Three Kids and a Book

Coach

2012-01-26T07:09:00.000-05:00

I wish I’d had a camera when Rebecca met Joanne Boyle, theUVa Women’s Basketball Coach. The coachstands over six feet tall and sports spiked heels and stunning designerclothing; for this game it was a floor length skit. Rebecca’s reaction was complete open-mouthedshock and awe and silence. She has since spent a fair bit of time wearing highheels and proclaiming herself Basketball Coach. This reaction, of course, didnot fit so well my fantasies of the guest coach experience showing her tall,athletic, and powerful women…

At the end of last semester a very tall woman in my music101 class handed me a piece of paper which I tossed in my backpack and losttrack of. I read it a few weeks laterand realized it was an invitation to be Basketball Coach for the Day. It seemedclear that every Division One basketball team needs a legally blind coach onthe bench. This seemed like it would bethe closest to a ball sport I’ll ever come, and I’d never been to a basketballgame. My hoop glory days were brief and consisted of, college Sunday morningfeminist basketball which, after many months of patient coaching, yielded onesuccessful (and uncontested) lay-up. Let’s just say that one of the main reasons Irun is that when I showed up for field hockey, Coach Noeltook one look at me with a ball and a stick and sent me over to Coach Adkinsand the cross country team.

My instructions were to show up for the afternoon shoot-aroundand evening game with a guest. I had noclue what a shoot-around was but, because my actual date would be in school forsaid shoot-around. Manuel was jealousthat I picked Rebecca and not him as guest so I said Manuel could attend thepregame festivities. He loved it… Intypical UVa fashion the invite came with a dress code for the event; Cavalier clothingfor the shoot-around and a suit for the game. I owned neither, but thanks to afew donations and after trying on suits from some very generous lawyer friends,I was appropriately outfitted. (And for the record I have plenty of fine-lookingprofessional clothes but no business clothes!) A shoot-around turns out to be a very easypractice and, not surprisingly, they do not let the shrimpy Guest Coach anywherenear the athletes.

Rebecca and I acquired fancy “all access badges” which gaveus the run of John Paul Jones Arena for game day. She especially loved hers and informedsomeone who asked her if she was a ball girl that “I’m not a ball girl; I’m aguest coach.” She also enjoyed visiting her father, brother and friends in thenose bleed seats and announcing, “oh I have to get back to my seat.” We had avisiting scholar in the music department who graciously spent much of the gamediscussing and reading the heinous transformer book with Eli. Our passes got us into the locker room for thepre game ritual. And I use the wordritual purposefully to describe the whole experience. I found myself thinkingthe whole night about an article I read in a grad school ethnomusicology classabout the ritual of football game and about Bruno Nettl’s Ethnomusicologistfrom Mars who visits a music department and provides an ethnographicanalysis. Like all competitive sports, women’sbasketball games at UVa are complex social dramas complete with rituals andperformances.

When theabovementioned goddess coach enters the locker room the players applaud. Then,at various intervals during her pre game talk, they clap rhythmically. With a few more participant observations onecould make a pretty solid argument about the ritual of clapping as bothenacting the coach as an almost deity and as pushing the players into moving asa collective body. It ends with an inspirational quote and a group prayercircle, which somehow we ended up in—holding hands and looking solemn. They do,in fact, pray for victory, which perplexed Rebecca. “that was kind of weirdMommy, do you think God really has time for UVa basketball…” The ritual, in other words, involves divinepresence, and Geertz would no doubt read it as a religious experience. I’m with Rebecca on this one…

The most striking thing about a Division One big sportsschool is that revenue-generating sports exist on a different planet from mostof the rest of the University. For one thing, everyone wears orange. “they are all wearing cavaliers” my five yearold told me. My daughter’s stunnedreaction to a 6’3 coach pretty much matched mine to my first music 101 class atUVa back in 2007. When a block of eightfootball players walked in, my TA, Matt, and I were stunned—Medussa turned intostone style. I’d never seen people thatbig in real life—their legs were the size of my waist and they barely fit inthe chairs. The JPJ experience isutterly removed from Central Grounds where the university works hard toreconstruct a Jeffersonian academic village. In contrast to UVA brochures and websites, JPJ has no columns, no greenspace, and no diverse groups of students sitting under trees. Instead it’s allbright lights, expensive hotdogs, and noise… The current construction project not withstanding, Central Grounds isconstructed to block out external noise. JPJ resounds not just with talking but with cheering and the marchingband. The band tells the audience whento pay attention, when something good has happened, and when to avert theireyes.

I assume the coach for the day project is meant to help engenderwarm feelings from faculty for the athletes. It’s no secret on grounds that the business of student athletes is acomplicated one. Players generatemillions of dollars but get very little for themselves. Coaches make more money then the rest of uswill see in a life-time.

Many (of course, not all) athletes from revenue generatingsports come to UVa far less prepared than their classmates. Some of our teams have at least a few playerswho do not meet the NCAA standards—this is very low. As a football coach once told me when I askedpoint blank if football players were less academically skilled than the averageUVa student. “Well, they want us to beat Miami, and you don’t beat Miami withnice kids…” The athletes get tutors,they get study halls, they get their own dining room (complete with their ownnutritionist), and they get help picking classes that will meet their needs.And often, despite all of this, their grades are below the mean. Music 101 regularly gets groups from teams,so I track it.

But here’s the thing. The basketball staff member who ushered me around my various duties asguest coach made it clear that these women spend SIX HOURS a day on their training. That’s six hours of physical activity. Football players in Music 101 regularly cameto class with arms in slings looking like they’d come home from battle. They often had. The bottom line is that we set them up tofail. If they come to UVa underprepared,and they have a physically demanding nearly full time job, they are set up foracademic trouble.

All of that not withstanding, I loved the game! I’m a sucker for ritual. I love the marching band, I love watching theway everyone cheers. I don’t enjoysports on TV, I can never find the damn ball. Football games are usually cold,and the field is big so no matter where I sit I can’t see what’s going on. The basketball court is small and intimate bystadium standards, and if you get to sit on the bench you are right in thethick of it. I was totally sucked intothe drama and into the pleasure of not knowing what would happen. The kids loved the game and got to back onSaturday with courtside front row tickets given to us by another friend. On the one hand the evening brought home thecontrast between JPJ and central grounds. While the kids and Manuel were in cavalier finery eating popcorn andwatching hoops I was on the so called music-balcony of the newly restoredGarret Hall playing a Scottish lament on my viola for a dead wife that TJ mayor may not have listened to. I waspretty jealous of the kids!

The Layout Room

2011-12-14T09:32:00.001-05:00

At some point soon I’ll write a nuanced description of theSound in Early America exhibit that my grad students are curating. The teamincludes the two first year grad students Amy Coddington and GretchenMichelson. We also have Courtney Kleftis,Stephanie Doktor, Emily Gale and Winston Barham helping out. Winston is the resident expert on oldbooks. My official description willexplain the ways in which we have tried to remind everyone that Early Americawas a noisy place and that we want to animate the archive by turning itsusually silent stacks into sonorous echoes of the past. After all it’s only we moderns who think ofReading as a solitary and silent practice. For now I’ll just say that I hope the chaos of today will bedelightfully invisible to the millions of visitors who will troop into the UVaSpecial Collections Library when our exhibit opens.

Yesterday’s class project was layout. That means apparently that you turn layoutthe goods on a mock display to make sure they all fit. It gets pretty punchywhen you’re in a windowless room with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth ofprecious documents including a civil war era valentine, some printing toolsthat look like toy soldier weapons, and a picture of the lovely Jenny Lindt.Most rare books rooms only let you look at a few things at once, and they havevery strict rules about not talking, not sharing, etc. We had a good 36 items floating around. Old paper gets dusty fast and we learned thatall of us scratch our throats in unladylike ways that gross out ourboyfriends/husbands. And yes, other thanWinston who is holding down the man fort, we are all women—a formidable bunchof women I might add. The whole processworks like corralling kids. I think I said “use your inside voice” at leastfive times. (the room is not soundproofand other people were actually doing SCHOLARSHIP) I’m also pretty sure there was throwing. I’mnot mentioning names, but those cute little bean bag things that hold pagesopen definitely flew.

The first of six cases took us a good forty minutes to dealwith, which I’m pretty sure left the library wishing they’d never asked us todo this. Petrina and Anne (the excellentlibrarians who have been working with us) have been remarkably patient andhelpful. I, for example, have not had time to get my e-services password towork, so any time I need a book I go old fashioned and write it on a paperslip. I feel totally 1990’s. In terms ofthe Music Department crew, I am thankful that Amy took over and acted as drillsergeant and book gatherer. I think she was really hungry and thought if we gotit done she could get food faster… Butit worked. I realized about ten minutes into the process that I’m a terribleperson for this sort of thing; archival exhibits are completely inaccessible tothe visually impaired since they prevent my usualstick-my-nose-quite-literally-in-the-book pose. In addition, my lack of fine motor skills makes writing labels andquickly moving around fragile things treacherous. Before Amy took over I heard phrases like “uhoh, I think we just made something up.” And, again I’m not naming names, butsomeone put a song from 1824 in the civil war section. We plan to upset (wehope) some visitors by deliberately placing the Civil War in the Patriotismsection and presenting some of the more abhorrent Confederate materials as examplesof what happens when Patriotism goes wrong.

My low point during the initial warm up was picking upThomas Jefferson’s edition of DerFreishutz and watching the title page fly off—yes, fly off. I’ve been drawn to this particular editionfor a few years. This piano reductionhas a beautiful cover illustration. It’sa really simple reduction; much easier to play than most. And it doesn’t really fit in with anythingelse in TJ’s collection. Jews believethat if you drop a Torah you have to fast for forty days, and I’m sure theretributions for dropping anything Mr. Jefferson put his hands on are harsheraround here. I promise that part of my Decentering of TJ project does notinvolve consciously dropping his stuff. (thoughin my opinion we could all stand to rough up a little more of his stuff…)

It got pretty brutal down there as we had to make choicesabout which documents would actually get to spend some time in the displaycases instead of languishing in the bowels of the library. The most crushingomission was probably the tiny books. Weall fell in love with these little miniature books that measure about threeinches. You could easily fit three of themin your jeans pocket. After oohing andawwwing every time, we were finally informed by the librarians that “they arecute but...” As in, “Get over it ladies. These things are too small even for peoplewho can see.” We also ran into spaceproblems and had to evict Jenny Lind. The sweetish nightingale became famous inthe States after an extremely successful concert tour organized by PT Barnum in1850. It felt a little like a crossbetween a sorority and a job search as we had to eliminate her because shesimply did not meet our needs and her delightful little program was falling apartand decrepit. With her, unfortunately,went Willa Cather’s Song of The Lark. Assomeone said “we gave her the boot even if she was the first woman to win the Pulitzerprize or something like that.” We had tomove all kinds of things around because the precious wax cylinder is considereda security risk.

We’ve divided the exhibit into six major categories. I’m not going to write them here because Iwant EVERYONE TO COME SEE IT, and I know that you are all dying to know exactlyhow we’ve organized the goods. We’vebeen most fascinated by, and had the most trouble with, the sections of theexhibit that deal with musical representations of Native Americans and AfricanAmericans. We first categorized this as “stuff white people like to transcribe”. That seemed not quite right, so we moved ontoa Guyatri Spivak style “can the subaltern sing?” We settled on musical ethnographies. Wordplayaside, writing about Race is always hard, and it’s particularly vexed at UVa,which has its own ugly history of racism; a history that is with us today incountless ways. That means that, inaddition to Frederick Douglas’s speeches, we have a Steven Foster minstrelsong. Frederick Douglas was disgusted bythe idea that the songs of enslaved people reflected their happiness andinsisted that they told a “tale of woe in tones loud, long and deep.” Andminstrel songs stand as an egregious example of a white celebration andappropriation of the Black Culture it attempts to oppress. And we also have theearliest printed collection of music of the enslaved people published in1867. We also have “Death Song of the Cherokee Indians” from1786 that claims to be “An original air, brought from America by a Gentlemanlong conversant [sic] with the Indian Tribes, and particularly with the Nationof the Cherokees.” The gentlemen thatbrought back those original airs also participated in a process of genocide. These are very tricky issues for graduatestudents to navigate in two sentences of text.

I did notice that we’ve allsort of fallen in love with old books. I’ve always been disparaging of the kind of opera or literaturescholarship that acts like the author is about to have lunch with thecharacter. But I’d say we’ve all crosseda line with these books. We worriedabout finding them a home, giving them room to breathe, finding them a safespace to be, etc… I’m not sure what thestudents actually think about the process. When I promised them all A’s in the class they seemed to relax a bit...But I am pretty sure that I’m not the only one in that room whogets a kind of visceral pleasure out of touching old books.

Arts Engagement

2011-12-01T15:52:00.001-05:00

I was asked a few weeks ago to write a brief update on my Mead endowmentproject. This is a small grant I havefrom the University that I am using to pair UVa students with third and fourthgraders for a series of Arts events over the course of the year. Inthe Charlottesville public schools, kids can start a musical instrument infifth grade. They can also begin to take extra art and drama. Kids who experience the arts are more likelyto want to make art. There’s a lot of talk about the achievement gap inacademics but there also exists a very real artistic gap, which to me feelsjust as tragic. Like every parent in theCharlottesville schools, I’ve seen the achievement gap happen. Some kids whostarted kindergarten coming out of Head Start reading better than either of mychildren now read below grade level. This is not because my kids are smarter. Likewise, my kids consider the UVA Lawn their playground and have beengoing to concerts since they were literally a week old; they assumed they wouldplay musical instruments, and they do. My daughter thinks she might be anartist because she knows some. The kidsin the Arts program go to the elementary school that Rebecca and Jonathan go tobut they come from different worlds. They live predominantly in two underservedcommunities in Charlottesville, both of which are bussed to the school. Many of the kids have never been on UVa’scampus, even though it’s a fifteen-minute walk from their home. Many have never been to a live concert or anart museum, even though Charlottesville offers plenty of both for free. They donot play instruments and they do not have a cabinet of art supplies in theirhomes. Things change slowly, and the Arts and UVa remain inaccessible andalienating to much of the city’s population, especially to people of colorliving in poverty.

I’d been asked to do this progress report a few weeks ago and, althoughthis project has consumed more mental space than Music 101, the task stumpedme. For a few days I considered justsending them some really great pictures that a history faculty member and documentaryphotographer took of the group at the Bill T Jones open rehearsal. Eventually I sat down and wrote a few blandsentences; the kind that can go on brochures.

A brief update about my Mead project. I had a tremendous amount ofinterest from the undergraduates and, in fact, had to turn many students away. We've had two events so far. The first was a photography show andjazz concert at the Bridge. The second was a bit more ambitious and involvedtaking everyone to see a Bill T Jones open rehearsal. Below are a seriesof pictures. John Mason from the history department took the second set.It's been a blast to get to know these undergraduates. About half of them arefrom my music 101 class or other things I've been involved with on grounds andabout half are brand new to me. The best part is probably exploring the projectof arts engagement with these bright and enthusiastic students. The University as a whole seems to bestruggling with community engagement and it turns out that if we ask ourstudents they have some pretty good hunches. The undergrads and little kids arekeeping journals together and a few pairs have been on WTJU. This gives them asense to experience live radio and give me a chance to hang out with them more.There have of course been some mishaps. For example just because you canhave a group of 200 music 101 students completely under control and enthralleddoesn't mean you can effectively control 12 third and fourth graders on a bus.That University Transit driver may have quit. It's a learning experience forall of us. On Saturday we're headed to a step contest at the Paramount.The UVa students came up with this plan. I haven't been to a step event in a goodtwenty years and it's out of my comfort zone but I'm sure it'll be anexperience for all of us!

While all of the above is true, beneath thatsurface lies a much more complicated truth, most of which I think wouldn’t beappropriate for the kind of upbeat positive spin that donors want to read. It turns out that taking a small group of UVastudents and a small group of little kids to some events is not as cute as itsounds. And I’ve spent a lot more energy on logistics and crowd control than onthinking deep thoughts about Arts engagement. For starters, I can’t evencontrol my own kids, so I’m not sure what made me think I could control tenextras. When putting together theproposal for this project, I thought of those moments when my own children satangelically moved by some performance, not the ones where they kicked theperson in front of them, threw up on me, or cracked up at a moment that anartist thought was sublimely moving. (and those ARE things my kids have done).Also, it turns out that while on good days I can soemtimes make an assignmentclear to a graduate seminar, I can’t do it for third and fourth graders. Mystudent Lauren, who has been a real school teacher, and without whom this wholething would fall apart, informs me that when talking to groups of children Ineed to limit the information to three things. And she suggests I get the most important safety and logisticalinformation out there before opening up the floor for questions. So that, for example, everyone knows whattime they will be picked up before discussing what happens if you bring moneyfor ice cream but you don’t quite have enough money for ice cream and if oneperson has to go to the bathroom will the other person wait before buying themythological ice cream that I never said we’d buy. Next time we speak to the group of kids, shetalks.

The most complicated part of this project is,not surprisingly, moving twenty people around. Despite the fact that they have smart phones that they check every threeseconds and that I think I’m crystal clear, the UVa students are alwaysconfused and some chunk of them go to the wrong place. The University doesn’twant us driving kids around—it’s a liability nightmare. So they suggested we get a University TransitService (UTS) bus. We did this for ourtrip to the Bill T Jones rehearsal at UVa. It seemed to make no sense to have the UVa kids on the bus because thiswould take about an extra hour of their time, cost more etc. So this left me with twelve kids on giantbus. The low point came on the bus ridehome, during which I realized that the bus driver didn’t know where he wasgoing and, because I don’t drive, I had no clue how to get there either. Since I was sitting between three fightingten and eleven year old boys, I dispatched an eleven-year-old girl to givedirections. When I heard her say to the bus driver “Oops, we missed it. Can youjust back this thing up a bit?” I knew we were in trouble. In order to back the thing up, a bit heturned the lights of which enticed all of the kids to scream their headsoff. (Don’t worry everyone was safe andgot home in one piece). We’ll all beenrolling in Harry Potter magic school before this weekend’s event so that wecan magically appear in our location without worrying about vehicles or directions.

Our events have thus far been ratherheady—jazz, photography and the Bill T Jones rehearsal. Bill T, though he gave the kids a great10-minute audience, did not do a lot of dancing. This extravaganza turned intoa classic case of things not going quite as I imagined. His residency here cameas part of a project called Story Time in collaboration with Ted Coffey acomposer and friend of mine in the Music Department. The open rehearsal I saw with this groupabout a year ago still stands as one of the most arresting performances I’veever seen. I found Bill gorgeous to watch, and he captures an entire room evenhe is just sitting in a chair. Thisexperience immediately incited liberal music professor fantasies in me aboutbringing this particular group of predominantly African American kids to see anAfrican American Artist. He’s one of the most innovative and powerful dancersof this era and has shown a profound commitment to experimental arts and tocommunity engagement. With Arnie Zane his dance company has merged with NewYork Live Arts to become one of the most innovative arts engagement projects inthe country. I’m not naive enough to think that a few arts events can bridgethe achievement gap or provide role models. But I do believe in exposure, and I believe in giving kids theopportunity to see grownups who look like them do great things. The UVaresidency wasn’t really aimed at those sorts of goals. Nonetheless, I’d been trying to bring at riskkids to see one of the Bill T events for about two years and got nowhere. For last year’s events, I was told that kidscouldn’t come. This year the events had more seating, and I decided with theUVa students to take the kids to see a rehearsal. They, like me, saw this as aunique opportunity to expose kids to UVa and to the Arts. A rehearsal seemed like it would suit ourneeds as we could talk about the process of working hard to get good atsomething and see first hand the process of making art.

This particular rehearsal focused more onconcept than action. The dancers spent a lot of time moving stage equipment anddid a few dance like small movements. The kids asked variations of “sois modern dance where you stand still” and “why don’t they just move the couchif it’s in their way.” Some of the ten-year-old boys informed me that thedancers just weren’t any good and that they just kind of looked weird. The boys, predictably, got restless after 45minutes, so I took them out into the lobby told them they cold quietly show mewhat they thought dance should look like. They did a series of very quiet backflips and step dancing which got us all in trouble with the undergraduate hallmonitor. (they were in fact veryquiet) Back in the auditorium some ofthe kids found the moving of furniture complexly fascinating. But about halfway through I wondered if I’dmanaged to kill dance for a group of kids that love to dance. However, whenBill T spoke with the kids, it was a pretty phenomenal moment. They asked engaging questions, suggestingthat while I was doing crowd control they had actually gotten quite a bit outof the experience. This was not easy art to experience. So the real progressreport is a giant question mark. I know that all of us have seen a few verycool things that we hadn’t seen before. Beyond that I don’t know if this is working. I don’t know what the UVa students or thelittle kids are getting out of it. And it may well be that my impulse towardsexposing at risk kids to the arts is misguided. Maybe they need too many other things. Perhaps the UVa students needmore training and more guidance than I can give them. And on a personal note perhaps this takes toomuch time away from my regular job and my own kids. But, hopefully, the twenty-five of us involved,and those twenty five include my husband and kids, will make some sense of itby the end of the year.

Birthday Dream

2011-11-28T09:53:00.001-05:00

Everyone needs a construction site next door. It’s true that the giant machines wake you upat 6:45 EVERY SINGLE DAY. And yourentire house will be covered in dirt for months. At least two members of your family will getsomething in their eye that will cause major problems. You will inadvertently become a strip showfor construction men. Your children willstage protests by throwing play mobiles at the workers who are not, in factresponsible, for the construction. You’ll have to call the police a few timeswhen people rob the dumpster or use it to throw away large metal objects. The children and the resident dog will cry astheir favorite trees are ripped heartlessly from the ground. But there’s nothing better than aconstruction site for a five-year-old birthday party. Ok, it was slightly stressful when two kidswent missing and the phrase “they are in the bobcat” was used.

Other than that, this was by far the easiest birthday partywe have ever had, including the ones where we paid outside agents to do all thework. We spent about ten bucks on juice boxes and paper plates and had noplans. Poor deprived Eli almost neverhas playdates except on his birthday. By8 am it seemed like we might be headed towards the usual disaster because elihad already had two tantrums; the first because he knew we needed MORE BAKINGSODA IN THE CAKE!. I’ve had a thingabout making elaborate b-day cakes for years now. My friend Cynthia and I outdid ourselves withthe Williams Sonoma double train cake for Rebecca and Jonathan when they turnedfour, and we have also specialized in cute little ice cream cone cupcakes. Cynthia was generous enough to fly in fromAlaska for this year’s festivities, but Reidecca Party Planning, Ltd. tookover. Reid and Rebecca first made apin-the-siren-on-the-fire-engine game out of poster board and then hit thecake. These are kids who until now putso much frosting on Hanukah cookies that they were inedible and always producedcakes that had more sprinkle than cake. This year they carefully outlined the fire engine wheels in minim&m’s and took off from there. Theyboth have better fine motor skills than I do.

It seemed like we were pushing our luck when we had somefriends passing through town and invited their three kids to come to theparty. And then the first guests arrivedhalf an hour early because the kids had been begging to go to the party all dayand finally the dad said “ok that’s it. if you want to go now we walk.” So theywalked the two miles. And the kidsplayed on the site in the mud for most of the time. Hannah, who showed up in a pink taffeta partydress, spent a good hour in a muddy hole and came out with a miraculously cleandress. Everyone needs a party dress toplay in the dirt. At some poing the big kids started a game of relay relay which involved jumping around in retail relay bins. I typically use these for time out. When things lookedlike they might get cranky, we moved on to birthday cake, which was lovely,although Eli, who had burned his hand making pancakes in the morning, wantednothing to do with the actual candles. After opening presents we had a half hour left on the b-day party clock,and I suggested Rebecca read to the kids out of E’s new Dr. Seuss book. Thismeant that when parents picked up their kids no one was on large constructionequipment. Instead, the five year olds were gathered around the second andthird grade girls who were calmly and seriously reading to them. We had three big sisters with us, each ofwhom needed to take a turn! And I’m pretty sure that another mom cleaned thefamily room and swept the floor while the big sisters read.

For the record, we have terrible birthday party karma. I pretty much hate them and have attendedabout two kid b-day parties other than my own. Even when we moved to having parties at outside venues I felt like Ineeded heavy painkillers to recover. I can barely locate my own children in acrowd even when I dress them in matching bright colors, so the last thing I cando is keep track of seven extra kids who are high on sugar and party uppers. Rebecca and Jonathan’s five-year-old birthdayparty was one of the worst ever. Becauseof the twin factor we had to invite the entire class. That class is pretty much on speed and hasalready traumatized multiple preschool and Sunday school teachers. They allcame including uninvited siblings and parents who stayed. Meanwhile the power went out and the lowpoint was a kid (not ours) throwing rocks at another kid while his fatherlooked on doing nothing. Although we had sent our dog away for the party, aguest arrived with an unleashed dog who, though very friendly, traumatized twoof the kids at the party and a few neighbors. Two kids climbed over the fence and the art project that I had carefullyplanned after serious Internet research took exactly three seconds.

I’m not sure what happened yesterday other than karmicpayback for torturous parties of birthdays past. It’s true that Eli’s class is a calmergroup. The little boys who have been onhis b-day list the longest are Sid, Solomon and Charlie, who, when you add Elito the mix, sound like a group of old men in Florida. I’d like to say that I am super mom and thatwe should all go back to basics—no theme, no goody bags, no activities, norules; just let it rip. But that’sprobably not the answer for every party…

Conference Cheat Sheet

2011-11-21T17:20:00.001-05:00

I’m back from my two-week conference tour. As a grad student and young assistantprofessor, I frequently attended the meetings of both the AmericanMusicological Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology. But they are always back-to-back and with ajob, spouse, and kids, such gallivanting became difficult. The combo of travel, friends from at leastten different phases of my life, and papers whose names I can no longerremember has me somewhat brain-dead. ButI loved going back to SEM after many years and, especially, hanging out withold friends. Suffice it to say that Friday nights giggle fest was worth thetrip. I have a few observations from mycomparative ethnography, but I haven’t figured out how to say them in ways thatwon’t make everyone mad so for now I’ll keep most of them to myself. As ateaser, Ethnomusicologists sport much cooler, attire but they do not drink asmuch as musicologists.

I spent much ofFriday and Saturday afternoon/evening with current and former students. They suggested that I write down some of theconference tips I gave them. I did notcome with all of these myself but gleaned many from my friends and mentors.

1) Do not go to a conference exhausted. For example, I do not recommend taking thirtykids to see Bill T Jones and chaperoning a bus trip the night before a crosscontinental flight to a conference. Thiswill take two weeks, at least, to recover from.

2) Read the program before the conference and try always togo to a few papers that seem completely irrelevant to your research and thatinterest you. Do this when you are youngbecause at a certain point you can do nothing but support students, formerstudents, friends, former friends etc... and intellectual interest fallscompletely out of the equation.

3) Put a little thought into meals. Foraging for food canturn into a very eighth grade affair. Afew people make plans, someone else tries to join; suddenly seven people findthemselves in a clump with an awkward five-person reservation on theoffer. If you are on the job market or asearch committee you may find yourself in the awkward position of adding theemployment power dynamic to the 8^th grade social machinations. Reserve a few activities for really goodfriends and keep them small! ConsultYelp and locals.

4) If you have kids and they have either given you a manicureor put a tattoo on you, remove. You mayfeel uncomfortable with multi colored fingernails and a spider man on yourwrist.

5) Hydrate. Think ofthis like a marathon. Hotels are dry,and the air quality often resembles an airplane delayed on the runway. Drink lots of water and apply hand creamgenerously. (the latter is particularly for scholars not in the early stages oftheir careers, as we euphemistically say in the AMS now)

6) Speaking of hydrating… If you drink, a flask is key. Hotel bars charge a fortune for drinks andcan be full of people whom you may or may not want to see. I recommend Bourbon or Cognac. Many Universities sponsor parties with freealcohol (and you can fill your flask if you charm the bartender) or cashbars. The Harvard party at SEM got theprize this year for delightful peach margaritas.

7) Bring Advil. Seeabove for hydrating issues. Add to thatthe fact that conference hotels now frequently combine environmentally correctslightly yellow lighting with crazy light displays, and a head ache will surelyrear its ugly head.

8) Bring Snacks, preferably protein. Any event with food will include starch andmore starch. The weekend is likely togyrate unpredictably between eating giant starch-infused meals to situationswith no opportunity for food for hours on end. Always have a high quality dark chocolate barin your bag—this can solve food and caffeine problems.

9) A very eminent and serious female musicologist who shallremain nameless explained to me about twenty years ago that when she gets apaper accepted she plans the outfit first and then writes the paper. And every year at least two femalemusicologists asked me what to wear to AMS or SEM. This is all a little more vexed for womenthan for men. My general words of wisdom are wear teaching clothes and wearsomething you feel good in. I recommendtights with glitter on them, and have them hand delivered by a fabulous friendto sparkle up day seven of conference going in two weeks. But if that doesn’t work for you, findsomething else. Don’t get too caught upin what you are supposed to wear. Thereare certainly those women who wear suits, but if you’re like me and you looklike you’re wearing your mom’s hand me downs in a suit, find something elsethat works. I’m personally committed to color, and I appreciate it when peoplewear it. If you don’t see well and everythird person is wearing gray or black it can be hard to locate your friends.

10) Do not speak in elevators ever. It is inevitable that you will insult theperson you are riding with directly or at least insult someone who is just likethem.

11) Introduce yourself to people if the person you know incommon fails to do so. Said person hasprobably forgotten their name but can not ask because they should know. And if you’re a senior scholar wear yournametag and introduce your students to people so that they don’t feel lonelyand awkward. (after 9 pm name tags canprobably come off.)

12) Bring a pen. Writingsnide notes is more subtle than texting the person sitting next to you. If you txt you may accidentally push a buttonthat makes noise or send the text to someone’s 12 year old daughter who has asimilar name.

13) Add entertaining apps to your smart phone. The MozartDice game and Cat piano work especially well.

14) Stick to exercise routines. If possible get OUTSIDE the hotel. If you’re an adult who probably should havebeen on ritalin as a child, the consequences of this can be dire including, forexample, accidentally kicking an extremely eminent scholar while fidgetingduring a paper. In addition to the stressrelease, there’s a certain kid of hooky pleasure that comes from sneaking pastcolleagues incognito in running clothes. But if you’re meeting someone else don’t leave them stranded in thelobby in running shorts. In order toavoid this scenario I ended up bringing a female student up to my room while Ichanged, which is probably breaking some sort of rule.

15) Do not bother bringing seven books to write that paperyou’ve been needing to write all semester. This will only hurt your back. Another eminent female musicologist I know spent much of her conferencetime writing when her children were small, but she’s a special case.

16) Figure out whether or not you like to stay in theconference hotel. Some people alwayslike to sleep away from the hoards. Others value the convenience above all else. Another nameless scholar informed a fewfriends that after walking all over San Francisco to avoid the hotel strike andbeing tired and sweaty that even if the next one took place in a bordello witha musicology prostitution ring the conference hotel was a must.

17) Make sure you are teaching something you can do in yoursleep or showing lengthy Opera video examples the day after a conference. Your brain will be completely mush fromscholarly overstimulation and will need a time out. Avoid situations where you can make a fool ofyourself or where, if it’s a promotion year, your evaluations might benegatively affected by confusing Schubert and Shobart and or getting trapped ina digression about Deluzian philosophy while teaching Schoenberg.

18) Above all, make sure you do at least one thing each daythat is fun for you. This could rangefrom solo morning coffee to wearing your favorite socks to adding mustaches tosome of the advertisements on bulletin boards.

Cocktails and Sketch Studies

2011-11-14T21:45:00.001-05:00

I’m writing thisfrom 30,000 feet on the plane home from San Francisco where I attended thenational meeting of the American Musicological Society.—a musicological minicamp. Instead of campfires we haveheady evening sessions. And instead ofroasting marshmallows we roast each other over wine and cheese. In San Francisco dining options includedboutique cocktails with bricks of ice and pieces of Ginger. This was of course all that much moredelicious thanks to menus that described in great detail the provenance ofevery morsel consumed in a restaurant—the cow named Clifford who lived on afarm in Napa, the apple that grows only in the valley and was picked a merethirty two hours ago etc..

The weekend onceagain reminded that the China summer is the gift that keeps on giving. On the plus side even though the plane wasdelayed on the runway for 90 minutes because they parking break was stuck andthey needed to get it a new one the trip feels easy. The more delightfulcontinuing effect centers around the boils that occasionally sprout up on oneof us. Yes I do mean boils in thePassover ten plagues sense of the word. Eli had one on his butt last week, which caused him some pain but didgive him essentially unlimited license to talk about butts, a favorite topic offive-year-old boys. Manuel’sunfortunately was in a slightly more vulnerable spot—the armpit. It required surgical lancing and a narcotic painkillerthat was so strong that he mistook his hospital bed for a swimming pool. Soonwe will need to begin a process of decontamination and decolonization. Thisbegins apparently with bathing the children in diluted Clorox. In other gross echoes of the jungle have abit of pathological dishpan hands from washing things in non-potablewater. But this can be turned into afashion statement by replacing rings with spider man Band-Aids. The boilsprovide great cocktail party conversation and my friends Nathan and Cynthiawhom I had not seen in FIVE years were especially delighted to hear and see allof the gory details. I even showed thempictures of the boil on my hip/muffin top, which is not a place a twin mothershares with many people.

The otherbenefit to me of the summer centers on domestic calculus. I feel that three months in a third worldcountry in which I made bread every day and did not spend more than two hoursaway from my precious offspring gives me a kind of carte blanche travel freedomfor at least a decade. This is similarto my attitude towards changing yucky diapers which amounted basically too “Ibirthed and nursed them you do the other gross stuff.” The fantasy of cashingin on this particular family debt centered on spas with lady friends and timein urban centers around the world. Needless to say the combo of my grandmother dying and needing to go toan extra conference this fall didn’t measure up to those sultry daydreams. But I did have a fabulous extra day inBerkeley recovering from the American Musicological Society. The children unfortunately seem to havecompletely forgotten the summer of love/attachment parenting and simply want toknow why I travel so much, how I could possibly miss the sock hop, pianorecital and two soccer games, and why they could not come with me. By all accounts Rebecca rocked SpanishDance. Her teacher reports that hesuggested she work on getting some height in her chords to produce a bigsound. She apparently got the hands wayoff the keyboard and “loved the drama and got a little bit of sound of theinstrument too…”At this point she’s all drama and gesture and not muchcontent. In asking her about the recitalI was careful to ask at last four times if she had fun before asking how sheplayed. He would like her to progress faster in her weekly lessons which translatesto “hey you’re a pianist why can’t your kid get a little more done here…..”

I’ll be home fortwo days before setting off for the Society for Ethnomusicology. I’m planning comparative fashion ethnographyof the two societies building on the fine work of three of our graduatestudents. I always give my graduatestudents various writing assignments and ethnographic tasks around nationalmeetings. A few years ago a particularlydynamic threesome turned in a stunning ethno-sartorial study of the AMS. While I’m quite certain that I possessneither their style nor their critical eye I’ll do my best to report. My hunchis a lot less suits and definitely no Republican frocks.

Bedtime woes

2011-10-24T21:38:00.000-04:00

Someone please explain to me how a perfectly pleasant and kid-centered evening with your children can turn wretched in a matter of minutes. At dinner we civilly discussed Little Women and the upcoming school board election and two of three kids ate their weight in broccoli. We concluded with the kids eating dessert in front of the classic kids show “wizards of waverly place” while I chit-chatted on the phone. (take that sugar lady. by the way I happily give my kids dessert on a regular basis). Later, long after the mythical ‘sugar rush’ should have occurred, all hell broke loose. I’m not sure what happened except that Eli was running around with a broom and a lite saber, Jonathan somehow thought both weapons actually belonged to him, everyone was screaming and crying, and someone hit someone with something. I’m not exaggerating when I say we switched from a Norman Rockwell painting to surrealist depiction of hell in about three seconds. In one of those moments of parental desperation I think sent Rebecca to read in my bed and forbade the boys from reading or being read to which resulted in more screaming and crying to the point where it seemed possible that we might have two pukers. In between screams they threatened to “smite me” “write mean things on my tombstone” and a few nominations for meanest mommy ever.

Finally after twenty minutes of serious noise everyone calmed down. I decided to process the evening’s event with Jonathan. I thought we could talk about resisting the temptation to smack the little brother. For some reason I decided to talk about Odysseus and the sirens. Why on earth in that weak moment did I go for the sirens? As a feminist musicologist who writes on early modern Europe I’ve been asked to write enough essays about sirens that I could have a whole third book project and I’ve never once taken the bite. First I was informed “he put wax in his ears and the sirens were beautiful women. My ears are already full of wax and Eli is not a beautiful women. He is a horrific creature from the underworld.” The led Rebecca to a long discourse about how maybe she would be a siren because she loves to sing. And “oh don’t forget about Pandora.” Then she invoked Artemis. Jonathan finished the story by saying “well what’s his name was tempted to look at her at her bathing and was turned into a stag. He was then torn apart by his hounds.” So in the grand tradition of cautionary tales I said “see what happens when you succumb to the temptation to hit your brother.”

And, by the way, Rebecca is having second thoughts about being Demeter for Halloween; a costume her grandmother labored over. She worries that she might come across a supporting Antiochus because he wanted people to pray to the Greek Gods. Manuel argued that dressing up as a Greek God did not mean supporting all the attendant theology. She was unconvinced. We may be in for sartorial trouble on that front.

Ghost in the Machine

2011-10-21T21:29:00.000-04:00

I am about one class period away from turning music 101 into a philosophical exploration of the ghost in the machine. There are many classes in which technology doesn’t add much or simply provides a bit of accent. But like most people who teach soap-box style lecture classes, I’ve become dependent on new-fangled technologies for music 101. Gone are the days of the mixed tape for class, the pile of CD’s heavy enough to break an LL Bean backpack, transparencies, and books passed around the classroom. The technology in our beloved classroom has been smiting me for every sentence I’ve every negative word I’ve ever written about technology. To start the week, Martha Jefferson’s musical commonplace book took us directly to Iran. This seems improbable until you recall that in order to turn on our thirty-six key keyboard, you need to push a special button on the computer control. (The technology folks spare no expense for Music 101) This time, instead of activating the slightly out of tune electronic keyboard, it activated a map of the Middle East which highlighted Iran. Yesterday’s highlight involved a computer that refused to read jump drives at all. I meant to show a 19th century illustration of a Turkish dance and play a clip of the Turkish march from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and ask the class to discuss it. After a few minutes of interpretive dancing by all, my TA hooked my laptop up to the projector which, among other tidbits, involved sharing emails from my sister about Halloween Costumes and my actual lecture notes complete with phrases like “blather on about exoticism for a bit” to the entire class. We read the work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction for my grad seminar, which seemed more than apt. We can be sure that whatever aura Beethoven, Monteverdi, the Tokens, or Paul Simon ever had was completely sucked up and spat out by technology.

I rushed home to run what turned out to be the Parkway afterschool program. Thanks to spending a lot of time at an afterschool program, I knew exactly how to handle them. I sat them down for snack, made them all do their homework, and then explained that the activity was cleaning Rebecca and Jonathan’s room. I announced that anyone who disobeyed would lose a privilege. After they finished the clean-up, the girls made cookies for a work dinner I was hosting that night, and the boys continued to excavate the construction site next door. (being a feminist mother sucks at least ten times a week) The dinner also featured asking guests to do Jonathan’s homework for him. For some reason the third grade unit on economics and capitalism ended up in a fair in which kids were told to “bring in something useless” and sell it. Jonathan and Marietta played violin for 15 cents. And Jonathan, who has a fine motor delay and hates arts and crafts decided to make beaded bracelets.

The first low point was when the neighborhood cat ran into our house and the two five year olds ran after the cat and down the stairs, falling down the bottom three and announcing that each had pushed the other down. Both screamed until I stuffed cookies made by their sisters into their mouths. The second low point is ongoing. As it turns out in joining the boys for a little construction site exploration I got something in my eye that I’m allergic to and the whole organ started a long process of swelling, exuding puss, and generally turning red. Said process landed us in the eye doctor for the afternoon; never a fun place to hang out.

Tomorrow is the first event in my Arts Mentoring program. It would be super-fabulous if I could open my eye and see completely by then. I’m pretty sure that the fabulous graduate student Lauren would be in her rights to kill me if I said “hey you go ahead and coordinate getting 12 UVa students and 12 children from underserved communities to an art gallery for a photography exhibit, pizza picnic, and concert.” Speaking of this event wish us both luck. It’s one of those events that could really go either way!

oops i'm a tiger mom

2011-10-13T22:35:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I had Chinese food for the first time since we got back from China. Needless to say Panda Garden had almost nothing in common with what we ate in China. I’m pretty sure the cheese wontons would have made anyone in the Menglun metropolitan area puke. But Panda Garden combined with the annual sukkah hysteria inspired me to return to the blogosphere. We knew sukkot in Charlottesville spelled trouble when during our first fall Rebecca and Jonathan announced that their whole class was coming over for snack under our Sukkah. We had no intentions of building one. Somehow this has become an annual ritual and while we do now look forward to a hoard of tiny Jews traipsing to our little hut it would be a good idea if the teachers actually checked the dates with us. We thought Eli was making it up when he said his class would appear this morning. Having failed to convince him that the civil war did not end in 1953 and George Washington did not fight in it, I gave up trying to convince him that his buddies were not on the way. It turns out he had worked out a date with the teachers. Luckily, the biblical rainstorm saved us at least until Monday. This all amounts to some sort of cosmic payback for the time I volunteered my mom to make Latkas for the entire first grade.

Meanwhile I have to confess that I had a tiger mom moment with my not yet five year old. Eli begged to take piano lessons and we said sure. I think he’s too young but he loves it and takes it very seriously. At least he takes it seriously in the lesson where he tells his teacher things like “oh yes I know all the notes” or “I only pway in mino keys.” Pwacticing, however, is not his thing and usually consists of ten minutes of setting up his music, stretching, and organizing things and maybe finding middle C once. The other day I casually mentioned to the big kids that we’d have desert after they practiced. Somehow I thought it was a good idea to tell this to Eli too who of course refused to practice. But by then I’d taken a stand and felt I had to see it through. I make fun of most Dads I know for the “going nuclear” approach to parenting where for example a kid fails to put their shoes on and the Dad says something like “put your shoes on or you will never have another playdate again….” This is impossible, the kid knows it, and continues not to put the shoe on. So once I said the desert thing I felt I had to follow through. Let’s just say it ended with Eli screaming from his bed “I’M HUNGWWWWWWY. I PWOMISE I WILL PWACTICE…..” He also proudly explained to the teacher that his mother took away his desert for no reason and that said mother didn’t understand that his piano has a Z on it. Suffice it to say his performance of “Old Mista Wabbit” was lackluster at best this afternoon. In the end it’s hard to know what to say about a day that starts with rumbling front loaders, moves through Berlioz’s witches’ Sabbath, Charles Burney, Sting’s racial politics, and ends with a rather whimpery Mista Wabbit.

As I posted this the page just told me my blog is boring and old fashioned and that I should update the format. I promptly clicked a few buttons and found myself unable to figure out how to post. I did take a quick glace at a few of my posts from China. I'm not sure I can sustain this back here in cville. It all seems a little mundane now. But it did inspire a small congratulatory moment. I did in fact meet the summer's goals set out by my grad school bff Kirstin. 1. Do not beat the children. 2. Do not divorce the husband who took you to China. 3. Do not contract any fatal diseases. (I think the continued presence of the boils doesn't count so much as fatal disease as it does as pure gross. Nope the lovely thing on my neck is not a viola hicky caused by a newfound interest in practicing rock licks. It's a BOIL!"

Bye Bye Trees...

2011-09-18T23:27:00.002-04:00

The breakfast table wore my brain out on Friday. By 7:30 we had covered peaceful protest, civil disobedience, pogroms, Nazis and religious genocide. We’ve trained the children to read the newspaper or a book so we usually don’t have to talk before 7:30. I knew we were in a for a long morning when the kids came down the stairs in full mourning for the trees that are going to be cut down in the property next to our house. I’m talking operatic “we have to spend the entire day in the trees” mourning. This has been a long time coming; various neighborhood groups made sustained efforts to curtail the transformation of the former old people’s home into an apartment unit with a giant parking lot that start about two inches from our driveway. The kids are furious about loosing green space and their favorite climbing and they are very worried about Savvy, their dog friend who has colonized a space under one of the trees. Before we left for China they launched a peaceful protest with signs, sidewalk chalk, and notes on the building to the developers. They talked a lot about a petition but I’m not sure it ever happened. However when they heard the news that the trees will actually meet their demise next week they came up with a plan of throwing play mobiles at the tree guys. After a discussion about peaceful opposition I said “what would Martin Luther King have done”. Jonathan’s response was “well that took a really long time and we only have until Monday.” Rebecca added “and he got shot.” We tried also to explain to them that the guys actually cutting the trees were not responsible for the decisions. The image of a couple of faculty brats hurling plastic toys at grounds crews is truly liberal parent hell. Luckily before we had to deconstruct that situation we moved on to discussing the Ellis Island and immigration portion of the third grade curriculum. The kids wanted to know if our families had come here in search of religious freedom. We quickly explained that describing fleeing the pogroms and the Nazis as a search for religious freedom seemed to understate the issue just a bit. Somehow we snuck religious genocide and socialism in there before running down the street to catch the bus.

After we finished with genocide, civil disobedience, and religious persecution I took a moment to realize that we’ve been back from China for exactly one month. Returning from China feels very different than returning from almost anywhere else I’ve been. It seems so far away that it’s almost like it never happened. When I’ve returned from stints in Rome I come back thinking in Italian, reading books I’ve purchased, carefully reading Italian newspapers etc.. But the resonances between China and anything we do in our daily life here are almost none. The most noticeable thing about the return is that we’re still not playing with a full deck. Physically we’re all still on the mend. We’re not boil free and Manuel and I both still have serious pathological not-potable-water dishpan hand flare ups. It turns out that the lack of potable water, readily available protein and dairy, and a few modern conveniences actually takes a while to recover from. I still have not eaten a grain of rice and I think Rebecca’s new fascination with top chef may be a hint that her parents need to attend a little more to her culinary needs.

my grandmother

2011-09-10T09:12:00.000-04:00

We buried my grandmother yesterday. It was a small but lovely funeral if such things can be lovely. Here is what I read. My Uncle Michael, her baby, and I said very similar things.

My grandmother called the obituaries the party page, and she loved parties. She thought life cycle events demanded full participation and extravagant celebrations. We all thought that the St. Patrick’s Day parade was in her honor, and she kept a record of who called on birthdays and anniversaries. If she could, she’d take attendance today.

When she turned 83 she said she wanted to ride a double decker tour bus around New York City with her five granddaughters, so we did that and finished it off with a jazz concert in a club off of Madison Avenue. This last spring we had a party which included, in addition to the usual suspects, almost all of her nephews, and she was more with it and connected than I’d seen her in years. She loved every minute of it. She talked about my cousins’ weddings for weeks. And for my twins’ naming ceremony and bris she insisted that she and my mother wear matching green. She did jello shots at my sisters’ college graduation. And while I spent my high school and college years decked out in baggy ethnic garb, listening to earnest folk singers, she wore custom made leather outfits to clubs and concerts in the City. Every so often she bought me a sexy shirt that I wouldn’t wear for almost twenty years. I think this aesthetic caused a mixture of pride and trepidation in my cousins who lived in the city and got to bring her to grandparents’ day. You never know how black leather and sequins will play in an upper East Side primary school. So my niece probably had it right when she wanted to wear a peach taffeta puffy dress today. And I know that I’m not the only granddaughter who felt inclined to buy a colorful outrageous dress this week. If there had been time I would have suggested green manicures for all before this morning’s service. She loved parties because she loved people. I know that she would want us to celebrate her life.

And, perhaps even more importantly, I am certain that she was ready to die. She stopped her rote greeting of “I’m happy to be alive” about a year ago. And this last week she said she was ready to go. Mammy outlived everyone in her generation except her husband. We come from a family that does not shy away from talking about death; for the last twenty years both of my grandparents have taken a Woody Allen approach to old age, reminding me that they could die soon and therefore I should, for sure, come up for lunch. And by the time my grandmother’s slow decline became a reality I had internalized the behavior. She was, by the end a shell of what she once was. But that she was not much older than I am now when I was born means that I have vivid memories of her in her 50’s. And for that I am incredibly thankful. Not only was she vibrant enough to take my sister and me on trips, stay with us when our parents traveled, and generally be the coolest grandmother on the planet, but I got to have an adult girl friend relationship with her. And those are the memories I want to hold on to.

I want to remember the Mammy who did my hair at Uncle Michael and Aunt Lynn’s wedding. And I want to remember the Mammy who slept with me and Pami in the big trundle bed and told us stories about my Mom and Uncle Earl and Michael when they were children. I always liked the one about how she locked then in a closet when they had misbehaved and they asked for cookies. And I want to remember the Mammy who took train to Philadelphia to hang out with me in when I was in graduate school. And of course I want to remember the Mammy who loved my babies.

Mammy saw five granddaughters married and eight great grand children come into the world. Two of my favorite snapshot memories are of her on the floor stacking cups with my twin babies and of her walking down 86th street with one tiny hand in each of her two. They were her walker. And she thought the baby monitor was the best invention of the 20th century. She was largely blind but could sit on Uncle Earl’s deck in the Hamptons listening to the kids squawk at each other for hours. My children looked forward to her visits, which came complete with bagels and lox and usually a hideous toy that made too much noise. She got to meet her newest great grand kids Henry and Nola in the last year, and I know that thrilled her.

My grandmother lived a wild and crazy life, and she lived it with gusto. She was movie star beautiful in her youth and flirted shamelessly not just with her children’s friends but my friends all the way through graduate school. She knew that every ex-boyfriend any of her granddaughters had must be gay. She was in the coast guard, a dental hygienist, a cable television producer, an avid traveler, an amateur Egyptologist, and a good guitar player. She loved music and was truly adventurous. She always bucked the system. Our cousin Bill reminded us yesterday that in the throws of losing her eye site she got thrown out of the Lighthouse for The Blind support group. Instead of a seeing eye dog, she wanted a seeing eye horse so she wouldn't have to walk everywhere.

She had a fast and furious romance with my grandfather who, more than any of us knew, was still the love of her life 68 years later. It broke my heart to see her reach for him this last week. And in this they may be a model for us all. While they were movie star beautiful they did not have a movie style marriage. They had the kind that took work in the decades before people talked therapyspeak. They loved each other fiercely and had extremely strong ideas that didn’t always match. I don’t know many women of her generation who so clearly lived the way they wanted even when it went against what their husbands wanted. They knew how to fight and how to make up.

My grandmother told me years ago that she didn’t want anyone making stuff up at her funeral or saying nice things if they weren’t true. (my mother has said the same thing so it must be genetic) And so it’s worth saying that she never ever turned into a sweet little old lady—little yes in her final years but sweet no. With that vigor for life came a vicious temper. It didn’t really surprise me when she gave the ER resident the finger last weekend in the hospital, actually it cracked me up. She had spunk and humor until the very last minute. And she always loved her comforts and those too she had at the end. I had the best grandmother in the world. She was by no means perfect, and that’s exactly why she was the best. I’ll miss her terribly, but I’ll end by saying again that I’m sure she’d want us to have a party today

And so it begins....

2011-08-30T23:03:00.001-04:00

We spent the entire summer in an earthquake zone where one of our biggest fears was the fatal mix of seismic action and Chinese construction. And there we were in Charlottesville on the last day before school started when an earthquake came. It’s clear that at least this east coast girl had no clue what to do and had this happened in our Chinese house we would have all bitten the dust because we would have been in the closet while it came tumbling down on us. I somehow confused earthquake and tornado protocol and hustled the five kids in the house into the front closet which was away from the windows. After a few seconds I thought to get the hell out of the house. If it hadn’t been the longest thirty seconds of my life the sight of five kids waiting for me as I bolted down the stairs with their little ears covered and then the six of us huddled in the closet might have been kind of cute. Eli’s friend Sam was freaked out and wanted to go back in the house, Eli was clueless, Jonathan thought it sounded like horses storming in the Peloponnesian war, and Rebecca and her friend Olivia managed in thirty seconds to turn into an operatic “WE ALMOST DIED IN AN EARTHQUAKE”

Meanwhile we’re all settling back into normal—or at least our form of normal. We have a few nice little staph infection boils as souvenirs, and I don’t think any of us has gone near a grain of rice. It’s clear that we’re not yet batting with a full team. One of us who shall remain nameless failed to check the time of their first class and missed it, one of us had the day wrong on a seminar, and one of us scheduled office hours during class. Needless to say that the wilting afternoons in the jungle with nothing to do but sweat often drove me completely crazy, but something between that and five people and one driver going in eight different directions might have been a nice transition.

The kids, for the most part, seem to have completely forgotten the experience. Last week I said “Isn’t it kind of weird that ten days ago we were in the jungle.” And the response was a resounding, “Can I have another waffle please?” I, on the other hand, found it remarkable to be standing in front of sixty first-year students talking about the tune Hound dog and Beethoven ten days after riding a Vespa into town to eat dumplings.

They still have a few habits; shoes left outside houses, obsessive washing of hands, constant checking if water is ok to drink. They seemed a little feral when we first got back, and one of them did their best impersonation of a psychotic child at the school open house, complete with no eye contact with anyone and grunting at teachers, etc… But all three of them marched off to the first day of school and haven’t looked back. As always, we get almost no information from them, though I learned from eavesdropping after bedtime that this year the Spanish teacher “actually speaks Spanish to us.” This seems like an improvement. Rebecca seems still to have a crush on the music teacher, and Jonathan would rather learn Latin than Spanish. Eli seems to be having a blast in the same preschool class he was in last year, though his joy was temporarily tampered when his big sibs said “really Eli are you going to learn anything at that school this year?”

I told the kids that I wasn’t cooking for two months when we got back. I lasted two weeks but have still not baked anything. Rebecca explained to me that she was pretty sure that what I baked would be more nutritious than the packaged snacks they were eating. I said a whole wheat Ritz cracker was plenty healthy enough.

Reverse Culture Shock

2011-08-19T07:04:00.002-04:00

Thank goodness for Google. When I came home from rural Kenya in 1988 I had no idea that the panic attack caused by the cereal isle in Safeway came from a phenomenon called “reverse culture shock.” I think it’s safe to say that’s what we have going on in the Gordon/Lerdau family. We did mitigate it a bit by staying at my parents house for two days on the way back, which worked a little like one of those bubbles that astronauts hang out it when returning to Earth. Even with that, there is something bizarrely decentering about having the familiar feel unfamiliar. Seven minutes of internet research revealed that reverse culture shock often expresses itself in a radical reevaluating of priorities and a re-setting of life goals. My symptoms are more material than spiritual.

Electric lighting feels blinding, and I can’t finish any of the meals I crave. No one looks at me when I walk down the street, and no one touches my kids. Everyone looks very large; this was especially so in the barbecue place we stopped in on the way back to C’ville. But I’m not tall anymore. The transformation of language from a largely inaccessible background noise to a mode of communication is not seemless. Not only do other people’s conversations distract, but when everyone around you understands you a little self censorship is in order. Time to turn the brain/mouth filter back on. This, by the way, is a concept neither the kids nor Manuel have grokked; I am sure all four will be sent home from their respective schools at least once in the first week.

My yoga class on Wednesday night kind of captured the whole thing. For starters my regular teacher wasn’t there, and it was all new people, so no comfy yoga return. But also coming from a part of China that is extremely Buddhist, where greetings regularly involve a kind of yogic head bow, and where squatting is a way of life, not a pose, made the whole thing seem hilarious to me. The sight of white chycs in athletic tank tops with “exotic” patterns as fashion accent toting large mats and chanting Sanskrit just seemed incongruous.

Charlottesville is very invested in local food these days. I’m kind of over local food. One of my friends came over to try to take me to the farmers market the day we returned. (she also left ice cream and waffles in my freezer and took care of my ant problem for me when I was gone so she rocks) However, at the market request I pretty much laughed in her face. “A market are you crazy? All I want is groceries delivered, and I want the food I want without worrying about whether or not it’s possible in this climate.” I went to a farmers market every other day and bought all kinds of delicious locally grown produce. However, had I had the option of anything not locally grown, we would all have had an easier summer.

There’s even an oddness to the giant brick that has been lifted off my head by US safety standards. Rural China comes with multiple ways in which your children can meet their demise. In the last two days we were in China we read Chinese news stories about child kidnapping, death from tampered food at KFC, renegade escalators running people over, kids dying when roller coasters collapsed, death by plane crash, and statistics on motor vehicle death. And that was the Party news, which means it was heavily censored and hid most of the bad stuff. Even without the help of the news, it’s not hard to conjure up demise in the form of venomous snakes, poisonous spiders, motor accidents, crumbling buildings, earthquakes, mudslides, fire, flood, vicious tropical viruses, bullet trains, airplanes with no safety rules, etc… To exist there with small children and not collapse with anxiety involves simply putting every idea about the safety of your children in a little box. But to maintain that box takes a lot of mental energy. And now that we are back I have let myself think about all the things that didn’t happen; that’s scary.

While Manuel and I are walking around in a kind of haze and have yet to interact with anyone but our very closest friends, the kids seem fairly immune to the whole business. As creatures of the moment China was the new normal in May and now it’s Virginia’s turn. They have said some comical things like “do you think Ian and Caroline will remember us” (Ian and Caroline live across the street and Ian apparently wondered if they’d still understand English.) For the first day they looked for places to stash their shoes outside buildings and asked repeatedly if water was safe to drink. We also need to aggressively Chinese government style impose some new normal; we wear seatbelts, bike helmets, sit in booster seats, do not leave the house and go visiting without telling an adult, take off on our bikes at will etc… But for them home is simply where we are. When asked about the best parts of their trip they immediately talk about the vacations, which I initially thought revealed the excitement of the trips. But now my sense is that the living in the Garden part of our experience barely registers as a trip. It was simply where we stashed ourselves for a while.

Ok, I have to admit I have no clue how they have been the last couple of days because my fabulous parents have them. This is the first time in three months that I’ve been without them for more than about two hours, and I don’t miss them one bit. In fact given that the Charlottesville schools deactivated them and then failed to promote them to third grade it might not be a bad idea for my parents to just register them in Alexandria and send them to the school Pam and I went to…

There are of course countless ways in which it feels like home. Our friends filled our fridge with prosecco, beer, orange juice and milk and left chips, salsa, and coffee around the house. They also left a brilliant note, which should go in an essay on gender in the jungle, but it began “Welcome home, Family of Dr. Manuel Lerdau and servant-wife Bonnie. They set some rules for us “No air conditioning in day-time. No playing in mud. No Privacy. No bad language. No No. 2 in toilet. Outside please.” Sitting on the downtown mall eating Tacos we ran into quite a few people we know and then I had my first ever Dave Mathews citing. He was headed to the Gillian Welch concert and I saw the back of his head. In the morning I went for a run with my running lady friends and though the run practically killed me I realized how much I’d missed the collective. My neighbor came over to say Hi yesterday and it was sooooo good to see her—really made it feel like home. Although I have not so much as made a cup of coffee it feels really good to have our kitchen back. And I’ve worn nothing but shorts and tank tops since I got home—neither of which really flew in China.

Today’s my goal is to find my new office. It was moved while I was gone and I don’t even know where it is. Classes start on Tuesday. This somehow seems symbolic of the whole return. Manuel has to go in today to start freshman advising; I’m afraid he’ll focus on telling them how to get bottled water and avoid the cobra who lives two-thirds of the way up the trail. I have a few more blog posts up my sleeve processing the whole experience and then my hunch is it will all get a lot less interesting.

Exit

2011-08-17T06:47:00.000-04:00

We are hanging out at my parent’s house in Alexandria, recovering from the journey and visiting with family before heading back to Charlottesville. It’s funny how a three-month trip to another planet defamiliarizes the familiar. This process began as we boarded the United Airlines flight. On Chinese airlines safety precautions are suggestions rather than rules; so if the flight attendant says buckle up and stow your baggage only about 1/3 of the people bother to do it. If there is something worth looking at out the window everyone gets up to check it out; no matter what the seatbelt sign says. On United they mean business and because so many of the passengers spend more time on Chinese airlines the flight attendants were pretty busy getting all the bags stowed and passengers buckled. The only time they didn’t carefully check each row was when the pilot made the somewhat alarming announcement “fasten your seatbelts and flight attendants sit down wherever you are.”

The soundscape feels radically different here; modernization performs a kind of evening out. Cars all sound the same; no more radical difference between truck, toktok, motorbike, tractor etc… The bugs, even Virginia Cicadas barely seem audible compared to the natural cacophony that underscored everything we did in the jungle. And the breeze is a treat to hear. It also feels amazing to be clean, and I mean really cleaner than I’ve been since May. I took a long hot shower in soft water that actually rinses the soap off, and we are washing everything that came to China. Once the clothes came out of the washing machine, the grime we’ve lived with for three months seemed repulsive. And what a delight to walk into a public restroom and find both toilet paper and soap. Potable water is the best!

As I mentioned in my last post, our exit was a study in what could possibly go wrong. The first problem was that on Tuesday I got really sick; tropical virus that made it impossible for me to get out of bed for two days—two days that ought perhaps to have been spent packing, organizing stuff, finishing my syllabus etc… And I basically felt crappy the whole rest of the week. Manuel then followed this with some sort of hacking disease that made enough noise to wake up all the ghosts who reside up the hill from the house. When we finally both woke up two days before we were to leave, and Manuel went to the bank he found that it was completely out of money. Our account was in fine shape, but the bank itself had no money. The second bank in town was simply closed because it was August 13. Luckily I’ve embraced the Chinese cash economy and had a few piles of cash stashed away in my underwear drawer and my wallet so we were fine.

The real excitement was the journey from the Garden to Beijing. We have never had a problem with a driver from the Garden. But sure enough on our last and perhaps most important ride the guy was almost forty minutes late. There is only one morning flight from Jing Hong to Kunming so if you miss that it’s possible you won’t get to Beijing that day. And we wanted nothing getting in the way of our getting on that precious United flight out of China! Manuel convinced himself that we would certainly miss the flight and when we called the guy who made the van arrangements all we got was “oh my god wait a minute…” The driver arrived and neighbors tossed our bags and kids in the van and off we went on a ride that felt more like an amusement park stomach turner than a drive. It usually takes 75 minutes to get to the airport we did it in 45 and that included driving through a few sections of road that had been washed out by mudslides. By some miracle no one puked. We made it to the gate halfway through the boarding process with the kids running through the airport and Eli falling every few minutes. We arrived in Kunming and found that one of the two new bags we bought for $1 had busted leaving Rebecca’s bathing suit and Manuel’s underwear dragging along the luggage dispenser. Luckily, both bathing suit and underwear were of a style not tempting to other passengers (& there’s almost no petty crime in China) and this sort of bag explosion happens so often in China that the airport has a place where they wrap and fix bags. I had also learned the night before we left that Kunming is a center of child-snatching in China. So while we waited on line I used my iPad to read up about said snatching, which inspired me to yell at the kids every time they got more than two feet from me and conclude with a stern lecture about staying close to us unless they wanted to be stolen and sold into slavery. They were totally unimpressed and informed me that there is no slavery in the modern world. This is another one of those things that someone might have told me before our many flights through Kunming. We finally arrived in Kunming and went to look for the free shuttle that came with our hotel. That bus turned out to leave from parking slip c-0818 in the basement of being airport. The waiting area neither provided enough air to breathe or enough space to insure not being hit by a car.

As soon as we arrived at the hotel we turned around and attempted to get a cab into town to have dinner with my cousin Jordan. Our bad car karma continued and after waiting almost 40 minutes the guy arrived and informed us that he could not drive us because we were too many. We finally made it to the dumpling restaurant half an hour late and proceeded to eat our weight in delicious dumplings. My favorite was a spicy pork with celery and something else yummy. We also had one with dried shrimp, corn, spicy cabbage, and something else. Manuel ordered another delicious one that had something, something else, and a different something else. We each sucked down a 24 oz. beer in about two minutes. It was a blast to watch our kids play with Jordan’s son Jayden. I’m not sure I’ve ever met a third cousin. All four of the children started off working very hard to ignore each other and drive their parents crazy. But by the eventually bonded in the form of shooting things, not eating as much as their mothers wanted them to, and building stuff.

We all collapsed after dinner and stayed that way until we made our way to breakfast at the “swiss chalet” at 10:30. The kids did their usual, unpack every little bottle and box in the bathroom which this time included a package of condoms. This registered on our bill as “health accessory.” Manuel took the kids to the pool which had them so excited that they jumped in with their clothes on. We arrived at the airport about four hours before our flight and saw the longest line on the planet. By the time we checked in I was ready to kill the kids and they were ready to kill each other. We had hagandaz ice cream for $5 a scoop, and Jonathan spent the entire time worried that we’d miss the flights. He takes after his father and two grandfathers. Security was fine but passport control caused some trouble. The passport control people at the Beijing airport look like combat soldiers and yelled regularly. This time they yelled at me. We never figured out what I did wrong but there was a lot of incomprehensible yelling and they made me get the eye scan multiple times. The only thing that prevented me from ending up in a re-education camp was probably the “bebe” who they decided was cute. The bebe was by that point terrified and did not perform his usual cuteness. As we waited for the plane the kids had exactly one moment of playing nicely—it went by so fast that by the time we got the camera out it was done so I had very low expectations for the plane. But on the way down the mile long jetway someone took the kids and replaced them with sweet angelic kids whom the flight attendants complimented us on. They were all pleases and thankyous and quietly drank their milk and apple juice. Rebecca and Joanthan were so happy to have English reading material that they read the Hemispheres magazine cover to cover and when I attempted a skim I was told “mommy you did not skip the article about roman coins on page 17 did you.” They watched Thor which they found ridiculously inattentive to the norse mythology. They were full of ethnic observations. The first remark was “woah look at all the white people” followed by “wow there are African Americans on this plane” After a few rounds of that we decided it was time to dose them up with benedryl and they went to sleep. We zipped through us passport control and customs with no problems, which, given the number of chicken feet and bottles of moonshine we brought with us, is somewhat miraculous.

We are all exhausted and wired today. Jonathan suggested we “languish” for the day but we’ve been messing with our stuff, drinking water, and generally experiencing culture shock. More on that a little later….

Return from the Ends of the earth....

2011-08-15T00:42:00.000-04:00

We’re in a hotel near the Beijing airport that used to be the Sino/Swiss hotel, and we can’t decide if it used to be nice and is mid-dilapidation process or if it used to be gross and is now being fixed up. In any case, it comes with plenty for the kids to do, including the usual 8 bottles of bathroom things, combs, little tea cups, TV, and a mammoth swimming pool. Yesterday’s 12-hour journey involved a harrowing trip in a speeding mini-van through a mud slide, two airplanes, and ½ an hour in the diesally airport basement waiting for the shuttle bus to the hotel. Today we look forward to our fourteen-hour flight with glee.

There’s nothing like leaving a place to put it all in some kind of perspective. This last week really has felt like watching a movie about being stuck in a tropical paradise, spending a lot of time fantasizing about getting out, and then realizing what you’ll miss... For starters just about everything that could go wrong did. In fact, so much went wrong that it needs a list in a separate post; we do, after all, still have another twenty-four hours to get through…. But I knew we were in for a long week when we arrived home from Lijeing to find the Compound ground to a halt by the presence of the wife of the director of the Chinese Academy of Science. She was staying in the house across the street from us, which meant that every night about ten police dudes came and circled the place. And every so often they closed the road in and out of the garden. So, for example, when our Indonesian neighbor went into town with her seventy three year old mother who is observing Ramadan and has arthritic knees, the police would not allow any motorized vehicles on the road to bring her back. So she called her husband who came and carried the mom on the back of his BYCYCLE. By the time we got back, the other moms were so mad that during the police imposed afternoon two hour quiet time we instructed the kids to have the loudest water fight they’d ever had. The water stand pipe sits in Mrs. Big Potato’s yard.

We ended up putting off packing until the very last minute not just out of procrastination but because both Manuel and I were struck with wretched tropical viruses. I decided while lying in bed writhing in joint pain that I was done with the whole earth mother full time thing and told Manuel he had to take charge of packing to go home. Not a single person in the compound believed me or thought he could do it. This also requires a longer post but suffice it to say that the gender politics and domestic arrangements surrounding us would have seemed patriarchal and sexist in the 1940’s.

I did deal with the food because I spent so much energy this summer acquiring and hoarding western food that I wanted to dispense the left overs. My neighbors felt that the parting gifts of Vanilla extract, baking powder, coco powder, baking soda, butter and peanut butter were a form of food nirvana. The large pharmacy we left met a similar reception. We came to China with a vast supply of medications and, knock on every piece of fake wood possible, we have needed to use very little of it. One of the very scariest things about inhabiting the particular end of the earth we did is the complete lack of medical care and of viable medication. Our neighbors in the foreigners compound all have horror stories about hospitals and doctors. They no motrin left for their kids and had no antihistamines, so when the four year old broke out in a rash over her entire body from playing in the rain forest they had no recourse. They can’t get reliable anti-malaria meds, which you need for many places easily accessible from Menglun. On a more mundane note, we left our bikes with the new foreigners who will be in the garden for two weeks and Rebecca dispensed her art supplies and nail polish in a manner that makes the way my grandmother has been discussing her will for the last thirty years seem blithe. Eli magnanimously gave each of his friends one crappy toy including the baby shrek that makes so much noise I’ve tried to bury it at least seven times—it doesn’t die. Jonathan did not want to give away a single book but eventually dispensed them.

On Friday night our next-door neighbors had a potluck in our honor, which was incredibly lovely and delicious. I wouldn’t say that I became intimate friends with the two foreign wives Sumi and Warin who live in the compound. But that the kids all call me auntie sort of captures the level of dependence and intertwining that goes on in a place like that. We lived at the ends of the earth in glass houses. I spent more time with these kids than I’ve ever spent with any who are not my own, and we all moved in and out of each others houses as if it was one big one. (there are pluses and minuses to this sort of forced intimacy…) And we were affiliated with a high-powered scientific institute that couldn’t quite decide what it wanted with foreigners. Some want them around, and some find them despicable leaches. As I’ve stressed before, living the earth mother dream in rural China is very hard work. And of the three of us (foreign moms) I had the hardest time. It’s not just that there’s a learning curve and I was only there for three months. But also villages in Indonesia and Thailand are a lot more like Menglun than Charlottesville is. And there is simply no way I could have fed my family and kept them healthy without their help. No one official told me that the lightpoles outside our house are live wires or showed me where to buy chicken breasts and yogurt.

Saturday morning Manuel and I went for a last run in the jungle. Then I hopped on the Vespa with Warin, and we drove to the dorms to pick up another woman. We zipped into town and stopped for a breakfast snack at a fabulous dumpling stand I’d never even noticed before. Then I went to the grocery store to stock up on snacks and spices to bring home. My taste for super spicy is way up, and I’ve fallen in love with a variety of hot peppers and weird spices. I bought two glass jars of delicious smoky hot pepper, which the packing commander would not let me bring home. The highlight of my day was, of course, my solo ride on the Vespa during which, contrary to Manuels fears, I neither broke my collarbone nor took out any small children or old people.

Saturday night while we were packing our American neighbor came over with an excellent bottle of scotch that we drank post mac-n-cheese. At some point I migrated next door with the women and children and the other men migrated to our house. The children reported to me that “I think the dad’s are getting really drunk and they ate all the brownies without saving us any…” The scene at the chyc house was kind of hilarious. For starters Sumi has her mom and sister visiting and they all observe Ramadan. The result for me was a constant stream of delicious but slightly mysterious homemade Indonesian snacks. My favorites were friend curried mashed potatoes and home made freetoes. I gave them a tour of their new medicine cabinet and dispensed motrin to Sumi’s mom who then asked if I was a doctor and had any medicine to make her son less skinny. The kids said extremely dramatic and tearful goodbyes to their friends, and Eli announced that actually he wanted to stay a bit longer.

When we went outside at 6 to wait for the driver (who was about half an hour late and almost made us miss our plane), we saw our neighbors coming in their nightgowns and flipflops to say goodbye. Tropical dawn is kind of magical; mist rising off the forest, birds and bugs making all kinds of sounds, and temperatures almost cool. As we sat on the steps with our friends, I realized how many arresting sights, sounds and smells I’ve experienced and how many wonderful people I’ve come to treat as family whom I would never meet in any other circumstances. And the sound of the van put putting up the hill made me feel really lucky that for us this was only a summer adventure and not a permanent way of life.

Two more days in the Jungle....

2011-08-11T21:12:00.002-04:00

Yesterday we saw a bucket of squirming eels in the market and the biggest weirdest mushrooms I’ve ever seen under the rubric of “Food.”. New “foreigners” arrived in the garden and they also have a set of twins. On the way to dinner we met a set of Chinese tourist twins. That made three sets on the Menglun suspension bridge. The world stopped turning for just a moment. When we got to dinner and sat down on our 11 inch chairs, the lady from the Dai clothing store next door came and reminded me that I had forgotten to pick up Jonathan’s outfit at 5. So the kids and I went with her, she opened up her shop gave us the outfit and we were joined by the other five kids at dinner, and they all spent some time picking out fabric scraps. For dinner we enjoyed Dai barbecue; some of the most delicious food I’ve ever tasted including spicy sweet potato noodles, spicy grilled tofu, grilled eggplant and more. My spice tolerance and appreciation have gone up exponentially this summer.

In the morning Jonathan and I chased after a guy pulling a trishaw with large boxes, thinking it was Manuel’s long anticipated research equipment; it wasn’t. Manuel packed the box in April with his fancy lab equipment, warm clothes for Lijiang, and food including ten boxes of mac-n-cheese. The equipment was to have been the basis of his research here and part of his job was to be teaching Chinese students how to use it. The box first sat at UVa for quite some time while UVa tried to figure out how to mail it. Apparently, in the administration’s haste to develop exchange programs with China, they have not yet mastered the mail. It eventually left the US and took some sort of slow boat until it arrived in Guangzho, where it then sat for six weeks because the Asian Games shut down customs. Then it made it to Kunming where it was scheduled to come on the once a week garden bus from Kunming. It got bumped by the Communist Party’s sports equipment. And then it arrived finally yesterday afternoon on a three-wheeled motorcycle. The kids had their best snack yet of peanut butter filled pretzels, chocolate covered pretzels, and Kashi.

The punch line to these vignettes is that, in the end, the best and the worst parts of our experience coalesce and all involve staying long enough that we no longer qualify at tourists. When the kids scoff at busses of tourists lollygagging through the garden they have a point. That means that even the most gorgeous and fascinating things change their timbre when they become the background noise of daily life. For starters, the entire basis of Manuel’s science project—the reason we are all here with our staph infections—got held up by the machine of a repressive government concerned among other things about the threat of Annie’s mac-n-cheese and gas chromatographs. That sort of hold up is a reality of living here. It’s fascinating to read the People’s Daily and to think about the bizarre counterpoint of a communist government and a capitalist economic system on speed. Indeed, our visit to LIjiang made a study of that phenomenon. What happens when the Chinese government decides to make a place that was closed to foreigners until the mid ‘80s and did not have a real airport until 1995 a major tourist destination? From what I can tell, such a rapid opening up leads hundreds of pashmina shops and thousands of Chinese tourists who come out in the evening to buy them in crowds that make a Perugia passigiato or the Washington DC national mall look like a lonely mountaintop. But it’s not so fascinating when your peanut butter sits in Guangzho for six weeks and when capitalism has not arrived in your village so no amount of money can buy what you think you need. Nor is the regime all that captivating when you wake up every single morning and say hi to the spy cameras. It’s actually giving me exhibitionist fantasies, which my children seem to be acting out for me. The tropical plants blow my mind every day, and I can understand why anyone would pay big money just to have one walk through this garden. But those plants require temperatures over 90 and a humidity of 100% every day for months; conditions which local air conditioners can’t cope with. That’s not easy to live with. And it is extremely satisfying to learn some of a language that three months ago barely registered as a mode of communication to me. But it would have been a hell of a lot easier to learn those words if this place had cared enough about the foreigners it is avidly recruiting to provide someone who actually knows how to teach Chinese…. And it’s kind of funny when I think I’m talking about mud to someone and it turns out I’ve said something about monkeys. But it’s not that funny when the grocery store lady takes my egg carton away because I can’t explain to her that I brought it from Jinghong and that I’m simply incapable to safely brining eggs home without a carton. And it’s even less funny when every so often I lie awake at night wondering what I’d do if the staph infections went septic or the kids got Dengue fever and there was no one less than a plan flight away with even rudimentary medical training who could understand me.

Today I’m feeding all the foreign kids lunch with my ten boxes of mac-n-cheese. I promised the kids a post-lunch water fight, and I’m sure they will make their way outside to the mud and water when the afternoon deluge comes. I do hope none of them touches the streetlight pole that becomes live when it rains; the last thing we need is another minor electrocution. There’s lot about this experience that I wouldn’t trade, but that doesn’t mean it was all fun and games. I suppose it’s not unlike the business of being a musicologist. Often when I tell people I teach music history they response is “oh how lovely” as if all we do all day is sit around listening to good music. It’s also a job and has moments of sucking as much as any other job.

Big Gongs...

2011-08-07T20:35:00.000-04:00

We’re back from our vacation in Lijiang. The return trip to the jungle was only an hour flight, but we got off the plane to temperatures that were a good 20 degrees hotter and to 100% humidity. The kids looked like something out of the movies as they shielded their eyes from the sun and immediately seemed to wilt. Within about eleven minutes of returning we had an extra five girls in the house, and by an hour later all of them had gone outside for the ritual afternoon mud and tropical rainstorm play.

One of the highlights of the trip for all of us was Friday night’s concert of the “ancient naxi music ensemble.” We chose Lijiang, as opposed to some other Himalayan destinations, because Manuel’s Chinese ping pong buddy suggested the music. .He was totally right. I found it fascinating both as a sound experience and as ethnography. It turned out that when they said kids get in free they meant kids don’t have seats, so all five of us sat in two seats—comfy. The kids were captivated for an hour and half and then got restless. The musicians averaged about 80 and the M.C. introduced them as “aged musicians” touting their ages with great pride. Seven were over 80, four looked to be under 60, and about nine were in-between. They all slowly walked (or hobbled) onto the stage wearing brightly colored silk clothing.

For some one who has heard very little traditional Chinese music, parts of it had that sonic shock value that one gets at a really radical new music concert; it’s just sounds that bend the ear. The instruments could all be described as “original” instruments, and many had been buried for safe keeping during the Cultural Revolution or made by the players themselves. They included bowed and plucked string instruments, bamboo transverse flutes, some double reed type and lots of percussion, especially cool looking gongs. They had a two hundred year old “ten chiming gong.” I liked the huquin that looked like a giant bamboo theorbo. The striking thing about the instruments is the pitch variability. They all tune to different pitches, and they tune to pitches that to a western trained ear sound almost impossible to tune to, like, for example, a D#. It’s like hearing early music groups tune to a 415 A; if you have perfect pitch it sounds out of tune. And to a western trained ear the radical heterophony is captivating. (that means that each player interprets the basic melody in a slightly different way) The result is an unpredictable melody that’s hard for the ear to capture. The line between melody and accompaniment also seems at times almost nonexistent. The players lean on the dissonances created by their separate tunes. It sounds corny, but it oddly reminded me of the waterways in the town itself, with little branches flowing away and then coming back together. The string players and singers favor a super-wide vibrato that makes the lack of equal temperament even more decentering; again, it’s hard for the ear to capture a pitch. Rebecca wanted to know how the singers made their voices do that and then said “don’t tell me we’ll need to find a Chinese musicologist to figure it out…” Jonathan thought they needed to tune up a little more.

The orchestra leader, Xuan Ke, addresses audiences each night with stories and historical lessons. And he makes it very clear that he intends to preserve a traditional art that, in the end, is not especially naxi. The groups repertoire is mostly based on Donjing music, that was used by the literati in the Tang and Song dynasties as part of musical rituals. He explained that many of the sounds and instruments came from the Han Chinese ethnic majority. That’s probably why quite a bit of it sounded familiar to me. I’ve heard Han music but had never heard of the Naxi until a few weeks ago. Until 1949 the music served religious ends, while now it is entirely secular. The group leader explained all of this even as he emphasized the Naxi ethnicity of the players and the Naxi “spirit” of the tune. So there’s a dissonant combination of the performance on an ethnic identity through the assimilation of dominant sounds.

I have to admit that part of what I loved about it was that it provided a refreshing break from the incessant irritating pop music I hear day in and day out here. There’s one song that has the words “darling darling darling darling” and uses exactly two chords for the full twenty minutes it takes to get through. I came to rural China expecting to find some really cool tunes; I’ve read about and taught traditional Chinese music. And I’ve heard plenty of it on CD’s. And I’ve read about, taught, and listened to plenty of Asian hip hop and rock sounds that really rock my world. But the truth is that out in the stix here mostly what I hear is heavily western influenced. Even so called traditional tunes or Red songs are westernized, accompanied by synthesized pianos and cellos with the occasional pipa for some accent. The homophonic texture once in a while gets a little polyphonic and singers give a nod to the wide vibrato of traditional music. I’ve never heard so many sequences in my life. Today in the cab I thought the CD was stuck. My smallest child is sadly obsessed with Celine Dion and the modulations of what I hear day in and day out pretty much sound like her.

And as it turns out, I’m exactly the target audience for Naxi Traditional Music. Lijiang is now a huge tourist destination for Chinese tourists and the majority of the audience was Chinese. But it also contained the most white people I’ve seen in one space in three months. And, given the combo of young euro backpackers and wealthy over sixty brits & germans (all toting around Lonely Planet), I’m thinking they, like me, had fantasies of a musical China that did not involve Darling Darling Darling or Lady Gaga. The orchestra bills itself as playing music that is “unchanged ancient dynasty”. English guide books suggest these events as highlights of a visit to Lijiang which stands as a “pure” and “untouched” city.

My hunch is that the music serves a similar role for Chinese tourists. Yunnan province is something of a minority heaven, with twenty five separate groups and, as far as I can tell, each and every one of them is portrayed as good at singing and dancing while their women are lovely in their brightly colored traditional garb. As long as they stay docile the Chinese (Han) government seems to like its minorities. My sense is that when it comes to minority arts the Chinese may even be more orientalist than Western tourists at this point. Every bit of state sponsored literature in translation presents minorities as an exotic other to a more staid and far less expressive Han majority. And every city in Yunan has an ethnic dance and singing group, usually featuring scantily clad women dancing to fairly western sounding orchestras with the same sort of “chinese color” as I hear in the pop music. The Chinese government comes by this naturally. Mao after all spent quite a bit of capital organizing ethnic groups and their musics and encouraging them to make their music “more scientific”

Despite the clear cone of silence around the cultural revolution, this particular orchestra clearly has an agenda. The leader worked as a conductor in Kunming when the red army entered and was eventually sentenced to re-education in a forced labor camp where he was tortured. We heard a story about the “very stupid history” of China as embodied in foot binding. (the kids are now obsessed with foot binding) Manuel thinks that was all code for the Cultural Revolution, and he’s probably right. Regardless of whether or not lurid details of uncles breaking the feet of four year old girls actually stand in for the persecution of artists and intellectuals, the group does present a stunning musical narrative of cultural preservation and survival. The “aged” musicians in their wire glasses could well be the intellectuals and artists pictured in any number of films and books about the torture of intellectuals. And, as we learned, many of the musicians in this group, hid their instruments during the Cultural Revolution, and a number of them were sent out for ‘reform’ as well.

But, despite all of this, I loved it and wish the kids had lasted through the entire thing. I’ve heard traditional Chinese music but I’ve never heard it live. And it’s like any other kind of performance; better, colorful and simply more arresting when heard live. That kind of completely unpredictable polyrhythm feels different when you hear it in real time because you really don’t know where it’s going next. The tunning song gave a real sense of the variabilities of pitch and of the way timbre invariably inflects pitch. And the musicians made mistakes, which is also part of the performance. At one point during a performance of “Yunnan” opera, the instrumentalists started playing the wrong accompaniment. And, indeed, the fact that the group leader had his fingers broken in a forced labor camp made the whole thing that much more poignant to me. It’s true that the group works hard to create a package of the preservation of an ancient tradition that, in some ways, never existed. But the package did not mute the sounds for me.

Budahs and Horses

2011-08-06T00:53:00.000-04:00

On Thursday we woke up and had breakfast in the hotel. Just next to our table stood a statue with a giant erect penis and big boobs. I can’t figure out who he/she is but I remember my mom and sister taking lots of pictures of him in Katmandu so he/she is obviously important. That hardly registered as interesting by the end of the day.

Our Mongolian guide arrived to pick us up at 9 in a van with a driver. Three months ago the 1970’s van that looked like it would barely make it around the block might have set off alarm bells. But as long as I didn’t have to get on a cable car I was fine. Heading out of town we passed the weekly cattle market and eventually arrived at Zhiyun Montestary. The budhists here practice a sect of Tibetan Buddhism knows as “Red Hat” Buddhism. Originally built in 1727, it had thirteen courtyards, most of which were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. We pulled right up to the temple, which was at that point completely empty. As we pulled up we saw two hundred year old trees covered with Prayer Flags; each little flag carries a prayer spread through the world by the wind. The brightly colored cloths blowing in the wind entranced the kids, and, in fact, the whole thing had a silencing effect on them. Visiting a giant Buddhist temple is not unlike visiting the Vatican with Jewish kids; the little synagogue in C’ville seems pretty boring by comparison. We walked through a number of courtyards inadvertently following the sound of Tibetan monks giving “singing lessons” to “baby monks.” My mind is not easily quieted; it takes usually a good hour and a half of yoga to do it but there is something essentially peaceful about an almost empty Tibetan Monastery in the Himalayas with a view of snow capped mountains and valley lakes. The kids loved the prayer wheels, though they experienced no real quieting effect. Eli ran through them, making them go as fast as he could occationally chanting either “ohm shanti shanti….” Or “sun yat sen sun yat sen” Like the prayer flags, the prayer wheels carry mantras which spread through the motion of the wheels.

In many ways this place represented the western fantasy of a Buddhist temple; gorgeous, quiet, almost empty. Even I, who can’t sit still, could imagine sitting for a long time there just listening and looking. We’ve spent a lot of time in Buddhist places this summer, and I have to disagree with White Buddhists friends who say it’s a philosophy and not a religion. There’s no doubt that the Buddhists here think of it as a religion where prayer to a god yields some tangible benefit. For example, we saw a painting of The Buddha of Wealth, whom people pray to so they can make more money. There’s no doubt these Buddhists are doing quite a bit of unabashed idol worship. I also got a kick out of the Buddah of Hooch (baijo). He had a bottle of the ever-present hooch, which the monks refill every day; when you pray to him you supposed to take a swig. The kids liked the idea of a protection cord, which you also purchase. We did not. Doing that in a sacred space seemed a little like taking communion in a Catholic church—don’t do it if you don’t believe it because it’s disrespectful.

We then hiked up a mountain path to the “new monastery” which is being built predominantly as a tourist trap. Along the way our driver picked mushrooms and berries for the kids to eat. (they refused) We arrived huffing and puffing at a construction site. In addition to the usual scaffolding, dangerous construction implements, etc., it had Tankas and Buddhas in varying states of completion. Watching the temple painters was truly fascinating. It’s easy to forget that all of those gorgeous multicolored walls require precise hands to create. They had a huge palate of colors and worked with tiny brushes—the kind I think of as useful for individual canvasses, not mammoth walls. Thanks to the fact that temple construction sites in China pay no more attention than bullet trains to safety we got to climb around the whole thing and at each level of the building saw new and exciting things. We all liked watching the guy who sketches the paintings for the entire thing. He did with a super fine brush and black ink. We hiked to another courtyard, which will eventually house two fertility Buddhas; a male one and a female one. The sight of a ginormous raw uncut Buddha came off as somewhere between grotesque and profane; yet completely fascinating.

As we hiked back to the entrance we came upon a group of baby monks on break from school. Let’s just say that they made me feel much better about the sometimes-violent tendencies of my boys as none of the peaceful side of Buddhism had affected them yet. They were running around, screaming, hitting, tackling, and pinning each other down. Rebecca got herself right in the middle of the action and made sure the monklets all noticed her, while Eli and Jonathan stayed far out of the way. As always, there is a slightly darker underbelly to the young boys in monk garb inhabiting a gorgeous place. The education system in the monasteries is pretty terrible and caters predominantly to very poor families and orphans who have absolutely no other option besides starvation or street life. As our guide said, being a monk is pretty good job.

We hoped back in the van and bumpety bumped down a very narrow muddy mountain pass. The bumps and heights bruised my butt and made me totally nauseous. Little did I know this was just the beginning… We finally arrived at a little outpost in the middle of nowhere, which is a 1400 year old village, where we mounted horses. Yes all five of us got on horses and proceeded to ride them for TWO AND A HALF HOURS. The good part of the riding thing was that, given the altitude, we never would have made it that high on foot and the view was truly spectacular; mind boggling clear. We had been reading and hearing about how the region are Lijiang was very poor, and we saw that clearly as we rode. The only source of money for the villagers are these tourist horse trips, and they grow most of their crops to feed to their horses. Almost none of the kids here go to school. The two dominant crops are corn and a mystery green, both for horses. There was also rape, which they use for oil, and white bean, which they eat. They intercrop sunflower with the bean and corn, but it grown more for fun. Pot is an important cash crop, and we saw a lovely little stand, but given the penalties for possession here, neither of us was tempted. (At the end of the day we learned that the Canadian our guide had planned to go into business with was currently sitting in a Dali prison for pot)

Rebecca LOVED riding a horse and charmed the guide, who claimed that she is a natural. Jonathan told me that the horse idea was the worst idea I’d ever had. Part of me agrees. I pretty much hate riding horses. Eli rode with the guide and Jonathan rode with me. Given that two years ago we could barely get Jonathan on a carousel, he did remarkable well. Again, I recommend a summer in China as immersion Occupational Therapy. If your kid has vestibular motion problems stick them on a horse that cantors up steep slopes. My and J’s horse seemed to be channeling us when at moments it simply stopped and refused to go and every time I heard the guy yell at the horses I imagined us all careening to our death down the mountain side. The horse guide had a lovely voice and treated us to some nice Naxi tunes as well as the Naxi mountain greeting which is kind of like a yodel. Manuel, who had never before been on a horse, claimed to enjoy it, but I am skeptical. He was, however, the only one of us did the whole ride without a guide leading his horse.

On the way back to the hotel we were supposed to stop in a Naxi village to admire frescoes and Tanka paintings. We did stop, but by 4:00 with a monastary and horse ride behind them and no lunch, the kids pretty much busted. We zipped through the master embroidery lady’s studio in about three minutes and piled back into the van. We arrived back at the hotel at 5 and collapsed.

As a side note we were all pleasantly freezing all day. The temperature was in the 70’s. I know we’ve missed the heat wave of the century on the East Coast, but in the jungle the temperature has been above 90 with 100% humidity every single day since May and we have no AC during the day.

Himilayas!!!!!

2011-08-03T20:02:00.000-04:00

When we got off the plane yesterday Rebecca said “Johnathan we are IN the Himalayas. I mean REALLY we are IN the Himalayas. That’s so weird and so cool” I’m not sure why after a summer of seeing the Great Wall, living in a rainforest and going to Saigon this finally struck her as remarkable but… Jonathan said later “you know we’ve been traveling around so much that we just adjust immediately” And it’s true they have become shockingly flexible and worldly in their own weird way. I did have serious fantasies of throwing all three of them out the taxi cab window while we were driving over a narrow mountain pass and they were playing some game that involved head bonking, leaning, and lots of noise and me as a kind of home base.

Thus far the trip has been our smoothest yet. Getting out of the garden had the usual complications. We were supposed to leave at noon but at 12:45 someone called and said we had to leave at 11:00. And then it turned out that on the way to the airport we had to drop off our neighbor at the hospital. Her sister is visiting from Indonesia and they think it might be cheaper to get a surgery here. Our plane was parked in the absolute last spot on in the plane parking lot and as we walked for a good half-mile on the hot tarmac the whole thing started to worry me. Needless to say the bullet train thing has me panicked about transit.

We arrived in Lijiang yesterday afternoon. It’s at 8000 feet, which is about the same as Aspen Colorado. Manuel and I both have killer headaches but the kids seem to be fine. The weather forecast, including the pilot on the plane, said it would either be 76 or 96 degrees, and luckily it was 76, which actually left us all kind of freezing—in a good way. It’s amazing to me how massively different this place is given that it’s only an hour flight away from where we live. We can see the mountains in every direction. The colors are darker than where we are and the whole place just feels different. My sister spent a semester in college studying Tibetan Budishm and spent time in Nepal, Dharmsala, and Bhutan. It looks a lot like her pictures, from the scenery to the architecture. The cultural and architectural differences make Vermont and Santa Fe seem almost identical. I assume some of this is because we wiped out the vastly different cultures, and the Chinese in their own way, have preserved them. But also there’s a kind of enforced stability here. To move cities here still requires permission. In other words you can get a job in another city but you need permission to move there. And there are places like where we live that are shockingly isolated; no one leaves and no one travels.

Our hotel sits at the edge of the old town. The new town was built during the China/Soviet love affair and is positively Stalinist. Parts of it look like the housing project I lived in in Bratislava. The old town on the other hand is jumbled cobblestone streets with wooden buildings. Apparently during a giant earthquake in 1996 the new town basically crumbled and the old town did fine. The wooden houses sway when the earth moves. So the government sunk a lot of money reverting to old styles.

For dinner we wandered to the old town in search of a Tibetan restaurant touted by Lonely Planet. Like Charlottesville it’s full of Tibetan refugees selling pashminas, which Rebecca and I immediately bought because we were cold and NEEDED them. Jonathan wants a poncho today but is a little concerned that men don’t wear them. He then explained that they do in Peru and he has some Peruvian blood so it should work out. We located the Tibetan restaurant despite having no real map. The first clue was all the white people and the Tonka paintings familiar to me from my sister’s Tibetan Buddhist phase. (she didn’t take refuge but she was into it). As promised the place was gorgeous and, sitting in couches, on the second floor we had a great seat for people watching. Jonathan, our pathologically finicky eater who spent years in feeding therapy, shocked us by saying “Hmmm there are lots of interesting things to try here. I’d like to sample the local goat cheese…” So we ordered a Tibetan feast of soup with yak meat, yak dumplings, goat cheese on Tibetan flat bread, and fried yak cheese. The kids had real unpasteurized milk.

Today we’re off to tour some ancient Chinese villages with a guide from inner Mongolia. I think we might be riding some horses up to a really old one. I refused to go near a Chinese cable car but Chinese horses seem ok. I’m hoping evolution trumps culture in their case.

The Best Stuff

2011-08-02T11:17:00.002-04:00

Last week we had an American grad student over for dinner, and he asked what the best and worst parts of our experience in China had been. It took only a few minutes for us to come up with the worst: flood, fire, boils (the Passover plagues part). We had this conversation while enjoying a meal of all western food; pasta with garlic and oil, chicken parmigian, French wine, and chocolate peanut butter cake, and we very quickly moved to the frustrations of China. This seems to be a normal pattern when foreigners get together; the exchange of pleasantries followed quickly by complaints, which, with the proper amount of alcohol, can be brutal and hilarious at the same time. Inevitably, like David Sederis, we all get around to stories of being spat on during someone’s juicy hock gone wrong. And, of course, the sanitation standards that are shockingly low. Crazy encounters with vehicles rank high in these sorts of conversation. And we all have them. A couple of nights ago my neighbor and I took one look at a completely full electric car and jumped aboard with six kids. That meant we were basically both holding our babies sticking out of the car and our big kids were snuggled up on laps of people they’d never met. Then we got a ride to the Dai villiage in a “tok tok”, which is kind of like a motorcycle with the butt of a covered pick-up truck on it. We think we paid an extra fee for the two American men we had with us. Both are significantly larger than the local population.

But then came the question of what has been the best thing about living here. In the end it’s hard to come up with the best because the best and the worst probably amount to the same things. It’s all amazing; but its day in and day out amazing sometimes gets to be too much. I’ve been trying to get the kids to tell me what they have liked best. They said the swimming pool in Vietnam and the Great Wall. I agree on both counts. The Wall is truly a wonder of the world, and I imagine it as one of those images that will stay with me for ever; like an image of standing on top of Masada with my sister twenty five years ago that is still vivid in my imagination.

I need to think about this a little more but here’s some things for starters that are on the best list.

The whole sensory experience of being here stuns me almost every day. This is indeed one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. I’ve run pretty much all over the world but this might be the best run yet. I regularly run through palm trees, banana trees, tea plants, coffee beans, exotic flowers, mango trees, and more. I have a thing for banana leaves; a leaf that is taller than me seems almost supernatural. Some of the food we’ve had also ranks as some of the best meals ever. It just feels different on the tongue. It’s also a new soundscape, which is a rare experience as an adult. It’s not just the language, which is tonal and runs through a whole different set of guttural sounds than IndoEuropeanphones are used to. The bugs frog, and birds make different noises too. And even though we are in the middle of nowhere we, like every other remote location in the world, have plenty of technological sounds. We have hypermodern cell phones beeping out but also vehicles that are to cars that go on American cars what a record from 1920 is to a Radio Head CD.

I love the market. It’s true that sometimes it pisses me off; especially when I can’t get what I want, when too many people stare at me, when it’s so hot I can barely breathe. You never know what you’re going to find there; sometimes there are eels and snake heads. Some afternoons feature more wild mushrooms then I knew existed. The smells overwhelm; some of it delicious grilled meats and some of it a kind of rotted meat stench that makes me want to puke ever time. It’s a very slow paced market; not the kind you can rush through and this allows for great people watching; baby monks in from the monastery, Dai women in gorgeous brightly colored outfits, tiny women carrying huge baskets on their shoulders, men in shorts fanning themselves with magazines and more…

Of course we are now a little less than two weeks from leaving, and the bottom line is that we are all ready to come home. I don’t think we stayed two weeks too long I think the last bit of time in a far away place is always hard. We are hot and tired and more often then not thinking about the frustrations of living in a part of China that is still a developing country and in a place where between spy cameras and firewire it really does feel like Big Brother is watching. But my plan is to get the kids to spend a bit of time each day thinking of what they like best. This will help me do it too.

Tomorrow we head to Lijiang which turns out to be at 8000 ft. So wish us luck with the kids at high altitude!

Ready to Roll

2011-07-29T04:01:00.000-04:00

We leave China in a little over two weeks and are approaching that inevitable part of any adventure where, on the one hand you feel desperate to get out and, on the other, you think of things you will miss and things

you haven’t done. We have an action-packed two weeks planned including a trip up north to Lijiang, which sits on the edge of Himalayas. We chose this particular city largely because it’s famous for its performances of traditional Naxi music. In the style of a nineteenth century anthropologist who doesn’t speak the language and knows nothing about the culture, I’ve been doing my own exploration of soundscapes and, despite the fact that we are in a place with an ethnic minority where more women dress in traditional clothes than western clothes, it’s extremely hard to find music that doesn‘t sound like anemic western pop. Lijiang also sits at the base of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. Obviously with three kids in tow we can’t do any heavy high altitude trekking but we can at least look at the snow. (In May Manuel mailed a piece of lab equipment and some warm clothing for this trip. The boxes have reached China but are stuck in customs for about three weeks thanks to the Asian Games, which, apparently, create a need for especially vigorous scrutiny of scientific equipment, jeans, and peanut butter pretzels. ) Locally we’re very busy with going to the Dai village with a Dai student, apparently taking the whole lab out to dinner, and gathering up useless paper and plastic items to give to friends in the States.

But despite all of these tasty treats, Manuel has been telling people for a few days that he thinks I’m done with the jungle. I lost it a couple of days ago when my running water bottle and computer power cord suffered an army ant invasion. So what follows is a list of signs that we may have reached some sort of tipping point here…

I now know that the Chinese government’s Great Firewall blocks PBS kids but not Feudalism II or the “Meet Chinese girls “ site Jonathan found before I quickly unplugged the computer.

I manically worked on an ice cream without an ice cream maker project all day and we got exactly five bites each.

Our entire credit card bill last month was Kindle and iTunes charges.

In addition to various natural jungle soundscapes I can tell by ear when the AC will go off, when the power will surge, when the breadmaker will finish its kneading cycle, when the two year old next door will erupt into a tantrum, and when the big potato who lives across the street is coming home.

Last night while Manuel was out drinking hooch and eating Dai barbecue with his lab, I actually cursed at my four year old when he wouldn’t go to bed. After all three kids finally went to bed I settled down with a cup of chocolate sorbet made by my own brute force and a little shot of “disposed wine.” I spent a delightful hour trolling through the UVa special collections catalogue for quirky items to display in an exhibit. This seemed like the most fun I’d had in days.

I painstakingly created home made mac-n-cheese and short bread cake in a toaster oven with butter acquired by plane ride to Vietnam, and the kids told me it looked suspicious. I told them they are pains in the ass.

I passed two peacocks humping on my run. I did not think they were beautiful or even note the cool factor of sharing the road with said birds. I just cursed at them for blocking my path.

Our kids are basically feral.

Because we’ve all had boils and other dirt induced illnesses, we’ve been stressing hand washing. The kids are becoming slightly germaphobic, and I overheard Jonathan explaining to Eli that he really needed to wash his hands carefully even if Chinese kids don’t because Americans are just neater than Chinese people. That’s exactly the kind of cultural generalization/judgement one hopes an experience in another culture will smack out of their kids, not drive into them.

Our collective idea of home-schooling is now CCTV documentaries where the kids learn about various acts of aggression against the never-at-fault Chinese government.

In our first months here, my attitude towards things that cost 25 cents was “just because it’s almost free doesn’t mean you can have a new one if you loose it or break it. We must respect things.” But, yesterday Jonathan discovered that Eli had lost too many pieces of this third magnetic chess set by turning them into a clone warrior army. I decided that, given the price of $1, I wold buy a new one just to keep both boys quiet.

The next door neighbor is mad at me/the kids because Eli “snuck” a rock into her house by putting it behind his back and said because her kid was mean to johnny he would “huff and puff and knock the house down.” He got the ending of that book wrong.

Rebecca and Eli between them ate two servings of heart, liver, and kidney from unknown large vertebrates (maybe mammalian) the other night. We thought we ordered beefsteak. Luckily I was at the store buying beer and soda when the food came so I didn’t even have to look at it. Jonathan ate one piece of bread and some Sprite, and that seemed fine.

The kids want us to drink more (beer) because they are collecting bottle caps. But the beer is so weak and tasteless that I don’t even want it.

Given the paucity of reading material and the computer gymnastics it takes for me to add things to kindles, we’ve given up worrying about whether books are appropriate for eight year olds. Consequently both Rebecca and Jonathan frequently use phrases that may not fly at school, “police are cynical bastards.” “do you think that is a guild of exotic dancers” and “check out those gams.”

We don’t think that it’s strange that the a.c. doesn’t start working until after 5 when the sun lowers a bit. The best-case scenario of turning it on is that it goes off every 6 minutes. The worst is that it starts a fire or a flood. Not does it seem strange to go look at the pool every few days and see if it has water in it. And part of any bedtime ritual involves sending armies of ant to meet their maker before crawling into bed.

It seems pretty normal to me that a few times a week garden staff waltz into the house ostensibly to fix something but don’t touch anything in the house. When one of the dudes spends a good half hour playing with eli and taking his picture, I do not assume he is a pedophile as I might do at home if a strange man started snapping my kid’s picture.

And of course most importantly we all miss our friends and family; our google phone, skype, and email usage is going up not down and the kids are worried that their friends have forgotten them. It’s true that we’ve been away for this length of time before and that we’ve had friends go away for a year but something about being so very far away seems to magnify the time.

Back at the Market

2011-07-26T08:36:00.001-04:00

It turns out that our kids think the fact that they have not seen the latest Harry Potter flick almost counts as child abuse. I tried reminding them that they have seen the Great Wall, the Lama Temple, the Cu Chi tunnels, monkey blood, rubber trees, etc…. And I stressed that they regularly see kids who do not have running water, will probably not go to school past age 10, and have never been to a doctor. They actually said “Mommy are you done with your speech yet. This is a long one.”

I took my three ungrateful spawn plus two extras into town today. The kids have made appearances at this slow Buddhist market at least twice a week for 2.5 months now. I don’t think I’ve seen a single other Caucasian in the market besides us, and we go to the same stalls every time. I always do the grab your boobs buy chicken boobs thing at the same chicken lady, I get yummy short bananas from the same fruit lady, and I even have my favorite Lao pineapple guy. And yet each time we go we attract attention and comments. It’s gotten almost rote for me to say in Chinese “the three white ones are mine” and then to nod my head vigorously at how lucky I am etc….. Eli, too, has his own market trick. He figured out early on that twins, especially of the dragon/phoenix variety are quite remarkable here so he screams out the Chinese word for twins and points to the kids. This invariably ends with multiple people touching them, looking at them, and using phones to snap pictures. He then disappears behind my skirt. The big ones hate it.

Despite the fact that as it turns out our rural market habits are as predictable as our Retail Relay orders, we find something new almost every time. Today the kids spotted a table where women used giant hatchets to chop up the congealed cow blood. This occurred just next to the chicken slaughterhouse, which I also had never noticed.

The best discovery, though, happened in the grocery store. They have a bounce-n-play style indoor playground with slides, trampolines, and ball pits. How have I not known about this? The whole thing is about the size of Rebecca and Jonathan’s bedroom and costs 45 cents per kid. So what if it’s 98 degrees here and there is no a.c. and all three kids looked close to heat stroke when I got them. Of course, you sign no consent forms and grownups can’t stay mostly because they don’t fit and no one supervises the kids. Rebecca, who had been there before, informed me that I was supposed to shop while they played. And to make the whole thing even more delicious, the store now carries cold coke zeros; something that when we got here required a plane ride to procure. The store is tiny, crowded and filth, but is Targetesque in that in addition to food you can buy clothing, toys, dishes etc.. Even so, it’s more of necessity kind of store than an enjoy-the-shopping-experience one. But with the new find I got the bright idea that I could dump them, buy a diet coke, and peruse crappy plastic items, moonshine, pickled chicken feet, and mystery sauces to my heart’s content. I took one swig of my diet coke before I was yelled at and escorted back to the front of the store. After doing penance for that one amazing coke zero swig I found an isle of facial scrubs promising “skin whitening” and a cucumber scrub called “skin Love” that “penetrates pores”. I also discovered rows and rows of individual condom packets hanging in between crocs and bras. This stuck out because previously I’ve only seen condoms hanging from ceilings in little outdoor shops. In these contexts they are pretty much indistinguishable from packets of yeast, which you cannot buy in the grocery store or in any shop that sells flour. So it took a while for me to learn which was which.

On the condoms I really hope that given the one child policy and the ensuing often-horrific consequences of accidental pregnancy out here in the stix that there is an isle of birth control pills around somewhere to go with them. In rural areas storefronts featuring pictures of serene women looking upward unregistered abortion clinics. Scalpels are a whole lot more common than rubber gloves and antibacterial soap. Just last night my Thai neighbor told me that the extreme grime and dirt of her birth experience in the big city a flight away was almost enough to send her running back to Thailand. No gloves at delivery, street clothes not removed, and a level of dirt that she said I’d never believe. They do have incredibly up to date equipment though. My unprofessional hunch is that the rural abortion clinics probably are even less clean.

On a lighter note, we’re leaving in about three weeks so I’m shifting my purchasing quest from butter and cheese to local stuff. I keep reading about all of this fabulous Chinese and Mongolian gritty rock in the Western Press, so I’m looking for that. Needless to say, no one here admits to having ever heard of it; even the grad students who regularly do karaoke and claim to be hip. But one of the students agreed to help me on my quest. Rebecca, Zhuanfang, and I rode our bikes in a pouring tropical rainstorm. Luckily, I had my trusty straw hat made out of rice straw to keep the rain off my glasses. The CD store in town was full of “baby monks.” Zhuanfang is Dai and takes her Buddhism very seriously and that’s what she told us they were called. The babymonks themselves seemed most interested in slapstick humor DVD’s, but they agreed to help us find good tunes. We came away with recordings of traditional instrumental music, cheezy love ballads, a blue ray disk of red songs with Mao on the cover and the one piece of gritty sound in the whole town—a Mongolian rock CD. The whole shebang cost me $8. None of this played on my new Mac, but it all played on Manuel’s old PC; again the Chinese tech gets me.

Meanwhile, Rebecca wanted to have Dai dressess made for her cousin and her friend Reid, so, armed with their measurements and Zhuanfang’s Dai, we took care of that. My great-grandmother was a dress designer, and all I can say is I think my kid got the gene. It was the most excruciatingly detailed dress purchase by an eight-year-old girl ever. She did some of her own talking and pantomiming in Chinese and very carefully chose fabric for each girl. Each one had to have different necklines, embroidery, sleeves, etc… We can only hope that in a decade or so they think that the babymonks, cow blood, and crazy indoor playground were worth waiting a month to see Harry Potter grow up.

Chicken Feet and Cheese

2011-07-24T05:01:00.001-04:00

I have no idea what traveling to Vietnam would have felt like if we had taken a plane directly from Dulles to Ho Chi Min City. But coming from Menglun a town in China that is a ten-hour bus ride or hour-long plane ride from a city(Kunming) that the woman who found the fake Apple Stores in China called the End of the Earth; HCMC felt like Paris, really comfy! Kunming is a city of 7 million with an airport that has direct flights to cities such as Singapore and Seoul not to mention snickers bars cheese and corn flakes so I’m not quite sure what was meant by the End-of-Earth crack. And, while at a different time in my life I might well have scorned these comforts, I have to admit that at this point, after two months of jungle living, I soaked up every bit of bourgeois and Western pleasure I could.

Back in the Garden I’m staring out my porch window as my feral looking kids scramble up a rugged jungle footpath carrying rambutan, and I have all the windows and doors open because the ac doesn’t actually work during the hottest points of the day. I just got back from buying rice in the market, where I squatted and sniffed like all the other women. (I have no idea what I’m sniffing for, but everyone else does it). From this vantage point Vietnam seems like Asia-light—it’s Asia but with the trappings and conveniences of a Western city. In the end it felt uncanilly familiar because it was a mash up of our Western lives and our home-away-from-home in the Jungle. We’re used to seeing a whole family on a vespa; in fact, we sometimes are that family, and banana leaves and rubber trees barely attract our attention any more—an azalea or a large carton of milk would be more shocking. Rebecca and Eli who a few months ago probably would have thought rambutan looked like a small sea animal were thrilled to find it at the breakfast buffet. They had plenty of chicken feet and pigs ears, but as the kids said “whatever...” Moreover, a lot of what we saw in Vietnam lived up to expectations gleaned from guide books, newspapers, movies, and restaurants.

For sure, lots of the trip was cool and fascinating because it was different and new. The Cu Chi tunnels were provoking and grotesque. And the water puppets came with music that was by far the most interesting I’ve heard since we arrived in Asia. It lacked the cheesy enya like harmonies and boring drum tracks that undercut most all the other music I hear in China. I didn’t hear a single diatonic scale the entire night. Rebecca even noticed the difference. “they don’t have so many triads in this stuff.”

But really, the creature comforts made the trip; baguettes and croissants for breakfast, English speakers at the markets, restaurants where no one spits on the floor or tosses empty beer bottles around. I found clothing that fit my giant white body not to mention real cotton T-shirts for the boys {Manuel, however, could find neither shoes nor shirts, but he could get pants, }. In Vietnam people wear helmets on their vespas and wash their hands frequently. I’m not a germaphobe and, indeed, bad vision keeps me from being bothered by a lot of dirt; but it is filthy in China, and Vietnam’s like an operating room at Brigham and Women’s by comparison. You can’t drink the water there, but it’s a whole lot cleaner than the water here—I hadn’t felt so clean in two months. I agree with David Sederis in his Guardian piece “Chicken Toenails anyone” that at first it’s pretty disconcerting to see people spitting on floors, kids pooping on the street out of their split pants, etc.. And, while unlike him, we’ve stayed long enough that it doesn’t bother us, it did feel good to be back in a place that shares more of our hygiene norms. (thanks Bridget for sending that article)

Some of these creature comforts emerged from the fact that the tourist experience comes with a certain kind of uniformity across cultures and locations, and its inherent voyeurism rarely gets beneath the surface of the destination and the moment. We never saw the HCMC equivalent of Menglun’s AgMarket with pig-eyes and chicken toes. Manuel’s high school friend Juliet, who lives in HCMC, told us that the market near her house has a range of products that would make us squirm in the same way Menglun’s fresh duck intestine does.

In addition, it is s disconcerting to think about how many of the core familiarities of Vietnam emerge from a darker past. As an enlightened liberal, it pains me to admit that these European elements that made us comfortable are very vivid remnants of the colonial project. The French left Indochina in 1954. It sounds like a long time ago but cultures move at almost glacial paces. And it’s equally painful to realize that even the “authentically” Vietnamese parts of Vietnam are more familiar than anything in “our” part of the Mekong because of the Vietnam War. What that means is that a lot our pleasure and enjoyment emerged out of a long history of violence, domination and cultural destruction. I did not take the opportunity to explain to the kids that the baguette they happily snarfed was the product of such a fraught history.

I did try to explain exoticism to them, but it went nowhere. References to Mulan and Aladin did not help. Both hotels we stayed in made promises on their websites of “the real Vietnam” and an “exotic” experience. That it didn’t feel exotic at all to us kept sending my thoughts back to learning about orientalism and exoticism in college. I have a vivid memory of reading Edward Said’s Orientalism in a literature class where we focused on exoticism. I remember little lights going off because I always knew that Beethoven’s Turkish march had little to do with Turkish people. (ok this is crass now but I was seventeen) A lot about those concepts went over my head, but I remember the notion of orientalism as created not by facts but by Western fantasies of the orient. And then I found it everywhere; it was kind of like when we learned about phallic and Christ imagery in AP English and all we all found it in every single thing we read, saw, and heard (our slightly repressed English teacher encouraged this).

Part of the reason it wasn’t that exotic in Ho Chi Minh City was, of course, the food and the cleanliness standards. The kids had pizza almost every night. David Sederis’ droll assessment of Chinese food put all of the mundane details of cusine here under a snarky colorful microscope in the Guardian piece I mentioned earlier. And, like most satire, some of it was spot on and some was just over the top offensive. I’m still disgusted by chicken feet, and I try really hard not to think about the fact that most of the people who cook our food don’t use soap to wash their hands. Vietnamese food didn’t taste or feel more familiar to me because of a lack of chicken toes. It felt comfortable because; it tasted a lot like Vietnamese food in Harvard Square and Arlington, VA. It was a little fresher and a little spicier but basically variations on a theme. In contrast, almost nothing we eat here has any resemblance to any Chinese food I’ve ever encountered. But no one here makes me eat chicken toes or pig eyes. In fact, anyone who has encountered a westerner, and even those who haven’t, knows I will find those things repulsive and thinks it’s kind of funny. And they take one look at the color of my skin and turn the spicy down a notch. Even my Indonesian and Thai neighbors do that on the spice meter. But eople here are disgusted by cheese—especially the really good expensive pre rotted kinds. And Sedaris seemed bothered by tongue but my people, European-descended Jews, eat a lot of it, and I have a vivid memory of my friend Cynthia’s mom feeding it to me. (I didn’t’ eat it) Anyway back in the local market today I passed up the tongues, feet and brains and stuck with my usual veggies and Tofu (and, we also bought more rambutan, mangosteens, little yellow mangoes, weird white mushrooms, and steamed buns with spicy mystery meat).

The Great Kindle Rescue

2011-07-21T23:09:00.002-04:00

Sadly I’m not a good enough writer to truly capture the experience of rescuing Jonathan’s Kindle in the Guangzho airport. It sat with the “Luggage Team for a week, and he had been using mine during that time. Luckily he did not get through all of my books. About a year ago I identified e readers as the best low vision aids on the planet and put as much of my research and teaching materials on it as possible. Thank you project Guttenburg! One of my best teaching tricks, or ticks depending on how you look at it, involves using modern texts, music, and videos to seduce techno-craving undergraduates to the early modern and ancient worlds. For example, in my Music and Gender Class I paired up the Kama sutra with a book called Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man. Fortunately Jonathan got stuck in baroque mysteries and didn’t find either of those.

But I digress…. We arrived in Guangzho, the airport from hell, with two hours until our next flight. Apparently this airport has a large problem with foreigners sneaking into China and thus needs extremely thorough and harsh passport control stations. Thank goodness I thought to hide “TinTin in Tibet” very deep in the luggage… They even insisted that Rebecca and Jonathan go through all by themselves, which caused both kids to freak out. And, predictably, Jonathan left his passport with the mean looking passport control guy—I got it back. We retrieved our bags and went to the luggage claim desk where we had been assured that we could call a special phone number and retrieve the lost Kindle. The baggage woman made the call. Describing the Kindle even while holding one proved very difficult. We now know from the news that fake Apples stores with fake ipads abound, but Amazon Kindles have not made it here. The woman very carefully spelled out the logo while looking sort of alarmed at the device. She informed us that we’d have to go to some other location to get it back it but we had all noticed that our flight was already boarding. Thus ensued multiple phone calls with very fast and urgent Chinese. Then she told us to follow her and run. Though she sported a pencil skirt and high-heeled pumps she took off at a pace that would give a lot of runners a run for their money. And we huffed and puffed behind her. Eventually she tossed us onto a stretch golf cart that drove faster than most cars do here in Menglun. We almost took out at least three people. The kids meanwhile looked completely stunned between huffs and puffs. Along the way she said we’d have to pay about 20 Yuan per person for this whole operation, and we said fine assuming this was some kind of airport bribe. Finally the golf cart stopped at an undisclosed location and we were all booted off. She left the kids and me in the rig and took off with Manuel down a back alley of the airport that looked e like it might lead to a little white room where they lock up trouble makers. Somehow he came back with the Kindle, and we arrived at another security checkpoint. We all jumped out of the stretch golf cart and put our bags through security. The kids were by this point almost collapsed in asthmatic fits. As the kids and I got back on the cart Manuel struggled through security and we noticed him emptying out our carry-on suitcase, which caused even more upset to the spawn. “we can’t leave without daddy” “I better go check on him.” Yes, indeed, we had to pass the dreaded cheese test. Cheese appears so infrequently in Chinese airports that they have no idea what it is on an x-ray machine or what to do with it. They made Manuel take it out and everyone sniffed it and we got back on the cart. Somehow we transferred carts and gave some money to a random man and sped along to our gate where, low and behold, the flight was delayed…

The Kindle rescue marked the highpoint of our eighteen-hour journey back to the jungle. For extra fun at each of the three flights you have to fetch your luggage and recheck it. I also enjoyed swiping the little individual servings of New Zealand butter from the first airplane. I felt close to my grandmothers who both embraced diner-snagged sweet-n-low when I opened the packs to fix pasta and butter for the kids. While sitting on these planes I took the time to read thoroughly two Chinese English Newspapers; which do not come this far into remote lands. The news and editorials reminded me again that we do not currently reside in the kind of political system I am used to and that no matter what recent regimes in the White House did to civil liberties we still have it pretty good on the other side of the world. And I might add the tone and tenor of the newspapers is one of many reasons why I do not like my children going through passport control by themselves.

The Sports section argued that Chinese do not excel at soccer because their students are far too busy learning in school to build early skills. A second page news story explained that it would be impossible to reduce the use of capital punishment because life sentences simply do not deter crimes.

We have a large community of Tibetans in Charlottesville so I was drawn to the front page which told the story of the “liberation” of Tibet in 1951. In their version until the Chinese took over “Tibet used to be a society of feudal serfdom under theocratic rule, a society even darker than medieval society in Europe. The dark days are gone.” The article also stated that The US President Barak Obama welcomed the Dali Lama to the white house for a predictable run of Chinese bashing.” The author abhorred the “stale claims of cultural genocide” “For those people everything under the Dali Lama was good. No mention is ever made of the cruel realities of the savage serfdom that existed then.”

At a celebration of the liberation vice president Xi Jinping said that China needs to take immediate steps to prevent infiltration and sabotage activities by Tibetan separatist forces in order to safeguard stability in Tibet as well as national unity. This warning came in the wake of incidents in Hotan just the day before. Depending on which country’s newspapers you read the incident involved police protesters gunning down rioters at a peaceful protest or rioters attacking the police station in an “organized terrorist attack” Just below this news story an opinions piece said that “”The Middle East and North Africa is viewed through western eyes as if the transformation of Ali Babba and the Seven Thieves into Thomas Jefferson and the international Court of Justice.” Full disclosure, a professor at Loyola Marymount in California wrote the last comment.

We arrived back in Banna very late at night, and it seems in some ways almost as far from Hotan and Tibet as it does from Ho Chi Min City. The government classifies the Dai as a good and docile minority, and seems to leave them alone.

Yesterday morning we returned to China normal. After a week of no running in Vietnam, I took off for a steamy rainy run and exchanged pleasantries with the locals. I checked out the pool and found it empty on a super hot day. The kids fought and wreaked havoc on an already trashed house. We took showers in our yucko water. I know now that people pay big bucks to soak in sulfur hot springs, but it’s not great for getting super clean! Eli and I went with our neighbor Sumi to the market in town on a Vespa—yup that’s three of us on one with no helmets and purchased various fruits and vegetables that I’d never seen until we came to China. We chased geckos around our bathrooms.

Cu Chi Tunnels

2011-07-21T03:47:00.000-04:00

The government placed a shooting range within the War Memorial Park at the Cu Chi Tunnels. The sound of gunshots assaulted my ears and made my stomach hurt. The constant gunshots felt crushing. I’ve never heard so many shots so close. As we came closer to the range, the kids covered their ears and tried to escape the sound—even my over-militarized boys. They don’t know that you can’t hide from aural assault. The jungle has grown back sufficiently that the guns and shooters remained invisible until we were right at the edge of the firing range—the disembodied sound is indeed uncannily powerful. (note to musicologists, Carolynn Abbate is spot on) Whoever thought of including a shooting range, complete with Vietnam era weapons, as part of the tourist attraction was either a sadist or a brilliant sonic artist. For a couple of bucks you can shoot an AK 47 and lots of people apparently do. It made the whole thing that much more real.

When we decided to go to Vietnam Manuel immediately said he wanted to go to the Cu Chi tunnels. I have to admit I knew the name but had no recollection of what they were. Thanks again Google and Wikipedia. I was born in 1968, the year the Tet offensive launched from the Cu Chi tunnels. This makes me a little too young to remember the war but old enough to have it as a pivotal moment for people just slightly older than me and, of course, my parents’ generation. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were shot that year, and anti war protests were on the rise. It’s a strange year to have been born in. When I went to Brown my freshman hallway had seven people on it who were born in October or November of 1968 and whose fathers were born in November or December of 1942. Our parents had been against the war, and our fathers all got the last paternity deferments. And while in college we learned about the Vietnam war as history and we learned that for the most part that the working and impoverished citizens took care of the messy jungle parts of the war (My uncle was an exception; he enlisted). Amy Carter was a class ahead of us and hung out on campus with Abby Hoffman, and students born in the sixties attempted to reenact the decade of their birth protesting everything.

So on Saturday morning we piled into a mini van with Manuel’s high school chum Juliet and her two kids. Our guide, Mr. Trunh, was a very friendly 38 year old who looked to be about 24. We learned at the very end of the day that his father had lived in the tunnels. The entrance was full of tour groups; not many Americans but lots of Foreigners. Guides quickly ushered visitors into a ditch to watch a documentary film. I couldn’t see any of it, but I hear it was black and white and grainy featuring B52 bombers going off, villagers running for cover, and Viet Cong fighting bravely. The narration came straight out of the Cold War and said things like “Cu Chi, the land of many gardens peaceful all year round under shady trees until the American bombers have ruthlessly decided to kill this gentle piece of countryside.. “the crazy devils fired into women and children” “Cu Chi will never die.” At some point we began to wonder if any of this was appropriate for the children; though, as it turned out the gritty black and white texture combined with 1920’s style sound rendered the whole thing largely incomprehensible to them. The little kids (two four year olds and a two year old) got a little bored so I turned on the panda cam on my ipad, which made quite a visual, aural, and cognitive dissonance. Just outside the trench theater guards in green fatigues lead tourists through jungle trails that would seem rugged if you didn’t live in the jungle. (to us they seemed tame) Very real automatons dressed in black trousers hang out making weapons, holding Viet Cong flags and generally adding to the scenery.

The site marks a central spot on Vietnam’s war tourism map; in the last fifteen years the Vietnamese have apparently begun marketing the gory past, and it comes off as an eerie combination of capitalism and propaganda. One of the official websites about the tunnels. says this “system of “fighting tunnels”, the inheritance is crystallized from spirit, power, will, intelligence, creation and efforts of Cu Chi military and people as well as soldiers from everywhere in our country living, fighting and devoting thoroughly 30 years in the fierce battle. The purpose is also to propagate, educate revolution traditions to Vietnamese youths and foreign travelers visiting and researching. .”

The Cu Chi tunnels comprise a seventy-five mile maze of tunnels that at their peak housed sixteen thousand people, ten thousand of whom died during the war. Tourists can now explore a small portion of this. The guides all emphasize the cleverness of the Vietnamese people and state the gruesome parts with a disaffected bluntness. The kids were taken with the idea of camouflaging air holes with fake anthills and termite mounds. They know exactly what a jungle termite hill looks like now. The systems for bringing food and water in and out during the night come across as ingenious games if you let your mind wander from the horrors of it all for just a moment.

Our guide pointed out that they didn’t have enough food, water, or air and that thousands of people died of malaria because of mosquito infestations. We were all fascinated with the exhibit of traps which the guide set in motion—trap doors which trapped enemies in spikes, a folding chair that ended in a spite necklace etc. Like the torture museum in San Gimangiano, it’s oddly and sickly fascinating. Automatons inhabited multiple ditches eerily and repetitiously making weapons. They were by far the most realistic automatons I’ve ever seen. To be honest, from a distance they didn’t look that much different that the identically clad real live people making rice paper.

Various points on the trail feature opened entrance holes which visitors can lower themselves into. Picture a hole that is barely wide enough for most Western Men’s shoulders to fit through. The guy who tried just before Manuel got stuck and it took two people to pull him out. The kids all panicked when their parent went in. (Manuel and Juliet did it; I didn’t) The kids couldn’t wait to explore the three levels of tunnel open to tourists. But the first time Manuel, Juliet and the kids four and over tried to go down to a level two tunnel a few of the kids panicked. Jonathan, Rebecca, and Eli all went down to the second level of tunnels and went through about 40 meters. I’m just claustrophobic enough to be very grateful that Juliet’s two year old needed someone to hang out with on the outside. At the second attempt all the kids went in. Manuel reported that while the westerners all went on hands and feet the guide walked in the tunnel in a squat. He experienced it as a low place to walk and they experienced it as a place to be horizontal; bipedal v. quadrapedal. Given that I couldn’t even make myself go down for five minutes I cannot begin to fathom how anyone lived there for a decade. And it makes the war that much more incomprehensible from the vantage point of history. If people were willing to live in those conditions how could anyone possibly beat them. And certainly bombing the hell out of the ground above would not do much damage.

As always taking the kids to a site that is hard to swallow makes the whole thing all the more surreal. The big kids wanted to know who won the Vietnam war. We said the Vietnamese did. They wanted to know why Americans went there in the first place. How do you explain that to eight year olds? The four year olds obsessively reminded us that the guns were fake like toys. And because they are four we did not contradict. We told them that lots of people died here a long time ago but now no one does.

We all wondered at various points during the day whether bringing the kids there was a good thing. In the end I think it was good or irrelevant. Certainly the War Remnants Museum would not have worked--parts of the tunnels seemed like a game to them and that’s probably fine. What little kid doesn’t fantasize about a secret world that adults are basically too big to inhabit? But there was enough reality to it to make at least the older ones understand that something very bad had happened there and that no matter how much they like games from shootemup.com, guns are scary and war is complicated. As a parent I struggle often with how to teach kids about hard things. Obviously, we don’t completely shelter them or we wouldn’t be here in the land of staph infections, massive rural poverty, safety norms that would send a lot of Americans running.

They know what the Nazis were and they know at some level that their Grandfather and his sister fled them when they were small children. They know that the Nazis killed lots of Jews. But we have decidedly not shown them pictures of concentration camps or taken them to the Holocaust Museum. Likewise, I saw no reason to make our trip to Vietnam a gut wrenching study of the war. Without kids we would certainly have explored more of that side of Ho Chi Min City. But I also saw no reason to completely shield them from it. War is ugly, and they need to know that. But they need to know it in a way that leaves them still feeling safe. One message we have al received loud and clear during our time in Asia is that safety in all forms is a privilege. But it’s a privilege I need my kids to have.

Beach....

2011-07-18T20:31:00.001-04:00

I’m writing now from the Ho Tram beach resort. Our exit from Ho Chi min city was a little rough on me. Note to self: if the sign says yogurt with roasted nuts, DON’T eat it. Somehow I’ve made it through two months in a place with foods that are totally mysterious and not a word of English without incident and a giant English sign got me in trouble (Manuel was great, very kind and supportive toward me and taking over all matters logistical while wrangling the children, who were acting as though they had taken the epinephrine shot. Later he told me he was thinking the exact same thing, “We finally get to a place where they tell you in English what the food is, and you eat NUTS!”). So, thanks to the allergic reaction, an epipen, and three Benadryl, I spent most of the first day at the beach asleep. The R and R is great for Manuel and me; we are both physically exhausted from our time in the jungle. But, more importantly, the kids love this, which reinforces one of the most important rules for traveling with kids; plan lots of down time and things that will thrill them and that will feel familiar. Our hotel room has an outside bathroom—as in you can lie in the bathtub and look at the stars. The restaurant has Vietnamese and western food, which works fabulously for us. Other highlights include the playground, collecting shells on the beach, and the cartoon channel. Eli summed it up by saying, “they do all of our jobs here and all we have to do is eat and drink.” Eli looks dapper this morning in the gap pj’s I purchased for 70 cents at the Saigon market the other night.

In Food news we especially liked the Vietnamese Hot pot which was not at all what we expected and included an array of freshly caught seafood that we then cooked in the pot. Rebecca had a fabulous sea bass in a clay pot and we drank wine and cocktails. While we were cooking squid and mystery fish Jonathan entertained us with his summary of a baroque mystery. He’s reading my kindle since he left his on the plane. He found Cruel Music, a terrible mystery that has a castrato in it. His narration included discussions of the “Jewess” who had decided to become “pagan” pronounced with a soft g like agent. She discovered the magic of Diana and could not resist apparently. He’d like to meet some pagans in Charlottesville. He then explained to his siblings that castrati, which they all know about, had high voices because someone found the very best boy singers in all of Italy and cut off little bits of their tongues or maybe their vocal cords. I have to admit that I’ve glossed over the mechanics of making a castrato with the kids; they’ve heard tons of music for castrati, heard me lecture about it, and even read some of my sources. And they’ve even heard me explain the procedure. But I’ve never quite explained it all to them. So Manuel carefully explained the whole business of smushing testicles and hormones and the way that voices get low when you hit puberty. And in the end what they took from it was that it must have been very hard to live with smushed “intestines”, and they couldn’t figure out why smashed intestines made it hard to get married. Given that we’ve already covered the Vietnam war, the needless death of children, and abandoned orphans since we got here, we decided to just leave the whole testicle thing alone. (I’m still processing the war parts of the trip so more on that later)

We head back to Ho Chi Min city this morning and will do some errands and take the kids to a water puppet show. We need to buy coffee, chocolate, cereal, pasta, butter, cheese, antibacterial soap, and hand sanitizer. If we have time I will probably buy a few more clothing items for the kids. Nothing gets clean in the jungle so their clothes are just nasty and both boys have outgrown shoes. And I probably need some sort of fashion treat for myself!

Epic Journeys

2011-07-15T10:13:00.000-04:00

Our epic journey to Ho Chi Min City involved three planes; when you go from one communist country to another you can’t actually cross the border in very many places. And at each point the notion of Americans going from China to Vietnam stumped the passport people. Lonely Planet makes it seem like back packers do this all the time, but the Chinese did not get that memo when they confiscated all those guide books. The second plane advertised “gorgeous human origin intoxicant fertile jianshi; hand cream made with human placenta. They did not, I’m sorry to say, sell it on the plane.

I’ve never had such a complicated time getting out of a country; and that includes living in Slovakia in the early 90’s and traveling around Eastern Europe. At some point I really felt like a fleeing dissident and the insistent percussive rubber-stamping made an oppressive soundtrack. We flew through Kunming, which, when we arrived two months ago, felt like the exit to Lost... and this time seemed familiar. The temperature of 64 degrees made us all cold for the first time in two months. We then flew to Guangzho, another one of those cities of twenty four million that I had never heard of before. It felt like the biggest airport in the universe, and the golf carts are the size of Toyotas and zip through it faster than cars do on highways in Yunnan. It took us about an hour (55’ says my scientist husband, who timed it) to walk to our next gate, and the security at the customs/exit station was intense. My shifty eyes do not play well in a communist country, and a certain points I would not have been surprised if someone tossed us in a little white room for extra questions. Guangzho is a center of international commerce, and feels like one of those places with factories full of thousands of underaged girls that you read about in newspapers. And, delightfully, it’s an earthquake center. Sometimes it’s probably better not to google things. In any case we noticed an immense racial diversity. We have seen almost no white people anywhere in Yunnan and exactly one Black person who happens to be a Cameroonian grad student at the Garden. The kids explained all of this to us in the first two minutes of airport time. The real blow came when Jonathan realized he’d left his Kindle on flight number two and understandably collapsed in a puddle. Thanks to the big brother is watching you aspect of China they found it before we even took off from Guangzho, and we can get it on the way back. With spy cameras everywhere the things that get left places rarely to actually get stolen.

It also became very clear that had the five of us needed to escape a repressive regime and keep the Jewish people alive we would never have made it. Rebecca makes the worst possible escape; she looks around dreamily and takes on an almost aggressive and selective need to follow every rule, and then dreamily looks around some more. When I told her to cut underneath the rope to make our 10 mile hike to the customs agent quicker she put her hands on her hips and said loudly "but the sign says follow the arrows." Meanwhile half the time we saw a threatening looking guy in a uniform Eli had one of two stress responses; pretending to shoot him or refusing to walk. I’m sure the Vietnamese especially like to see little American boy shooting.

We finally arrived in HCMC at about 11:00 and had to get our visa; the visa agent promptly ripped off but at least we got in which is not true for the Russians on the plane with us or the Dutch guy who didn’t even get to leave China. When we got to the hotel at midnight the kids had to explore every nook and cranny of our rooms before going to sleep. Eli let out a huge yelp and announced "wow i've never seen a vacuum like that before...." The joint does come with hot water, bath, bath salts, slippers, robes, cartoon network, a pool with water in it etc... This morning I took the best shower I’ve taken since we left Charlottesville. They popped up at 6:30 ready to swim. Instead, we went to the breakfast buffet full of croissants, bread cheese, real yogourt etc... We were all kind of overwhelmed at first and probably could have sat there all day. In case you need reading material for elementary aged kids I recommend an English language communist propaganda newspaper delivered to your door; simple, clear politics and a good deal of rah rah. They loved it, read the whole thing wanted to know if we'd get another one tomorrow etc...

After croissants and coffee Manuel headed to the doctor to deal with the giant pussing oozng staph boil on his elbow. One of our fun family bonding actives has been draining boils and spending time sending gross pictures to doctors at home to decide what to do. Jonathan had a doozy on his chest and one of my love handles is now scarred from one on my hip—rude. The doctor in Ho Chi Minc city told Manuel that he sees this all the time with westerners who move to Asia. The boils, though not attractive are nothing to worry about, but we do need to rinse with some antiseptic soap. We can add this to the list of moments when I wish we had a doctor anywhere near us and to the list of things that someone who is supposedly shepherding us through the process of living in remote China might have shared. So none of us will meet our demise by boils, and we’ll have to do something other than lance boils for fun.

While Manuel went to the doctor, the kids and I headed out on the town. First we changed Yuen to Dong which got us funny looks. The exchange rate from Dong to Dollars is about 20,500 to a dollar, so it really does work like the old lira and it’s totally confusing me. I made Rebecca take charge of the map and for dealing with the traffic we developed a routine of holding hands and running across the street. Eli thinks he’s seeing motorcycle races. The green clad crossing guards sometimes sort of helped. They are not, however, dumb, and understand that it is best for them to wait for traffic to stop before stepping out to stop traffic. And the traffic works kind of like shock therapy for someone with an overzealous panic response to oncoming cars thanks to last springs SUV runin. We basically spent the morning as consumers doing exactly the things that in another life I would have scoffed at. Eli found a little wooden bicycle and Jonathan got a jumbo pack of Bakugans. Rebecca and I got fitted for new custom made dresses (about $20 each; silk for me and cotton for her). We also got cone hats, cookies, chocolate some of which we might well be able to buy on the down town mall in Charlottesvile. We found an English bookstore and purchased some gems there too.

To add to the excitement of the morning I looked at the proofs for an article and noted that the illustration is wrong. The analogy would be it say look at the pretty cat and instead you get a Philadelphia pretzel. I’m editing the journal issue so it’s my fault... So I sent my fabulous graduate student to find it. When it wasn’t at my house she tried to go to my office. But, oops, my office is not office anymore, my stuff is in boxes, and I don't even know where the new office lives. While working on this, my little internet trick stopped working, which spun me into a panic as I envisioned finishing out the summer without google, facebook, new york times, etc… I did get it work again this morning with some very complicated computer gymnastics--go me. So far, we are all loving it here and in fact it does feel refreshingly like Paris!

The Spawn

2011-07-13T02:00:00.002-04:00

Every time I talk to someone on the phone they ask what the kids are getting out of this and what I think they will take away from it. In truth, I do not have a clue. In that inevitable way of children, they take everything in stride, and things that still seem exotic and scary to grownups register as nearly normal to them.

Eli has picked up the most Chinese, though he will not use it on command. When I try to get him to perform here it’s not only in an “isn’t my kid cute way” but also a way of saying “yes we are giant white people who do not speak your language or understand your culture, but we really are trying and at least one of us can pronounce things accurately.” His pretend play includes not only Chinese activities in which he frequently becomes a grounds worker or a plumber but also words in Chinese, Thai, and Dai. But I don’t think he understands them as different languages. Obiwan mostly speaks a mash up of these language and spitting noises these days. He can also have a full out conversation with one of his acquaintances Chen Chen in which neither of then understands a word the other is saying; but they do speak with conversational inflections, stop for questions to be answered and giggle at the same time. Since at almost five he still spends much of his time on a different planet, this whole business of jungle living in some ways may seem less weird; he, for example, regularly sends emails to friends, cousins and super heroes and often comes home from the woods bearing gifts of precious gems, wild animals, and high automated rifles.

The big kids also frequent fantasy worlds, but theirs bears a striking resemblance to a Mekong village town. They sweep and mop the porch. They say it’s safe for kids to do that here because no on uses soap anyway. (this is true) Any kind of pretend cooking requires filtered water and dramatic banging on something. All three of them dress their stuffed animals in Dai clothing crafted from scraps mooched from the Dai seamstresses in town. They very casually inform me on walks “watch out mommy that’s an elephant ear; it’s poisonous.” They know exactly where to buy anything they want in town—soda from one supermarket, dim sum buns from the lady in the back of the market, fabric trim next to the spicy noodle shop etc…. Rubber trees, tea plants, banana leaves, coconut trees, and mango trees don’t even bear mention any more; unless they are hungry and want a mango. They can, in other words, identify plants, animals, foods and sounds that I had never even imagined before I came here, and they don’t think it’s unusual.

All three of them enjoy a kind of freedom and independence here that eight and 4 year olds do not enjoy in the United States for practical and cultural reasons. They hike on a footpath through fairly rough forest for 2/3 of a mile to say hi their Chinese friends or play with their dogs, pigs, and chickens. They get on their bikes and cruise around the compound on road that they share with cars, motorcycles, and the occasional lost truck—there is nothing funnier than Eli barrel-assing around corners on his little blue bike with training wheels. And we all ride into town alongside giant dumps trucks full of concrete blocks, which are never strapped down and could crush one of them at any moment. We use the size of these blocks to justify not wearing helmets We leave them alone when we go running; they amble through the market alone buying snacks. While our pool at home reliably comes with chlorine and lifeguards, Rebecca will no longer be able to simply hop on somebody’s Vespa or get on her mini green bike with any family cruising by and take a dip.

Some things simply go over their heads. Thanks to the Communist Party Birthday celebration we discussed communism, but it made no sense to them. When we explained the economic theory, the response was “but there are rich and poor people here.” When I was reading about Chinese artists thrown in prison or sent out for re-education and launched into a discussion of the virtues of free speech, they simply could not fathom a place without it. They, like Mr. Jefferson, seem to “hold these truths to be self evident” And while Yuen feels like play money to me they think that paying 60 qui for a bicycle would be a total rip off. They don’t understand the economic and cultural implications of the fact that everything here is obscenely cheap by American standards.

Mostly I’m struck by the ways that they cannot absorb the tremendous gaps in wealth and modernization. Given that I spent much of my sabbatical free time working with kids in Charlottesville’s most impoverished housing project, I am more than aware that we have tremendous wealth disparities too. But I cannot think of many places in the US where a house with three bathrooms, a.c. with 5 zones, and double-paned glass is only 200m from a house with no indoor plumbing or kitchen. When the kids took me to the farm I was stunned. They noticed that the Chinese kids have two TV’s but failed to register that only one room has electricity. They are jealous of the animals but didn’t notice the toothbrushes neatly put away outside in a cup. And like all privileged Western animal rights advocates, they worry more about the fate of the dogs whom they’ve now diagnosed with ADHD, multiple personality disorder, and “post tragic” syndrome than about kids who will be lucky if they are allowed to finish school. And they traipse down the hill and inform me in passing that they came home because “another elderly gentleman came to drink alcohol with the grandfather.” (It was 10:30 in the morning when they said this and the grandfather is no much older than me)

Though they accept much of the world around themselves, the kids are not by any means enjoying and It’s-a-small-world style complete harmonious bonding with rural China. They find things as frustrating as we do and often express it in ways that we are too politically correct to say, even in our own home. Material differences that affect them make the strongest impression. Food, of course, looms large, and they can give a long list of the indignities of eating in China and of the things that they are miserable without. But they also fully accept and expect sticky rice balls and mangosteins for snacks. They know that the Chinese export the good stuff and make a game of predicting how quickly things will break. They constantly fume at the swimming pool; they know it should have chlorine, be filled on hot days, and staff life guards who yell at people who run, smoke in the pool, throw their lunch trash in the pool, and don’t get out when they hear lightning. They, too, have had multiple skin infections and wash their hands with a kind of vigor I never thought I’d see. And they understand that we get flu shots and take antibiotics, which kids here don’t get to do. The radical differences in music and ambient noise also beg constant attention. Often they talk about sound in a comparative way. “that sounds like queen don’t you think” or “why do they have the same piano on all the radios” (they mean the same inane synthesizer tracks) “The bugs here are 20 times louder than anything at home”

The big kids, like their parent’s, process a lot through reading and information. Both of them speak in a tone I thought was reserved for arrogant male academics when they inform other foreigners about Chinese culture. They can quote facts and stories from various dynasties and frequently reference the Red Guard and Chang Chai Shek. And like the good comparativists that the solipsism of childhood makes them, many of their cultural observations come out in terms they already know. We spoke with Manuel’s student about the problem with Dai men drinking and gambling: Jonathan said. “oh yes in our country the native Americans have that problem especially on reservations.” During a conversation about the vastly inferior schooling in the Dai villages Rebecca said “isn’t that like an achievement gap.” Not to mention the question we got early on “how come all of the Chinese men shave their entire bodies?” And while I have often complained about the horrors of bringing up boys, there may be hope for at least my eldest son. During a discussion of what are by our standards completely regressive domestic arrangements of everyone around us Jonathan said with a smirk “well that works out well for the men but not the ladies. Mommy wouldn’t stand for that.” (And for the record when I say regressive I’m not talking about arrangements of men working outside the home and women working in it) And, despite our failed attempts to explain communism and wealth disparity, they did understand it when we said an important marker of what I think of as the wretched gender politics here is the fact that a country that makes and distributes amazingly zippy cell phones to even the most remote communities and technology superior business accessories (both of which are primarily used by men), they cannot sell any kitchen convenience including a good sponge. Why make women’s lives easier?

As to the question of what they will remember I just don’t know.It is true that Rebecca and Jonathan remember Rome quite well; or at least they claim to. But my scholarly life does not exist in a separate plane from our home life, and anytime they see me preparing a power point presentation for a talk they see places where they played. All of us love to go to Mona Lisa and buy Perugino; not because I think it’s the best chocolate in town but because it’s what we used to bribe 2.5-year-old Rebecca to suck down unsweetened prednisone. They hear me speak Italian on the phone and when they’ll have it I read to them in Italian. And I usually end up in Europe at least once a year and come home with some kind of Italian treat. It’s not in the end that far from their normal world. This is very far away with few flashpoints at home.

In closing I quote from Jonathan, who frequently has long involved conversations with his best friend Kiren during which I sometimes write down his words. I tune out for long discussions of Warriors, which is a completely wretched book series. He has already learned to make things that spin him into tantrums seem interesting or buff to his friends. This is especially true when it comes to food, which challenges all three of them in big ways.

“We have made several observations. The nanny’s all ride pink bikes.”

“I have quite a bit of a diet. There is bread. There is very good cheddar cheese. Jinghong has a restaurant that has good pizza. Their eggs are phenomenal no matter where you go. And then we have some buns in case I start to starve. We found these things that are like Chinese granola bars. So actually I‘m not bad off.” (Jing Hong is an hour away and we’ve been twice)

“we’re stuck in china getting eaten alive.”

“you know our mom played a song for the communist party’s 90th birthday”

“we do have a bug zapper. It looks like a tennis racket”

“There’re two Indonesian slash dutch girls and two Malaysian slash Texan girls and there’s one four year old Thai slash Scottish girl”

“Becca she’s fine she’s sleeping right now though. Sometimes the garden exhausts her”

“Wait let me guess Chile also made a declaration of independence. A lot of countries did”

“I’m on my dad’s computer which just happens to have this funny thing from the new york times” (followed by a complete reading of the NY Times op ed piece of the US’s Facebook page)

Monkey Parts and Wine

2011-07-10T05:24:00.000-04:00

On Wednesday one of our neighbors told us that the monthly “dai” market on the Chinese Lao border was very cool and that if we went we could purchase wine, beer, and monkey head. It pops up on the 7th and 8th of each month and sellers from Lao cross the border to sell their wares, which consist largely of illegal animal products. As always it seemed slightly mysterious, and guide book and google research yielded very little information. Supposedly, the only way to go involves getting someone from the Dai villiage with a van to drive. Luckily, Manuel is working with Zhuangfang who happens to be from the local village, and she said she’d hook us up. The guy her mom found had never worked as a driver so he said he wouldn’t do it without Zhuangfang, which was a bonus for us since she is super fun and speaks Dai, the lingua franca of the market. She told me later that her mom wanted to find driving work for this guy because most of the men in the village spend their time away from the rubber plantations where they work gambling, drinking and playing illegal lottery games and this man has avoided all of those things. He is exactly my age and already has grandchildren.

Driving out of town and looking around without worrying about whether or not my kids were getting hit by a car allowed me to really look which led to a “wow I can’t believe we live here” moment. Shortly after we left town began passing through seemingly endless rubber plantations. We saw miles and miles of tightly planted rubber groves taking up every bit of available space on terraced hilltops. As far as I can tell, most of the local men currently work as rubber tappers. In the mid twentieth century this area still consisted largely of tropical rainforest. In the 1950’s when the west imposed trade embargos on China the government made Xishuangbanna a hotbed of rubber as part of a larger plan to render the country agriculturally independent. In the 1970’s local people were still considered too lazy for this kind of work but educated urban youths in need of re-education did a lot of time on rubber plantations. Land reforms of the 80’s and 90’s gave land to individuals and encouraged the continued planting of rubber. The Garden in which we live does quite a bit of research on the environmental impacts of rubber planting and is responsible for some as of yet completely unattempted plans for reforestation. I’ll have to do a little fieldwork in the compound to understand the science of it. For starters I found this quotation from our neighbor and director of the institute. (He is not the party secretary) “The future of the botanical garden is intimately linked to the future of the ecological environment of the region,” says Chen Jin, director of XTBG. “The day when the forests are gone and rivers dried up would be the end of the XTBG.”

At some point the kids got restless and miraculously the little minivan with no seat belts and no ac sprouted a TV screen playing music videos of red songs and Xishuangbanna anthems. I could not see the tiny screen but I’m told it featured scantily clothed dai women dancing with plants and exotic animals. Eventually we turned on to the infamous Kungming-Bangok expressway, which goes through China, Laos and Thailand, linking Mekong river countries. The highway contributes to a trade infrastructure and will in theory have great impacts for globalization. As of January, studies predicted that it would double the trade between China and Thailand. It also considerably opens up relations between China and Laos. I know nothing about this area but I can only imagine that the highway will have large impacts on cultural trade as well. The people of Yunnan, Laos and Thai are ethnically linked and their different political situations are imposed by their different nation-states.

The Mohan landport is the only land border crossing between China and Laos and, as we cruised down the highway, sure enough a market sprouted up out of nowhere. They apparently open up the border for this endeavor once a month. At first glance it looked like the usual market except it was full of women from a variety of ethnic groups that we had not seen. The colors were stunningly vivid. As always in the region women dress in traditional dress where as men wear crappy looking modern clothing often doing away with the inconvenience of a shirt. I found the Yao who come from the hilltops and wear amazing brightly colored skirts particularly arresting.

Like the market here, it had none of the bustle and hustle of a big city market, or of a village market in Latin America—not a single person tried to get us to buy something. That may be the Buddhist thing. We were the only white people or westerners in sight, and the kids attracted a lot of quiet attention—no photos but a lot of stroking of their hair and skin. We’ve learned that at times when women here stroke the kids arms and seem to sort of measure them they are checking to see if they are healthy. Interestingly, Rebecca who wears tank tops attracts the most concern on the health front.

Since this was day two of the market, there were no monkey heads left but If you’ve seen my pictures on facebook you know that we passed up opportunities to buy all sorts of yummies. Zhuangfang did buy deer skin which she says tastes good and betters health if you roast it on an open fire and suck the juice out—we passed. Zhuangang and I located monkey penis which given my work on castrati it might well count as research. It’s dried and long. They also sold congealed monkey blood, which apparently cures menstrual cramps. The kids imagined a Red Cross blood drive scene with nice ladies giving out cookies, not poached monkey’s shot and drained. Rebecca desperately wanted an ivory comb but since it was actual illegal elephant ivory she had to settle for a rabbit’s foot made out of otter. They also sold ground up tiger bones, rhino horn, and bear bile.

We bought none of those animal delicacies but we did buy raisins, which I’ve had no luck finding here. Other treats were peanut and sunflower brittle and some very yummy crackers made from sticky rice and honey. A fruit vendor gave us a bag of mangosteins for no clear reasons and we bought fresh honey. Manuel bought a gorgeous Laotian basket, which I used to carry rolls to a birthday party yesterday, and I purchased some Dai fabric that looks a bit different from what we get here.

Our next stop was the duty free shop, which turned out to be two shops. The first one specialized in food and yielded olive oil, Italian spaghetti and chocolate. The kids spent a good 10 minutes picking out m and m’s which turned out to cost $40 so we did not buy them. We had to find duty free shop number 2 to get the booze, which I wanted. I am desperate for wine. This involved going directly to the border crossing. They have a brand-new swanky building that looks like an airport except that the check in counters are customs and passport control. We ran into a group of monks crossing from China to Laos. We saw the gorgeous sight of wine and bought three bottles.

The ten and under crowd took this all in stride, as if in our family when neither the Charlottesville farmers market nor Retail Relay can meet our needs we regularly traipse off to a market of illegal animal parts on the formerly closed China/Lao border. Things that to adults seem phenomenally interesting, disturbing, or simply markers of what a different planet we inhabit this summer already register as normal for them. In contrast, we came back to the news that a long postponed birthday party for Eli’s four-year old friend Rona would occur as a pot-luck picnic in the pagoda on top of the waterfall. The excitement in the compound may have exceeded our kids’ reaction to the Great Wall. By 9:00 in the morning we had a full report on the pink cake, and Eli had already gone to help make it. Manuel and the big kids rode bikes into town to procure supplies for our contribution, and Rebecca carefully plotted turtle and R shaped challah buns, and the kids all planned various games. (Each kid was supposed to bring a game) But 2:30 we were asked every three minutes when we were leaving and finally at 3:45 when we saw Rona’s 6’ 3” Scottish dad drive off on a bicycle wagon built for a 5’ tall person hauling his daughter, the cake and various treats, the pitch was high indeed.

And the whole event made such a stark contrast to the day before that I once again had that the disconcerting sense of living in a not quite post-colonial compound. We all arrived on bike or motorbike, and the bulk of the party was the group of foreigners in which all of the families other than us are comprised of white scientists married to Asian women. Revellers also included a few Chinese grad students, and, best of all from Eli’s perspective, Rona’s Chinese friend Chen Chen, whom Eli flirted with shamelessly, much to Rona’s chagrin. I took a picture of Eli and Chen Chen playing a drum brought back from Tanzania and titled it “An American boy, a Chinese girl, and an African drum.” Other than Chen Chen, these are the same seven kids who spend every day together, and all eight of the kids were out-of-control excited. The setting was truly spectacular, on top of the waterfall and overlooking a pond and more plants than I normally see in a month.

The temperature probably passed 100 degrees at some point and everyone was red faced and sweaty. The kids had sack races, three-legged races, and played British bulldog and Tug-o-War while the adults sucked down warm Lao beer opened without an opener. And though no one has more than two burners and a toaster oven in their kitchen, the food included beautifully presented (and excellent tasting) pizza, cake, apple pie, spring rolls, Thai noodles, tempura potatoes, watermelon, and a few fruits I’d never seen before. One of my problems in these sort of pot luck scenes is that everything I make looks like one of Eli’s playdoh project. I simply can’t become one with my battered electric toaster oven and stovetop that beeps and shuts off when it doesn’t like the pot. The whole scene seemed very far from the China/Laos market with it’s monkey parts, brightly colored ethnic minority clothing, and the ever-present hooch.

More Floods

2011-07-06T07:52:00.000-04:00

I didn’t even leave my house today and I still inhabit the twilight zone. As always the joys of Chinese construction add excitement. Our kitchen sink, the one with the explosive water valve, has been leaking again for a few days and every day some one else comes to fix it and every day it still leaks. Today it leaked and the bathrooms flooded. The appropriate calls were made but nothing happened so we went about our business as usual.

We’ve started a new plan in the compound where the seven foreign kids have a specific house to go to each morning and that house will contain one adult. Call me bourgeois, but I’m not completely comfortable with the lord of the flies scenario of seven kids aged 4-10 hanging out unsupervised in houses where the electricity sparks every few minutes and valves burst about once a week. Manuel organized this as a way to prevent me from going completely and totally crazy since mostly they all come to me and with me everywhere I go. Today they went away, which left me alone to do something that actually had to get done today—it didn’t.

We’ve figured out that if we keep the a.c. off as much as possible during the day it and the rest of power might stay on from about 7 pm on—which is when the killer bugs come out so the windows and doors need to be closed. So I set myself up in shorts and a tank top with every single door wide open in the house drinking coffee and working away at a little application. I had the great idea to stream in WFUV in the evening for some funky music. At some point I looked outside and saw four police officers and four garden workers hanging out on the porch in chairs and squatting listening to the tunes too. This seemed like not my understanding of personal space but... They hung out for a while and then went away and came back with their own music. So we had a kind of ipod battle of the bands. I took the whole thing as just another weird China moment. Manuel didn’t quite feel that way when I called him.

The kids eventually toodled home for lunch and some time in the lab. The hotel in the garden made the mistake of storing a lot of hotel things in our garage—little toothpastes, combs, shower caps, blue slippers etc… So these kids who live in a giant lab now spend much of the day walking around in shower caps and blue booties doing experiments. While the six young Dr. Frankenstiens worked in the lab I went to lie down for twenty minutes and made them promise not to blow anything up. Because it’s a commune and we don’t do personal space I woke up to find a Chinese guy with his shirt pulled up halter style and the obligatory water bottle of hooch standing over my bed saying “Hi, water kitchen” in Chinese to me. He did his thing, gave me the thumbs up, and then left. An hour later after we had made rolls in the shapes of turtles, skeletons, and baseballs the sink started leaking again. At that point I lay down on the couch with a novel on my ipad and pretended I was somewhere else until a policeman came to deliver a few ten gallon jugs of water.

While preparing a stir fry of mystery greens and mystery spices the leak seemed to get bigger and bigger, so more calls were made. Manuel (who is not a plumber but has caused floods in his own lab) noticed that the drain hose did not in fact attach to anything so the sink water simply came up out of the ground. And then the water-bearing policeman came back. He too performed experiments on the sink, which prompted him for some reason to turn the water on and keep it running thus flooding much of the kitchen. Manuel kept turning it off and saying in English “this makes no sense” while the policeman-waterdeliveryman-plumbeman turned it back on and said in Chinese “let me do my job, you idiot.” Finally, his wife, wearing a dress almost identical to the one I performed in on 1 July, arrived on a Vespa. She turned the water on while her husband squatted underneath the house and smiled. The two of them smiled, mopped, and told us “OK”, with the obligatory thumbs-up. And like Angels of Mercy departing toward their next act of kindness, they were gone. Eli is now playing plumber which involves saying “I am plumbing the house first I have to flood it.” Then he goes outside speeds up to the house on his little bike and whips out his cell phone into which he screams the same ten words of Chinese over and over.

Pennies and Moonshine

2011-07-04T01:31:00.000-04:00

There is nothing funnier to a Dai Buddhist than a gigantic white chyc who can’t afford her dozen eggs. Yes, that was me in the market counting out every last bill (some worth no more than 5 cents) and still finding myself ½ a yuan (7 cents) short and my plastic wallet empty. The nice ladies are Buddhist enough to wait patiently and tell all their friends but not Buddhist enough to just give me the damn (and small) eggs. This morning I made the mistake of going to the market without raiding the cash drawer. We live in a completely cash-based economy. (Note to the New York Times and to Capital 1. The miracle Venture 1 Visa card does not work here. ) Money seems very much like play money; it’s the size of monopoly money and it reminds me of spending lira in Italy before the Euro—very hard to think in.

My market mishap, which also left us without July 4 watermelon, came at a timely moment. I’ve been trying to figure out our accounts today because we head to Vietnam for a visit to a disease lab and a vacation in Ho Chi min city and a beach resort at the end of next week. I’ve made it very clear that in addition to a cultural experience I want straight up Western luxury; wine, cocktails, food my kids will eat that I don’t cook, swimming pool with chlorine, hot water that doesn’t depend on a summer day, cable TV and really good not Yunnan style food.. (Manuel is concerned that I’ve watched too much TV and confuse Siagon with Paris which will lead to disappointment…) This involves taking stock of the financial situation because we want Manuel’s Chinese salary to completely support us here. The first not trivial question involves whether we can use Chinese money in Vietnam. The second equally not trivial question is exactly how much we have. Everything here is fluid, including salaries—when one gets paid, how one gets paid, how much, etc… To get a sense of the financial scale we have spent about $500 in six weeks here in the jungle. The house comes with the gig so that’s not part of the accounts. But it includes four bicycles, my fancy custom made dress, new sim cards for our phones, new shoes for all the kids, plastic crap to amuse the spawn, three sets of roller blades and two trips to the most expensive grocery store in China stocked with Western Imports. Despite the feeling of living in a glorified bamboo hut, we maintain a very expensive lifestyle by local standards.

As I’ve said to anyone who will listen I crave most a good glass of wine or a good beer. But I should make it clear that it’s not at all the case that people don’t drink. They just don’t drink stuff I want. There is a huge drinking culture, and it’s almost a competitive sport. When you toast you down the whole glass of whatever it is—kind of like the four glasses of wine at the seder. People give each other drinking names “does not fall down,” “can’t walk home” etc….. And I won’t mention any names but the hooch is so strong that it knocked a number of not petite Western Scientists off their feet and led my own npWS to have a nice nap on the bathroom floor when he came home the other night. And it’s everywhere. I noticed a couple of weeks ago that every so often the maintenance guys or the water guys leave water bottles with a mystery liquid in it around our house. I assumed it was a cleaning chemical and quickly got rid of it lest the spawn drink it. But actually they travel with hooch. This may explain why everything breaks!

And it’s July 4 and no one but our kids cares. Of the foreigners we are the only family with two American parents and the only ones whose kids have lived exclusively in the West. I’m not especially patriotic or invested in this holiday, but the kids are. Thanks to the help of my email advisors we are planning some minor festivities. More on that next time but the kids spent the morning decorating their bikes for a parade and Rebecca and Jonathan have spent much of the day lecturing on the Declaration of Independence. Coming just three days after the giant Communist Party Birthday, this makes for an interesting juxtaposition.

Red Songs go Glee

2011-07-02T06:09:00.001-04:00

Last night’s song competition for the Communists Party’s 90th birthday was one of the most bizarre musical experiences I’ve ever had, and I’ve had some doozies. Imagine a combo of the TV show Glee, a Maoist communal farm rising up in song, and a martial tune on repeat with an overzealous drum and synthesizer track in the background. One of our theories about the seeming lack of planning and organization is that everything is so structured, ritualized, and prescribed that the locals do not need careful instruction. The foreigners, for example, didn’t even get a straight answer on the time until two hours beforehand.

As always, the event remained mysterious to the foreigners, and most of what I figured out came from reading international newspapers that Red Songs were hottest during Mao’s heyday. “Protecting the Yellow River,” which we heard several times last night was composed in 1938 during the Chinese/Japanese war and concludes with these words

The green fields are full of courageous soldiers
Wielding their rifles and their pistols
Waving their swords and their spears
Protecting the homeland, protecting the yellow river
Protecting the north of China, protecting the whole of China

The command performance of Red Song competitions comes as part of an effort by the government to beef up red culture—a giant pep rally. In big cities governments organized Cultural Revolution style mass choruses and every institution including mental hospitals and jails staged these events. The irony is thick and critics in China say that you can’t feed people with songs. University professors say that forced group revelry attempts to control and that the songs represent an attempt by the party to reclaim control in an atmosphere people no longer believe in communism as a political system and where as an economic system it no longer exists.

We are far enough away from the center of power that almost none of this tension seemed to exist. I even asked the grad students leading questions and still got nothing. The foreigners’ were also asked to participate in a show of solidarity. In a bonding of the other kind of way our group made up of American, Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian, French, Russian, Dutch, British and Scottish people felt very connected at that moment. Our Russian friend had flashbacks to her youth and couldn’t believe that she was actually at an event like this. Our contribution to the event included my playing a Chinese song on the viola dressed as a Dai woman and then the whole group singing Auld Lang Syne in English and Chinese. Luckily the genomics conference that occurred this week left us with a few extra foreigners who could carry a tune, and we had an accompanist, which seemed good until it became clear that he considered the tune to be a traditional Scottish funeral processional and chose his tempo accordingly. My fashion became a collective project. I tried to buy shoes to match but the only thing I could find in town that fit were men’s red flip flops. Rebecca and her friend Surya spent the day beading them and finished it off with a lime green bow—child labor.

The Chinese groups all dressed in matching outfits, which for the most part consisted of black pants and matching bright colored golf shirts. One group’s shirts said Jamaica and another had the playboy bunny on the back. The grad student girls wore tiny plaid skirts and white shirts, which looked like Catholic school uniforms. So I, the tall white woman, was the only person in traditional clothes. And I wore the festival outfit of the Dai people, who are an ethnic minority that comprise the majority of the local population. In 1950 The CCP began labeling ethnic minorities. In their hierarchy of these minorities the Dai stand as ideal. They are “exotic,” and “docile.” Of course this also means that they neither assimilate nor modernize and thus stand far from the ideal Chinese. I’m not clear on the political and practical ramifications of this classification. The government allows the Dai special privileges; they can have more than one child, receive tax breaks, and can practice religions that were banned for Han Chinese. But they have no real political power. And when the government decides that an ethnic minority has gone too far the story is not pretty. So I can’t begin to figure out how to read the performance of a white woman in Dai clothing at a CCP festival. After all, Westerners exoticize the Chinese and the Chinese do the same with the Dai, so the whole process was turned on its head. In the end I was the exotic one.

The foreigners walked up the hill towards the auditorium together, and as we walked we sensed something big. We saw more cars than we’ve seen since we got here. When we arrived the place bustled with groups practicing, all in their outfits. Everyone, including the men had make up on; we especially liked the blue eye shadow to match the blue shirts. And some of the groups sounded really good. This rendered the kids temporarily speechless, and Jonathan wanted to know why their patriotic songs sounded just like ours. A triadic common time martial tune apparently sends a rather universal message.

At about 8 everyone filed into the auditorium and sat in assigned seats. As soon as we saw that the stage featured a scene of the Garden with the Chinese flag functioning as the sun and hammer and sickles all over the place we knew we were in for quite an evening. We saw no picture of Mao, but he was there in spirit. We learned that we were number 13 out of 16. The party secretary of the garden introduced the judges and welcomed everyone to the event. In case we forgot that we are living in a communist country the institute has two administrative tracs—scientific and communist party. The senior scientists (big potatoes according to the students sitting next to me) performed first. What had sounded in the rehearsal like a small decent choir came out as something completely bizarre. They had piped in an accompaniment which was very techno sounding; with a rhythm loop, lyrical overdubbing, and for the martial tunes aggressive triadic accents. The conductor waved his arms enthusiastically in a beat that had nothing to do with the drum loop, and the singers sang together and followed neither the drum loop nor the conductor. The solosits, including the party secretary were terrible. Only a few of them seemed to sport real revolutionary fervor.

The grad students’ stole the show with their glee style combo of “Walking towards rejuvenation” followed by “Love Each Other” I’m working on getting translations of the songs. The first was classically martial and prompted Eli to march up and down the aisles with a pretend sword. Jonathan said it reminded him of the Red Guard and wondered if they were coming. Rebecca was sitting with her friends, so I have no idea what she thought. The grad students had serious revolutionary fervor, big smiles, swaying to the beat. The march moved seamlessly into a cheese pop with techno underpinnings ballad, which basically talks about, shared goals and shared love. The song featured two very buttoned up students belting out soloes as if they played lead roles in a romantic drama. The conductor, who will begin her PhD in Madison, WI this fall, turned around and had the entire audience clapping and singing along by the end. We also heard from the garden staff (as in grounds keepers,) retirees, tour guides, bus drivers, and cleaning people, the pharmaceutical company, and a few others I lost track of. The rejuvenation song came gain and again as did the anthem of the Cultural Revolution: The East is Red.

Interestingly the retirees and grounds keepers had a different kind of timbre; their singing sounded less polished and the pitches warbled. As is poignantly obvious when you live in a fancy house two hundred yards from people who don’t have running water, communism is far from a classless society; in fact the class systems are more rigid here than anywhere else I’ve ever been. But I’ve also never seen an event that literally puts on the same platform high-powered government officials and senior scientists with grounds keepers and people who get up every morning at 5 to sweep the roads with bamboo brooms.

When it was time for our group to take the stage, the grad student in charge ushered us out into the warm up area and sent Manuel, Eli and me to a special entrance with the pianist. This also meant that we had left nine foreign kids with no supervision. I have my Made-in-China crappy viola with me that I purchased for the rock band with me. Our conductor wanted me to talk about bringing my viola to its homeland. I said that dressing up and playing was all I could muster. I was actually getting nervous; this is a big crowd with varying degree of fervor, and for all I knew the idea of white chyc in native garb playing red song was terribly offensive. And for the record it’s been a long time since I TA’d for a world music class, but it sounded more Jewish than Chinese to me. My friend Chai Shen turned pages, and I let it rip. When I got the melodic part that was supposed to be soft I suddenly heard many many people humming along—they did in fact know the tune. I gave up on dynamics and just belted out. Usually, when I perform the Pixar effect of the whole thing, every little thing is exaggerated and brightened, works most dramatically on my mistakes, scratches, fingers on fingerboard etc.. This time I found the sounds of the auditorium captivating—old people humming along with me, little kids clapping, and the occasional screech of one of my children from outside. When we sang out dirge style Auld Lang Syne the audience also tried to clap but it didn’t quite work. Jonathan and Rebecca kept saying “we have this song on the UVa band cd. The words should be glory to Virginia.”

The graduate students won the event which made sense; they rocked. The big potatoes came in second; they sucked. Coming in second though was clearly strategic. They couldn’t win because they so clearly sucked but they couldn’t not place because that would mean loosing face.

When it was all over the foreigners walked down the hill and all noted that in no other place could they imagine an event like this. Rather than booze, watermelon, fireworks and games, the patriotic anniversary was celebrated with a serious song contest, and everyone participated. Manuel wants UVa to conduct similar events to promote school spirit and harmony. I’m pretty sure I have not done it justice but if we get a dvd of it I’ll happily share.

Red Dress

2011-06-30T08:53:00.000-04:00

There’s nothing like a special grocery delivery from Beijing and Internet to cheer up a jungle princess. Manuel’s friend Jake arrived last night after I went to bed so I woke up to a strange man on our couch and whole wheat flour, butter, cereal, pretzels, bagels, cheese, pita bread and more. The kids jumped for joy at having cereal for breakfast and pizza for lunch. Between Jake’s deliveries, my mom’s package and the crappy toaster oven we finally had the makings for cookies. The texture was a little funky but the kids literally licked the plate and were completely silenced by the food.

Jake and Manuel have a piece coming out in Nature next week, which epitomizes the difference between publishing in the sciences and in the humanities. They submitted it last week and it comes out next week. They apparently plan to do another one before August. I submitted an article two years ago and it will probably come out this fall. And even that depends on me wire-transferring money from here to the Vatican. (I’m assuming my sister/financial manager will take care of it for me)

As for the Internet we were all like crack addicts. When it came back on the seven kids in my house huddled around the computer playing some dumb dress up game. I admit it I suffered just as badly and had a screaming fight with Eli over computer usage. Again I realized how much we need internet here to live in the style we are accustomed to. I couldn’t skype any of my home girls for a dose of American feminism. I couldn’t call or skype my mom to discuss the package she sent. No TV. No face book. No online metric conversions. No google translator to figure out what the grandfather of the girls up the hill was trying to say to me. I had visions of him trying to tell me an earth-quake was coming my way.

The power and Internet here mystifies and frustrates everyone. Yesterday I ran into a Dutch post-doc hauling a giant server size computer across the basketball cout towards the electric bus. Huffing, puffing, sweating and cursing he made quite a sight and I’m afraid the kids and I all cracked up. He explained that he needed to run a computer program that took 4 days to run and after two months of trying to get consistent internet access in the fancy new lab he gave up and moved the whole operation somewhere else.

I’m getting a little anxious about the 90th birthday celebration of the communist party. Since agreeing to play viola at this event I’ve learned that it’s a rather bigger deal than I thought. In addition to the participation of various high-ranking officials here the event is part of a larger project of red song revivals; essentially party propaganda. Party officials commanded red song festivals and competitions all over the country. Meanwhile according to the New York Times liberal thinkers see it as problematically portraying party ideology as somehow native and as a potential harbinger of the most destructive aspects of Maoism. None of that critique exists here in the isolated south where everyone from the grounds keepers who live without running water to the lab groups are practicing songs. I really have no idea what to expect. I’m a bit worried about the kids too. People take this very seriously and I’m not sure Eli belting out the Star Spangled banner or Rebecca and Jonathan singing their song about Monkeys and Darth Vader would end well.

The color of the day will be red. When we asked what I ought to wear for my solo viola performance the unanimous vote (command) was modest red dress. I have no such thin here and I’m four inches too tall to purchase anything modest. Someone, I’m not sure who, got the idea that we should have a Dai dress made for me. I’m not sure how the Dai, feel about the communist party but they practice budhism and live and do not speak Chinese as a first language. A Dai grad student took me to her dressmaker to have the frock made. Rebecca chose the most elaborate and expensive model in the store for me. This turned out to be a good thing as the other red fabrics were very thick and had no give—not for me when the temperature will no be lower than 95. I bought red mens flip flops in the market today which Rebecca and her friend think they can cover with beads by tomorrow. In addition to viola performance anxiety it’s possible that I will look like an idiotic white person trying to be ethnic.

On a lighter note, the kids think they need to acquire DS’s. I don’t know what that is but they tell us the ones here are fake so we’ll need to go to Malaysia or Thailand to get one. They are also home schooling Rona, the four year old down the street. They have now taught her to write her name and to recognize numbers. They began Spanish yesterday, which since they don’t speak it and Rona already negotiates English, Thai and Chinese seemed like a bad plan to me. But who can argue with child pedagogues. Eli runs the scribbling class and it has lots of homework.

I'm an Earth Mother

2011-06-27T03:51:00.001-04:00

We have an incredibly small carbon footprint here. Our power comes from the dam and goes out all the time anyway. We don’t drive and rarely get in a car more than once every two weeks. The sun powers our wussy shower. I make bread every day, use freshly picked banana leaves to roll sticky rice, and hand pick my eggs. I know which plants to use if the kids get a cut in the forest. The kids use nature as their playground. When they want to climb we find exotic trees, for a slide they use the hills, and for water play they collect rainwater. They play with snails, rubber, geckos, farm dogs, and flowers. They are covered with mud and filth at all times. We live what might be called a simple life.

So, in short, I’ve become an au natural holistic unschooling earth mother in just six weeks….. And yes it’s fun, exciting, challenging, rewarding, frustrating and maddening. But here’s the thing, I’m still convinced that the whole idea of the earth mother in the West is about privilege.

I’ve never trusted the earth mother ideal. I’ll try to avoid the soapbox here, but when my twins were babies I felt hostile to that widely touted notion; merely the mention of the virtues of pregnancy without intervention, the joys of midwives and corresponding evils of Ob-Gyns, and the absolute necessity of exclusive breast-feeding could send me on a tirade. My kids would be dead without ultrasounds, a great high-risk Ob-Gyn, radio-active imaging, formula, etc. Attachment parenting doesn’t work well with two—hard to keep two attached at all times; I tried it!. When you do kangaroo care in the NICU, you still return your kid to an incubator with tubes. I’ve wondered sometimes if it’s defensiveness about my own choices; with two jobs, three kids, two of whom were pretty high maintenance preemies, and one driver in the family we take every convenience we can.

Here we’ve embraced what I hear is called “unschooling,” allowing children to learn through their own life experiences. For example Rebecca and her friend Surya wanted to do a repurposing t-shirts project. This involves mooching fabric scraps from the Dai seamstresses in town, purchasing very cheap shirts, cutting them up and sewing new stuff on them. I said I’d enable the project but nothing more than that. We rode our bikes all the way town (1.5 miles each way must give a PE class a run for its money) They wanted to remake nine shirts, which I said could not cost more than the equivalent of $1.50. This means they had to convert the money (6 Yuen to the dollar). And when it looked like it would cost too much I made them bargain in Chinese. They are tough girls. Little did I know that the hardest part of this project would be group dynamics but that’s another story. The garmets are completely hideous but the girls are proud and creative.

All children have different learning styles and Jonathan has no interest in this, but he’s a wiz with bug and plant identification, has memorized everything he’s read about ancient china, and practicing the violin seems to calm him down. He gets to read for hours and hours enhancing his malapropism repertoire. He wanted to be “reinstated” for snacks he shared (reimbursed) And he informed us that athletic t-shifts are good for those who “assert themselves” by which he meant exert. And through all of this I am very glad that fabulous teachers taught them to read, write, and do basic arithmetic.

As for the simple holistic aspects of our life here, I’m more convinced than ever that it’s one thing to be holistic because you must, and another because you want to and have the cash to support it. In Charlottesville you can have organic produce delivered to your door, a huge fridge to keep your tofu made on the commune or the organic cow you bought, you can go out to dinner in your car when you get tired, and you can send your kids to a leftie crunchy preschool. Here we go to the market on a no speed bike every two days and it’s rarely cooler than 90 even at 8 in the morning. The homegrown tofu often turns out to be rancid. I love the market; I get a kick out of speaking my 40 words of market Chinese, the challenge of experimenting with new produce, and the solo bike ride. But if we don’t go we don’t have anything to eat. We eat no convenience or prepackaged foods. We cook everything on two burners and we cook three home cooked all natural meals a day.

We wash everything by hand and hang our laundry. And consequently all of the women here, and a few of the men (including me and Manuel) have pathological dish pan hands. That means our hands are peppered with infected cuts and rashes. That’s the no potable water problem. Despite the abundance of rubber trees, the actual rubber gloves do just as much damage. And we have it good by local standards. We don’t have many toys, so the kids make play structures out of exotic branches, and they make dye out of flowers. As lovely as all of this seems, it is physically draining and depends on a vigorous mom. I can run a sub-seven-minute mile, but daily life exhausts me and makes me sore. I sleep more than usual. I grew up running cross-country in Virginia. I’m good in heat and don’t sweat much. But I am drenched always drenched here and I sometimes huff and puff as I inch along on my “rashperry thunder.” (The name the kids gave my bike)

We make all of our own medical choices. We live in a town full of unvaccinated kids. Those with any vaccines certainly do not adhere to conventional western vaccination schedule. But those who can afford it get on a plane to make sure their kids get vaccines that affluent folks in the States reject. And I might add kids here regularly die from things we vaccinate for. The privilege of not vaccinating your kids depends on diseases having been eradicated and having enough other people doing so. When I walk by the outdoor clinic and see malnourished kids receiving treatment in very unsterile environments, I am extremely thankful for vaccines.

No medical intervention means we diagnose ourselves and medicate conservatively. One reason we can do this is our education. We learned a lot about medical problems when our twins were sick all the time. We can read a scientific study and see its strengths and flaws. We use a combo of ethnographic research (asking other parents), high-powered web searches, and Manuel’s experiences with self-diagnosing in other tropical climes to solve our problems. We take the mystery cream from the Indonesian neighbor and use our CVS antibiotics and we try really hard not to panic no matter what oozes out.

The success of the holistic earth mother project here depends on basically healthy kids, educated parents, and escape routes. If the kids were behind in school I doubt I’d yank them from it. If Jonathan still had serious developmental delays and sensory issues, I wouldn’t do it for this amount of time; I’d want to make sure he got every bit of high tech support he needed, and the change in routine would have been unbearable for all of us. Medically, there is no way in hell we would have come to a place like this when our twins were small and still immune compromised. And I’m perfectly happy to treat a cut with a plant if we’re in the forest, to lance a boil with sterilized sewing needs, and to give Rebecca amoxicillin for a red throat when we decide it’s necessary. But if we sensed a serious problem we grab the first flight out, and if we had to we would beg money from all the grandparents, uncles etc.. and spend every penny we needed to get out quickly and get the absolute best money could buy until we could leave including bribes etc… So it is a privilege to live this holistic life. And in many ways we are all relishing it. At it’s best it’s a fascinating and fun adventure. But we will happily and shamelessly return to public school, regular visits to the pediatrician, craft supplies from Michaels, frozen waffles, pizza delivery, and a spa treatment for my hands and feet.

Plauges.....

2011-06-25T09:44:00.000-04:00

First it’s clear that all white people here look alike here. Our six-foot tall waspy bald neighbor took his half Malaysian daughters to buy bikes the other day. When they asked how much the bikes cost the bikeguy said “the same as last time.” Chuck had no clue what he was talking about until the bike man said “you know when you were here with your twins….”

The real excitement of the weekend was biblical flood/fire combo that resulted from the delights of Chinese construction. To repeat the cliché; they export the good stuff…
Super dad was frying up French fries when I heard a huge unidentifiable noise and then Manuel screaming. He held the water main valve shut while I called someone who spoke Chinese who would then call the maintenance people and hopefully send someone over pronto. While holding the valve shut and thus allowing the kitchen to fill with only 1.5 inches of water Manuel forgot about the French fries which caused an oil fire and a nice flaming oil gliding across the wet floor. After the fire I went to get the Dutch guy next door who located the water main under a humongous concrete brick but was unable to move it, even with my brawny assistance. So I took over the water main holding job, and my studly husband lifted the brick while the Dutch dude used his vast cultural experience with stopping floods and turned the water off. And low and behold in the dirt hole sat a frog, which combined with the screaming, and running out of the house attracted the whole neighborhood—well everyone but the fix-it guys. Finally a rather small old guy pulled up on a little motorcycle with a single wrench. This gave me no confidence at all; I wanted a fire truck, a utility truck and a shop-vac…. A few other guys eventually joined him, with a bottle of oil and a valve and the whole thing was spic and span an hour later. The hair on Manuel’s arm was the only real casualty. We tried to order brick oven pizza delivery but no dice… After it was all over our neighbors all said “oh yea that happens to all the houses, they’ve had to replace a bunch of floors.” The theory is that the valves are too weak for the water pressure, which given that the shower is but a trickle seems odd, but whatever…. I watched three episodes of Friday Night Lights to recover.

The seven western kids in the compound meanwhile befriended two Chinese girls who live up the hill on a farm. They first discovered their dogs and started their own version of PETA. The western kids are convinced that the dogs are abused and don’t have long to live and asked us to buy raw meat for them in the market. “those poor dogs eat rice….” Somehow they got over cross cultural differences about dogs and brought the girls to play on their landslide; a big hill which they climb up and slide down so that they can get covered in nasty dirt. When the temperature exceeded 100 degrease they brought the kids into the house and Manuel smartly hightailed it out of here on a vespa. I found the kids talking through Google translator. It was quite brilliant actually. Rebecca typed a question in English and hit translate and then the other little girl typed an answer in Chinese and hit translate.

We’re all still recovering from last night’s biblical events and have noted that we’ve encountered so far seven of the ten Passover plagues; including hail, boils, locusts, pestilence, frogs, blood, and darkness. To celebrate avoiding the other three we went out to dinner in town and walked home in the sultry sticky evening. And may I say that after an evening in town and a 40 minute walk with three kids, there is nothing so fabulous as air conditioning, the smell of freshly baked cheese bread, and a nice toilet!

Shrooms and Tunes

2011-06-22T10:21:00.003-04:00

We are constantly told that Chinese students work all the time and that they work much harder than American graduate students. The institution carefully guards the “work day”, excluding of course the two-hour nap break after lunch break. Maybe not…. I’m pleased to say that some things are “universal” Manuel popped into the student office and found one student on Facebook, one editing an art magazine, and one ordering something that was not science related online. These facebook-reading students turn out to be great source of cultural information. The kids keep asking, as they shout out tunes from Fiddler on the Roof and Debbie Friedman’s greatest hits if anyone here knows about Jews. I assumed no But according to the students; a very popular Chinese sit-com ay features a Jewish Doctor who, like many Chinese people, suffers from lactose intolerance. The show thus consists mostly of fart jokes. This works for the kids who like nothing better than to talk about farts and butts.

In other news our house is getting some necessary upgrades. We hear an “oven is coming.” We haven’t seen it yet. But everyone is talking about it. We did, however, get a door put in between our house and garage. The house comes rather incongruously with a garage. No one has a car here, and no one drives. The big door for the car on the garage front is wired shut, and the garage just opened into the house like an extra room. This means that if someone did bust through the big door and put a car in it, everyone would die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Now we don’t have to worry dying at the hands of Eli’s fleet of trucks that live in the garage.

And just in case things were not weird enough, we had an interesting drop-by during dinner. We had just sat down to eat delicious mushrooms. After rain storms Dai women gather them from the forest and sell them in the market. We used a little of our carefully guarded butter and sautéed them up and they were, indeed, amazing; like no mushrooms I’ve had before. Manuel explained that they were of the genus Lactarius and quite similar to L. volemus, which is found in Charlottesville. The boys actively ignored him, and Rebecca asked at the end if jews and Chinese could eat it without farting.

In the middle of his mushroom monologue, our neighbor popped over to ask if I would play a Chinese folk song at the garden’s celebration of the 90th anniversary of the communist party. The “Foreigners” are also all supposed to sing a song. This will be a gesture of goodwill, and my viola playing will be the centerpiece. Luckily I just started giving a Chinese graduate student violin lessons last week and she taught me some Chinese tunes so I’ve already re-familiarized myself with the pentatonic scale. Exactly what tune I'm playing is still up in the air.

In other food news we finally got the new breadmaker paddle back via a hand delivery. Yesterday we tried it and got a mess of yucky paste. Note to self—do not use dumpling flour to make bread. Today it worked, and I had a bit of a baking binge; oatmeal bread, yeasted corn bread, and chocolate cake. I stuck the kids in front of Peter Pan, gave them each a piece of chocolate cake and took a nap. I was exhausted from taking seven of them to the purple playground and then from offering careful suggestions to the musical they are writing. It’s called “Warrior Idol” and involves Warrior Cats in a cat version of American Idol. (If you haven’t read the Warrior series; do not….) Jonathan is supposed to sing “If I were a rich man.” Despite the fact that he orchestrated the “Barbie recreation center” which involved him brushing Barbie’s hair and directing the others to do the same, he seems to be their best option for patriarchal authority.

Potao Jam

2011-06-20T01:23:00.000-04:00

The Kids proclaimed that they want to come back here every summer. But they’d also like a week in England. In particular “We want to go to Redding so we can see the cast of the wingless bronzed eagle that they had in the roman times. It’s not the real one but it will probably have something like SPQR.” They’ve also spent a lot of time this week writing “acoustic” poems by which they men acrostic poems. They asked if when we get back I can bring them to UVa and get them published. Apparently they have not been following goings on at the VQR.

On Saturday we went to the big city for supplies; mostly food and roller blades. We went to a new super market, which had a better selection of westernish food. We got a giant box of frozen tilapia filets so we don’t have to deal with the live ones. Everyone else in the compound bought them too. We fried it in dumplng flour for the kids and stir fried it in a mystery Dai spice pack for us—yum. We also procured eighteen containers of yogurt. I learned last night from a student that Eli has literally been sucking the town dry of yogurt. Every time the students go to buy it; it’s all gone. And for a major coup they had little tiny bags of m and m’s (about 6 per bag) But this allows us to return to the “you get one m and m for every new food you try.” Jonathan drank a smoothie made with Yogurt and Mango—truly radical for him. We visited the croc store (called “Coqui”, which prompted Manuel to give the children a lecture on Puerto Rican frogs. Sometimes the whole biology thing is a mixed blessing) where the kids got to custom design their own crocs with special little widgets. Our feet are definitely not scaled to china. Rebecca got an adult size. I looked in many market shops for flip flops. When I stuck out my feet and my shoes everyone pretty much smiled, laughed, and shook their heads. The croc store had one pair for my gargantuan feet!

The hour long drive actually took 90 minutes because of a “Big Potato.” The Chinese word for V.I.P. is translates literally as big potato. We noticed an impressive police presence in the garden and on the way out of town and figured out that the head of the Chinese Academy was on his way to the garden for a visit. He qualifies here as a very big potato—complete with motorcade etc. It’s sort of like having the head of NSF and the NEH ride around with a full Secret Service Detail and police escort. The security involved simply closing the major highway through Banna. The kids were completely fascinated. As the potato got closer, the human traffic lights started to gear up. Jonathan wanted to know if they had “bronze fingers” by which I think he meant “brass knuckles.” They actually merely had ceremonial white gloves much to the disappointment of the boys. We heard that when the potatoes entered the special lunch the entire room got up, clapped and did a little bow. For at least one of our neighbors this served as one of those “wow we really do live in a dictatorship” moments.

We attempted this weekend to find out a bit about the “pharmacy” When we first arrived, and I heard the word pharmacy I imagined a Chinese CVS with cosmetics, advil, and herbs to cure all of my jungle induced aesthetic problems. Nope. The pharmacy is actually a huge pharmaceutical company that makes a lot of money producing drugs from plants in the Garden. We never see anyone go in or out, and no one knows exactly what they do in there. The building is screamingly modern with reflective windows so you can’t see in. I think I’ve been reading too many thrillers set in China and too many books and articles about the treatment of girls working in factories. But I have visions of 1000 young girls stuck inside producing toxic things and occasionally covering up for a murder. In the realm of “reality” it seems that they produce a very popular medicine in China called “Dragon Blood” that fights cancers, bacterial infections, and erectile dysfunction.

In our continued adventures and experiments with food, I had two successes this weekend. The green things that we thought were green peanuts were actually whole green mung beans. I boiled them with garlic and salt, and other than being a little over cooked they were super yum, and thing 1 and 3 scarfed them up. Thanks to the earth mother website my sister sent me I learned how to make dulce du leche. (I can’t believe I’m reading that site) Basically you stick a can of condensed milk in a pot of boiling water for two hours. It’s super yummy with pretzels or apples dipped in it. It also works with peanut butter on whole wheat Tibetan flat bread. Manuel has been experimenting with different varieties of mangoes. He decided that today’s was too good to be shared with the children.

Missed the Boat

2011-06-17T19:49:00.000-04:00

When I go back to my regular life in the fall, I will teach the Introduction to Music Study for Graduate Students. On sweltering tropical afternoons while seven kids play on the bamboo back porch, I’ve been perusing articles from previous years of teaching and checking out recent journal issues. This I can do while occasionally saying “yes, you are totally tougher than a droid; no, you may not make paint out of flowers and turn the porch floor into a mural, of course that paint is toxic; it’s made in china, do not kick your brother.”

Getting ready for the graduate class involves a literature survey ranging from 19th century musicological texts to the New York Times and recent cultural theory. This time I’m coming to the sad realization that as a professional music scholar I missed the boat. A hundred year ago I could have donned a fetching straw hat and called the whole adventure anthropology or comparative musicology. And if I were slightly older or slightly younger I would have the proper vocabulary and scholarly comportment to take sound bites, turn them into aural moments of global tourism, and get a publication out of them. If either of those approaches seemed appropriate, I could write up a monograph and a few articles, put them on my annual report, and earn either a promotion or a $200 merit raise.

The graduate class always starts with Guido Adler—a father of musicology. I’ve always loved the 1885 chart delineating the details of systematic musicology. His version of ethnomusicology attended to “folksongs of the various peoples of the earth” by which he meant “non-western” or “exotic.” A comparative scholar following his model would have loved this weeks graduation ceremony. The students planted a tree—biologist’s equivalent of Jews virtually planting trees in Israel. Each participant then dumped a shovel full of dirt on the tree—much like the Jewish funeral. Moving out of the garden I would no doubt have celebrated bucolic village life and admired the exotic beauty of the local women. Their humming in augmented seconds surely would have stood for an inherent bond with the land. The fact that I can speak neither the local language nor the national language would not have hampered my ability to make aesthetic judgments and gross cultural generalizations. I would have been very bothered by what the tuning which I would have described as “lack of equal temperament” (translation: pitches are different here.) I don’t think the ever-present pentatonic scale would have given me much comfort. But the thirds and fifths that seem to pepper the local music here would have felt nice and triadic at moments. The kids and I would have zipped around transcribing and recording to our hearts content. The resemblance of the Erhu to a violin or cello would have thrilled me; especially when I heard a player zip seamlessly between classical tunes and Dai melodies. I would have tried really hard to name the modulation that allowed that transition and eventually settled on “pivot chord on ‘roids”

The cultural tourism model could be even more fun especially if it was peppered with discussions of cultural transfer. Just today I encountered incipets for two such articles. The first would be titled Traditional Dai Music and the Modern Machine. I would begin with the traditional ethnographic anecdote and note that while I was firing up my ipod to go for my morning jungle run, I was almost run over by a huge construction vehicle with a roller. The driver appeared to be not more than twelve and had music blaring. From what I can gather from my amateur ethnography and internet research, the tune was a traditional Dai Buddhist chant. The dissonances between small boy, driving large machine, blasting Buddhist ritualistic sounds took my breath away. The fact that my ipod shuffled to man-eater just as I started running only made the soundscape wackier and added that enticing note of dissonance. The article would stop there as I cranked up the volume on my ipod and tuned out the Buddhist chant, street sweepers, loud tropical birds, and buzzing motorcyles.

The second sound bite from today could fall under the rubric of “musical ecologies.” Today I took seven kids to the “exotic” or “ethnic” plant garden. (It depends on which sign you read; the translations are different) We moved around amidst packs of Chinese tourists led by garden tour guides--Dai women wearing traditional Dai clothing. The main attractions are the little shop of horros plant that grabs your finger when you touch it and the grass that dances if you sing to it. Yes really you can sing to the grass. We learned that it does not respond to non-melodic singing or to children pretending to be opera singers. It’s a music 101 student style plant—to count as singing it must have a melody…. From this I could of course pontificate on the inherent musicality of the universe (a-la-Ficino). Even the plants respond to the magic of song… Or I could do the cultural tourism route and describe the different musical activities that the poor plant must endure on a given Friday morning. It seems to prefer high voices. The cultural tourism approach to the plant would have to center on the women singing traditional Dai melodies in a distance, catching the ears of western children and chinese tourists alike; plucking ritual song out of its context and marketing it for eco-tourists. They sang to one set of plants while a china pipa and flute duo sounded; the overplayed Rachmaninoff Vocalise, mixing unmistakably western classical tunes with quintessentially Chinese timbres creating a live sonic pastiche….. And just to make sure that everyone played their musical roles the only song that all seven kids I had with me knew was Do Re Me. And yes they did blast it out and successfully got the plants to do a jig—apparently the ethnic and exotic plants do respond to the diatonic scale. And again the sight and sound of seven kids representing four different ethnicities matching pitch in a song that essential serenades tonal harmony while talking to plants in rural china is certainly worth a caption. This turned out to be their musical highpoint as they then spent a ridiculous amount of time making up a song about various gruesome ways to die that featured crucifixion, live burial, venomous snake attack, and other lovely things.

Sadly thought I missed the musicological boat on comparative musicology when you don’t speak the language and on cultural tourism. So for now I’ll stick to the mommy blog and return to Castrati in the fall.

Not that zen....

2011-06-16T21:39:00.000-04:00

Craving Efficiency
OK I admit it the whole inefficiency thing is getting on my nerves. I’m trying really hard to be zen and use my ashtanga yoga breathing to simply go with the flow. However, it just seems ridiculous to EMPTY the pool every three days. This is not a small pool; at it’s longest point it’s a nice 25m. We are in a Chinese Academy of Sciences facility; can these people not use some chlorine? And I admire the fact that the architects designed the houses here to model Dai homes which are open, made of bamboo and raised a few feet above the ground to allow for cows and chickens to reside beneath. But they might have considered the fact that in the tropics wood swells, and if you provide no space between the joints it buckles. The kids have a fascinating little mountain growing out of the floor in their bedroom… The other cute house detail involves the master bedroom suite; which Eli now occupies. He has Internet, a big bed, a patio, a little desk, and a large rattan armoire. He does not however have a mattress—just a box spring. That works for him; not us.

My favorite little bits of local news involve the bank and the doctor. We have a bank account with The Agricultural Bank of China. This seemed fine and dandy except that they are currently tearing down the bank in town; no bank = no cash. This is a total cash economy. So we sent our friends to the big city with our bankcard and our secret passcode. (turned out the card didn’t work anyway so they lent us a big wad of cash) As for the doctor we were told that there would be a doctor on the premises. Well it turns out she paid one visit to her husband and declared his house so messy as to be completely uninhabitable and high tailed it for the capital of Yunnan—a one hour plane ride away. Our pediatrician thankfully partakes in e-medicine.

Rebecca, meanwhile, turns out to be the most acclimated of all of us. She strutted her stuff last night. Yesterday was graduation here and the original plan was for all of us to attend a banquet, however, the general consensus was that it would be loud, require good behavior from the kids, and have nothing they would eat. By the time we decided to pass on the banquet I had gotten my head around no cooking or cleaning and was feeling cooked out from the fabulous pizza quesadillas we had for lunch. So we decided to go into town and try a new restaurant that the students all love. Rebecca actually knew where it was. We were all a little dubious when we sat down and realized that it didn’t have even a Chinese menu and the table next to us had at least a dozen beer bottles underneath it and some very drunk guys. But we were led into the kitchen, which, among other things included a tree trunk and machete as cutting board and paring knife. We pointed at food we wanted and then they cooked it up. The local food here is extremely spicy even by Chinese standards, so Manuel pointed at the hot peppers and said no. And I repeatedly said not too spicy in Chinese. (I think that’s what I said) We somehow ordered about seven dishes, way too many but the whole extravaganza including two large beers was only eleven bucks. We all (except Jonathan) liked what we think were green peanuts. They were cooked with garlic and not much else. The mashed potatoes with scallions were also pretty stunning and the kids snarfed them up. Somehow, our request about lack of spicieness did not make it to our greens. They had so much bite that I couldn’t eat them. We think it was supposed to be BYOB because when we asked for a beer the woman who owned the restaurant ran next door and bought two. Rebecca took me to a “convenience store” to buy water bottles for the kids. At the end of the meal she went and got a check and translated the price for her father, who looked shocked at her abilities. She then led us to a “coffee shop” where she had heard they had real ice cream. I thought the ice cream sucked, but the kids liked it. The coffee was actually quite good (ML, who has been sampling coffee in Yunnan and Beijing pronounced the best so far). I noticed one outlet that's about seven feet off the ground and has a fan plugged into it. Jonathan said, "hey you could bring your lap top here and sit around like you do in Charlottesville...." We’ll see…. The big kids finished the evening with a night time nature walk led by someone from the Garden. Eli and I had our own nature walk which involved walking home (a good 1.5 miles), failing to catch fire flies, and at least 30 minutes of continuous verbage about bobofet and droid soldiers.

You know you've been in China a month.....

2011-06-14T20:55:00.002-04:00

We’ve been in China just over a month. This means away from Charlottesville. Musicology has moved for a few months to the realm of hobby, the occasional copy edits, a new fascination with early modern Chinese European encounters, and enjoying Craig Monson’s fabulous book on my kindle not withstanding. (Don’t tell the dean). I’ve noticed a few changes in all of our behaviors and attitudes, which are listed below.

1.My pathologically cautious daughter regularly hitches a ride on the back of a vespa with one mom and three other kids and zips her little green bike up and down hills. My son who never played with playdoh, couldn’t stand wet clothes for 30 seconds, and refused to get his hands dirty runs around in torrential tropical rain and makes mud soup. (OT should have brought him to jungle)

2. When I see a spider the size of my fist I don’t squeal. I kill it with a wok or a bug zapper. This provides delicious pleasure.

3 When my four year old slips in the mud on the way to the market, I take his shirt off let him walk around in the tropical sun for a while without sunblock then buy him a new shirt. I bargain the t-shirt guy down to $2 because $3 for a Thomas the Tank T-shirt with a genuine puffy train seems obscene. Speaking of prices 50 cents seems like way too much money for six ears of the sweetest most delicious corn ever.

4. It seems easier to eat noodles with chopsticks than a fork.

5. I no longer go through a container of hand sanitizer a day; embrace the dirt…

6. The four year old’s battle noises all sound like Chinese and you’re told that in fact he says Chinese words—dog, cheeta, juice, banana. Apparently the ipad matching Chinese game works.

7. It seems normal for kids I’ve only known a few weeks to call me auntie. And after not riding a bike for almost 10 years I put one of those kids on the mousetrap on the back of my bike and let it rip.

8. I listened to Dave Mathews while running. I liked DMB as much as anyone in my cohort. But then I moved to cville where he is second only to Thomas Jefferson and every spot he walked is sacred. I’m enough of a child of 60’s liberals to distrust any such icon and stopped listening to him. He’s back.

9. Checking the local news involves a complicated calculus of Chinese English language propaganda, New York Times, CNN. Often finding news of things that happened anywhere near where we are goes through a news service in the Netherlands which seems still to have active and uncensored interests in Indonesia and thus the rest of the region.

10. I lie in the bathtub fantasizing about eggo waffles, watching TV on a big screen, and ordering groceries on line. And we all did a happy dance when we heard that the director of the Research Institute had approved an oven for our house. (oven means toaster) We got a little less happy when we learned that said toaster will take a while to arrive. To acquire it, Manuel will first have to thank the director and the guy who will buy it. Then they will send someone to buy it. And then he will have to thank him again. And then maybe I’ll get my toaster.

11. I can say knock it off in three Asian languages. Thai sounds best.

12. Thanks to a twelve-hour time difference between here and the east coast and an obsessive use of Facebook and email for social contact I can tell you when most of my friends wake up and go to sleep.

13. Making coffee is a multistep art involving a ten-gallon water tank and a special pot. Westerners share it and tricks for acquiring it in ways that make it sound like a black-market item.

14. The kids and I can use Chinese words. (no we do not speak it)

15. We eat rambotan and mangosteen for snack—two things I’d never heard of before we arrived. Other favorites are corn on the cob and dim sum buns reheated in a steamer, Tibetan flat bread, and disgusting strawberry Oreos.

16. Goals for the summer are not book chapters and articles but rather not killing the spawn.

Home with Cheese and Chocolate

2011-06-12T03:19:00.002-04:00

When we are home I don’t mind Manuel going away for a few days; in fact every so often I like it. The kids and I have special little things we do. And I generally put them to bed as close to 7 as possible and treat myself to chyc flicks and other delicacies. That is not the case in China. The act of having to fill the coffee pot with potable water from a slow drip 10 gallon jug made me totally crazy. When I got the news that Manuel would be hours and perhaps a day late it just about pushed me over the edge; the edge included so many hours of computer games for the kids that they must have lost brain cells and lots of cursing from me.

He did make it back from Beijing after an epic journey which included sitting on the runway in Beijing for nearly 5 hours. Apparently, the airport witnessed hundreds of flight delays yesterday thanks to torrential downpours in Guizhou and Hunnan. Once again the dissonance of a globalization style consequence—the delay of national and international flights—and the local consequences is gritty. My ire came from my husband’s flight delays after an international science conference and a trip to the Western grocery store. And, I used my newfound computer skills combined with a historians toolbox to figure out exactly what went on where. But thousands of people died and suffered serious injury because they lived in poorly constructed buildings, ran out of potable water, and simply cold not get shelter from the rain, wind and lightening. And they probably had no idea why and certainly did not have internet weather radars to feed obsessions.

These gravity of the rain situation remained unknown to us until the flight delays. It wasn’t quite dramatic enough to make the New York Times or CNN. And while I dutifully check the English Language Chinese news every couple of days it goes to great lengths to block anything at all unseemly or related to death from natural disasters. This angle of censorship seems especially ironic. At the risk of seeming trite when you reside in the part of China that is developing or rural the immensely destructive power of nature and the fragility of human bodies sounds loud and clear. Late afternoon heat without ac literally stifles the breath, and the noise of torrential rain pours in bamboo houses or on those with tin roofs deafens. Meat comes with blood, guts, feathers and every other part that reminds you that dinner came from someone breaking the neck of your chicken. And the sale of gobs of blood makes this even clearer. The town doctors office resides in an open air room so severe illness and even death vigils occur in public spaces. Children get antibiotics through IV’s—as in they can be seen walking down the street with an IV pole.

Manuel did make it back quite late last night and he came with a suitcase full of Western delicacies; mostly importantly the five chocolate bars which he knew he’d need to gain entry back into the house. With the wild Harvest Tomato Sauce, pita bread, and mozzarella cheese I made pizza in the wok with pita bread with the kids scarfed in three seconds. Apparently the 5lbs of cheddar cheese caused some trouble at Beijing Airport security and involved a security official sniffing it, wrinkling his nose in disgust, and then shaving a slice off and running it though a special bomb-sniffing machine. At the Kunming Airport they were concerned, instead, with parmegiano. Ironically, as I was getting ready to go for my first run since Manuel left the kids asked “aren’t you making us anything for breakfast, pancakes, Tibetan flatbread.” My quick retort was “are kidding me? Daddy took two planes and a bus to buy you corn flakes and shredded wheat. fix your own breakfast. And start thinking about Eggo for when we get home” I also asked them to report my super mom feats to their father, hoping they’d talk about exciting walks in the rainforest or the family project of constructing a play kitchen for Eli out of boxes. Instead they reported that I had made them wear helmets which made them look silly and that I said “look I can’t keep an eye on you with Eli on my butt.” It’s true I said it, and everyone under eleven remembers it. And that sentence had already gone through the parental censorship process.

My favorite report from Beijing involved a text I received from the wife of Manuel’s colleague. It said, “The boys went to a hookah bar.” Admittedly I only know what Hookah is because we have one in Cville at a place that plays great music and serves good salad. And I think someone smoked it in the movie Around the World in Eighty Days. So it seemed weird but not the weirdest thing we’ve encountered here. She then called a few moments later to say that she had been concerned and alarmed. She is Chinese and did not know the word hookah and thought her husband had said Hooker. She knows that western men traveling alone still frequently answer their hotel room doors to find hookers offering their services.

Solo

2011-06-10T23:35:00.000-04:00

Manuel will come back from Beijing tonight with whole-wheat flour, pretzels, cheese, butter, and various other treats. I feel pretty buff after my four days flying solo here. The first night sucked. At 1:00 am all the circuits blew with a huge noise that jolted us all awake. Getting back to sleep required flipping all the circuits on and then turning on six different ac thermostats. After not much sleep I came downstairs to find my two boys, shirtless, using the Chinese computer to surf the FBI’s most wanted site. “Eli why doesn’t the FBI know that Osama Bin Ladin is dead?” (I’m told this is normal for boys and they will not grow up to be serial killers) I don’t understand why the Chinese Internet sensors allow this list and disallow information about a lightening storm in Malaysia. The plus side of the great firewall is that it acts a bit like parental controls—nothing with sex or the word butt or poop gets through. (this is no laughing matter here as I learned from the New York times that a man in southwest China earned a spot in a labor camp for scatological humor involving a high ranking official.)

I pretended the whole scene of boys looking at violent criminals before breakfast was a hallucination and walked towards the new French press coffee maker where I promptly squired myself in the face during the push-down-the-press part of the process. Luckily, Rebecca had read on the Internet that it’s best to pour the water just before boiling. And for the icing on the cake; while cooking the morning batch of Tibetan Flat bread I noticed a spider the size of my fist attempting to crawl onto the first loaf. I grabbed the giant frying pan (the kind that you can kill an intruder with) and smashed it.

Thursday night I realized that the ten-gallon water jug had to be changed. When I first tried to lift it I completely failed. Rebecca and I rolled it across the entire house and then I tried again. The kids suggested that we all grunt—which we did—and miraculously I lifted it. I then had a shot of some sort of Chinese moonshine (throat burning alcohol), which staved off any muscle aches. The other big buff moment came last when going to the pool depended on me finding the bike with the baby seat on it. Despite having very little distance vision and no depth perception I’ve always been willing to do things like bike, ski, run and roller blade based on the assumption that the only person I’ll hurt if something goes wrong is myself. Putting a kid in the baby seat obviously defies that logic. However, with a temperature of close to 100 degrees and no other way to get to the pool we had no choice. The whole scene looked like a cross between Big Love and Fantasy Island. Three out of four husbands skipped town, this week which left one Dutch guy, four wives and eight kids. Apparently word on the street yesterday was that we were all Indonesian. We figured out how a pool with no chlorine stays in business all summer. Every few days they empty and refill it; yesterday was a refill day. This thrilled Eli as he could now walk across most of the pool.

We all made it there and back in one piece. And I’m not sure me with a back seat driver is any less safe than Rebecca’s favorite mode of transit, which is multiple girls on a vespa. She feels best with one grown up and three girls and has taken to hitching rides rather than wait for the electric bus. There has to be a kind of safety equivalent of willing suspension of disbelieve while we’re here. I can either spend the entire summer worrying about the various ways the children can be killed (venomous snakes, vespas, faulty construction, rotten tofu, tropical disease etc..) or I can just let it rip.

Meanwhile we’re continuing our exploration of the garden and the rainforest. The kids who have grown up here are enjoying teaching our kids the names of various exotic plants, which I’ve never heard of. On one of these tours, the one that led us to a tree where we could sit INSIDE the roots Jonathan scowled in frustration “well we only know the Latin names tell us in Latin”

Oh and if you need to find some protein that a kid who eats only chicken nuggets will eat may I recommend using a dumpling steamer to poaching a chicken breast in with a little salt and Chinese chicken bullion. (do not look at the ingredients because you will puke) Then shred it. And if you have to get the chicken by a kind of weird boob dance you will feel especially proud of yourself about the meal.

Meanwhile Manuel was living it up with foreign scientists. Highlights seemed to be a grad student style tour of multiple Chinese scientific institutes, a musical performance with a contortionist, and smoking hookah. His paper apparently went fine.

Mud and Trafic violations

2011-06-08T02:45:00.000-04:00

Manuel left for three days in Beijing today. I will attempt to stay out of trouble. Yesterday’s infraction came in the form of a moving violation for I think speeding through a construction zone going the wrong way on a one-way street. The purple hot rod clearly transforms into a trouble machine when used for early morning market trips. The crime escalated when I didn’t realize that the three cops were actually yelling at me. I assumed that the yelling could not possibly involve me. After all I am merely a petite mother of three ambling along on a no-speed bike to the market. I forgot that I’m far from petite here—in fact I tower over the policemen. And I forgot that the garden has rigid traffic laws for bikers and pedestrians during peak tourist hours. So, they chased me down on their more powerful no-speed bikes, stopped my bike and pointed frantically in the other direction. I smiled and apologized in Chinese and eventually made it to the market where I stocked up on chicken, veggies and steamed buns dim sum style.

The bigger trouble involved mud. On Tuesday it rained all day and I t sent the kids outside to do a water experiment—how long does it take a tropical rain forest to fill up a giant bowl? These are all children of field biologists so they never miss an opportunity for outdoor experiments that are messy and potentially dangerous. In addition to studying the environment the Dad’s share a certain macho “I fight with venomous snakes and go to places without potable water to do my science” attitude. As far as I can tell they were all in Bornoio in the 80’s and at the last collective dinner I tuned out when the talk turned to wild Rhinos.

But I digress. After the water experiment they decided to experiment with the destruction of mud balls. And then when science got boring they started playing cave man in the torrential down pour that came complete with the kind water/mud puddles that were literally up to their shins. I admit that I encouraged the whole thing; bringing them supplies and enjoying some quiet moments with yet another poorly written Chinese murder mystery. Two hours later they were covered literally head to foot in mud and for some bizarre reason had taken to turning the electrical pole into a mud hut and had carefully covered it with mud from the ground to as high as their hands could reach. I next heard someone yelling at them in Chinese. A few minutes later Manuel arrived home to find four children caked in mud apologizing in Chinese, one mother yelling at her kid, one mother cracking up and a third looking completely bewildered. (The bewildered was me and yes I made my kids apologize in Chinese) The next door neighbor informed me that the electric pole is basically live and that the last time someone touched it in the rain they got electrocuted—hence the yelling. The other Mom and the nanny were explaining in multiple languages that this was what kids always did in their villages and it was ok. Manuel began hosing down the kids.

Meanwhile I was feeling terribly guilty for having encouraged this and my guilt magnified as I watched the maintenance guy laboriously carry pink bucket full after pink bucket full of water over to the road to clean it. The kids of course offered to help, which seemed like it could only make things worse. The downside of living in the middle of a tourist garden is that even though we inhabit the so-called private/staff area, an aesthetic of the pristine presides. So every morning the garden is full of people sweeping the streets and after every rain--storm—every day as it is the rainy season—they wash the roadThis despite the fact that no one bothers to ground the live wires in the electrical poles, clear the weeds that are taking over the road, fix the wireless in the lab, remove the piles of knocked down buildings etc…. Somehow the incident also seems oddly exemplary of the clash in especially rural areas of China between hyper capitalist productivity and the imperative to keep everyone employed. And it speaks to the clash of educational classes. Here are men and women, mostly Dai and mostly past middle age, using hand made bamboo brooms to sweep the street that runs through a biopharmaceutical lab and a flagship research station of the Chinese Academy of Science.

So far today I have stayed out of trouble. I also forbade the boys to lay any violent computer games, hoping that this will keep their fraternal smacking and jabbing to a minimum. This did not go as well as I hoped. They immediately a dress-up characters site and wanted to know if it was ok to dress Jesus Christ on the cross in star wars costumes. I said no way, as it seemed like bad juju.

Food for Thought

2011-06-06T03:44:00.000-04:00

If I were a different kind of writer and a different kind of Mom I could turn this into into a cool food blog about feeding American kids in a place where what you’ve been confidentially told is baking powder actually turns out to be lye and where the spices look and smell like narcotics. It’s also a place where every recipe anyone gives you resembles the instructions my grandmother once gave me for making Chicken Soup. “put a chicken in a pot, toss some onions and carrots in the pot and say a barucha.” The blog would include snap shots of me on daily bike rides on a pimped out no speed purple bike to the grocery store or market. It would also include scrumptious pictures of elegant Reeces sticky rice balls and an artful shot of the fish heads that came off of the tilapia Manuel fried up the other night. That would be the tilapia whom I fished out of the water, looked in the eye, and said “ok buddy you are dinner.” He was fried in batter made with eggs that had cracked on the way home when my egg carton was confiscated by the supermarket. We thought it was a brilliant idea to bring our own egg carton. Unfortunately, I stupidly put the eggs in it before I purchased them, which prompted three people to yell at me, take my cartoon, and hand me ten eggs in a plastic bag.

A food blog would also have a fine series of photos dedicated to globalization and product placement that would show various products in containers that mimic the American counterpart [my personal favorites are the Oreos—in a little carton that looks like an Oreo-stuffed with blueberry and strawberry centers]. However, I generally look sweaty and confused on the bike, my rice balls and other treats look like Eli made them in Preschool, the whole fish escapade left even a committed biologist like Manuel a little quesy, and I can’t possibly capture the nasty plastic scrumptiousness of the multicolored oreos, so no pics. Bonnie-the-FoodBlogger would then return to Charlottesville anxious to be an EarthMother and ready to explain the virtues of low-tech food prep. While food prep here is an interesting experiment and provides infinite lessons in mathematics and fine motor skills for me and my family, the second we get back to Charlottesville I will embrace the fabulous Retail Relay delivery service where I can purchase already-made bread, a full gallon of milk, very dead (& filleted) fish, and eggs that come in a carton. They can expect a several orders a day from me, which will include every possible convenience item. I’m seriously fantasizing about grocery delivery, ovens, microwaves, and take out. Heck, I’d settle for a fridge that was not sized based on the One-Child Policy.

Today’s lunch was a feat. I actually spent an entire hour preparing quesadillas from scratch. Thanks to Kristen for the Tortilla idea. I first had to go get a vat of Baking Soda from Summi, who has a FIVE-pound container of it. Apparently that’s the only quantity you can buy it in here. Then I found a recipe, transferred it to my ipad and hit the kitchen. The kids had, fortunately, gone next door for their daily infusion of screen time because the recipe is alarmingly similar to play doh and they would have no doubt wanted to add food coloring and play with it. I fried them (quesadillas, not the spawn) up in the wok and then topped them with tiny pieces of the cheddar cheese that was specially flown in. (that would be the cheese that our British neighbor picked up on his way home from Japan when he stopped in Kunming. Cheese is, indeed, a plane flight away). The kids then asked if we could have this every day for lunch. And it’s the happiest Jonathan has been about lunch since we got here.

The kids are for the most part doing pretty well with the food considering that almost nothing is familiar. Of the ex-pat kids here they are the only ones with two American parents who have grown up entirely in the West. That means they are the only ones who are not comfortable with rice for breakfast and very hot chili sauce as garnish. And they are the only ones whose mother did not know what to do with a banana leaf until last week and is afraid of the meat section. Jonathan is our weak link of the food thing though even he is doing better than I might have expected. The saving grace is that he adapted very easily to the boxed milk. Those who know our family well and have any recollection of the first four years of Jonathan and Rebecca’s life will recall that I’m talking about feeding a kid who had diagnosed feeding problems, went to a feeding therapist, and was chronically puny. His current violin teacher, the infamous Jomamma, is one of the few non-family members who had the patience to spend forty-five minutes feeding him ONE OUNCE of high calorie formula. I’m not going to try to tally up how much time I’ve spent reading about feeding problems, failure to thrive, etc.. And Rebecca whispered to me after dinner the other night, “I told you we should have put him back in feeding therapy before we came here. Let me see what I can do with him.” So this is a test for all of us……

Live Fish and Dead Chickens

2011-06-04T03:08:00.000-04:00

Thankfully, our second trip to the pool was much more successful. We made it there and back without a single tantrum. Rebecca and Jonathan are still painfully slow with the bikes—they walk up and down every single hill and both need to have the pedals lined up in exactly the proper way to start again. The pool was green by the second day—they don’t use chlorine and we’re told that in a few days the algae and muck will make it unswimmable. This time it was full of
Chinese men smoking IN the pool—a nice touch.

This morning I was all set to go for a short run and finish dealing with copyedits on an article when the next-door neighbor, Sumi, appeared with her motor bike wanting to take me to the market to give me a proper introduction and solve some market mysteries. She suggested I drive since I’m taller—this seemed like a bad plan, so I hoped on the back. The garden and the town were quite crowded this morning. Today is the beginning of the dragon boat festival-which is not observed in town since we are in a Dai region but seems none the less to require a huge police presence—they are everywhere. The graduate students are also apparently up to something, but none of the faculty—including the Chinese—know what. No one here seems very clear on what the festival celebrates but it has something to do with the suicide of the 4th century poet Qu Yuan. Festivities involve drinking wine, racing dragon boats, and eating sticky rice rolled up in banana leaves.

The market was bustling with Dai families coming in from the countryside and carrying produce, animals, and goods on tricycle pick up trucks and baskets hanging from their shoulders. Sumi was especially excited to show me where to buy chicken breasts and catfish. Jonathan told her he would eat those things and his translucent skinniness is of some concern to the other women in the compound—mothers and nanny’s alike. (given that our kids tower over the other kids here I’m not sure why his particularly skinyyness is such a focus but….) We stopped for delicious dim sum type buns on the way and headed for the chicken lady. I learned that the way to get chicken breasts is to grab your own breasts and kind of shake/massage them and then says the amount of kilos you want. I saw at least six other women do this. Can men even buy these? The next stop was fish, where I was told to stay away from the dead fish and pick the live ones. Admittedly, when when one of the live ones leapt out of the water and touched me I squealed. We picked two swimming fish and the fish lady cleaned them up for us. We also passed live chickens, and dead chickens complete with feathers etc… That’s not for me…. She showed me which vendor to get rice and flour from, explaining that the ones with bins closer to the ground are problematic because the dogs pee in them. The various cooking instructions were themselves an exercise in multiple translations since I was getting them from an Indonesian woman living in a Dai area of China. I also learned that the green and spinach leafy stuff is actually spinach and the giant blocks of red/brown stuff is blood—we didn’t buy that. The rotisserie birds hanging in the market are Peking duck. I was told to buy the one still on the grill—fairly recently alive and it comes chopped up with little sauces. I haven’t opened the bag; I’m thinking it still has head and feet and while I’m now willing to buy but I’m not ready to touch.

Pool Disaster

2011-06-01T22:34:00.001-04:00

I just tried to buy myself some time by sending the boys to gather banana leaves. Unfortunately Manuel, always the botanist, decided that they don’t really know what banana leaves look like and there may well be venomous snakes around so they are back. Damn.

Spending time in a developing nation comes with a certain amount of inconvenience, discomfort, frustration, and general malaise. That is part of the challenge and indeed the pleasure—it’s interesting, different, exciting…. And, yes I understand from my recent reading binge on China that the question of developing v. developed is vexed here. By per capita income it is developing, and yet its global power, economy, and influence defies that categorization. China loaned more money than the World Bank last year. That said, we’re in a place where it’s hot as hell, the water is not potable, there is nothing resembling a hospital, there are few paved roads, many homes have no running water, it is impossible to purchase any food without a huge amount of effort, etc… So the upshot is that while this is very exciting and interesting sometimes it’s inconvenient and uncomfortable and the presence of three kids exaggerates that. Kids are not always flexible nor, when push comes to shove, are they all that interested in wrecking their machines. Yesterday was one of those days when I decided that yes, in fact, this whole venture was crazy and that it might make sense to sell the children and spend the rest of the summer on a beach in Laos.

The inauspicious day began by figuring out that the blade for the bread maker had gone on walk about. It was an epic journey to figure out how to make bread in a place where MSG is more common than yeast or flour. The completion of two delicious breads made everyone happy for TWO DAYS. Without the stirrer we can’t make bread, and we have rendered someone else’s machine useless. So the kids and I hightailed it out to lunch at our favorite juice/fried rice/fried egg joint. After drinking mango ice I noted that the fresh tofu we had purchased at the agricultural market had spilled all over everything in my back-pack, me and my head. There was a butterfly on my head and while stopping to fix the tofu situation I squatted in a nice mud pile. Eli was chipper and belting out the star spangled banner calling attention to me squatting and leaking tofu juice. So we came home for an afternoon of bickering. At a certain point news spread through the compound that the pool had water in it so the whole neighborhood (all three families) headed over. This seemed extremely promising on a day where the temperature was close to 100.

Except… first we had to outfit a bike with a baby seat for e and then we had to ride there with Rebecca and Jonathan who just learned to ride a bike last week. It's about 1.5 miles. This involved walking down hills, falling, crying, screaming, etc.. When we arrived I asked if there was a pool bar—no one answered or laughed. Meanwhile we have no goggles, so Jonathan had started tantruming as soon as the word pool was mentioned. We explained that they don't use chlorine here so stinging eyes wouldn’t be a problem. No luck; the kid continued to scream. By the time we got there after the scary bike ride, a search party had been sent out for us. Both big kids acted like they have never been swimming, clung to our legs refused to put their heads in the water. There was no evidence of last year’s swim lessons or swim team. Thing two got out of the pool did a giant burp as if he might puke and declared himself “water sick” and unable to ever go back to the “namby panby wretched Chinese pool ever again as long as I live.” At this pool kids eat their dinner IN THE pool, which seemed pretty exciting to me. As we decided, a few minutes too late obviously, that it was time to leave thing two began a new round of screaming. He could neither ride his bike nor walk home. After reaching a feverish tantruming fit with the entire pool full of well behaved girls—even the local people have only girl children—he hitched a ride. One of our neighbors threw him on her Vespa with her six month old. Despite his objections we left the bike there. I tried to keep up with the Vespa on my NO SPEED purple bike. Manuel meanwhile rode home with Eli in the babyseat and Rebecca riding (and, according to ML, stopping every 20 meters because of some ailment). I understand that Rebecca fell into a three-foot ditch on the way home, but she seemed fine when they arrived. While Manuel ran back to retrieve the abandoned bike I attempted to make mac n cheese with Chinese noodles and no butter. I also fantasied about a beach in Laos and a long sola boat ride down the Mekong River.

So this morning we had yet another discussion of the proverb “nothing ventured nothing gained.” I’m also preparing a home schooling lecture on the excitement of the explorer and began by telling the children they would hear later about Matteo Ricci, Italian Jesuit who hung out in the Forbidden City in the late seventeenth century. I’ve become interested I him for his discussions of Eunuchs. We’re also embarked on a series of discussions about cultural difference. Although the boys failed to find a banana leaf, a random grad student delivered one to my door and the kids are now making shoes with it. Manuel is going to visit the town metal maker to see if he can fashion a stirrer for the bread maker, and we’ll give the pool another whirl tonight. Another day in the jungle…..

Living in a Compound

2011-05-31T11:35:00.000-04:00

I think we live in a colonial compound. It’s a circle of brand new swanky new houses built for senior scientists. One side of the street has Chinese scientists and the other has four Western Scientists and their wives. The entire garden except our compound supposedly has wireless. The kids (including our three) who can walk and talk, and two babies, run in and out of each other’s houses and speak a dizzying array of languages. The houses are all glass. That means if the girl next door comes over to play and I say “the kids are resting” She can say “no they aren’t I just saw Jonathan jump on his bed.” Adults are in and out quite a bit as well. Everyone removes shoes and I’ve started to recognize individual footwear habits. Mine are about three times the size of any other woman’s. This global glass house intimacy means that for example the dai nanny of the half Indonesian/half Dutch 18 month old next door noticed that our tv is never on. So while the kids and I were hanging out this morning she came in with the 18 month old on her back to fix the tv. When that didn’t work she decided it was time for Chinese lessons and began quizzing us on the little flashcards we bought last weekend.

All of the other kids are girls and two more are on the way. Jonathan explained to me “it’s a good thing I mostly played with girls in kindergarten and first grade so I’m comfortable with their play habits.” Eli has a bit more preschool machismo. The Sunday afternoon ramifications of this were that while the rest of the kids were INSIDE watching Kung Fu Panda Two, Eli was OUTSIDE doing his own kungfu and screaming so loud I thought he would be ejected from the garden. (and yes the irony of a bunch of children of white scientists hanging out in the jungle watching kungfu panda is thick…). He also attempted to use my phone as a missle/num chuck, which endeared him to his new admirer. Rona will be four next month. She was gone the first week we were here but came home and found true love in Eli and a goddess in Rebecca. At every wretched thing Eli does she collapses on the floor in hysterical giggles, which prompts him to do it more. When that becomes boring she follows Rebecca around who takes the opportunity to demonstrate an extreme big kid kindness, which she rarely lends towards her brother. Eli will have to be deprogrammed when we go home. One of his new favorite games is hopping on his crappy little bike, pedaling about three rotations and announcing, “I’m going to wooook. You stay home and take care of becca and jonny. Make Sure they do their home wooook”

We’re still spending a fair amount of effort on set-up/ getting used to things. I have a feeling we’ll get it all worked out just in time to leave. I’ve been having an epic battle with the Kindle app on my ipad trying to download new books without a wireless connection. I decided I simply could not live another day with out a copy of “The Frankfort School in Exile” and the latest of the “Red Princess” Mystries which are set in Beijing. And I routinely bribe the children with free Kindle books and games. After more hours than I’ll admit I got everything to work with the Kindle but failed with the iPad until we discovered the sneaky fact that the graduate students have wireless in their office (Manuel does not) so I can hike to the lab, hang out with the students, and synch my ipad. Meanwhile, should I have any cooking questions those can be attended to as well. The kids are also figuring things out and Jonathan took his first ride on the back of a Vespa today. He hates carousels, roller coasters, and anything fast so he has avoided all activities that involve this mode of transit. Today, he was shamed by a four-year-old girl and off he went to the soccer game. We were all so relieved when the kids made it back safely a few minutes into a gigantic tropical thunderstorm that we ignored the fact that they returned on the back of a bike of someone they and we had never met and who spoke no English; she seemed very nice. When I came home from my first substantial bike ride in 10 years in one piece, the kids asked over and over again if I had gotten lost or had any falls.

One of our many challenges this summer is keeping the children occupied in a place with no swimming pool, two other kids who speak their language, no familiar food, no lessons, no activities etc… I’ve been cooking up various school activates; usually in the afternoon. Today they decided they wanted to sketch the lilly pond As it turned out all three have fallen in love with the toxic watercolors we bought last weekend. So Rebecca packed a backpack with watercolors, brushes, little glass bowls wrapped in kitchen towels for mixing colors, and paint brushes. They spent a good hour idyllically mixing colors and making “abstract” pictures. This was followed by an hour of truly wretched behavior including Rebecca sneaking out of quiet time to go next door and Eli taking the laundry off the line THREE times.

How to Make Bread in Bamma-without an oven

2011-05-29T01:25:00.003-04:00

1. Listen to your children ask for bread or toast for 8 days and instead feed them something that is supposed to be bread but tastes like a bad brioche and the consistency of chewy cotton with sweetened beans stuck in throughout. Be sure to carefully pick the red beans out of the center if they refuse to believe that said beans are “Chinese chocolate.” Be patient when every day the supposedly bright children seem surprised not to have a delivery from ABC bakery in Charlottesville or even a nice English Muffin.

2 Send daughter over to Indonesian neighbor’s house where she is given sticky rice balls with chicken inside and similar rice balls will be sent home with her. Kids will act incredibly satiated and start hanging out at next door neighbors house looking hungry.
The sight of hungry American children will lead the neighbor to lend a bread machine.

3. Go to the “big city” an hour away to buy supplies. This will be no small feat and will involve a driver and an 11-seater van that looks like something one of those crazy families on reality shows with 14 kids would drive around. Also bring a couple of Chinese graduate students to guide you through the big city. Walk through a park whose most interesting thing is the birds who are brought there for a conversation hour so they don’t get lonely. There will be 20 year old pieces of carnival equipment which the kids will not want to play on. Instead they will cling shyly to your legs on a hot jungle day. This is a Mekong river town…. On the way to the grocery store stop at a bookstore and purchase hilarious books for 75 cents with Chinese on one side on English on the other. Also purchase Legos for $2, art supplies and an ashtray with Barak Obama dressed in a Chinese military uniform. Pass two floors of giant tv’s playing tinker bell in Chinese. Endure one MASSIVE tantrum by the four-year old because he wants a toy, a computer, and/or a washing machine. Next go to Mei Mei Café, which serves Western Food. The pizza and milk shakes with actual ice cream will be a hit. Next walk to a bike store to purchase bicycle helmets, which turn out to cost more than the bikes themselves. Chinese people will all look at you like you are crazy for this making this purchase. Nobody will get your ESP or pantomime about what a pain in the butt recovering from a massive concussion is. Given the number and speed of motorcycles riding on sidewalk, try to persuade kids to wear helmets at all times when outside. Fail.

5. Go to the supermarket. Get pushed in a great mass of people upstairs where they do not have food but do have endless isles of plastic shoes, clothing and cosmetics. Gesticulate wildly for about 15 minutes trying to figure out where the ramp that takes you and the cart down from the clothes section to the food section is. The ramp will be delightfully full of crappy plastic things that the children will want as well as shrink-wrapped pickled chicken feet. But it will also have the first Q-tips spotted on this continent. Joy.

6. Suffer complete sensory overload from a crowded store full of brightly colored foods. Listen to the children ask for an unnamed sweet object every three seconds. Find the bulk section with rice and stuff that looks like four. Try with sign language to locate sticky rice, flour, and yeast. When sign language fails attempt to use a few Chinese words. When that fails gesticulate wildly while holding up some rolls. When that fails call the Indonesian woman on the phone and she will attempt to talk to the grocery store lady. But don’t forget that she is INDONESIAN not CHINESE so this will not work. Receive a text from said neighbor with the word for yeast. Still no luck. Give up and exit store. Go to the check out line with 96 individual containers of “pure milk” in a box and various other goodies. Attempt to use your new VISA acquired specifically for this trip. It will be cruelly rejected. Pay in cash. Find the English speaking graduate student and go back into the store. She will then speak to multiple people and they will present you a bag of stuff, which you will not notice is the wrong color to be yeast. Exit the store and the other English speaking graduate student will tell you to use that for dish washing. On the way home stop at the local super market in the small village where they will have individual packets of yeast labeled “yeast” in English—kind of like they do at Giant or Whole Foods.

6. Wake up Sunday morning excited to make bread. Realize the bread maker was purchased in Europe and will require an adapter to get from a European plug to a Chinese plug. This will involve unplugging the surge protector and trying three different converters. It will also flip the circuit in the kitchen. Next realize that the measurements are in grams, not Tsp etc… Attempt to google for conversions. Oops the computer will be in the kitchen without an Internet connection. Curse. Remember from NICU days that 500g is 1 pound and see what that does for you—not much. Hook up a second computer to the Internet for the tsp to gr conversion. In the middle of this go outside to chat with neighbors who all sweetly want to know if you’ve made bread yet. Somehow notice that five kids are in your house and your two boys are screaming and hitting each other. One is using your phone as a billy club. Go back inside and continue bread project. You will have to use one measuring cup for everything and a hot-and-sour soup spoon as a flour scoop. You will spill some and need to grab the bamboo broom so as to avoid tracking flour through the entire house. Push start on the bread maker and listen to your children ask if it’s ready every three minutes.

Calmer days....

2011-05-27T09:27:00.002-04:00

We have recovered from Wednesday’s market disaster. Part of the recovery involved NOT GOING to the market or, rather, sending Manuel on a bicycle without anyone else, esp. our punching-thunder-tempered-wretched-four-year-old. Tomorrow we head to Jing Hong—the city we flew into, which promises a western restaurant and a grocery store. As of tonight we have acquired a bread maker—borrowed from the Indonesian woman next door. She claims flour and yeast can be procured in the city. I’m also told that I can purchase chicken without the feet, head, eyes, feathers, etc…. And we have pretty much cleaned the town out of milk so we can buy a few cases of that. The two boys drink more little boxes of milk than the rest of Xishuangbanna and Sipshawnbanna combined. The kids continue their acquisition of Chinese words and yesterday learned to say butt. Thankfully, their 8-year-old tutor claimed not to know the words for poop or pee, which they also asked about. The cultural exchange of book v. practical knowledge continues, and today’s discourse involved explaining that “many men in Malaysa have an earring in one ear indicating that they have survived a work accident” The local response was “Chinese men have earrings because they like to look silly.” Tonight we’re discussing the epistemology of ghosts. The other wives are apparently afraid of the ghosts that live up the hill and claim the dead don’t rest easy here. So the kids want to know if ghosts are real and while we’re at it they want to know about the difference between a ghost and a reincarnated. I have no response. And in nature lessons they have discovered the joys of rainy season mud and seem have discovered every possible way to get full of red mud which leaves delightful little footprints all over the white house. It was even prettier when they fell into the Lilly pad pond. I had to promptly call Manuel on the phone and ask him if there were any diseases in the water—he says no. We’ve instituted a foot washing station in order to keep the dai cleaning ladies from killing us. And yes we do have two cleaning ladies that come every single day. That might be my favorite part of being here!

One of the most bizarre things about being here are the cognitive dissonances created by technology. In the event of an emergency we could not possibly get home in less than three days. But we can email, facebook, skype and google phone at will. This means that, for example, I google phoned my grandparents. The shock almost did them in but……. On their planet granddaughters don’t call from China. And my sister sent me a text from Harvard Yard saying she was waiting for the graduation procession. The kids have had some moving skype calls with their cousins, mostly related to the butt and potty themes mentioned above. One of my friends pointed out that I could go into business as a girlfriend night shift—my all night is all day in the States. (It’s also with noting that when Eli wanted my attention rather than whining or pulling on my arm he merely unplugged the internet cable thus disconnecting the call….). This is all radically different from when I did this kind of travel twenty years ago. When I taught in rural Kenya I had to walk or hitch to a town a few miles away to make a phone call, which I did once a week at most. When I was in Bratislava playing in the opera orchestra and my sister was dallying with Tibetan Buddhism in Katmandu my parents said we could talk on the phone for her birthday. I tried to call her and was told “there is no such country.” She finally reached me at a hotel in Prague. We spoke for ten minutes and it cost $265 bucks. That was the end of that. And while she was shacked up with a Tibetan monk, airdropped into the Himalayas, my parents received no contact from her for a month other than a fax from a trekker who had passed through. When Kircher fashioned a speaking tube to talk to porters in the courtyard, I doubt that in his wildest dreams he imagined the possibility of talking to China. Nor, I’m sure, did Bell when he made his gadgets for recording the vibrations of speech imagine anything like this.

And there is the much-touted completely uneven modernization of China that plays out in technology and is tied to class and status. With the proper gadgets and skill we can watch John Stuart on hulu, download books onto our kindles, practice Chinese on youtube, and other fun things. But I got misplaced running the other day and wandered into the area of the garden where the ground crews live, and they have no running water or electric wires. While we were playing in the lily pond, the kids found a set of bathroom tiles. It turned out the construction dudes were using the pond to wash them. The same woman who gave me the bread maker explained to me how to make sticky rice by picking a banana leaf from up the hill (with the ghosts). The market has a booth that sells cell phones but vegetables are weighed with a scale that looks like Confucius might have used it.

Tonight’s wild life excitement was a lizard crawling up the wall.

market disaster

2011-05-25T04:40:00.000-04:00

This morning was fine. I went for a short run and did some yoga on the concrete marble floor while Manuel biked to the grocery store to buy some things that are too heavy for me—a case of milk etc.. The kids played outside and got filthy scaling the landslide

, which they had created by removing rocks. The afternoon—not so much. Keep in mind as background for this delightful expedition that the effect of me walking anywhere with my three (or four) children is as if I was a six foot tall woman walking on the down town mall in Cville wearing a bikini and toting identical quadruplets. It’s not the photo frenzy of Beijing but everyone looks and my limited vision is what stops me from being uncomfortable. Also keep in the mind that the local Dai people are described as “peaceful” “budhist” “quiet” etc… And there is no bustle here even in town.

My idea was that the spawn and I would go out to lunch and then do a bit of shopping. I should have known we were headed for disaster when we missed the electric bus that leaves fifty feet from our house. We missed it because when a yellow bus went by and I went to flag it down t the kids started saying "no it's for TOURISTS" (as if they aren't) for some reason I listened to them. And after ten minutes no bus came we called it a loss and went home for a snack of some goldfish I found in the bottom of Jonathan’s backpack. (in a bag but still) Then we headed back out for the 1:00 bus; fifteen minutes and an excruciating set of 20 questions rounds early. We finally made it and walked to the restaurant we had liked on Sunday. We passed water buffalo on the way. I’m getting more comfortable with chickens passing by my feet in restaurants and managed to order water in Chinese and use actual words for numbers. We had a yummy lunch of veggie-fried rice (with just some pork) and the best fresh orange juice I’ve ever had. Jonathan proclaimed, "the guide books is right they really do know how to make eggs in China" and both big kids agreed it was the best lime aid they'd ever tasted. I’m sure the ice cubes were toxic but whatever….. While we were eating it got to be about 120 degrees, which you could tell because the men who were by this point lazing around in no shirts were dripping with sweat. We went to the topless agricultural market and found roller blade store--too good to be true. The kids all tried on blades, knocked down every scoter in the place, and found ones they loved. Then I realized I had all of $3 in my purse. A series of hand gestures and phone calls for remote translation incurred during which I was silently cursing myself for not having taken a Chinese emersion class. The total lack of cash turned out to be the least of the problems since the guy wanted $500 for them (about $83 bucks). That seemed outlandish to me. Now that I think about it that's not bad for three pair of roller blades but..... Meanwhile the tyrannical third child had decided he wanted a gun. The Chinese talk about a little emperor syndrome—prized only children who are boys. Eli gave them all a run for his money. Why in a country that has no legal firearms, even for police, they have toy guns every three feet is beyond me. But Eli wanted one and he flew into an unabashed four-year-old rage prompting the entire market to stare and point at us. Not only did they point but they tried to help which involved wiping snot off his face, picking him up off the floor, and patting his head. For each intervention he punched someone until I picked him up and he started punching me, still screaming. Recall that these are a peaceful people and we’re already crowd stopping even when we are peaceful. Clearly we were not going to make it to the grocery store. Instead we walked at a snails pace through the wretched heat with big kids screaming "we really need to find an aya for temper of thunder so we can explore the local countryside without him." They were trying to say the Chinese word for nanny but it came out as the basic expression for "oh my, what a tragedy, yikes etc...." This word from their little white faces only added to the spectacle. At one point Eli walked into an air-conditioned hotel without us as if to check in. As he walked in I watched another shirtless guy ride a vespa out—by then I thought I was hallucinating from the heat. For the icing on the cake Rebecca came about 1/2 inch from getting run over by an old man on a Vespa prompting me to literally scream and screech. I was by that time carrying Eli and saying completely inappropriate things to him. Rebecca, who is easily terrified by the most innocuous things and screeches at least 37 times a day said “really mama I don’t know why you screamed. I’m fine and you’re the only one here who has gotten run over by anything.” We finally made it back to the bus stop where the bus driver took one look at the filthy kids and seemed to be saying "no way are you getting on my bus you sweaty yelling Americans.” Finally he warmed up to us after making the kids move seats three times and dropped us at the house of the Dutch guy next door. I think the logic was "I have no idea where you people belong but he looks a little like you and I want you off my dam bus" The big kids gave him a delightful thanks and bye in Chinese—performing good children. I dumped Eli in a long time out, although he’d pretty much forgotten what the offense was and am now fantasizing about a margarita and ice cream Sunday. The title nine add that flipped into my in box announcing “Today’s wow” of a print om bra top would undoubtedly be retail therapy if I thought anything would ever arrive here…. They make it sound like a printed oooooom will solve all your problems.

to market......

2011-05-23T08:33:00.003-04:00

Today was our first day of attempting a routine. The kids seemed gung ho about home schooling, which has always been my idea of hell. I don’t even like to spend that much time in the kids classrooms-- I pay the school or taxes which go to the school to keep them occupied. And there are really smart people trained to teach them. But the fact that my kids are lazing around in a hammock during the hottest part of a rainforest day and have learned to suck on sugar cane suggests that the usual rules may not apply. The plan is to do outside stuff in the morning and inside “school” activities in the afternoon when it gets hot.

We started by picking up our fourth child and traipsing to the electric bus to go into town. The Botanical garden has a handful of western scientists but all are married to Asian women so I am clearly the only white woman who has been here for some time. And with four kids behind me I make quite a site. Although ethnic minorities are allowed to have more than one child the spectacle of three (or four) is still unusual. We have learned, which stalls stock “locally grown” produce and which are “second hand” as the student told me. We purchased lots of vegetables but were completely defeated by the spices which all looked like narcotics. We bought seven eggs, which were given to us in a plastic bag—three made it home. The grilled whole ducks tempted us—they look like market equivalent of rotisserie duck. But upon closer examination the birds still had head and feet and I just couldn’t walk around with a duck head in my backpack. We visited the much touted “yogurt store’ which turned out to be one fridge case with three different varieties of yogurt. I bought six individual containers and the kids had eaten three by the time we got home. All of this purchasing was done with hand gesturing, horribly mispronouncing Chinese words and the help of our eight year old translator. There is not a bit of any Romance language to be heard.

The kids had an interesting discussion about Tai Chi in which Jonathan informed Veruna that it was “the only martial art that is predominantly a solo practice.” Her response was “no it’s exercise old people do in the morning.” And so begins the 8 year old experience of book versus practical knowledge… I was also told by my kids that “in traditional dai villages tank tops are not worn” This was I believe a message to change out of my title-nine sundress. (the kind that the catalogues say you can do everything from running to cocktails in…) The guidebook apparently also recommends “mingling with the locals” which the kids said they want to do.

From my perspective the school part of the day is a way to keep the kids busy during the hottest part of the day Rebecca already informed me that I’m not a real teacher and suggested that I “incorporate age appropriate activities for Eli.” Jonahtan says he prefers it when “Mrs. Spencer OCCUSIONALLY works with him” The high point was Jonathan instructing Eli on handwriting. Jonathan’s handwriting is completely and utterly illegible. But he has been through the handwriting without tears routine with enough OT’s to understand the rhetoric. We did some Chinese animal flashcards on my ipad. Not surprisingly the kids remember vocabulary much better than I and are counting fairly proficiently already.

The oddest sound of the day was a bit of Dai pop music coming out of a very squeaky sound system that featured the incessant repetition of a bit of Mozart’s 40th symphony. I’m not making this up; it was the second phrase of the first theme transposed to Am and on a continuous sequence loop with ethnic dai words.

Tropical Sunday

2011-05-22T03:37:00.000-04:00

Last night's moment of wow this is China involved happily falling into a lovely looking bed to find that it is actually only a box spring--as in harder than a futon. And as it turns out a solid concrete floor underneath that gorgeous fake marble is not super for a foot plagued by post-suv arthritis. And it is clear that we will need a kind of zen about transportation that is not natural to those of us who had babies during the era of the five point car seat. Concerns about booster seats and seat belts went out the proverbial window when I watched Rebecca hop onto an electric bike. She was on the bike with one very tiny woman, another 8 year old and an 18 month old—yes that’s four people on one bike—no helmets, flip-flops for everyone. The best part of that particular adventure is that it seems to have inspired both kids to want to ride a bike. They have borrowed one from their friend and are taking turns practicing.

I’ve now been on two runs during which I’ve neither gotten lost nor been swallowed by a banana tree. It’s crazy muggy here—like running through soup.
The route passes some roosters, chickens, a tea garden, banana trees, rubber plants, a tropical rain forest, and a giant lab complex that has the same slightly surreal ultra modern in the jungle feel as our house. We are in the middle of a botanical garden that is half public garden with tourists riding through it on stretch golf carts that look like the Catskills in the 1950’s and half scientific institute. The scientists all live “on grounds” which means, for example, one of Manuel’s Chinese collaborators popped over this morning as I was walking around with my sweaty and skimpy running outfit on and the kids were playing a rather loud fantasy game of some sort. It kind of felt like having the Dean stop by while you’re in your pj’s.

The technological accomplishment for the day was the acquisition of a hot plate that can accommodate the espresso maker, which releases us from the jungle latte of Folgers and boxed milk. And we successfully rode the electric bus to town, ate a lunch of excellent tropical juices, very good fried rice dishes (the vegetarian dish only had small pieces of pork, and the ‘acid and spicy Thailand flavor’ dish was acid, spicy, and delicious, and NO tantrums. We then wandered through town, admired the cosmetics stores, went to the supermarket, purchased a few more odds and ends, and lost no children. We caught the bus home, re-started the A.C., and deposited the children separately into rooms for quiet time. So far, so good.

Planes and Rubber Trees

2011-05-20T10:14:00.000-04:00

We made it to the jungle. It took sixteen hours, two planes, and a bus but here we are. The kids were total troopers and read their kindles, played with travel toys, and every so often had a fight or a tantrum. We first flew from Beijing to Kunming where we had a delightful lunch of KFC and good humor style ice cream cones. The ice cream is very safe for me because there is NOTHING natural in it, not even milk. The five hour wait in the unairconditioned airport with not a single westerner in sight and people speaking all kinds of ethnic languages gave us the sense that we were going somewhere very far away. Kunming is a gateway city/airport to China’s southwest, which is something of a trekking center and one of few locations with an ethnic majority.

We then flew to Jing Hong which is the capital of Xixhuangbanna Dai Autonomous region in Yunnan province. And it really did feel different as soon as we got off the plane. We were met at the gate by a grad student at the garden and a driver who promptly whisked the kids and I through the evening rain to the eleven-seater van they’d brought for us and our millions of bags. As we drove down the road with the vegetation getting thicker and thicker I had the distinct impression of moving towards an episode of Lost. As soon as we got here the kids, who had been sacked perked up to go exploring. We’re living in a brand spanking new house, built by an alcoholic French architect with the explicit intention of attracting Western Scientists. It’s completely pristine including all white floors, which I imagine we’ll trash in about a week. It took us quite a while to figure out how to use the solar shower, and the woman who cleans the house quickly gave up on trying to explain the laundry to us and did it for us this morning. My favorite part is that the stove is smarter than we are. The burners only work with certain pots. So for example if you try to put your stovetop espresso maker on it, which you carefully brought with you, it simply beeps loudly and shuts down. It also comes equipped with two separate fancy tea sets. The internet is not wireless but it is super fast—faster than anything in Charlottesville.

The kids woke up early and immediately spotted the eight-year-old girl who lives next store. Veruna speaks Dutch, Indonesian, Chinese and English and was completely thrilled to see them as well. By 9 am they were bff’s enough that we brought her to town with us. The town is called Melung and is on the Mekong river. As it turns out, having the eight year old translator in addition to the graduate student was quite useful, and she was quick to lead the kids towards the hideous pink marshmallows in the grocery store. The supermarket is small and has bread product but nothing resembling cheese or yogurt. When Manuel finally successfully pantomimed , they brought him to a refrigerated part of the store and showed him some “caned fresh meat” that had a picture of a seahorse on it. Luckily, Jonathan and Eli have both taken to the milk in a box. The meat section of the outdoor agricultural market included an entire pig’s face and feet, a table full of pig liver (which Manuel used as an opportunity to explain the etymology of ), and sheep intestines. We settled on rice, bok choy, and tofu for tonight’s dinner with a cucumber & tomato salad, and oreos & Yao Me (Chinese fruit that is a cross among a cherry, a plum, and an indian strawberry) for dessert.

The farmers are largely Dai. Dai people consist of 56 ethnic groups but are recognized as one group by the Chinese people. They speak a language akin to Thai and have a 28 letter alphabet. They tend to be quite Buddhist, and the market has a calm to it that is quite unlike markets I’ve seen anywhere else. I spent much of the day yesterday reading the lonely planet’s guide to Yunnan, which made me very curious about the local culture. Apparently the Dai are known for a solo opera called Zhang Khap.

We were all a little shell shocked from the journey and from the surrealness of being here and spent much of the day inside unpacking, reading, and, of course, tantruming. The surreal part comes from the fact that the kids picked rubber off of rubber trees, played with mysterious and brightly colored bugs, and hung out under banana leafs, but we have central air and a fancy tea set. And we have a 32” flat-screen tv (cable) with an English station consisting of nothing but Chinese propaganda. Manuel’s great accomplishment today was changing the Chinese font on the house computer to English so the boys could play Ben10 Destructo.

Taxis and Acrobats

2011-05-18T16:53:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday Manuel went off to a conference at the Chinese Academy of Science, which featured Chinese science dignitaries, a successful talk and a dinner with duck feet and donkey meat. (I’m vegetarian bound this summer) The kids and I headed for the infamous Chinese acrobats. The kids LOVED it although Eli did manage to fall asleep standing up during the grand finale. The acrobats were pretty stunning—like the Olympics meets the circus meets ashtanga series five meets slightly erotic dancers. Musically it was truly bizarre. It may just be that I’ve spent too much of my adult life learning to read musical signs of gender and sex or that I’m just too western classically ingrained to hear repeated thumped augmented seconds as anything but exotic. But the sound made it seem like something not totally g rated. (it was a family show, kids and groups of high school kids etc.) Everything the men did was accompanied by incessant electronic thumping with low drums and low pitches. The men all wore very few clothing and did a lot of chest thumping and grunting. The women on the other hand were decked out in flowers and pastels and performed slightly homoerotic contortions to high pitched slow melodies with chromaticisms thrown in all over the place. It was textbook western fantasy of exotic Asian-other music. But the audience was almost all Chinese. I don’t know enough Post colonial theory to know quite how to read the whole thing.

Meanwhile the kids and I had a long discussion about adventures and how sometimes when you’re traveling things are not smooth and that things that seem scary are just part of the experience. This all had to do with the cab rides which have proven much more hairy than the subways. I didn’t quite have the guts to deal with the subway on my own with the three kids so attempted to hail a cab. On the way there an elderly woman took pity on me and hailed it for me. She did this after looking at Eli’s hands and saying “dirty” “wash” which made me feel like a wretched mother. She then caught a cab in the middle of the street and motioned for the kids and me to make a run for it. I’m a little sensitive about being hit by cars so not entirely comfy standing out in the middle of a busy Beijing street where the drivers pride themselves on how close they can come to the pedestrians. Going home was even more special. We first spent about 20 minutes trying to hail a cab. Finally one stopped and the guy appeared to be very sweet; singing to the kids in Chinese. Then he started hitting his meter and announced, “meter broken” He had a woman in the car who told us she was his wife. He then asked me how much to take me to the hotel and proposed an astronomical price. At that point I said no way and hauled the kids out of the car. We got off on a side street and decided to find dinner and try again. This was a street with no food so after 45 minutes of again trying to get a cab on a very large road with me carrying Eli who was crying because he was tired, Rebecca carrying my back pack and Jonathan crying because he had to pee and his eyes hurt I found a hotel who hailed us a cab. (Rebecca kept saying I wish the boys would just behave) We walked home on the main street by our hotel—again a no food street. So we ran into our rooms, washed our hands, and zipped out to get the kids ice cream. They collapsed in bed and I had Cadbury eggs and Mongolian bagel for dinner. Mongolian bagel was left over from the night before and was actually more of a bialy—flat and salty. And apparently one eats it to store up for crossing the desert. Manuel arrived home cheerful but not too drunk to realize he should downplay how much fun he had being dined and feted and then driven home by the lab director’s chauffeur.

Lama Temple

2011-05-17T02:24:00.000-04:00

The kids and I have now had our first adventures out without Manuel. I’m usually quite daring with these sorts of things but I have to admit I was nervous here. I can’t read maps so I usually get around by gut instinct and asking people direction every three feet. That doesn’t work here. The Olympic park was our first activity and we were basically tossed out of a cab at what looked like a large abandoned highway. The place is truly bizarre, large and gorgeous with nothing going on. Four lane highways are slow pedestrian zones. The excitement really came a few moments after we sat down to have a snack and read our books. The kids quickly realized that a group of about 20 tourists were taking or pictures of us. As soon as we looked up photographers got even more excited and animated and many wanted to pose with us including quite a few who actually picked the kids up. I’ve bee stressing to the kids that we are interlopers in another culture that we have to be polite and respectful and understand that things are different here. So they’ve been reasonably good sports with the photographs. But after about twenty minutes of this even I started to get irritated. I’ll have to figure out the protocol on this. I’m not comfortable saying no but I’m also not comfortable with complete strangers picking up my kids, hugging them, kissing them, and surrounding them in crowds of 30 or so.

We then met Manuel at a dinner hosted by his colleague at the Chinese Academy of Science. I was predicting the worst; miserable behavior from the kids, etc… But was pleasantly surprised. The boys went to sleep and Rebecca enjoyed being the belle of the ball; flirting up a storm and trying a ton of new foods. It was truly spectacular food speaking; there must have been fifteen side dishes surrounding an entire roast lamb. The lamb included eyes, kidney’s and other parts I’d rather not think about.

This morning we went to the Lama temple; the largest Tibetan Budhist temple outside of Tibet. It was perhaps my favorite thing so far. The 18 meter high Buddha was stunning. It’s easy to see what early modern explorers were so utterly captivated and even afraid of what they saw. The kids were awed in good and bad ways. Eli was frightened of the fires that are kept burning for worshipers to light their incense. He ultimately relaxed enough to start doing his own bowing before the Buddha. (this seemed very bad form to me; like kneeling in a Catholic church when you’re a Jew) Jonathan and Rebecca were very intent on identifying every Buddha and figuring out what they stood for.

Eli has now extended his pretend play to include quite a lot of Chinese and interject his own imitations of Chinese phrases into the star wards leitmotifs he regularly sings. Rebecca and Jonathan are spending a lot of time in their own slightly wacky twin world. They have a system for walking up and down stairs and escalators that involves holding hands and have all kinds of fantasy worlds up and running. They are thrilled with the fact that boy/girl twins are called dragon and phoenix.

This is not news to anyone who has been to Beijing or read about it, but the cognitive dissonance between old and new is stunning. On the one had the CCTV building designed by looks like two gigantic futuristic donuts hugging each other. On the other the tiny streets of the hutongs are full of elderly Chinese people squatting before dilapidated buildings playing cards. Many of the buildings apparently still lack running water. The city I know best outside of the US is Rome and it too is a remarkable mix of old and new. But Rome is a city of layers; ancient ruins, topped by baroque churches, next to fancy designers. This seems more a city of polar opposites.

Advenutres....

2011-05-15T22:03:00.000-04:00

Today we are laying low after two days of heavy site seeing. Yesterday was the Summer Palace, which was quite remarkable and which the kids loved. Since arriving in China, Chinese scientists are coming out of the woodwork to show us around. What this turned out to mean yesterday was that they sent a lovely female graduate student who knows a lot about remote sensing and climate change and who spoke almost no English, had come to Beijing from inner Mongolia three months ago, and had been to the Summer Palace once. However, Rebecca fell completely in love with her and we had a lovely day. She got a huge kick out of taking a picture of herself with what she called “my three children.” When we initially arrived at the palace, we were immediately spotted by a Chinese tourist group each of whom wanted to take their pictures with the kids. The kids are for the most part being good sports about this picture taking business, and Eli is turning it into a game. By next week he will be charging them. There are very few Westerners around at this point.

The kids turned into climbing machines and especially like climbing to the top of the Buddha of 1000 arms, who they said ought to be called the Buddha of 1000 steps. I decided that I wouldn’t mind being an empress for a while. I especially liked the idea of incarcerating people you don’t like only while you are there. In other words while the Empress Cixi was not at the summer palace her enemies roamed free but when she was there she locked them up. I could think of various people whom that might work for. Manuel found a translation he repeated incessantly, “Temple of the Buddha’s body odor.”

Until about a week ago my knowledge of China until about a week ago came almost entirely from seventeenth century Italian Chinese artifacts and Judith Zeitlan’s wonderful work on 16th century Chinese courtesans. I’m learning a tremendous amount. So far this particular niche has proven useful, as many of the sites we have seen are 16th and 17th century oriented. Kircher’s China Illustra a 1667 encyclopedia of China is a classic. He shared with my children a fascination with Chinese Dragons that is completely grounded in Western Fantasy.

We got a little too brave at dinner and tried to find some restaurant my cousin recommended, which involved a subway ride and a two block walk. Beijing blocks turn out to be about 1/2 a mile. We then had to walk through a shopping mall that looked pretty much like an upscale mall here; Sephora, Guess, Nike, etc. Eli promptly fell asleep SITTING up. Apparently when he said he was tired he meant it. We put him on the couch that served as a dining room chair, which seemed fine until he fell off and hit his head on the ground making a large noise that made everyone jump and scoff. The waitress had already decided she hated us. Jonathan fell asleep a few seconds later and Rebecca stayed bubbly trying a bunch of new foods and looking forward to the shaved ice desert. My idea of an m and m for every new food tried has made her a culinary explorer. Jonathan woke up at the end of dinner wondering where the food was. It turns out also that getting places here is the easy part. Getting home involved flagging a cab, getting in, having the cab driver yell at us in what sounded like "wtf is wrong with you crazy Americans with all your dam kids and there is no way in hell I’m driving to your hotel in in that back alley" We called the hotel from our cell phone to try to get them to negotiate with the driver and the end result was us getting tossed out of the cab with THREE sleeping kids. The next driver, however, while also thinking us lunatics, drove us all the way up our hutong (narrow alley not meant for cars). Today we are exploring the hotel courtyards and washing the children who have become hazardous waste zones themselves.

My least favorite part of being here is my utter ignorance of the language. I’ve almost never been in a place where I’ve done no language study and it does not feel good. In addition, with Chinese’s being a tonal language, we can’t even tell when people are pleased with or threatening us.

China arival....

2011-05-14T17:52:00.000-04:00

It’s 4:34 in the morning and we are all awake!

The flight here fine in that fourteen hours in an enclosed box kind of way. Somehow our travel agent managed to get only Manuel an assigned seat, which meant that the kids and I were sitting separately. We also arrived at the airport to find that three of our four suitcases were too heavy so had to buy a new red monster suitcase in the gift shop. The $69 was cheaper than the overweight fees. There’s nothing quite like seeing your shampoo peanut butter, inhalers, bras, books, and deodorant flying around the airport. We were sure that someone would move once they took a look at the row but of course we were in economy plus and he was in steerage. The Chinese woman sitting net to us was fortunately quite charmed by the kids and gave Rebecca and gave her noodle eating lesson. The kids read their new kindle’s for much of the plane (thanks Joyce and papa) They also enjoyed watching the little map on the movie screen and “are we there yet” was quickly replaced by “we have 6,453 miles to go. Now we have 6, 325 miles to go etc…..” There was much excitement about flying over the north pole. At some point we decided it was tine to drug them and Benadryl was given to all. It seemed to have no effect on Eli other than to spin him into a mother of a 40 minute tantrum during which I gave him a second Benadryl He then fell asleep mid tantrum, as in standing on the floor and banging on the seat. I was slightly afraid that I’d overdosed him but he seemed to be breathing fine.

We are staying in a courtyard hotel. It’s fairly deep in in a Hutong, which are old neighborhood consisting of courtyard’s strung together. Guidebooks and Wikipedia tell me that they date back to the dynastic period and that many have been demolished. It is very peaceful, other than our kids waking everyone up yesterday by running around the courtyard. The practical implications are that cabs don’t drive in here and no one speaks any English. The local restaurants are “very authentic” and dinner number one was a complete and utter disaster featuring Jonathan screaming that he hates china, he wants to go home, he's never eating any food here etc....

Yesterday we spent the day with my cousin Jordan (a second cousin) and his wife. Rebecca is in love and spent the whole day flirting. It was a great but exhausting day featuring lunch, the forbidden city, a subway, a bus, the apple store, a shoe market, and a park. (the kids and Manuel skipped the errand parts) Jordan was a freshman at Brandeis when I taught there and he did at one point pick me up and toss me over his shoulder which I found not helpful to my authority. They took us to a delicious restaurant with some sort of porridge that Eli and Rebecca loved. Rebecca tried “nine new foods.” It helped that I promised the kids one m and m for every new food they tried. They bravely tried just about everything. We found Jonathan a corn pancake, which he liked and Jordan and his wife spun into some very complex negotiations in Chinese to get him plain noodles with nothing on them. We also went to the Forbidden City. Joanthan’s first remark was “it’s a pity they removed so much of the gold from the roofs during the Quing dynasty.” Rebecca explained that the carved animals were a sign of “wealth and prosperity” The second grade SOL’s are certainly paying of here. Unfortunately a few days ago some artifacts were stolen from the Forbidden City and many of the exhibits are closed or empty of jewels. This kids said “What’s the point of seeing the hall of heavenly peace if it doesn’t have anything in it…..”

Manuel took the kids back for a nap in the afternoon. Despite our lectures about the virtues of pushing through jet lag all three fell asleep and basically woke up to sleep eat some pizza. And yes we did go to a pizza place on our SECOND day in China. This was an attempt to appease thing 2 who barely woke up. The boys completely sleep ate…

Eli has no clue what is happening and woke up yesterday asking where the Subaru was how we’d get around without it. He loves the squat potties in restaurants and thinks we should get one at home. “this is willy gweat I just peed in the floor….” The kids are attracting a ton of attention which I thought they didn’t notice until Rebecca asked “how come all these people are staring at us all the time” We explained that we look different and that most Chinese people have only one kid. The kids are also getting touched a lot—lots of tactile admiration of their hair. So far they seem not especially bothered. Jonathan announced that he’s tired of meeting people we can’t talk to and both kids now want to learn Chinese. Eli thinks he knows Chinese and is perfectly happy talking to people in a mixture of English and what he imagines is Chinese. This is the first time in decades that I’ve been to a country where I understand zippo. And it is indeed disarming. The thing about being good at one Romance language is that all the others fall into place. So I think I will try and find us a student to teach us some Chinese when we get to the “garden of nice words.” I doubt we’ll get very good at it but it’ll give us something to do…

Yikes!!!!!!!!!

2011-05-09T08:10:00.000-04:00

I just checked out the web site of the botanical garden where our pagoda/hut will be located. It is Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden XTBG).I was looking for some sort of official land line emergency number—the “if someone dies or there is a natural disaster here’s how to reach us thing” I came across the garden rules and am now afraid our kids will be ejected. I also have visions of them spending the entire summer in some sort of institutional time out. Here are the two that concern me.

4.　Be courteous please. No fighting or nasty words may occur in the Garden.
5. Please take good care of any tree and grass in the Garden. Not any flower or branch is allowed to be cut. No climbing. No scribbling. No paddling in the ponds.

Let’s just say that we are not specializing in kind words this week and that Rebecca and Joanthan have spent the better part of the weekend IN the tree next door.

Meanwhile Manuel now tells me we are not “technically” going to the jungle. However I found our spot in the guidebook and on the web and both call it a jungle. So the technical biophysicological definition is not interesting to me just now.

We’re now in completely spastic mode of prep. Manuel has been to the cvs so many times that the check out ladies know his name. I’m making all kinds of lists, which seem to get longer rather than shorter. The kids leave today to have some quality time with their grandparents before we leave. This was my sister’s brilliant idea. Their help has of course been invaluable. I especially liked it when Jonathan put a giant wooden star of David shield that he made in woodworking in the pile to come with us. (it looks kind of like a very small maccabee has come to town) It was equally nice when they retrieved items from the trash and got the brilliant idea that perhaps they should burry some treasures in case some “hobos” moved in. And every day for at least the last two weeks Eli says “aw we goin to china today. Awww why not?”

Chaos....

2011-05-01T13:39:00.000-04:00

I think we should just call the pediatrician and make an appointment for every day at 4:30 until we leave. Friday night’s chaos involved Eli with an oozing superbug infection on his leg, 9 kids and three adults at the spring fling, and a slumber party with two extra kids.

For much of this year Manuel and I, along with Ms. Meyer, have been driving kids to school events who would otherwise not get to go. These are kids whose parents don’t have cars, work long hours, etc. If I were of a different socioeconomic class and/or with a different kind of partner, those kids would be my kids. I depend on my husband and my friends having the time, money, and willingness to cart my kids around. So, despite the irony of someone who can’t drive organizing driving, it makes sense.

But this week I had decided that it might be time to just assume that if we could keep our own three children in one piece we were doing well. Rebecca, however, had other ideas and came home with phone numbers and little notes from two friends at school whose “mommy’s can’t bring them and really really want to go…” Just as we were about ready to leave the house Manuel took a look at Eli’s leg and jumped into action. (Thankfully, he knows what these things look like) and had me call the pediatrician. That meant that when we got to a neighborhood with a bunch of kids whom we know playing outside, all of whom wanted to come to the spring fling, I had the nurse on the cell phone and a bunch of kids jumping up and down about spring fling. So Manuel stayed with our spawn while I gatheredp some kids and got permission from an adult in charge to drive them; exchanged pleasantries, admired babies, etc… Spring fling was shockingly uneventful, and the kids were remarkably well behaved and followed our rules, which involved periodically checking in with one of the three of the adults present. (Ok our middle child was not well behaved but he has never made it through a large event without a meltdown. This is community service; the other parents can feel glad it’s not theirs. He was especially pathetic weeping at the pizza table because they were out of plain) We finally got everyone home at about 9:00, including two extra children whom we had promised could have a slumber party here. Efficient parents that we are, all were asleep by 11:30.

The kids were, of course awake at 6:30 and involved in some fantasy game that involved hundreds of Playmobile guys who every so often needed a head change. Do they really need to make those guys so easy to decapitate? By some miracle Manuel actually managed to get all three kids out to the soccer game. Both players had announced, in various charming not quite age appropriate ways, that they were not going. (Yup another tantrum from thing 2) Despite the fact that I couldn’t care less about peewee soccer and think my kids have little future in this, I delivered a moving lecture on “commitments to the team etc.” and maintained a straight face. While they were gone the most important China prep task was accomplished. My computer is now China-ready. The culmination of the 24 hours of chaos was Eli, on Saturday evening, deciding to taste baking soda. It’s true that baking soda is harmless but it’s never a good sign when your kid announces that his tongue was going to fall off and was burning.

Another interesting thing about leaving for three months is that absolutely every thing one can possibly do is requested in the last days. Let’s just say that in addition to a rockin twinkle twinkle in Eli’s preschool class and a command lecture in Italian on “Music in Italy” to people who turned out not to really speak Italian anyway, UVa is getting their money out of me. But I woke up on Friday morning to this email from my friend Grace. That’s what friends are for—to crack you up.

Dear Dr. Gordon,
I was thinking about getting Italian marble in my new bathroom. I would like to request that you come and speak to the marble for me. I know the marble will feel better about joining our household if someone explains this to it in its own language. Perhaps, as I hear you are an accomplished musician, you could play some Italian versions of twinkle for it too?

Sincerely,
Grace

Acoustics and Acquisitions

2011-04-27T16:23:00.002-04:00

Today’s accomplishment was changing my blog title to three kids and a book in the jungle. For those family members and friends whom I sent email updates to when we were in Rome I'm going to use the blog this time. It's a little less cumbersome tan emails for me; especially when traveling.

We are now enmeshed enough in crazy trip prep that I’ve given up the idea of getting any writing done. Writing is replaced by an attempt to do one small book task every day. This on the advice of a friend who said she was mad at herself after a sabbatical about all the little bits of time she could have used. So for today I returned to Orlando Furiosso, an Italian epic poem I haven’t thought much about since graduate school. My interest this time around was not the feminist magical heroines but the acoustics—trumpets so loud they drown everything out, descriptions of what bloody battles sound like, etc… I got back to the epic via a one off from Galileo who claimed that reading Tasso after Ariosto was like eating cucumbers after melons. I have not idea what that is a metaphor for but it occurred to me that there were great descriptions of sound machines and voices in the poem and that I can get a nice 16th century version of it free on my ipad so it can come to the jungle.

I’m not going to admit publically how little of my day was actually spent on this fine scholarly pursuit. But suffice it to say that getting a family of five to rural china is not a trivial proposition. And perhaps someone can explain to me the natural tendency to do things you’ve meant to do for months before you leave and for weird stuff to just happen. The car for example needed to be fixed today. Various university projects for next year need to at least set in motion. The clothes need to be organized. The built in bookcases in the kids room need to in. The various plates we have had around for at least a year from barbecues need to go back to their rightful owners who are clearly miserable without them. And lucky for me the preschool is having music week in the Levana class and I need to go play for a bunch of 4-5 year olds tomorrow morning. The teacher informs me that they’d really prefer the electric viola since Eli has told them all about his mom’s “wock band” she suggested I play some of his favorites. I’m thinking she doesn’t actually want anything that will make him wing either “I dwopped acid on my tongue,”

And there is a good deal of consumer activity that is occurring each day, a shocking amount of money on jungle princess glasses and a summer’s worth of medications for all five of us. (I have the most expensive cocktail of all of us) New hiking boots for me for the Himalayas, the nice pair my parents got me for my 30 year old b-day have bit the dust and are too small for my post child bearing feet. And of course my MAC lipstick somehow got smashed in my purse the other day and there’s no way I’m leaving without that. It also occurs me that despite my proclaiming for months that I’m simply not learning Chinese it might be worth at least a Berlitz tape. The kids learned some words from watching kung fu panda and think they are all set.

The boys seem pretty obvious to the trip on an emotional level. Eli packs a suitcase almost every day and is pretty sure we’ll meet Anikan Skywalder while we are there and eat a lot of sushi. Jonathan every so often pipes up with a question. Rebecca is very worried and has an impressive list of questions and concerns. She’s mastering early the sulky teenager affect and has become extremely mommy focused. She doesn’t want me to go to yoga, even though it’s after she’s supposed to be in bed. The logic that we’d have 14 hours on a plane followed by three months in a botanical garden with no school or camp, only a few other kids to play with, and a father doing biological fieldwork did not work on her.