englishman at The Culture Club with a Tsingtao beer permanently attached to his hand. He gave me a rundown of what to expect weatherwise while swaying slightly in his chair and wafting the scent of all of the other Tsingtao beers that have resided in his fist over the past however long he’s been living in Shenzhen. It’ll be in the mid 60s and low 70s until January, when it’ll dip down to something that actually passes for cold for a couple of weeks. “If you’re from Seattle, you’ll have no trouble,” he hiccuped. Then the Drunken Englishman fixed his gaze to a point just above my left shoulder and turned the conversation to the issue of health insurance. “If you don’t have some, you really ought to get some,” he took another swig, “this guy didn’t have any and he got meningitis and two days later, well, he’s dead.” I nod seriously and say that I have to go pick my daughter up from kindergarten, and begin walking towards the pedestrian overpass, thinking to myself that it was the meningitis that killed the man, not the lack of health insurance. As I walk over the flow of traffic on Hongli Road, I find that I am touching my chin to my chest to prove to myself that I am not, in fact, showing symptoms of meningitis, and wonder about the Drunken Englishman’s credibility when it comes to predicting the weather.
A fleeting glimpse of my wingless purple fairy.
Athena dressed up as a wingless purple fairy for my school’s Halloween party two weeks ago Thursday. We had gone to Wal-Mart and bought pink fairy wings and what turned out to be very thick and oily face paint Wednesday night. Evidently it was in vain, however, as Athena refused to wear the wings and after looking at my handiwork with the face paint on her face, asked me to wash it off. She spent most of the party running manic loops around the parade ground. The thick oily face paint has now been painted across the set of drawers we keep Athena’s clothes in and all over the wardrobe I keep my clothes in. Athena has been going on these incredible mess-making rampages on Saturdays while the Amazing Ayi is staying with her. This means that I don’t see the full extent of the messes, as they’ve mostly been cleaned up by the time I get home, but instead get a rundown of the havoc that has been wreaked in my absence. “She,” the Amazing Ayi sputters while pointing at markers, or face paint, or boxes of cereal, and making frantic scribbling, painting and dumping motions, “she, she.” After the Amazing Ayi departs, Athena and I go on a walkthrough of the apartment. Athena points out all of the damage she has done, and I ask her why she felt so compelled. She is contrite as she tells me that she “just likes making messes.” At least she’s honest.
I much prefer this mess-making to the cereal box emptying variety.
Mailbox Magic
03 Nov 2011 4 Comments
 Our building is the round one. Today, on my way back from a sanity-restoring trip to our local Starbucks, I stopped in the lobby of my building and opened my mailbox. As I fitted the key into the lock, turned it, opened the little metal door, and took out the junk mail that was lying in wait there, a joie de vivre washed over me. Only a week ago, I could only retrieve mail by snaking my hand into the box through the uncomfortably small gap between the door and the top of the box, pressing the mail against the IKEA catalogue that defied removal, and slowly sliding it towards the door. Then I would painstakingly slip a finger under the edge of one or two envelopes at a time and work it out through the gap. I was unable to do any of this prior to the delivery of the IKEA catalogue. On our first night in Shenzhen, the woman at my school who is (rather reluctantly) in charge of helping us manage daily life in China showed Athena and I into our one bedroom apartment, gave me the key to the exterior metal door of my apartment and a key card for the building. She admonished me to not lose the key, turned on the air conditioner and left us to our own devices. I quickly discovered my inability to access my mailbox, and started asking her for the key. After more than two months of asking after the key, she finally contacted my landlord, who helpfully suggested I get the lock on the mailbox changed as he didn’t have a key for it either. Just before the seven-day National Day break, Athena and I hired the Amazing Ayi (ayi means “auntie”). She works for another family at the school, and had time in her schedule to fit in taking care of Athena on Saturday mornings. When she arrived at my apartment on that first Saturday, things were an absolute mess. As any of you who have ever stepped into a room I’ve inhabited for longer than a day, or a car I’ve been driving for more than 4 or 5 hours knows, my ability to keep anything clean is pretty much nonexistent. There should have been the sound of heavenly arpeggios being strummed on a harp after she entered the apartment. Within a matter of minutes, the dishes were clean, the bed was made, and the laundry was started. This was all before I managed to make it out the door to work. The woman is a miracle worker. She is about my age, very intent on improving her English, and determined that I will learn Chinese. While I am only improving in comprehension, her speaking and comprehension seem to improve in leaps and bounds; her efforts to learn English and teach me Chinese facilitate our communication nicely. When faced with the problem of having the lock on my mailbox changed— “Maybe you can ask the guards at your building,” the woman from the school nonchalantly suggested before quickly disappearing out the open door of the International Section office—I decided that the Amazing Ayi was my best bet. The guards are legion in China, manning various booths and desks in pretty much every apartment complex, school, department store, etc., and sporting spiffy police-like uniforms and red armbands emblazoned with bright yellow characters asserting their authority. The Amazing Ayi spoke with the one of the guards at my building’s front entrance, and then called around to some locksmiths, gleefully haggling with people. It turned out that my building has a deal with a locksmith, and I was able to hire him, with the Amazing Ayi’s assistance, for a fraction of the price of the rest of the locksmiths. Of course, one is only able to find out about the existence of this competitively priced locksmith if one pesters the guards for a few days running, as I believe the Amazing Ayi did. The locksmith put on a grand performance in the same vein as the watch repairman, and the hair stylist. There were two guards on duty when he showed up, and they both abandoned their post at the front door to smoke and watch the locksmith artfully pop the old lock out of my mailbox and install the new one. One of the guards, who is rather toad-like in physique but very friendly in disposition, ran an appreciative hand over the removed lock, and made impressed noises at the quick work that was made of the job. I made appreciative noises, handed over what amounted to a little over $2 US, and cleaned out about 9 months of mail from my now accessible mailbox. I guess the key has been missing for quite some time. |
NaNoWriMo
25 Oct 2011 Leave a Comment
 National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, is nearly upon us. Every November, thousands of people who have been bitten by the creative bug hunker down at their computers, typewriters, notepads, rolls of parchment, and papyrus scrolls, to pound out 50,000 word flights of literary fancy. WriMos, as we are frequently referred to, sign up for NaNoWriMo at http://nanowrimo.org, and find hours of fun procrastination in the forums and chat rooms there, as well as a place to verify our word counts and, come November 30, win. The goal is to produce 50,0000 words, roughly 175 pages of your own original novel. When your word count is verified at or above 50,0000, you win. If you think that 50,000 words couldn’t possibly be long enough to be a novel, think of Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or Fight Club, and think again. The month acts as a sort of creative kick in the pants, and can help one develop, what is commonly referred to as “The Writing Habit.” It is not a writing competition in the traditional sense, nobody reads what you produce, and there is no second place. I did NaNoWriMo last November, and had a great time producing a tragedy of a first draft, which is still haunting my computer. I get it out and hack at it every once in a while for grins. Well, I had such a good time with it last year, that I’ve decided to do it again this year. The Office of Letters and Light, which puts on NaNoWriMo, also puts on Script Frenzy in April, during which, you guessed it, participants write a script in the month of April, and two Camp NaNoWriMos during the summer. NaNoWriMo was kicked off in 1999, and has continued to grow over the past decade and a bit. They have write-ins in many cities around the world that are organized by Municipal Liasons and allow WriMos the opportunity to meet equally crazy people and write together. The Office of Letters and Light also provides materials for creative writing classes and workshops in schools and libraries across the US. And they have a young writers program that encourages teens to funnel their angst into poetry and prose instead of into empty vodka bottles. All in all, I think it is a stand-up organization, and I would like to do my part to support it. Or rather, I’d like you all to do my part to support it. WriMos can set up sponsorship pages for their month of literary abandon, which is exactly what I’ve done. If you’d like to help support NaNoWriMo, and encourage me in my novel writing efforts, please visit http://www.stayclassy.org/fundraise?fcid=128997, and break out the plastic. Or, perhaps you’d like to join me in the literary fit of November. If you’ve had a novel idea kicking around in your head for awhile, even if you haven’t and just think it sounds like fun, I encourage you to sign up and, come November 1st, start writing! |
Writing Assignments and Watch Repair
24 Oct 2011 2 Comments
Every week I come up with two overly ambitious writing projects to subject my students to, one for my second graders, and one for my third graders. This week I had my second graders write their own stories, and my third graders write their own journal entries. The concept of writing your own story was relatively easy to communicate, and I had a few students get pretty into it. Vinson wrote about a monkey trying to take the moon out of the sky, only to discover that he was fishing around in a well. And Tommy wrote about a cat and a dog who were not friends. The last illustration of his story showed the cat’s tail protruding from the dog’s mouth, and he ended the story with a zinger of a last sentence: “Dog eat cat.”
The journal entry project was a bit stickier. It took about half an hour to explain it well enough that not all of my students’ eyes were glazed over. We read two examples from the textbook, and I showed them my journal and explained that I write an entry in it every night, telling what happened to me that day. After I saw the lightbulb of understanding go off for a few students, I prowled amongst the rows trying to get them to put pen to paper. Sometime it’s hard to tell whether my students aren’t doing the assignment because they honestly haven’t understood a word coming out of my mouth, or because they are simply resisting doing any more written work. Jessica got rather excited when she glommed onto the meaning of “You can write about anything,” and wrote about two boys who had been fighting in her class that day. I got rather excited when she turned to her classmate to ask what “ma” means in English. “Ma” is the syllable that is used in every Chinese textbook I’ve encountered thus far to demonstrate the importance of the four tones in determining meaning in Chinese, so I knew that it could mean “mother,” “hemp,” “horse,” or “to scold.” Given the context of the girl’s journal entry, I knew it had to mean “to scold.” I was devilishly pleased with myself as I spelled it out for her.
Athena's rockstar hairdo.
While I was trying to extract journal entries from 3rd graders, Athena had another dance performance at school. I hope that I get to see at least one of her performances while we’re here. I picked her up on Friday and found her hair done up in two fluffy, teased out buns. Her eyelids glittered with stage makeup, and her eyes glittered with excitement as a description of the “big yellow thing” that she had worn for the show bubbled out of her.
My watch stopped at the beginning of this week. I left its poor, silent, motionless body in the apartment and relied on my phone for the time. My wrist felt naked, and I found myself glancing down at it frequently to check the time, only to read the engraved message on my bracelet, live in the moment. By Wednesday I couldn’t shake the feeling that my bracelet was mocking me. Yesterday, finally having enough time to embark on getting the watch fixed, Athena and I set out for the little watch repair booth I’d noticed on the way to this labyrinthine market that Athena loves. I think in her mind this market represents the mothership of all thrift stores, and she loves pawing through the large stacks of clothes and whatnot. The whole place feels like it’s fallen off the back of a truck to me.
Athena was fascinated by the watch battery replacement process. The watch repairman sat in a booth behind a window, jeweler’s loupe screwed firmly to his eye. There was one man getting his watch repaired, and a large group of people standing around watching the repairman work. There always seem to be large groups of people gathered around to watch people work, which results in the work becoming a kind of performance. When he was done with the man’s watch, the repairman held his hand out through a slit in the window to take my watch. His movements were full of grace and precision, but he was still able to make each step of the process into a big production: taking the back off of the watch, fishing the battery out, putting a new one in, putting the back on again. It was like a dance. He handed me the bill, I handed him the money, he handed me the watch. I strapped it onto my wrist and immediately felt like a whole person again.
