2
CHINA
Read travel blogs and books before you head out on a major expedition, and you will find as wide a variety of advice on what to bring as there are cultures and climates in the world. One expert swears by bringing only two pairs of underwear for a year’s worth of nomadic living, that the disadvantage of having to wash one daily, drying back at the guesthouse while you’re out and about, is offset by the advantage of a light backpack. Another experienced traveler—one likely without small heads to count—threatens that if you choose to rent a car instead of relying solely on public transportation, you’ll miss out on the real version of the place. Another tribe of travel writers promises that with enough tenacity, you, too, can make a living from anywhere and live the rest of your days location independent, so long as you live out of a backpack.
Research where to begin your round-the-world endeavor, and you’ll find some sane advice: start closest to where you already are and avoid major jet lag on top of the inevitable culture shock. If you’re European, take a bus across the closest border with nary a passport stamp. If you’re from the United States, begin in Canada, Mexico, or Central and South America. (However, as some Canadian friends of ours realized when they started their round-the-world trek in Argentina, eastern South America is still five hours ahead of western North American time. No matter how map savvy you are, the world continues to surprise.)
It’s not standard advice for this new way of life, this living out of the pack on your back for a year with three small kids in tow, to start on the opposite side of the planet amid almost as opposite a cultural worldview. You won’t find many travel experts recommend, “Ah, the heck with it—chuck logic out the window and start your kid-centric trip in a huge Communist country where you can’t even read the alphabet, much less ask for an appropriate place to pee.”
This is how we start anyway.
There are plenty of guidebooks about the fourth-largest county in the world, and there is more to do there than is possible in a life-time. But easy? Ease into a major shift of your family’s daily routine, breakfast options, or sense of privacy? You won’t find a gradual entry by starting in China. Tiptoeing down a gently sloping beach into the waters of world travel would mean starting in Canada. Cannonballing into the deep end of an ice cube–filled pool full of swimmers with no sense of democratically promised personal space—that’s China.
The only real advantage we have to starting our trip in the land of a billion people is that Kyle and I have already been here. Twelve years earlier, we found ourselves newly engaged and schlepping backpacks through China with friends as part of a research project entitled Could We Actually Live Here? That was the question on our minds, combining the stress of choosing the right flowers for a fall wedding with deciding in which foreign culture we should raise a family in a few years’ time.
We grabbed lunch in the Beijing airport on that trip, and I remember the hotel’s breakfast the following morning: fish and rice, and an eggplant-colored hard-boiled egg called a century egg. Ask me what I am least in the mood to eat when I wake up in the throes of jet lag, and I will tell you fish, rice, and a discolored, fermented, weeks-old egg.
We walked up the Great Wall with our friends, dripping with sweat from the humidity, and arrived at the top at closing time, which meant we stole only a few minutes to look around, then rushed back down to our taxi. The vendors taunted us with their Great Wall–emblazoned T-shirts and paperweights, and we joked that if the original Huns somehow made it over the wall today, they’d never pass the elderly women shoving copyright-violating guidebooks in their hands.
Beyond this, I don’t remember much of my first taste of Beijing. Clearer in my mind is our trek outward, into the wild west of China on the other side. There, in Ürümqi and Kashgar and the Gobi Desert, near the border of Tajikistan and Afghanistan, China’s land-scape becomes more like its Central Asian neighbors’. It is here that I had my first and last sip of fermented horse milk tea. This is where I witnessed the extreme geography of Asia: the tallest mountains in the world lying neighbor to one of its biggest deserts. And it is here that I first slept in a yurt.
Our friends decided it would be a cultural experience to spend the night with a traditional Kazakh family in the Tian Shan mountains of western China. We chartered a boat across the Tianchi lake, hiked several miles over moss-encrusted stones, and met our host family for the evening. She was middle-aged with teenage sons, a workhorse of a woman who silently eyed us while we partook of her culinary know-how. She slept that night with her boys in a makeshift shelter nearby while we slept in their dry yurt. The rain began at dusk and didn’t relent till the middle of the night. The heavens poured out so much water that nothing left in my pack could be classically defined as dry.
The yurt was dark but comfortable, and every rug, every bit of the tapestried walls, every teacup and sack of grain was a mystery to me. It resembled a movie set starring an unshaven Brad Pitt wandering the Himalayas. The woodburning stove in the middle kept us toasty through the night, but I shivered with exhaustion as I slept.
The next morning, after tea and breakfast, Kyle strapped on his backpack and trekked up the mountain for a solo walk, searching for quiet apart from the crowd. From my vantage point, mountain goats peeked out from boulders, the green grass shimmered with dew, and below, out and beyond, lay a mirrored-gray lake tucked into the nooks and crannies of low-lying clouds. At the base of the mountain, I sat on a wet log, ignored the group chatter around me, and clicked a mental snapshot, long and slow: this world is huge; it is majestic; it is worth exploring just for the sake of knowing it. Above me, somewhere, wandered a man who felt the same way and who also thought it a good idea to marry me. As I looked up the mountain, I considered it—maybe we’d have kids, and we’d unearth the hidden paths and mysteries of this grand world together.
Robert, our first guesthouse host of the year, picks the five of us up at the airport and drives through Beijing traffic to our apartment, a concrete building planted at the end of a gray alley canopied by a thousand electric wires. This is not his real name, of course, but he gives an English name to his Western guests to make his life easier. The lobby is sparse, and the minuscule elevators lead us to the fifth floor, where ten bikes perch against the scratched, unpainted concrete walls, lined up like delivery boys waiting for their next errand. The apartment door closest to the elevator is wide open, and its innards have been turned into a call center, six dark heads bobbling above makeshift cubicles from which the clattering of keyboards can be heard. The matted office carpet down the hallway is so stained I’m not sure where to step.
Robert unlocks a door. “Here we are.”
I know generally how our place will look because of the Internet listing, but it is still disorienting to see it in person. There are two double beds, a couch with an extra blanket, a bathroom, a kitchenette, a washer, and a clothes dryer all sandwiched in a room the size of my Oregon kitchen. Robert tells us he is a native of Beijing and is happy to give us ideas of what to do and see during our week there. Our only two official goals in Beijing are to show the kids the Great Wall and to begin the process of jet lag recovery, and we know the latter is best accomplished with sunshine and fresh air.
He scribbles a list of suggestions in Kyle’s notebook, most of which we already know: the Temple of Heaven, Tiananmen Square, a kung fu show. On the left he writes them in English; in the middle he writes in pinyin Chinese, a bastardized Mandarin employing the Roman alphabet, which helps native English speakers pronounce the language. On the right, he writes rapid-fire in Chinese characters, which we can show taxi drivers.
“Is there a place to buy food nearby?” I ask. There is, he says, and he draws a map on another journal page that points the way to a mall with a food court and supermarket down the road. He recommends the twenty-four-hour diner on the ground floor of our apartment building, tells us to try their sesame rolls. Then the only person we know in Beijing bids us well and leaves.
For the first time since we left my parents’ house in Austin two days earlier for breakfast tacos before our flight, the five of us are on our own. I feel like a squirrelly teenager away at college for the first time: apparently, I am a grown-up in charge here.
Hunger outweighs any desire to shower away the airplane funk and collapse into bed. So we leave our backpacks piled on the couch and follow Robert’s map out the building, turn right, and begin our week-long investigation of our neighborhood nestled in Beijing proper. This is a business district, gray office buildings sandwiched together and studded with shops on their first floors; there is a wide concrete pavilion along the road that serves as the evening hangout spot and children’s playground. A yellow-gray haze of smog rests on the tops of buildings, pauses to catch its breath or ours, thick and lifeless. Most of the small shops are now closed for the evening, but we find the mall with the food court. We choose a restaurant where the waitstaff appears friendly enough, and we order with our fingers from the menu. We slurp eye-wateringly spicy soup and bowls of perfectly round white rice scoops. The kids whisper requests for cups of water, and Kyle signals for someone from the staring throng of waitresses. “Shui?” he asks with a smile. The woman nods, hurries to the kitchen, then returns with a tray of piping hot water in handleless teacups. We forgot to add the ping bing to the shui to indicate cold and bottled. Steaming hot water—this the default, and we will forget it routinely for the next three weeks.
We are in China.
Novelist Anthony Doerr says that jet lag is “a dryness in the eyes, a loose wire in the spine.” Two days ago we sat in Austin traffic on the way to the airport. Now we are navigating crowded, pallid Beijing streets, loose-wired spines, death grips on the boys’ hands, and wondering aloud to no one in particular if street-stall grapes are safe to eat. I take melatonin capsules and strap on my eye mask at night, force my body to sleep after first forcing it to stay awake four hours longer than it wants. At three in the morning, I hear a sound in the corner of quiet rustling and the rapid shifting of paper scraps, like a mouse. I pull up my eye mask, and Finn is rummaging through the near-empty refrigerator, looking for an afternoon snack. I call him back to his pallet on the floor, where he prefers to sleep tonight instead of the couch. He is soon talking in his sleep: “Wait wait!”
Jet lag is punishment to a body already in culture shock, forcing you to sacrifice desire for the necessary: you may want to find solace from reading a novel in bed, but you’ll regret that decision later at three in the afternoon, when your body taunts your poor choice with shaky legs and heavy eyelids while standing on a crowded metro, strangers’ armpits too near your nose. The earliest European explorers endured months on a ship with seasickness and a vitamin C deficiency in order to touch Asian soil. Jet lag is our modern-day scurvy.
I question our sanity by our third day here. I’m enamored of the earth’s diversity of climates and cultures, and I want a drink of all of it. But China is a struggle for me, with its Communist worldview a battering ram against my overzealous democratic autonomy. I knew this about China before we landed here, so a few weeks before we left I journaled a note to my future self, as a hammer to break the glass in case of an emergency (the emergency being, of course, questioning our sanity and considering a trip to a coffee shop to grab some Wi-Fi and book a return flight home):
You’re in China, which is hard. But you can do hard things. You won’t be here long. This month is the foundation for the year. Lean in to the struggles; give thanks for the easy times. Hard doesn’t mean wrong. You’re on the right path.
I need this note. Instead of an emergency hammer, it is a life preserver. It keeps me away from the coffee shop’s Wi-Fi, and tonight we find Italian food for dinner instead. The kids watch cartoons on the restaurant’s television, and Kyle and I have a miniature date. I’m grateful for the wisdom of my past self.
We walk back to our apartment, bellies full, and sleeping four-year-old Finn loses a flip-flop in the Beijing night as Kyle carries him in his arms. He’s down to three shoes for the year until we buy him another pair. That did not take long.
We will only be in the capital city for a week, only to acclimate to the time change, to adjust to this side of the planet. It feels heavier here, the majority of the world’s population tilting the earth’s axis to the east, and I can feel the wobble in our collective rotation.
Today, in the supermarket produce section, abundant piles of pink dragon fruit sit in baskets next to apples and red lettuce. In the afternoon, schoolchildren in blue skirts and red neckerchiefs run to the store nearest our little neighborhood and leave with cellophane-wrapped snacks and cotton candy–colored drinks. Blonde women in line at the supermarket speak Russian, as does the woman in a power suit next to me on the metro. Several miles away, officials are planning their bid for another Olympic Games.
“Mom, whenever I blow my nose, it’s all black,” Reed remarks.
“My eyes itch here,” says Tate. We’re leaving a park for the evening and heading back to the apartment, and the gray sky is only slightly yellower than the concrete skyline.
The five of us are eager to leave the city, if only for the day. We need a literal breather.
There is a large Chinese edifice—complete with an urban leg-end about visibility from space—so well-known that it’s used as the national landmark for the entire country. Tourist trap it is, but it’s a solid excuse to escape the sallow city pollution, with its dull, stinging scent of metal and exhaust, and to engage with trees. Before we left for China, we asked the kids what they most wanted to see in our first week. All three independently said the Great Wall. Midway through our week, we hire a van and driver for the day, per Robert’s suggestion, and watch as the window’s view morphs from high-rises and hordes of businessmen in gray suits to dirt and grass. While the driver weaves through city traffic and then suburban villages, we listen to an audiobook about the wall, about Qin Shi Huangdi, the emperor who commissioned the construction, and about Mongols and ancient dynastic leaders with god complexes and paranoia. Our driver does not speak English, and he smiles and nods at us through the rearview mirror.
The Great Wall is an intimidating barrier of stone and fortitude, a staggering example of what humankind (and a steady dose of slave labor) can accomplish without modern technology. It is our springboard into history, how ruthless dictatorship and a reasonable fear of barbaric invasion leads to an impressive architectural marvel of stone and size. We climb up and down stairs that roll with the hills; it’s a stroll down a cobblestone sidewalk twenty-five feet above ground, and I hold the backs of shirts as my children lean out watch holes to check our height. We take First Day of School photos, even though it’s not technically the first day of school. Our blonde children pose for other photos with Asian tourists. We then queue for a toboggan ride down the hill, the most enjoyable method of egress for children leaving the wall and returning to the parking lot. The man governing the slide warns the Westerners in line, “No yeeeehaaaaaw! Be quiet. No America here.”
Finn sits in front of me on a plastic toboggan with wheels and a brake handle, and we glide away from the line of tourists in what could be a pleasure ride on a winding aluminum path through the forest, were it not for the timid woman on the slide in front of us, hand brake pulled and eking us down the hill at such a snail’s pace that even Finn is impatient. Tate, our oldest and in the sled behind us, escalates her annoyance at me with every careening, inevitable crash into the back of ours.
The Great Wall is a masterpiece, and the kids sketch it in their drawing books as it fades in the van’s rearview mirror. Our driver takes us to a farm-to-table restaurant in a nearby village. There, I sample pumpkin ice cream and the kids eat spaghetti. It’s surprisingly delicious. Beijing’s countryside is a welcome respite to city life, an exhale to a metropolis pace and population. I call our first field trip a success.
Jet lag is harder to shake than we anticipated. The next day I share a phone conversation with a friend in America while standing on our apartment balcony overlooking a behemoth piazza with weeds sprouting through cracks, strangers’ underwear drying outside the surrounding windows. Inside, the kids build a fort out of blankets and pillows on one of the beds. We wash our first load of laundry for the year and toss in the guesthouse’s two towels. Kyle stirs oatmeal on the hot plate while the kids wrestle in the fort.
Tate joins me on the balcony and says, “China isn’t what I thought it’d be.”
“What did you imagine?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she admits. “Maybe more red and dragons.”
China is one of the countries she was most excited to visit, so I wonder what’s playing in her head. Does this year already smell like disappointment to her? Will there be an unavoidable sullying of childhood imagination, where dragons fly Asia’s skies and lions dance with zebras instead of eat them on African savannas? I secretly love that she’s disappointed, because it means our nine-year-old’s childlike spirit is still intact.
We force ourselves to stay awake with an evening trip on the metro to Wangfujing snack street. The asphalt shimmers, reflections from lantern lights swinging above collecting in puddles from the spray of booth operators on either side of alleys, booth operators who pour out buckets of ice melt that keep their edible creatures fresh. These narrow alleys house family-run booths of anything imaginable on a stick: starfish, seahorses, turtles burned to a crisp, impaled scorpions still wriggling for life. These are the original food trucks. Vendors shout their wares, hoping to entice us with charred lizard and raw spiders. Reed panics, begs us not to make him try them. We buy corn on the cob.
At an alley’s dead end, a woman painted with a white face, pink eyes, and black villain eyebrows trills Peking-style opera into a distorted microphone on a small stage. Her peacock-like hat sprouts blue and gold triangles; she wears a polychromatic silk robe and flutters a yellow fan besotted with red roses. It is for the tourists, and we listen briefly until we end up with headaches from her shrill voice.
The kids do not normally care for McDonald’s, but they are hungry for the familiar and beg for hamburgers. We sit at our second-floor booth, nibbling fries and watching out the window as throngs of bodies inch through Wangfujing—teenagers carrying shopping bags emblazoned with European brands, tourists taking photos of St. Joseph’s Church, planted by Jesuit missionaries in 1655. The McDonald’s speakers play loud American pop. Reed wonders, out of curiosity, if there are any Panda Expresses nearby.
Tonight I take more melatonin and lie awake, restless on our mattress that burrows deep into my shoulder blades and hips. I pull back a sheet corner and my suspicions are confirmed: it is a slab of plywood covered in quilt batting. On the floor next to me, Finn mumbles something about hiccups, eyes twitching beneath his eyelids. I hear the showerhead drip, drip, dripping from the bathroom.
The next few days wane in the September breeze, warm gusts that blow out the last of summer humidity and foreshadow autumn. We visit the Temple of Heaven, take in a kung fu show, and find American-style pancakes at a trendy café, where the kids begin their schoolwork for the year with spiral notebooks and math problems. We take the metro to Tiananmen Square and watch children fly kites with their grandparents, then bottleneck in line with the other tourists across the street to squeeze through the entrance to the Forbidden City. Tate moans and holds her stomach, asks to leave, swears she will be sick. Concrete blares light from the sun with no shadow for respite; throngs of pushing bodies are everywhere. We swim upstream through the crowd, pass the gauntlet of locals selling folded fans and windup toys on upturned cardboard boxes outside. There is no trash can, and I have forgotten to add a plastic bag to my day pack, a travel habit I cultivated when we lived in Turkey and I was pregnant. Ten feet from us, in the dirt next to the sidewalk, a little boy defecates on a piece of cardboard held by his grandmother.
Still no shade, still people pushing forward and backward.
We hold hands, the five of us, and speed walk to the metro station. Tate keeps quiet, seals her lips shut as sweat bubbles on her forehead. We enter the train, hold on to the rails, and she vomits violently on the floor as the doors close. A sympathetic woman hands me tissues to mop up the mess, and Tate holds out her offending damp shirt from touching her skin, says cheerfully she feels better already. I apologize in English to the people around us. Our metro stop arrives, and we exit the train, wind through our neighborhood sidewalks full of men and women in power suits, then up to our apartment.
The smells of the city, the train, Tate’s retching have attached to us. We run our second load of laundry.
Seven days in Beijing and we feel our brain fog finally lift. Our spines stiffen, and the moisture returns to our eyes. Our bodies accept that we have switched sides of the planet. I give my past self, the one that wrote me my much-needed note, a mental high five. I made it through Beijing. Onward.
It’s the start of the second week of our journey, and it already feels like we’ve been gone for months. We fly to Xi’an, seven hundred miles southwest of Beijing, the country’s ancient capital, and check in to a guesthouse near friends through Kyle’s work, Americans who moved from Portland several months ago. This new apartment feels like a palace compared to our Beijing studio, with three bedrooms and a separate kitchen, and there is grass outside the building where the kids can play with other children both native and foreign. They head downstairs while Kyle and I put sheets on the mattresses; then he scrambles eggs in the kitchen, the air wafting a familiar smell of home. I smile and sigh in relief at this smattering of homeyness, then head outside to watch the kids.
The blacktop and patches of grass where the children play are surrounded by identical concrete apartment buildings, a village square in this city of five million people. I join a towheaded mother who is watching the game of tag and introduce myself. Her name is Ashley, she hails from North Carolina, she has four boys, and she reads my blog. They have lived in China for several years now, for her husband’s work, and it is a thrill for them when they meet other English speakers. Her boys excitedly shout game rules in both English and Mandarin, gather our kids and their neighbors like mother hens. The children play until dinnertime; Ashley and I swap stories about expatriate parenting and homeschooling and good green bean recipes, and we could be anywhere in the world having this experience, but we are in the ancient city of Xi’an in central China.
We will take the bus in this city, mostly, and our friends explain which bus number goes which direction. On the day we visit the Muslim Quarter in the city center, we board a sweaty bus and show the driver our destination written in Mandarin script. Curious eyes bore through our bodies and faces, shamelessly scrutinize our hair, the shape of our hips, our children wearing only shirts and shorts because it is still hot even though it is technically autumn. An old woman stands next to me and yells at me in Mandarin, pointing to the kids’ bare legs and shaking her head. She chastises me the entire ride downtown, pointing her finger at my face. The bus driver pulls over to a stop and tells us to get off the bus; we have arrived at our destination. We instead walk five more blocks, passing three more bus stops before entering the archaic city wall that marks the entrance to the quarter.
This is the original city center, perhaps the center of the entire world at the height of the Silk Road. It is here where the trade routes began, where merchants vagabonded westward, through Persia and Jerusalem, possibly passing a living, breathing Jesus on their way to Constantinople and Venice. Xi’an was once the most vibrant cosmopolitan city in the East, and now it is home to one of the world’s oldest mosques. It is also the ideal place to buy art, which is my souvenir of choice, both for future use and because it packs easily in a tube strapped to my pack.
We walk through the covered bazaar, pass booths of wooden frogs, jade necklaces, and political posters of Mao, and stop at a table where a man is selling his oil paintings for a few dollars each. I buy three, scenes of children playing in the snow in front of village pagodas, and roll them into our plastic architect’s tube. We walk by a stall where a woman is selling scrolls, tall and thin cuts of silk papered with designs of flowers and trees, and Tate asks for one for her room. For the sake of our bags and budget, we have told the kids they may have one souvenir per continent.
“Are you sure you want this to be your souvenir for Asia?” I ask her.
“Can she write my name on it in Chinese?” Tate asks.
We ask the woman in slow English, and the woman smiles and nods, asks, “What is your name?”
“Tatum,” she replies.
“I am sorry . . . I do not understand,” the woman says. (We have inadvertently saddled our daughter with a name that confuses more people than we suspected, something I swore I’d never do due to my own personal experience.)
“Tatum,” my daughter says again, slowly. “T-A-T-U-M.”
The woman pauses, repeats the letters, picks up her pencil, and scribbles on the side of her newspaper. “What do you think?” she asks. “The letters sound similar to your name. You say it Te tai mu.”
“Does that mean anything?” I ask.
She thinks for a moment. “In a way, it means ‘Caregiver of peace.’”
“I like that,” Tate says.
In Old English, Tatum means “Cheerful bringer of joy.”
The woman dips a brush in her inky black pot and paints three Chinese characters in the upper right corner of a painting of cherry blossoms. She blows it dry, rolls up the scroll, seals it in a purple square tube, and asks for a photo with the blonde-haired recipient. Tate smiles as the shutter actuates.
We walk away holding hands, me and my cheerful bringer of joy, a caregiver of peace.
That evening, we meet Ashley and her boys at a park for an afternoon playdate and let the kids run back and forth on bridges that pass over a massive pond full of koi fish. From the other side of the pond, I see locals stop to photograph our children. Sometimes they will pose next to them, as though we are family friends, and sometimes they ask first. Most of the time, they pull out their phones and steal photos paparazzi-style, cooing over hair and eyes. Our children are objects of beauty, born with blond heads for strangers to freely touch.
We have dealt with this for two weeks, and will still have one more week before we leave China, but Ashley lives here; this is her local park, nearby is her local supermarket, and these are the people among whom her family lives. I ask her, “How do you deal with this without going insane?” My mother-hen instinct is full throttle as I watch a third group of strangers pose with my kids.
“It is incredibly hard,” she says, “easily the hardest thing about living in China. My kids have learned to say, ‘One photo? One quai’ in Mandarin.” (Quai is the equivalent of “buck” in American English.) “At least they earn some decent money that way.”
A Communist worldview means no concept of the individual, in which your rights end where my body begins. Groupthink is the modus operandi; the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. On our flight from Xi’an to Guilin, in southeast China, Tate and I sit next to a woman whose eyes light up with eagerness as we take our seats. Over the two-hour flight, she asks us about our travel plans, what Tate is reading on her Kindle and may she read with her, too, where we are staying next, and would we like to meet for dinner at a restaurant sometime soon. I’m an introvert and have to take deep, managed breaths to make it to the flight’s finale with a courtesy smile still on my face.
It is dark when we arrive in Yangshuo, a small town nestled in the peculiar karst mountains fifty miles from the Guilin airport and our final stop in the country. Our home for the week is a family room in an inn tucked into trees and the cadence of crickets. Yellow lights glow from the front door as our taxi pulls through the entrance, red lanterns sleepily twisting in the midnight breeze. The next morning, we open our curtains and are smacked with the side of a steep hill, one among hundreds and drawn by God the way a child draws mountains, an unsteady conglomeration of the letter u upside-down. They seem fake, a clichéd background in a motel room painting of Asia. The sky is not yellow-gray for the first time in weeks, and the pink horizon makes my eyes ache.
Unknown to us when we booked our transpacific flight, it is Golden Week in China, their national holiday that covers seven full days, during which everyone takes a week off of work to travel across the country to visit family. We take a tuk-tuk ride into town, where red flags with yellow stars flap in cadence on banners stretched across streets and booths sell plastic light-up trinkets and paper-thin sarongs. We pop into a market to find snacks and only recognize prepackaged chicken feet, shrink-wrapped and glazed with an orange coating. The thump thump thump thump of a bass drum from a troubadour pelts my ears. I push my way into a stationery store, buy postcards, borrow a pen and scribble hello to some family and friends, then hand them back to the cashier, who promises to put them in the mail. I wonder if I have just thrown away ten dollars.
Outside the store, irrepressible floods of people halt all semblance of walkability, and the five of us hold hands. My overworked senses beg for mercy.
I think of Ashley in Xi’an empowering her kids, and it frees my mothering instincts to take over in fierce protection of my kids’ bodily ownership as they say no to the camera flashes. Reed forcibly poses with locals on holiday in their own family photo, but he shrugs his shoulders and says, “I guess it’s okay, Mom.”
In China, strangers unabashedly read over my shoulder on the bus when they see me with an English book. Twentysomethings pull my kids onto their laps on the metro. English speakers interject themselves into conversations between Kyle and me, give us their two cents about where we should go and what we should eat, ask why we are there.
We take a tuk-tuk back to the inn and stay there for our final few days in China. Kyle watercolors and I write; the kids work on their school and play foosball in the game room. They swim in the pool while I park poolside in the private backyard, and though there is a school field trip group staying here, as well as gatherings of extended family for holiday reunions, it trumps sharing my one square foot of bodily occupancy on Chinese streets.
Finn climbs trees and names one Steve, and after dinner one night, we stay in the inn’s restaurant and play Uno while Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton croon from the speakers about islands in the stream. Sail away with me to another world; and we rely on each other, ah ha. Kyle and I laugh, surprised at this song playing in the southeast China countryside.
Back in Beijing, an English-speaking local made chitchat with us at the diner downstairs from our apartment, where we suspect Tate got sick from the sesame rolls. Kyle asked him if he was a native of Beijing, and he replied, “No, I’m from the south. It’s a tiny village of only one million people.” I smiled and said, “I’m also from a village of one million people.” In North America, a million feels like too many people. In Asia, it is a village of neighbors and friends.
Starting this global trek in China serves well as our starting point on the opposite side of Western civilization, one of the world’s oldest cultures providing us with fresh context. When Captain Cook landed on the Australian continent, China had already existed for thirty-seven hundred years. When Gustave Eiffel erected his giant Tinkertoy in central Paris, the Chinese had already given to the rest of the world paper,1 umbrellas,2 earthquake detectors,3 and rockets.4
As in China, famous landmarks in other parts of the world will become the bookmarks in our travel log, the check-marked paragraphs between pages and pages of walks down nameless neighborhood streets and jet-lagged descriptions of cheap local noodles for dinner, where the bulk of our days are lived. All cultures teem with creativity, on display both via inconceivable monuments and in the flawless blend of two spices. I want to see the birthplace of all of it, the homes of humble geniuses who make our lives better, more interesting. I am grateful for our time in this country and its people who have stretched me emotionally, mentally, physically.
The best souvenir China bestows on me is on our last day in the country, in the late evening in the Yangshuo inn’s backyard. I am floating in the pool with six-year-old Reed during a starlit swim. Timid in the water for years and reticent to swim without a life jacket, he quietly, uneventfully lets go of the edge and swims out to the pool’s center, stars shimmering and karst hills shadowing in the rippled water. This is my child, who is labeled by many as developmentally different. He is fraught with sensory issues, and a frequent question mark hovers over him as we navigate parenting waters. He has already tried mango ice cream in Beijing, and now, he is swimming.
“Hey, buddy—do you realize what you’re doing?”
“Yeah,” he says between exerted breaths. “Yes. I guess I can swim now.” And so he can.