Ghost Town

A good number of expat families in China's bigger cities live in housing developments that are almost exclusively populated by expats. These places tend to have houses or town houses that are roughly comparable in size to US or European houses and have lawns, garages etc. That makes them vastly different than your typical housing for the average Chinese citizen. We live in one of these places. The residents are probably 40% American, 40% European, 10% other non-Asian country citizens (Australia, New Zealand, Latin American countries) and 10% Hong Kong, Korean or very successful local Chinese. Japanese expats tend to live in their own expat compounds. These compounds are almost always 95% plus Japanese. With very few exceptions, the husband of the expat families in these compounds works while the wife stays at home with school-age children. Almost all the children go to international schools whose calendars mirror those of the European or American systems that they are based on. The summer months in places like ours are a bit eerie because almost everybody clears out. When school lets out for the summer almost all the wives and children go back to where they are from for four to eight weeks. In the case of Europeans, the husbands will also often check out for three weeks. During the warmer months of the school year the streets are just a giant playground of kids kicking soccer balls, riding bikes, skateboards and scooters etc. when you come home from work. Summer is exactly the opposite. The month of July tends to be particularly desolate.

I haven't seen a person under the age of 18 in our compound for over a month. The men seem to just work a lot or hole up in their houses after work. Most days during the summer I feel like I've stumbled into an episode of The Twilight Zone where I go to work and while I'm gone all the residents of my neighborhood have been abducted by aliens, killed by some mysterious pestilence or have fled after an announcement of a pending Godzilla attack which I somehow missed. I'll go out for walks in the evening and find myself wandering empty streets in 95°/95% weather where it's just me and a zillion buzzing cicadas.

Anyway, these are some pictures of a recent evening. There aren't even many cars on most of these streets. Spooky!

Rabbits

Abby wants a rabbit. She keeps telling us that her friend Sheng Yi is going to give her one soon. She knows that we aren’t too keen on a pet at this point and we know that she’s determined to get one. Neither of Jenny or I want to be directly confrontational so we keep throwing up roadblocks in an attempt to discourage her. She calmly takes our comments under advisement and counters after a while. It’s this sort of understated battle of wits. Imagine the following extended over a 2-3 day period.

Abby: Sheng Yi said she will bring a me a rabbit on Friday.

Parents: Isn’t that what she said last Friday?

Abby: Yes. (No further comment, previous failures to deliver apparently being irrelevant)

Parents: How can we get a rabbit when we’ll be out of town for a few weeks in the summer? Who will feed him?

Abby: Our friends.

Parents: They’ll be away too.

Abby: We can let him eat 2 weeks worth of food the day before we leave.

Parents: That won’t fit in his stomach.

Abby: We can put a pile of food in the backyard and he can eat at his leisure.

Parents: What about water?

Abby: We can fill up the little plastic pool.

Parents: He can’t climb up to drink it.

Abby: We can lean a board up to the edge.

Etc…

Jenny finally had to intervene and have the kindergarten teacher ask Sheng Yi if she was really going to give Abby a rabbit, to which she calmly said “no”.

In any case, I’ve got a hunch we’ll be getting a rabbit sometime soon anyway. We had a few when we were young and they were a lot less demanding than dogs or cats. We just let them run around in the backyard. They basically mowed down all the vegetation less than a foot high, but my sister and I thought they were great.

Swimming

This is the swimming pool in our subdivision at about 7am on a weekday. I swim here once in a while and I have never ever seen anyone in this pool before work. Unlike the local YMCA in the US, there is no crowded time or sharing of lanes. You can swim diagonally across the pool or just spend a few minutes before work doing cannonballs if you want.

I think running is boring but swimming is boring². It’s like running with no Ipod in an endless monochrome tunnel. Plus you get wet. Jenny, who was a big swimmer growing up in the East Bay area of San Francisco where competitive swimming is pretty popular, says that I’m missing the point since it’s a good time to think – aerobic exercise with an enforced zen state. Now I’m no enemy of Eastern mysticism, but it just doesn’t work that way for me. You can’t even talk to yourself. I suppose you can in your head, and while that may make you look less crazy, I have always found imaginary conversations in which you impress your boss or friends with your razor sharp wit to be much more satisfying when conducted orally.

Jenny always accuses me of having this sour grapes attitude because I’m a bad swimmer. I don’t disagree. Its not that I can’t swim, but I apparently look weird doing it. Once I got the basics down at the age of 5 or 6, I never really had any further lessons, let alone a critic of my swimming form. I apparently pull harder with one arm than another. This doesn’t surprise me. When I first moved to South Beach in 1999, I’d go down to the beach once in a while to swim in the morning before work. I would set out to swim parallel to the beach for a few blocks, but after a few minutes of chugging along in my goofball style, I’d pop my head up and find out that I was further away from shore and headed in the opposite direction. I was swimming in circles, which makes sense if you’ve got one strong arm. Since I turned 12 and got bored of swimming in our pool, most of my swimming time has been limited to the swimming that goes on in surfing. That’s a different kind of swimming since you have a wetsuit on, which sort of floats you, and you’re tethered to your board by a leash. Surfing swimming is alternately mellow as you drift around during dull flat water intervals or a frantic survival effort as you try paddle to avoid getting smashed by big wave whitewaters, which, if not avoided, give you a good feel for what it must be like to be a dirty sock inside of a washing machine.

Here I mainly swim in the pool before we go on a vacation to a place where I can go surfing, which since our move to China has been a surprisingly large number of places. If you don’t do this as an almost 40 year old, I find that your upper arms just get killed, even on a very long board. So, just as I floss pretty regularly about 2 weeks before a dentist appointment to avoid the wrath of the hygienist, I swim for about 2 weeks before a surf opportunity to minimize the dirty sock in the washing machine treatment.

China Standard Time

This is a rough time of year in China for anyone who likes it really dark when they sleep. While China is roughly similar in size to the continental U.S., China has only one time zone versus the four in the U.S. There is also no day light savings time. I'm told that they had day light savings time at one point, but it apparently caused too much confusion in the countryside so they discontinued it. So it’s one time everywhere all the time in China. The good thing is you never have to change your watch no matter where you are in the country and you don’t have to remember “spring forward, fall back”. The bad thing is that it gets light at about 4:45am right now, which drives me crazy. I’ve taken to wearing the eyeshades you use on the plane on trans-Pacific flights. When we lived in the Netherlands, it was the opposite issue – it stayed light until almost 11pm. For me that was much better, since you could actually enjoy the long days after work. The only time I take any advantage of the early, early sunrises is when I’m in the jet-laggy week that follows a US trip and I’m waking up at 4am anyway. I’ll go for the occasional 5am walk. Not much action at that hour, except you can faintly hear the soldiers at a base nearby shouting out their marching songs in early morning drills.

Jackaroo

On Friday I had a funny lost in translation event.

I got an email from a Chinese business acquaintance who had recommended a potential summer intern to us. We interviewed her, were impressed and hired her. She and I actually chatted about James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which is an absolutely bizarre topic during an interview for an internship with a Chinese logistics company, but I admit that it was one of the more interesting interviews I've done recently.

In any case, afterwards, my acquaintance, who speaks even less English than I do Chinese if you can believe that, wrote me the following short email in English. She must have either got help from a friend or used one of the internet translation programs. I quote:

Dear Chris,

Thank you for accepting Miss Pan as a jackaroo in your company.

Sincerely yours

Tang Li Li

All I can say is that it never hurts to have an extra jackaroo on staff, particularly one who can talk to you about James Joyce.

Shanghai in bloom

Shanghai isn't alive with green space, but it has some nice little parks tucked away here and there. We have a backyard here, but the landscaping is controlled by our landlord so I miss my gardening. Perhaps that makes me a bit more attentive to the botanical happenings around me. If we're still doing this next year and we're still here, I'll do more of a blow by blow of spring blooms -- bet you can hardly wait. In college I read part of one of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello garden logs. It listed the specific dates of the sprouting, blooming and harvesting of every plant in the garden. Needless to say, there weren't too many people who had checked it out before me. I recognize that the attention span for a botanical blog entry is short so I'll skip to some pictures. There are a lot of these camellias in Shanghai. The symmetries are amazing as is the scent.



There are also some hollyhocks around. I always liked hollyhocks. They have a very cottage-y feel. Here are some of the last blooms of the season.

Free Yourself from the Misery of Existence

I try to take pictures of some of the funny English phrasing that you see in various places here. This is one of the best I've come across.

Its next door to a bike store we go to sometimes. Free Yourself from the Misery of Existence. At first I had no idea what this place could be - a Buddhist literature shop, an assisted suicide supply depot? It ended up being a local DVD store. It must specialize in highly escapist fare!

Skateboarding is not a crime!

Here's some pictures of budding Woodward family skaters roaming around in front our house in Shanghai. There are no Tony Hawks in our crew, but everybody seems to have a good time regardless of whether they’re standing, sitting or lying on a skateboard.

The skateboard is a 47 inch Original Skateboards longboard and we manage to get two or three people on it most of the time. This board actually replaced an older Sector 9 longboard that I bought on my 31st birthday while I was living in LA. I lived in this super tiny studio apartment above a garage on Almayo Avenue, close to the intersection of Pico and Beverly Glen. It turned out to that the little neighborhood near Almayo was a perfect place for a long skateboard because it had some long gentle hills. If you walked up to the top of Tennessee Avenue you had a couple of pretty good blocks of fairly mellow cruising. Anyway, that first longboard ended up getting run over by a mail truck when we lived in Florida. The post office gave us some money for it so I was able to upgrade. This new skateboard has amazing trucks. Its sort of the Maserati of longboards as far as I can tell - turns on a dime.

My first year college I didn't have a car or bike, only a skateboard. Unfortunately, this wasn't a reflection of skateboarding prowess or an assertion of coolness, but rather relative poverty -- I didn't have enough money for a car or a mountain bike. This was the mid-80s when skateboarding was in a lull between the 1970s Logan Earth Ski era and the 90s rise of Tony Hawk etc. so skateboarding hadn't been banned on campus yet. It seemed that there were only about 10 or 15 people that rode skateboards on campus at the time and when we passed each other on campus we’d give each other that slight male nod that represents acknowledgement without necessarily denoting approval or disapproval. The board I had was actually an old one that my friend Scott Oaks had given in lieu of some money he owed me. I remember it was a Dogtown deck with Gullwing trucks and red Kryptonics wheels. Life was good.

We're not actually moving so don't panic. Ethan just likes feeling like he's in on the action.

That's probably more than anyone would want to know about our skateboarding history.