A family first

Today was a milestone in family maturity for us. We started soccer. Not for the year, but actually just started for the first time. Neither Abby nor Ben had ever played in any organized way and I wanted them to play and not get behind their peers.

I never played growing up, but in my global wanderings I’ve often been pulled into matches only to demonstrate my football lameness.^† I’d either get totally outmaneuvered or just kick with wild abandon, batter other people’s shins and then play it off to American inexperience. I think that too many people in America play now so that technique won’t work for much longer so I figure our kids need to at least learn the basics. Ben, who has not shown much of a predisposition for balls or sports, caught us totally off guard. He jumped right into the practice and then when they started these little games he just went for it, dribbling the ball and scoring a bunch of goals. At 4 years old most of the kids were just wandering around and looking at their parents for some sign as to which way they should be running. The only exception was a little Italian kid who could do these amazing slide kicks and turns. Ben can be sort of aggressive and once someone told him where the goal was, there was no stopping him. Abby absolutely did not want to play and she just started really whining and resisting when we tried to get her to go to the practice. I really insisted that she at least try it, but Jenny didn’t seem to care. This lack of parental unity didn’t help. Jenny and I were essentially arguing about whether a 6 year old was best left to decide whether or not she wanted to play soccer. We eventually gave up and went to eat at a place called Johnny Wu’s. Johnny Wu’s looks suspriciously like Johnny Rockets in basically every respect – menu, décor, uniforms. The food is actually pretty good and the chicken strips, always a kid favorite, were really good – it tasted like they had a bit of cumin in the batter. I’ve found that the combination of my growing experience as a parent and my inherent cheapness has turned me into a relatively indiscriminate consumer of the leftovers on my kids’ plates.

† Note: That said, one of my athletic moments of glory did come as a 7^th grader at Walter Reed Junior High School in P.E. In 7^th grade they had a semester of rotating instruction on a variety of different sports. One day, they pulled out a soccer ball, set up some goals and gave a half-baked demonstration. After that they divided us up into a couple of teams and turned us loose. Basically nobody had done this before and it was like throwing a cat into a pack of feral dogs. Just wild kicking and running around, people falling down and getting kicked and stepped on until the pack stumbled past them. My moment came when the ball suddenly appeared close to me in my section of the pack. I kicked it as hard as I could having no idea what would happen and it sailed above everyone falling into the top corner of the goal. It was the only goal scored before the coaches realized that there were kids lying on the ground with bloody noses and they stepped in to stop the mayhem. Resigned to defeat, they just had us run laps for the last 15 minutes of P.E. This was the last time I remember playing soccer in any sort of formal setting. I was known as a good soccer player for a couple of weeks.

Welcome to Hong Kong – want a donut?

This is one of the first things you see when you emerge from the luggage area in the Hong Kong airport. I’ve always found it a bit ironic.

If this is what the wonder of globalization gets you, I feel short-changed. That said, I have to admit that I once bought one of these once in a moment of trans-fat nostalgia.

Yellow fish mobile

Here’s an end of summer picture taken in front of our house on the way to the community swimming pool. The three wheeled bike acts as a minivan of sorts for us in our neighborhood. The kids pile in the back and love it. You see these all over China, but they are usually hauling a 5 foot high pile of old cardboard, some watermelons or maybe a pile of used tires. When Chinese people see me pedaling around with three kids in the back they think it’s hilarious. In Shanghai the Chinese nickname for these is “yellow fish mobile” because in the past they were often used by local fishmongers who bought piles of yellow fish from the Yangtze River or its tributaries and pedaled around the neighborhoods selling them. I paid about US$35 for it and I think the shopkeeper that I bought it from thought I was totally crazy because he couldn’t imagine what I would possibly be using it for.

Baby raccoon

Abby is still hankering for a pet. She’s refining her strategy now. Last week she came to me and said that she no longer wanted a rabbit, because they go to the bathroom too much. Instead she gave me three potential pets to choose from: 1) a chipmunk, 2) a baby raccoon or 3) a teacup dog. I was then given a fairly systematic description of the relative merits of each. A chipmunk was very small, probably didn’t go to the bathroom that much and was very friendly. A baby raccoon had all the benefits of large raccoon, though she did not elaborate on what these were, but it was much smaller. Being smaller it was less likely to ransack our trashcans. A teacup dog was probably the best because she and her brothers all wanted a dog and a teacup dog was very small – aptly named since you could fit it in a teacup even when full grown. I was then asked to wait while she proceeded to the kitchen, where she got a mug to show me how small the dog would be.

I asked her where you could buy, say, a chipmunk in Shanghai.
Well, at the cricket market, of course.
Why not just buy a cricket?
Way too boring, maybe even more boring than a fish.
The saga continues.

Clocks

I saw this in a travel agent's office recently. I liked the lack of precision in the minute hands.

Collect the Distillate of the Whole World

This slogan was on an airport advertisement for a fancy golf course subdivision. It must sound better in Chinese. The English translation has got toxic tort written all over it.

Duck herding

Just a picture I took out the window of a car when in the Chinese countryside not too long ago.

Git' along lil' duckies.

Six Records of a Floating Life

I read a short book called “Six Records of a Floating Life” recently. It’s an autobiography by a Chinese man, Shen Fu, who lived in a Chinese city called Suzhou a couple of hundred years ago when China was still relatively untouched by the West. It was a fairly accesible window into another world. He wandered fairly precariously between jobs and cities around China during his life. The six records are supposed to be six chapters, but I got to the end and had only counted four. I went back to the introduction, which I skipped, like most introductions, and found out that the last two chapters were lost but the title and the first four chapters remained. (If I ever write a book and there is an introduction I’ll make sure I don’t call it an introduction to catch all the intro-skippers like myself). The first section is the best, which is largely a description of his marriage to a wife who died relatively young. A very touching and almost wistful description of the affection between them. Lovely stuff and a good short read – maybe 150 pages.

Portulacas

Here's pictures of some portulacas planted on the edges of the beds in our front and back yards.

I first planted portulacas in a small patch of land next to a little studio apartment I lived in in LA about 10 years ago. The apartment was above a garage and next to it there was this little weedy patch about 10 x 20. I asked my landlady if I could dig up the weeds and plant a little garden and since it was sort of out of the way and people rarely object to anyone voluntarily pulling weeds, she consented. I ended up planning tomatoes, some red and yellow peppers and then a bunch of flowers -- mostly seasonal stuff with lots of zinnias, petunias and impatiens. In the dead of the summer I planted portulacas, which I'd never known before, but are really nicely flowering things once they get going. They're annuals, which are both fun and sad, since you get the satisfaction of seeing them bloom quickly, but then you have to seem them die off quickly as well. They are heliotropic (the flowers turn to face the sun as it moves during the day) as well as diurnal (the flowers open in the morning and close at night). I felt obliged to shoehorn those words in somewhere just because I spent a lot of time learning what they meant and you can't really throw them into a normal conversation. Anyway, I showed my kids some morning glories in our neighborhood recently told them that the flowers open and closed. They were a bit skeptical but we did a check before and after sunset and I was justified in the eyes of my 4 and 6 year olds. Abby came up to me the other day and said that portulacas were related to morning glories since they closed up at night. I thought it was pretty observant and I was pleased to see that my botanical indoctrination was beginning to bear fruit. It's always nice to close on a bad pun

Rock formations

A couple of weekends ago I went with a neighbor on what was going to be a long day trip to a Chinese national park that was about an hour flight from Shanghai. Amusingly, I got the idea to go to this place from an online article in the New York Times travel section. I read the Times on the web each day. As far as I can tell it appears to be almost entirely uncensored by the Chinese government. Most days there is at least one article on China or something Chinese in the paper and very rarely do they get blocked. Web censorship occurs not by doing any selective deletion from articles, but by simply blocking entire web pages so that when you hit a link to a story on China the page just won't appear.

In any case, given that the trip to this place was a lot easier for us to pull off than it was for the average citizen of the Tri-State area, and since our families were both out of town, we decided to give it a try. One of the interesting differences between US and Chinese air fare structures worked in our favor. In the US, if you book early you can get the best fares, but in China it's the opposite. Many airlines don't release their discounted fares until a week to 10 days before a flight is scheduled to take off and the fares seem to drop even further during the day or two before the flight actually takes off. The place, called Zhangjiajie, was filled with lots of large natural stone pillars, sort of like a less colorful, but much lusher version of Bryce Canyon in Utah. It's the kind of geography that shows up in a lot of Chinese paintings. In the morning the temperature was great -- about 75°. By the afternoon it heated up a bit but it wasn't nearly as hot as Shanghai. We ended up doing a long hike down a narrow canyon next to river in the morning, then took a cable car up to a higher elevation part of the park and then later another cable car down to another area. Towards the end of the afternoon we did a hike that was on a trail that was essentially a staircase carved into the side of the mountain. We went straight up for probably an hour and a half. It was literally just climbing stairs for an hour and a half. Almost no flat stretches. I turn 40 in about a month and while I am in relatively good shape, I can’t scamper up the side of a mountain like I might've when I was 25. The hike was very pretty, but by the end I was totally hammered and my legs were little bit wobbly. Our flight didn't leave until 10 p.m. so we took a bus into town and wandered around for a little while you're at it this is a relatively small city by Chinese standards -- probably 1.5 million people. It's also a long way off the western manufacturing path so the city itself is very Chinese. In Shanghai you see quite a few signs that are in Chinese characters but also have English or Pinyin, which is a transliteration of the Chinese characters using the Roman alphabet. Zhangjiajie had almost no signs with any English or Pinyin.

But the real action started after we got to the airport. It turned out that there had been a big thunderstorm in Shanghai and so the plane that was supposed to pick us up never left Shanghai and they just canceled the flight. It was not great news to get when you're exhausted after a long day of hiking. The funniest part came when we realized that not only was the airline not providing any sort of hotel or transportation, but the airport staff had locked the doors to the airport so no one could leave. When I was a bit younger I spent many a night in strange countries sleeping in very sketchy and unhygienic circumstances, but the exoticism of spending a hot and humid night with 500 fellow travelers sleeping on a dirty linoleum floor in an airport with no central air conditioning doesn't have the appeal that it once did.

Fortunately, I traced my way back through security checks and metal detectors, which were all turned off, and found that the doors to the security were only closed by small sliding bolts. On a somewhat frightening side note, the airlines would check in whole groups of tourists by letting their tour guide just bring up a stack of ID cards and issuing the tickets for the stack. – no visual check of the passengers. Anyway, I undid one of the security gates, figuring that if I got in trouble I could always pull the confused foreigner card, and walked out into the main lobby where we found an open door to the outside. As we were headed out the door a bunch of people saw that we had escaped and began to follow our lead, pouring out of the airport. We managed to grab the last cab and found a hotel back in the town about midnight that had a couple of rooms with air conditioners. Our flight back to Shanghai didn’t leave until 10:30am the next morning since the plane had to come from Shanghai.

A girl after my own heart

This summer while in Los Angeles Abby heard that there was a water shortage in Southern California. She even told me that the mayor of LA announced the need to reduce water use, but then he got in trouble for increasing his water consumption after the announcement. In any case, she took it seriously and started to take cold showers. When Jenny asked her why she was taking cold showers, she said that it made her not want to stay in for so long so she was saving water. While my jobs or projects aren’t as directly involved in environmental issues as they once were, I still retain the sensibilities (which sometimes drive Jenny a bit crazy when I go around turning off the AC in the summer). Anyway, I was impressed by my 6 year old’s earnestness.

100 Years of Solitude

I finally read this. This is Jenny’s favorite novel as well as that of a few other friends I’ve known along the way. (Mine remains “Anna Karenina” which I read one summer in college when I was toiling away as a temp file clerk in the basement of O’Melveny and Myers in L.A.)

Wow. He didn’t win a Nobel Prize for nothing. With that blazing literary insight I'll check out.

Boys' Glee

I bought a CD recently of some choral songs by a Cambridge University group. As I listened to it one weekend morning while doing some cleaning up I heard an arrangement of “The Lord is my Shepard” that I had sung in 7^th grade boys’ glee club. I don’t think I had heard it since then but it was really lovely and it brought back memories. The Walter Reed Junior High School 7^th grade boys’ glee club was a strange thing in that it was cool to be in it. All my friends were in it also. After boys’ glee you could do choir in 8^th and 9^th grade. This didn’t have quite the cache, but that was somewhat offset by the fact that choir was coed. The singing thing sort of diminished in coolness after 7^th grade, plummeting in high school. I decided to take computer class in 8^th grade instead of choir, drawn in by the allure of the punch cards that were the staple of junior high computer classes at that time (this was slightly pre-Radio Shack TRS-80s). Anyway, it was a really nice arrangement. I can’t even imagine a public school group in the U.S. singing “The Lord is my Shepard” now. I remember hearing that Mr. Kennedy, the glee club and choir teacher, died of AIDS not long after I graduated from high school. That was not uncommon in L.A. in the mid-80s.

Go Dodgers!

I recently made a quick trip to LA to spend a couple of days and then travel back to Shanghai with the family. On arriving, I checked the Dodger schedule and found there was a game. I thought it would be fun for the kids so I picked a game a couple of days out so we could build some collective excitement and anticipation. The great thing about little kids is that they will get really excited about a lot of things given the right build up. So we started talking it up and took the kids to Target where we got some cheap Dodgers shirts and caps. On the day of the game, we actually arrived a bit early so we had some time to walk around outside the stadium. My dad, Jenny, Abby, Ben and I ended up going, leaving Ethan and my mom back at my parent’s house.

We got to the game and the kids were immediately focused on the hot dogs. As soon as we got in the gate the intensity of the hot dog longing ramped up quickly. I had originally hoped to wait an inning or two before getting some food, but the opposition to any delay quickly became overwhelming. Once I started handing them out Ben got mad because I had put ketchup on his hot dog – a bad choice given that day’s position on the highly variable Ben ketchup desirability/abhorrence spectrum. Luckily I was able to take the hot dog out of the bun, wipe it clean with a napkin and then he ate it bunless and happy. After the first inning the hot dogs were long gone, ketchup was all over the place, there was a big puddle from a couple of drinks that had spilled and the kids were getting sort of bored. The funny part was the absolute foreseeability of it all. We lasted about 4 innings before pulling out, but it was one of those great summer nights at Dodger stadium when the air was pretty clear and you could watch the sun fade away and the lights of the city come on as the temperature cooled pleasantly.

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!