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.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Home with Cheese and Chocolate
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.
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.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Solo
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Mud and Trafic violations
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.
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.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Food for Thought
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……
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……
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Live Fish and Dead Chickens
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Pool Disaster
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…..
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…..
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