Trained by China

In between leaving Shanghai and before moving into our new place in Seoul, we traveled for a few weeks in the U.S.  I've lived abroad for almost eight years now, and though I go back once a year or so, each time the U.S. seems more and more unfamiliar. Sometimes things have clearly changed over there, like trends (I remember spending much of one trip staring at people's very large earrings -- the kind that fit into and stretch the piercings to the size of dimes), catch-phrases, or cars. But mostly things are the same there, and I'm the one who has changed. Or at least my expectations have. In China and Korea, buildings, trends, slang, manners, laws, signage, food, scandals, and the landscape change so much from month to month that it's weird to go to a place that looks almost exactly the same for eight years. 

Anyway, on this last trip, it became clear to me that I have been trained by China.

We regularly stopped at Peet's coffee. Each time there was a line. But what a line! You could park an elephant between the cash registers and the start of the line. As if people are afraid to stand too close because the cashiers have bad breath or really large personal spaces. And each person in line seems to leave a good arm's length between himself and the people in front and behind. 

The whole thing made me very, very anxious. I kept moving closer to the person in front of me, but then he would uncomfortably move forwards or sideways, so I'd move back, aware that I'd made a social faux-pas. But then I'd start to feel nervous and move up again. And every once in a while someone would come and stand in the space in front of the registers in order to get a closer look at the menu or the pastries, and my whole body would tense, ready to pounce on them if they showed any sign of trying to cut in. I fastened my stink eye onto their backs, thinking, don't even try it, motherfucker. 

When you stand in line in China, you can't let your guard down for a minute. Someone is always trying to squeeze in. You can't let any daylight show between you and the person in front of you. In the grocery store, you start unloading your cart almost on top of the person in front of you. When a taxi stops, you hop in the front seat before the current passenger finishes getting out. At the doctor, there isn't really any line exactly, just a whole bunch of people crammed into a small room, all handing their x-rays or charts or whatever to the doctor at the same time. Whichever one is in her face is the one who goes next. 

Even places where numbers are taken are not straightforward. At one point during our stay we had to get an important real estate document from a certain government agency. There were something like five steps, and both parties and both agents all had to be there to perform the first one. When the building opened at 8 am there were already 100 people waiting outside. They rushed in and grabbed numbers. But they grabbed more than one number each. So if the first number was called and some member of the party wasn't there (maybe they went to the bathroom, or the bank, or fainted from standing and waiting for so many hours) they would use the next number. 

So when we started out we had several numbers which weren't very good. But our agent, who was standing under a No Smoking sign with a group of agents trading cigarettes and smoking like crazy, would come back every 10 minutes or so with a different number. They'd trade among themselves, giving others the numbers they had pulled but didn't need.

Then, after the first few steps were done, we had to go to a different area of the building to pay a tax, and there was no take-a-number system there, just one straight line. But my agent had paid(?) someone to stand in that line all day; he just kept waiting in line, and when he got to the front, he'd go around and stand in the back again. So that by the time we were ready for that step we already had a place close to the front. 

And in the end it was almost 4:30, closing time, and we still hadn't finished everything. (Like all government officials anywhere, they shut down from 11-1 for lunch.) I really didn't want to come back the next day and do it all over again. So it ended the way things do in China. My agent found someone he knew in the office, and five minutes later we were done.

Back to the U.S.  The other moment during the trip when I realized I had become Chinese was when it was time to cross a road. My friend E sauntered across four lanes with barely a look back and forth. I stood petrified on the sidewalk, saying, "Watch out! There's a car way over there!" She said, "What are you doing? Come on! They're legally obligated to stop!" Oh yeah. People actually do that here. 

quiet

I might as well be talking about the last few years of this blog, eh? Kind of fell off the blogging world when I moved to China. It took a while to get settled, you see. And I had to deal with learning the language and figuring out where to get my bicycle tires fixed (free advice: don't buy a bicycle at Carrefour, get it at Decathlon). I was going to school every day and rotating our milk sources. And then when I might have started blogging, we were blocked from blogger and that was a good excuse not to start up again.

So now we're back in Korea and I find that I've been thinking about blogging again a lot lately but having been away so long it seems scary, somehow, to put myself out there again. And the bar is a lot higher now; there are a lot of bloggers out there when once there were few. I need to face up to the fact that if I'm going to write anything it isn't going to be stupendous because I don't have time to edit.

So... baby steps. Small posts. For today: silence.

So we're in the new place, and it's good. Really good. Dishwasher (haven't had one of those for almost 8 years, unless you count ayi, who washed dishes among other duties...), heated toilet seats, nice community sauna/bath and swimming pool, etc.

The first night we slept here (on a 손없는날: that is, a day in which the ghosts go up to the heavens to play, so it is safe to move), I was exhausted from the moving and traveling, ready to collapse in our old bedding in the new place. But that's when it really hit me that we weren't in Shanghai anymore: it was so quiet. In the background I could hear the hum of something, probably the heating system, but that's it.

There are many types of quiet. Quiet in this place is Hotel Quiet: a mind-your-own-business kind of quiet; impersonal and antiseptic.

We had just spent a few weeks in the U.S., and we visited some friends from Shanghai who had recently moved to a hillside house in Saratoga, California. The quiet on their porch was a sweetly relaxing kind of quiet, the kind of quiet that makes you feel like you are being cradled by the kitten-soft tongues of tree leaves. I wanted to just stay on their porch, immobile, and watch the centuries go by. I could understand in that moment why writers seek places to nature to write, and why Koreans bury their bed on mountain tops. It was the kind of quiet that says eternal peace and wisdom.

The quiet of that first night back in Seoul was an empty kind of quiet, leaving enough of a sensory black hole to suck me right back to Shanghai, despite months of effortless denial about leaving that place. I remembered all the night noises in Shanghai; the baoan guards talking into their walkie-talkies, bells clanging for various recycling pickups, ubiquitous honking, the sounds of children playing in the playground. Our first night in our last apartment in Shanghai (we lived in two different places) we were all sleeping in a huge mosquito tent in the living room because our bedroom was full of stacks of books (we had not yet bought any furniture). Around 1am we woke to shouts from the street: "小偷!小偷!" [Xiaotou!Thief!] It took us a few minutes to groggily figure out what they were saying, and then KC and I stumbled towards the verandah and looked out into the night. Baoan were coming from all directions, converging on the poor thief in the middle of the large road behind our complex. Some of the baoan were on scooters, and they were going to run him down. Eventually they caught up with the guy and started punching him and then dragging him towards the side of the road, I guess to take him to the police. We went back inside and went back to sleep. Shortly after that, in preparation for Expo, the city began repaving and fixing all the roads in our area, so seven days a week from 7am to 10pm we would hear jackhammers, steamrollers, and work crews trying to make their deadlines. Accompanied by the wonderful smell of asphalt, of course.

The first night we spent in Shanghai (in our first apartment), we were woken at 7am (it was Sunday morning) which what sounded like gunfire. Of course it was fireworks, not gunfire, and within a short time we had become so used to the sound that I barely noticed it anymore.

But that's what happens with a city, I suppose. You're so busy trying to figure out where to step and who to befriend and where to buy your veggies that two and a half years go by in a big whoosh, and you don't realize that you're carrying the place around with you, in the grime under your fingernails, in the soundtrack to which you fall asleep at night. Every once in a while when I'm walking around Seoul, remembering what it was like to live here before and comparing it to now (more on that another day), I get a whiff of Shanghai and my mind takes me back. I think of the odd scenes: the man carrying a bag of live chickens on the subway, or the taxi driver who, during a long red light, painstakingly weeded his white hairs by leaning awkwardly out in order to see himself in the rearview mirror. I think of the commentary that followed me whenever I walked around with my kids, "Three sons! Three sons!"

I don't think I appreciated what a persistant and colorful character Shanghai had, and how much I had grown to love it, until that quiet night.

Guest Blogger: Max

Been neglecting the blog again, as I try to get my fill of Shanghai before we leave. So I'll turn things over to the words of our budding writer Max.

Max has been wanting to write since before he actually could. He used to spend long periods of time hunched over his notebook, drawing squiggy lines that met his perfectionistic standards. He'd then tear out the piece of paper, hand it to me, and very seriously inform me that "This is Blah Blah Blah Language. You have to take this and study it. Then I will test you tomorrow. If you get them all right I will give you one piece of candy." 

I guess this is what I sound like?

Now that he can actually write he leaves me amusing little notes like this one:

Dear Mommy,

     You do not have a house and you do not have a sword for fighting bad guys. 

Love, Max

I'm pretty sure I don't sound like that.

Anyway, today I give you, for your reading pleasure, a story he wrote in his handwriting notebook at school. I copied it the way he wrote it, so you have to decipher his spellings.

Starwars

Farfar away in the galaxy ther was a young gediy Calld anykin. anykin was youg but he was schrong wen he dfeds a person he Winks and one time he fannd a chick and the chick had one leg brokin so he fixit one person's chin brok so h fixit when he winks his mauth tacks I think wen my brother gros up he's gowing to go to the Sink and wash Dishis.

By Max Chang 

And if you don't like it, in Max's words, "You want to Bisa me?" [You want a piece of me?"]

Real blogging to follow soon.

Third child

Some animals mark their territory by pissing. We playfully tossed around the idea of marking the countries we've lived in by having a baby in each one. (Or perhaps more accurately, making each birth a souvenir of each place, and folding those countries into our family, at least symbolically.) I wasn't sure we would actually go through with it, but now we have. The U.S.: Aiden. Korea: Max. And now China: Felix. All boys, all born in May, but each in a different country. 

Pregnancy and childbirth are transformational experiences on the individual level (both physically and emotionally), but they also provide a kind of up-the-skirt glimpse at the values and prejudices of the society one lives in. When you're walking around with a big belly people feel free -- compelled, in some cases -- to give you advice. To warn you of the dangers of X and Y. To implore you to raise your kid This Way or That Way. Same thing when you're carrying around a newly-minted human being. I suppose that people see pregnant women and babies as a tabula rasa, a blank and forgiving slate, available for imprinting and for correcting previous wrongs. Pregnant women and babies represent a place for redemption, for individuals and societies. If you can just nip that problem in the bud and change someone else's life... the reasoning goes. So it's hard for people to keep their thoughts to themselves. 

Maybe because being pregnant draws people's comments so well, I feel like going through pregnancy and childbirth in each country gave me a chance to get to know each country better. In the case of China, it was my first real encounter with the medical system here. (Up to that point we had taken care of all of our medical needs in Korea, and just tried to stay healthy in China, where we have no medical insurance.) I don't think one can really feel comfortable living in a country unless one can comfortably bank, go to the doctor, and send one's kids to school. Now I have some experience with each of these, and it makes me feel more settled here.  

Anyway, sleep deprivation is no easier the third time around but I'll try to slap myself into semi-consciousness long enough to write some notes on this last pregnancy and childbirth. Not only am I tired and scatterbrained, but it's also been a long time since I did any writing. Starting blogging again is like starting exercising again: painful and clumsy. 

Third. In the U.S., having a third child is pretty ho-hum, but in China and Korea where birth rates are low, being a mom of three is much more unusual. Reactions upon discovering I was pregnant were interesting. In Korea, several people commented, ""육심이 많네요"; a case in a which I had trouble reading tone/nuance. [I'm having a hard time translating this: something like "you have a lot of desire/greed," but that doesn't really capture the meaning in Korean.] Was that meant to be a veiled criticism? Can't decide. In China, I got, "太多了!" (Too many!) Which just made me laugh. Many people speculated that I must be trying for a daughter, and several asked me if this baby was planned, which I felt was an overly personal question, but answered it anyway (yes, it was planned). In the early days, whatever I ate was scrutinized: my grapefruit cravings were a sure sign of a boy, but ice cream was a girl. My complexion was remarked upon many times (if your skin is good, it must be a girl). Later, the shape of my belly was commented on by almost everybody I walked by; I felt like a tourist attraction. The pointy belly meant a son for the Chinese, but for the Koreans it is the opposite. (In this case the Chinese were right.) I also got scolded for walking around so much, and after the baby was born, for being out and about so soon after giving birth, and for not putting socks and a hat on my newborn. Nobody asked me why I wasn't wearing one of those radiation garments, probably because I'm a laowai, but all the pregnant Chinese women were wearing them (an ugly smock that is supposed to block electromagnetic radiation). 

Hospital. We decided to have the birth at International Peace Maternity, a Chinese hospital specializing in women and children's health, in the VIP section. There's really no qualification to become a "VIP" except willingness to pay about ten times more than what the regular people pay, and for that you have fewer lines, better facilities, and doctors who have some international experience/training. I chose a Chinese hospital for two reasons: first, as a hospital that deals with so many births every day, it is well-equipped to deal with all sorts of emergencies, and it has an in-house NICU. The international hospitals provide an atmosphere that may be more like an American hospital, but the care is not necessarily as good. The second reason was financial; we don't have health insurance in China and delivering in a Chinese hospital, even in the VIP ward, is two or three times cheaper than in an international hospital. 

Peace is a pretty popular place for expats to deliver. I know a lot of women who have had their babies there. And for that reason it's hard to get an appointment, even at normal times, and it may have been more crowded than usual when I was pregnant because people were trying to have an "Expo baby." I called soon after I found out I was expecting and the first available time slot was not until my 19th week. So I ended up doing the first half of my pre-natal visits in Korea. 

Going back to Korea (to 차병원, which is also a well-known women and children's hospital) for half of my prenatals was nice and familiar, and my old doctor seemed very blase about this pregnancy, except for the maternal age factor. When the Triple Screen results came in, he said, "나이가 그렇고, 그래도 괜찮을것같아요." (something like: you're old but it'll probably be ok.)

Boy or girl? For the first time, I really wanted to know the sex of this child beforehand. But both Korea and China have policies prohibiting the disclosure of the child's sex, to prevent selective abortion of girl babies. In Korea the policy is changing, and in most local hospitals you can find out, but the larger hospitals  are still quite strict. I did my best to find out, pulling out the "I'm a foreigner!" card and the "I already have two boys!" card. I tried the subtler routes: asked what color clothes I should buy and whether the baby takes after me or my husband, but the ultrasound tech wouldn't even give me a hint. She told me to ask my doctor. Finally he told me, "아빠 닮았어요" (the baby takes after its father). In other words, another boy. At Peace, in the ultrasound room, they have a sign saying something along the lines of "don't even ask because we won't tell." 

First appointment at Peace. We were running late for our first appointment at Peace, so we rushed through the door without really thinking about what we would find. KC stopped in his tracks and said, "Oh my god, I've never seen so many pregnant women in my life!" It was a large room with tons of people standing in line, sitting in rows of uncomfortable chairs, and milling around. We headed towards the back where the VIP elevators are manned by a security guard, who looked us up and down and extended his hand towards the elevators, letting us through.

We took the elevator up to the 13th floor, where the scene was more peaceful. A large room with sofas, with a circular nurse's station in the middle topped by a chandelier. An espresso machine in the corner. Free bottles of juice and water plus packs of crackers and candies in bowls around the room. Most of the sofas were full but it was nothing like the cattle driving going on downstairs. 

Procedure-wise, it was much like Korea: check in, stand in line at the cashier, provide urine sample, get weighed, wait. Later: make appointment, pay for any remaining tests or medicine. Like Korea, there's a production-line structure to hospitals that enables clinics like this to see many many people in a short time. 

We met the doctor in a very large room, larger than our largest bedroom, but empty except for the desk, two chairs, and an examining table. After we talked for a bit the doctor asked me to take off my pants and lie down, but there was no sheet, no curtain, no barrier between me and the very large room. It felt odd. I mean, there's a chandelier outside but you can't give me a modesty sheet? The sheet, if you think about it, doesn't really do anything, it's just something extra to wash, the doctor and husband are going to see everything anyway in a moment, and there's nothing really to hide, it's just psychologically comforting, like a security blanket. 

This (what Americans would consider) lack of privacy was the main thing I noticed in the medical arena. When waiting in line for the cashier one day, a doctor and patient standing a foot away were immersed in a conversation which I think was about the patient's miscarriage. (Could be a misunderstanding, since it was in Chinese and I missed the beginning, but it was about how there was no heartbeat, how there is usually no way to know the reason, how the patient should try again, and get prenatal care earlier.) 

Check me out. The sizing up of patients is the same, or similar, no matter where you go. When I was admitted to give birth to my first baby, in the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor, I remember the nurse watching me for a while and then proclaiming, with a decided air, "You're going to do just fine." In Korea, while I was in early labor (3cm or so) there were two nurses hanging out in my room just waiting for things to get exciting, I guess, and we were all listening to the screams from the woman in the room next to mine. They commented, "She's having a hard time." And then looked at me and said, "You don't seem to be in any pain at all." You're weird, seemed to be the unspoken question. Then they gave me pitocin and I think I made enough noise to satisfy them after that.

It would be fascinating to do an enthnographic study of Labor and Delivery nurses, who have to deal with all manner of laboring woman, probably learning to diffuse each one like a different type of ticking time bomb. They seem to have their own codes and theories about what makes a woman easy or hard, or even what makes us go into labor. I arrived in the hospital in Ann Arbor for my first delivery after a tornado had gone past town, and was informed that the hospital was full. "When the barometer drops, everybody goes into labor," the nurse told me. In labor for the third time, when I approached the nurses station and announced that I was having contractions, the nurses gave each other a look. "A lot of people today?" I asked. "Four already," the nurse said, and gave a little chuckle. 

Anyway, perhaps (probably) because it was my third, the nurses and doctors here seemed relaxed about this pregnancy. They kept telling me, "No problem. It's going to go fast." And during labor, they for the most part left us alone, which was wonderful. We had a button to push if we needed anything, and got to labor the way we wanted. And after the birth, we were also left to enjoy our baby without much intervention, especially at night. In Michigan and Seoul people were coming in every hour, day and night, and I couldn't get any rest at all. Because of that, this last birth was the most relaxing. 

Show me the money. Since we didn't have insurance, we needed to deposit 30,000RMB before giving birth; this would be about the cost of a C-section should I need one. On the day we checked out of the hospital, an administrator came around with a large bag and a bunch of papers showing how much we had actually spent (less than half that amount, since it was an unmedicated natural birth), and then reached into her bag and started pulling out large wads of cash. "Count it to make sure it's correct," she told us. Ha! Someone should have told us we'd be taking home two important bundles: one with a baby and one with a lot of cash. Take note, Chinese robbers! The administrator remarked that she was returning a lot of cash that day because so many people had had natural deliveries. 

Baby Swimming. Another unusual experience in China was the baby swimming. I had seen advertisements for this in the subway stations and thought it looked really strange. Basically, they put little inner tubes around the baby's neck and let the baby swim in a small, tall tub of warm water. On Felix's second day of life the nurses asked us if we were interested in having him try this plus an infant massage for 100 RMB (less than 15 dollars). Sure, why not? The nurse woke him up, which he was not happy about, stripped him and put a piece of tape over his belly button stub, and put the tube around his head, all of which made him cry. But the minute he entered the tub he grew calm. He wiggled his little legs looked around very quietly. We were amazed. I suppose that being immersed in warm water must have felt familiar and comfortable for him, despite the big tube around his neck. I later ordered a tube on the internet and have been letting him "swim" every few days in our bathtub. It takes a lot of water so I don't do it every day, but he continues to love it. Our tub is not quite deep enough, so his feet touch, and he can push himself from one end of the tub to the other, and flip so he's somewhat stomach-down or back-down. 

Breast Massage.Another option in the hospital was to have a breast massage. I had just watched a good friend of mine here in Shanghai go through a terrible bout of mastitis, having to be put on IV antibiotics and finally having to have surgery to drain the infection. One of the things she ended up doing to help was having a breast massager come to her house and unclog the blocked ducts manually. Apparently there’s a branch of Chinese medicine that does breast massage. I got to watch once, as the masseuse rubbed and pulled at the breasts, spraying milk all over the place, and getting small back and white things to come out, which I guess were what was blocking the ducts. Pretty gross.

So when given the option to have a massage at the hospital I took it. I imagined it would be done by a person and that it would be painful, like my friend’s had been, especially since my milk had already come in and I was quite engorged, especially on the left since Felix seemed to prefer the right. But in the hospital it was done by a machine. A nurse came in with the big machine, and put two flat, round, black rubber pad-type things on my breasts, which emitted some sort of pulse. It was actually quite nice and not painful at all. Afterwards the nurse helped me express some of the milk from my rock hard left side. She got about an espresso shot amount out of it, still orange from the colostrum. “Drink it,” she said. “Don’t let it go to waste, this is good stuff.” It was far sweeter than I had imagined.

The small plastic cup she expressed the milk in (like an espresso shot size) was what they use to feed the babies in the nursery. I’m not sure why they don’t use bottles. Interesting.

Head or Tail? I was curious, this time around, to see how the midwife would hand the baby to me upon birth. In the U.S., I received Aiden head-first, so my first view of him was his face. In Korea the nurse handed me the baby butt first, so I got a good glimpse of his balls and penis, as if the nurse was allowing me to confirm that yes, this is indeed another boy. I don't know what to make of that, is it a cultural thing or just an accident of that particular hospital or nurse? 

Anyway, in China I again received the baby butt first. Hmm. 

Naming. Each of our kids has a Western first name and a Korean middle name on their American passports (their Korean passports just have their Korean names). It takes us a long time to come up with the first name, but we have total control over that process. The Korean name is more logistically complicated. The second part of the name is generational, so each kid has the same character. My in-laws have employed a name-maker to come up with options for the first part of the name. The name maker is someone who specializes in coming up with a good name for the child, based on the parents' and the child's birth dates and times. For Aiden, we knew we would only have a few days  to prepare a name, so we asked the name maker to come up with some suggestions despite not knowing exactly when he would be born. He gave us 5 options and we chose one of those. When Max was born, we had more time to employ a name maker, since the Korean hospitals give you more time to come up with a name. Still, the process was quick; it only took a day or two if I remember correctly.

This time around we called KC's parents soon after the birth and asked them to get on the name-making process. But they didn't understand, and it didn't occur to us to explain, that we needed the name within the next 3 days in order to put it on the birth certificate. They had decided to employ a high-end name-maker who needed a week. After some back and forth the name-maker agreed to give us a name on the third day but we would have to call him to get it. 

I was surprised how nervous we both were, waiting for this name. We called the name-maker from the hospital room (via skype) and he gave us three names. We chose one of those right away, and then ran into problems right away, since the character we chose, 爀 (빛날혁), is kind of an older character, not really used in modern Chinese. Would they be able to put it on the birth certificate?

It turns out that they were able to. So Felix's birth certificate has both his American and Chinese names. Pretty cool. 

42-day checkup. At Peace, mothers and babies come for a joint 42-day post-partum checkup. All the moms and babies are taken to the waiting area where the babies are weighed, one by one, and then sent one by one to see the pediatrician and the Ob/gyn. The weighing was quite funny to me: all these moms and grandmas and ayis crowded around their little baobaos, but watching all the other babies, sizing them up. Felix was the first to be weighed, since we arrived first (I finally learned to be the first one there in order to get out in a reasonable amount of time). He was quite small still, having been born 3 weeks early and exclusively breastfed (he is not small now, he is quite a porker). One mom abandoned her baby to grandma to stand by the scale and comment on all the other babies' weights. She asked the nurse, "Is that baby also 42 days? He is so small! He's only half the size of my baby!" Then after her baby was weighed, she crowed happily to him (and the whole room) "你是第一名!" (You're in first place!) He was a really big baby, must have been 5kg. The women were all busy exchanging information about whether they were doing breast or bottle, how much their babies were sleeping, etc. I listened to them, exhausted, remembering what it was like to have my first child, back in the days when I had no idea what I was doing, when I was hyper-conscious of what other parents were doing. Back when I gained a sense that I was doing ok as a parent by constantly comparing myself and my child to other moms and their children. Imagine a whole room of first time parents, all vying for some sense that they have a handle on things, trying to fight off that sense of panic that comes with being a parent for the first time and having your life changed completely as quickly as someone pulling the rug out from under you. Now imagine a society where almost all parents are like that, because they only have one child.

On that note, the Korean ajumas say that moms of three boys are 깡패, gangsters. I've got to go knock some heads, but will try to keep up the blogging now that I've started again.  

Note: Thanks for the comments, everybody! I have figured out how to email my posts, but I have not yet figured out how to approve comments from behind the Great Firewall. So keep the comments coming, but be patient with them appearing on the site. I still get a lot of spam so I don't want to set it to automatically post comments. I will figure it out soon. 

Two Years Later

My goodness it's been a long time since I've blogged. Too long. Sitting here in front of the computer I'm at a loss for how to start. My fingers don't know their way around the keyboard anymore, and I find myself sounding more like whatever book I'm reading, my old blogging voice buried somewhere in the recesses of my brain. 

So where were we? I think I had been providing updates on the language. Here's where we are on that. Aiden is much more comfortable in Chinese and his Korean is still very good. Some of the comic book series that he loves reading in Korean have been translated into Chinese, and he can read those too. He used to be shy about talking to Chinese-speaking kids in the playground, or waitresses in the restaurant, or taxi drivers, but now he just talks. He doesn't always know all the words, but he is able to converse easily, without thinking much. He still reads a lot in Korean and we have been spending about 2 months a year in Korea, so I don't think his Korean has suffered much if at all. Through his reading he's still picking up a lot of vocabulary. He still thinks my Chinese is better than his, but I doubt that's the case. He certainly can read better than I can.

Max's Chinese has improved a lot, but his perfectionist tendencies hold him back in public. He will speak Chinese if he knows the other person doesn't speak English or Korean, but otherwise he will not. He is now in first grade at the same school Aiden goes to, and doing quite well. His Korean has been declining since we moved to Shanghai, but I spent a lot of effort teaching him to read last year, so at least he's literate. Every time we go back to Korea for a month he picks it all up again, but English is definitely his strongest language, by far. He's also become a pretty proficient reader in English. 

Felix has joined our little house of boys, but his language ability is limited so ah-goo and grunting at this point. I've been telling the big boys that they need to speak to Felix in Korean, but I haven't enforced it so far. I need to come up with a language plan for him fairly soon. Something like: I speak English, KC and the other kids speak Korean.... but then what about the Chinese? Hmm.

We have been here for over 2 years now and it is finally feeling comfortable. Two years seems to be the amount of time it takes. We've settled down. We're in a different apartment complex (for the last year) which we love. The kids have their groups of friends, who are quite international. There's a gang of Korean boys on the bus, and a Korean basketball team on Sundays, which allows them to maintain a nice Korean social community while in Shanghai. Aiden's soccer team and Max's Kung Fu classes are Chinese. And we have a great group of friends from all over the place, with North America well represented. 

China still doesn't feel as comfortable as Korea, and it never will. I feel like I have a good sense of Korea, an impression in my mind of how things work. But my relationship with Korea is far longer, I gain a lot of insight into Korea through KC, we lived in Seoul for much longer (5 years), and we lived as locals, with the kids in public school. I used to go long periods without speaking to anybody who wasn't Korean. Here my life is different; we live in a bubble. It is not as opaque as it could be. We don't have a driver, we don't live in a villa, we take public transportation, we don't live in Jinqiao, our kids go to a Chinese school. But it is a private school, and they are in the international class. I would love to hang out and speak Chinese with the other moms from school (this, after all, is how I picked up so much Korean -- by lunching with the ladies) but it would be a burden to them since their English is fantastic. Our roots in Korea grow deeper and deeper because of the local school connection; every time we go back to visit, we run into Aiden's friends on the street, and the moms make as much effort as I do to maintain the kids' friendships. Seoul feels like home, and our neighborhood there is comfortable and easy. People know our names and we know theirs, and they are still around every time we go back. Because our friends in Shanghai are mostly international (even if they are from Shanghai originally), we are always saying goodbye and making new friends. In two years I won't know anybody here, I think. They will all be moving on. 

It's wonderful to meet international people because they understand so much of the way we live, and we understand each other so well. But like us they tread lightly in China; they are here to experience, and observe, to taste the air and leave and go taste the air somewhere else. They are not here to put down roots, to be invested, to shape this place. And for the most part their insight about China does not go longer than 5 or 6 years. They have an emotional relationship to China but it is personal, not so much historical. 

In Korea my friends are not so international, they are not so well traveled and maybe not as well educated, but they are Korea. They talk and understand from long experience in that one place, and their knowledge of that place is inseparable from themselves. What I learn about Korea when talking to the ladies at lunch may not be historical or factual but it teaches me about the categories and stories they carry around with them as they approach the world, and that teaches me about the way they understand things. 

I had hoped to develop a sense of China the way I did of Korea, but I don't think that's going to happen. We won't be here for long enough, my ties to the community are too superficial, and, let's face it, Chian is BIG. Much bigger, much more diverse, and much more regional than Korea. Maybe, in fact, I don't have a sense of Korea at all, just of my little area of Gang-nam in Seoul. But Gang-nam in Seoul is kind of where it's at, and a fourth of the population of Korea lives in Seoul. So that's a good start. But Shanghai, despite its size, is nothing compared to the rest of China, and even within China, there's so much regionalism. My ayi is from Sichuan, one tutor is from Shanghai, and the other is from Dong Bei somewhere (yes, we have a tutor for each child and an ayi, I am a total tai-tai now), and I can see the differences, and the skepticism and assumptions they arm themselves with when it comes to people from other regions. But I don't understand them. 

I wasn't expecting to emerge from this experience as an old China hand. I really hate it when people go to a country for a short time (and 2 years is a short time) and then talk about it like they really understand it. After all, I lived in the States for what? 28 years? And couldn't tell you the first thing about the Deep South or Texas or the Midwest (even though I lived in Ann Arbor) or LA or New York. I can't explain the Tea Party. I don't know what The Hills is about, or why people like wearing sweatpants with words written on the butt. So this is not a complaint or even really a post of disappointment. 

I'm not sure what it is. Maybe a proactive staying off of "what is China really like" type questions, which I can't answer. But also I think a preemptive sense of loss. Because I really would like to be able to hang around for another decade and see what happens here. I have already witnessed so many changes, and they are going to keep happening. Seoul is different, really different, each time I arrive. And China is changing even faster than that, fast enough to feel viscerally, every day, not just at intervals after leaving. But I won't get to stick around and witness this as a resident, because we are leaving in 4 months. We are moving back to Seoul for 18 months (give or take), then probably back to the U.S.

I haven't blogged for many reasons, some of them logistical, but underneath that there's been a hesitation to say anything until I actually had something to say. I remember coming to a point, after about 2.5 years in Korea, when things clicked in my head and all the fleeting impressions coalesced into stories, cause and effect, statements, insights. I've been waiting, patiently, for that to happen here, knowing it would take a long time. But now I'm out of time, so I'd better start typing. 

Back to Blogging. I think.

What's funny about c*ns*rsh*p is how it becomes automatic and internal over time. Whenever I leave China I engage in rabid facebooking, but I rarely look at youtube, twitter, and blogs. I have gotten out of the habit. 

While here, I could invest in a VPN like so many others, but I am too cheap to do it. And I'm so busy with the kids that blog-reading and youtubing were only activities I did in my few minutes of spare time, here and there, so when I found I could no longer do those, I didn't have much time to make a sustained effort to find work-arounds. And by the time I did have time to make an effort, I had already weaned myself of my old habits. I no longer need the Great Firewall, I am my own censor. How sad. 

Anyway, I've decided to try to get back into blogging, by e-mailing my posts in. We'll see how that goes. I won't be able to look at my own posts, and I can't moderate comments from here so you're comments won't show up until I leave the country again. But keep the comments coming. Some feedback from readers has encouraged me to start up again, though the blogging will be fitful at first! 

(the asterisks are just in case... paranoia has also made me less than an active blogger)

this is a test

http://www.nytimes.com Seeing if I can email a post.

What if there's boldface?

Italics?

한국말?

汉语呢？

random other text

blah blah blah

Curious words

I'm making a mental list of words whose origins I want to know. The first two:

1. "18번": This is your go-to song for karaoke, the one you know you can sing really well. Why "number 18"?

2. 아이스케키: Lifting a girl's skirt so her underwear shows. Sounds like "ice-cake" to my English ears. I heard this word for the first time when some friends were reminiscing about their elementary school days.

Yes, this is a short blog considering how long it's been. Baby steps.

Pop quiz

At the bus stop this morning, out of curiosity, I gave Aiden an impromptu quiz.

“Who is 세종대왕?" “He made 한글."

“Good! How about 이순신?" "He fought against the Japanese. He made 거북선."

“Yeah! How about Mao Tse-dong?” “He was China’s first.... uh.... I forgot the word.” He just read a story about Mao in school so I knew he was familiar with the name but hadn’t yet absorbed the vocab of his title.

“How about Confucius?” Blank look. “Maybe you know him as 孔子.” He shakes his head and says, ”不知道。“ Ah, maybe you know him as 공자님?" “Ah! Isn’t he a god?” “No, he was a philosopher. He’s the guy who said, ‘Respect your parents, love your children.’” “OH, I think I know. I thought he was a god.” (Has has achieved almost deity-like status...)

“OK, how about George Washington?” His face lights up. “He’s a famous basketball player!”

I guess we have some work to do.

It’s always interesting to think about what materials we use to learn language and culture. My own Chinese textbook includes a lot of old stories which teach both vocabulary but also a kind of cultural and philosophical point of view. We had an argument about this story (very roughly translated from memory):

A businessman, a banker, and a politician were lost, walking through a forest near a mountain. As it was getting dark they finally found a farm. They knocked on the door and asked the farmer if they could spend the night there. The farmer said, “Sure, but I only have room for two people. The third will have to stay in the barn, and the smell there is quite bad.” [臭气 was the vocab word for “bad smell,” but I found it only applies to rotten or sort of BO type smells, not, for instance, to drying paint, which is what I attempted to use it to describe.... anyway....] So the businessman volunteers to stay in the barn. They all go and lie down, but a short time later there’s a knock at the door. The businessman says, “The smell was unbearable!” The banker says he’ll go and sleep in the barn. Shortly he too knocks at the door, saying that the smell was overwhelming and he too could not handle it. The politician scoffs at them, saying something like, it’s just a smell, how is it that you can’t handle that in order to get some rest? A short time later there’s yet another knock at the door. The farmer, angry, opens it and draws back in surprise, for rather than the politician, he sees all the barn animals.

A funny story. Our interpretation was that the politician smelled so bad -- in other words, that he was so despicable -- that the animals couldn’t stand it. We took the story as a humorous criticism of politicians. The teacher’s interpretation was that politicians are such extraordinary people that they can handle anything. She said it was not a criticism of politicians.

I haven’t paid as much attention as I should to Aiden’s lessons (I’m trying to spend more time teaching and playing with Max when Aiden’s with the Chinese teacher), but the Mao story surprised me. I asked his teacher what Chinese people think of Mao. Do they still consider him a great leader? She said, rather carefully, that Mao “enabled them to stand,” (站起来), that he was great in the beginning, but he did some “bad things too.”

That’s a whole post in itself, but I started to think about public figures/symbols in cultural consciousness, and how much the longevity of a figure rests on the repetition of that person’s name and his/her stories. I’m sure Aiden has heard to George Washington before -- In fact, I’m fairly certain I explained to him that Washington, D.C. was named after him -- but the absence of George’s head and stories in his life made that information both irrelevant and quickly forgotten. King Sejong, however, is on Korean currency, there’s a museum (which Aiden’s been to, though he probably doesn’t remember) named after him, and stories about him abound. There’s a statue of Admiral Yi Sun-Shin in Kwanghwamun, there was a movie or drama made about him while we were living in Korea, we saw a model of the turtle boat at the Lotte World museum, not to mention that for little boys he’s a kick-ass dude. Now that we’re living in China (and thinking about taking a trip to Beijing) I’m sure Aiden’s little brain will be collecting impressions and images of Mao, Confucius, and other Chinese characters without even knowing about it. He’s not yet studying history (they take social studies, which very neutrally started with Ancient Egypt) so his historical knowledge is pretty spotty.

Anyway, I owe another language post, but I’m really behind in a bunch of areas and skipping class to catch up, so I’ll have to write it another day. But I wanted to record this before I forgot about it!

First time back to Seoul since the move

Rather rambling, unedited description of our first trip back to Korea.

So we’re just back from three weeks back in Korea. This was our first trip back (and the kids’ first trip out of China) since moving 6 months ago. I had imagined leaving the kids with the in-laws and having oodles of time to catch up on reading and studying while there but that didn’t happen. We were running around like crazy people pretty much the whole trip, seeing as many friends as we could and having the kids return to their old schools, piano lessons, swimming lessons, and taekwondo. It was great.

We landed at Incheon on a Saturday evening. Pretty much from the moment we landed there was this sense of lightness and relief. The signs, the language -- everything was familiar. We all stopped in the bathroom and I was tickled to be back in a place where you can reliably (in the airport, at least) find toilet paper in the bathrooms. There were no people yelling at each other. And then there was -- a mother yelling at her daughter for wanting to get divorced. That was weird. They were both clearly from the countryside. Later as we were leaving she was crying and holding onto her mother’s leg, begging for forgiveness. [It reminded me to the begger children around People’s Park here in Shanghai -- some of them only 3 or 4 years old -- who grab onto your legs when you walk by and beg for money.] But that’s the thing -- I knew this particular incident was odd. I have enough sense of Seoul to be able to interpret whether something is normal or an exception. In China (because people kept asking me to describe China) I just have no clue. All I can really see is my own reactions to China, with no reliable sense of what lies underneath.

On the airport bus I wanted KC to stop talking to me so I could take in the landscape. “It looks so peaceful and organized, doesn’t it?” he asked me. It did, but I think that’s as much a function of expectation than some sort of reality. Parking on the sidewalk, small stores with contents spilling out into the sidewalk -- my perceptual habits are used to accommodating scenes like that. Our neighborhood in China is relatively new and nice but China in general is still an assault on my senses, because so many parts are still puzzling or unfamiliar. Coming into our neighborhood in Gangnam things seem even more orderly because Gangnam-gu has spent so much money in recent years straightening sidewalks and repaving. The newer buildings also have fewer signs on the outside. The effect of this is a rather restrained, and organized atmosphere. It reminded me of going to Tokyo some years back. Although cities in general tend towards a sense of crowdedness and chaos, the precision of the small details in Tokyo made it feel much more orderly than Seoul at the time.

There was snow on the ground, so after we got off the bus the boys started a snowball fight. Max still has the idea that snow and Christmas belong together, and was quite puzzled when presents arrived without snow. When we got to Seoul he asked, “Is it Christmas again?”

Sunday morning the first thing I did after a nice meal (courtesy of my mother-in-law) of 떡국 and Seoul Coffee Milk was get a much needed haircut and 두피 treatment. As my friend Ming once said, when you move you can always make new friends but it is really hard to find someone to cut your hair. I’ve only cut my hair once in Shanghai (out of desperation) and my hair guy in Seoul spent a good deal of time holding up various parts of my hair going, “Wha....? What happened here? Why is it cut like this? Who cut your hair? Why didn’t you go to a nice Korean salon?” Ha. For the record, I wanted to do it on the cheap in a neighborhood place, and the job they did wasn’t bad, but they did hack one side oddly short. Anyway, I was chatting with the woman who washes my hair and she commented that I seemed to have forgotten a lot of Korean. The words were just coming... rather... slowly. I kept thinking in Chinese first. It was a weird feeling.

Max had a little trouble with Korean too. KC and I decided not to move around much for those first 6 months because we wanted to give the kids a chance to settle down. By the end of 6 months, though, we had all made incredible improvement in Chinese and gotten out of the habit of speaking Korean. We debated about going back to the U.S. for the Chinese New Year holiday (I’d really like to see my friends and family there, especially my new niece) but we decided that on top of the distance, cost, and time difference, having the kids speak Korean and renew all their social and familial ties to Korea would be more important. Watching Max and myself stumble with Korean those first few days made me glad we made the choice to come back to Seoul.

Aiden and KC didn’t have any trouble with the language. Aiden’s at the right age, I think -- I’ve heard (or read? can’t remember) that 8 is the magical age for languages. Aiden jumped right back in with no noticeable difficulty. It took Max and me a few days and then we were fine. And Max surprised me by having whole conversations with me in Chinese during this time. Since we mostly speak English and Korean at home I hadn’t realized just quite how good his Chinese is. He uses conjunctions and will pick up on any word I use and use it back to me, correctly. Blew me away. I knew he had improved a lot, but I had underestimated him.

KC had suspended my cellphone account so I could keep the number while gone and I had to wait until a weekday to reactivate it. So Monday morning I sent out a spate of text messages announcing that we were back and asking if we could make playdates. It was so nice to have my old number and phone intact, and the messages started coming back immediately. I spent so much time on the phone that day that I ran out of batteries and began to think Aiden needed his own secretary.

It was wonderful to re-enter our old communities; it was as if we never left. I felt, again, grateful for doing all those classroom cleanings and lunch duties with the first grade moms because we have a bond now that was slow to build but is now strong. We’re depending on the kids having strong relationships with their friends in different countries in order to maintain both language and cultural knowledge, plus the desire to maintain those. But I’m starting to realize how dependent I am on the mothers of his friends to keep those friendships up. They need to value the relationship as much as I do or it doesn’t really work. I’ve started to notice myself scrutinizing Aiden’s friends’ parents; not because I care so much what their socio-economic backgrounds are but because their values do really matter. Aiden has a new friend in Shanghai that we invited over a few times and each time his mom said no. It didn’t matter to me what reputation his friend had as long as they liked to play together, but after meeting and talking with his mom I began to realize the friendship probably wouldn’t go very far. She’s a very ambitious mom, and pushes her son in all sorts of areas, but just doesn’t seem to place much value on his social relationships.

I really appreciate this about the Seoul moms I’ve gotten close to: that they make an effort to sustain those relationships. And because so many of them, like us, have either lived abroad or are planning to expose their kids to multiple educational systems, they are good to talk to about the experience of moving back and forth. I hear from friends who have repatriated that because the experience of living abroad is relatively rare in the U.S., friends back home often don’t really want to listen to stories of the time spent away; the experience is too incomprehensible, or maybe they feel threatened or something. My friends back home have been pretty supportive but it was good to talk to these moms nonetheless. They know how much effort it takes to try to keep a foot in each culture. It took me a long time to break into the social group here, but those ties, once made, seem pretty strong.

This time back I was really glad we had sent Aiden to a neighborhood school. Walking around the place we kept bumping into people we knew. The first day back (after my haircut) we went to lunch at a neighborhood udon place located next to a large complex where one of Aiden’s friends lives, and while we waited for a table I jokingly said to Aiden, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we ran into Dylan here?” Not five minutes later a pack of boys runs around the corner -- not just Dylan, but Dylan and three more of Aiden’s friends. They immediately begin jumping up and down and shouting, “장웅재! 장웅재! 장웅재!" I had told Aiden that the first day would be a family day, but so much for that. He ate a quick lunch and joined his friends to play. If he had gone to international school (or even local school with an international section, like he does now) we wouldn’t be able to depend on seeing familiar faces upon returning; the turnover rate is too high.

Between running around seeing friends and sending the kids back to their own schools we were continuously busy. The kids in Korea were on vacation too but I assumed that they would be pretty busy with hakwon and other activities so I had planned, with the help of my father-in-law, to send the kids to piano, taekwondo, and swimming nearly every day, having them resume the lessons they left off when we moved. We’ve found lessons surprisingly expensive in China -- perhaps because they are more geared towards the well-off than they are in Korea, where each neighborhood has its own small piano, taekwondo, etc. studios, keeping the prices competitive. The kids come home from school late in Shanghai and with the overwhelming task of adjusting to a new language we decided not to enroll them in anything extra (though Aiden has swimming once a week at school and Max takes piano in his kindergarten). Max started taekwondo this time. It was nice to see him willing to go as long as he could follow his brother. Aiden held his hand and showed him what to do.

Our insurance is in Korea so we also had to do all the uncomfortable medical and dental check-ups. Aiden’s eyes have gotten a lot worse so the first Monday morning we were at the eye doctor, and then later in the day I took him to the Coex to get him new glasses. KC and I have been going to the same store in the Coex for the last ten years or more, always to the same guy there, who knows us well. I left Max with my in-laws and Aiden was positively jubilant the whole way there -- riding the subway, walking down the street. His face was beaming and he was jumping up and down with glee. Not just because he got to have some mommy time but because, I realized, he was so ecstatic to be back in Korea. He’s usually a happy kid, but he was bouncing with happiness to be back. I could, in that moment, really get a sense of how hard the move has been on him. I felt that sense of lightness too, being back in Korea, back in our old stomping grounds, full of random knowledge about where to go for this and that and how to phrase things with tact. It was how I felt going back to the U.S. during those first few years of living in Korea.

Anyway, we got to the glasses store and I was talking with the guy (I can never remember his name, because he looks like an Asian John Cusack, and that’s all I can think about when I see him) about our move and stuff and I had a flashback to the first time I was in that store. It was before we were married, so that must have been over 11 years ago. He gave me an eye exam and I couldn’t understand a word; KC had to translate for me and I felt very uncomfortable and embarrassed because I couldn’t understand. It was a measure of how far I’ve come, to be able to bring my son back here and go through the process of getting him glasses and conversing about a range of topics without a dictionary, without preparation, without even thinking. It felt really good, and reminded me that the feeling of ease and lightness could be had in China too, if I gave it some time.

Both kids went back to their old schools. Max’s kindergarten principal told me just to send him for the whole trip, which was unexpected and very nice of her. I had already scheduled all the other classes so I ended up sending him less than half the time. It’s still the same school year (since they go March to March and we left after their first semester) so his old classmates and teacher mobbed him upon return. Aiden’s teacher also told me to send him, since our last week there overlapped with their first week of school after the lunar new year break. The Korean school schedule is a bit weird. They pretty much finish the curriculum by the end of December, then have a month off. Then they go back after the lunar new year for exams, but in the lower grades there are no exams. So Aiden went to school for a day and watched movies, played games, and made things with paper. No real studying. It was nice to see his classmates though.

I was going to write more but I see this post is already really long. By the end of the trip my Korean was back, Max’s Korean had improved a great deal, and so did Aiden’s. Aiden’s become quite a bookworm. I caught myself scolding him a few times for going over to friends houses and reading their books instead of playing with them. I bought him a new manhwa book on Obama’s life, which he read in something like 30 minutes. I couldn’t quite believe he read it so quickly, so I started quizzing him, and then he accused me of being like Obama’s mother, because I’m always getting after him about studying. Ha. Our luggage was quite heavy with books for the kids and for myself. I picked up TOPIK and KLPT books while there, but I don’t know which one to take. Anyone want to give me some advice?

Several of Aiden’s friends’ moms commented that he’s matured a lot since we left. One called me to tell me that he had told her, “옛날에 할아버지가 잔소리 하시는것 되게 싫어했는데, 이제는 얼마나 사랑하시는지 느꼈어요." (Something like: I used to hate it when Grandpa would nag me, but now I understand that’s how much he loves me.”) He’s been less shy. Neither kid wanted to return to Shanghai, but Aiden said he was still glad we moved because he could appreciate the differences. Max announced, as soon as we arrived, that he loved staying in Grandma and Grandpa’s house and that we should stay there and not go back. I said, “What about Julia?” He said, “She can get on an airplane and move to Korea!”

One of my main accomplishments during the trip: I finally got around to making and printing about half of our Seoul Life book. Long time readers will recall that we make a travel book for each of our trips (I’m almost caught up on those too -- the last trip before the move and the one trip to Shenzhen hadn’t been made yet, but have been now) but I wanted to make a book about our life in Seoul. Aiden and I spent some time brainstorming what it would include: people we know, places we go, schools we’ve attended, food we eat, holidays, seasons, etc. I’m not really sure where to get things printed yet in Shanghai, but I have a guy who did all my printing in Seoul and I wanted to use him so that was good incentive to knock out a bunch of the book. Cost me about 100,000 won in printing, I got a lot of it done, and it was great to be back and look through the pages with the kids and my in-laws. Not only did it give us the chance to look back at all the fun things we did in our five years in Seoul, but it also let us watch the kids grow up again. I had forgotten how little Aiden was when we first moved. And since Max was born in Seoul, looking at his baby pictures again was great fun. I wish there was some way I could post parts of the books online for people to see, but the files are huge.

Anyway, we’re back in Shanghai now. Although it’s great to be back in our own place, and the warm weather has triggered a kind of biological excitement at the approach of spring, there’s a feeling of reluctance to return, a kind of dread at being back in a place where I’m too nervous to even get my hair cut at regular intervals. Aiden’s been complaining about going back to school. I have to remind myself that this feeling will pass, and that it is not the fault of China, but rather a natural shrinking away from the unfamiliar and challenging. I have to remember to be patient, and to appreciate the battles we already won, and know that this feeling, in time, will pass.

Multicultural living forum on Shanghai Family

Hi everyone,
I recently got involved with Shanghai Family magazine, which has just launched its website. Check it out! And, for all you Shanghai people out there, look at the forums. I'll be moderating one on "multicultural living." I hope that we can get some good discussions going there. I've pasted my intro to the forum below.


You may be thinking, What is “multicultural living,” and why have a forum for it?

If you’re anything like me, when you move to a foreign country your first instinct is to think through the logistics: Where will we live? What schools will the kids go to? What do I need to bring? How do we get our visas? But I’ve found, after two such moves, that those are the easy things. There are resources available to help you make such decisions and a finite number of choices.

The hard part, for me, is learning to feel at home in the new place, to cultivate relationships with the people I meet there, and to feel like I belong as I move alongside strangers and go about my daily tasks. I find myself in a new place where even people’s gestures are incomprehensible, where they have different rituals and standards of politeness, and where I stick out like a sore thumb even when walking around.

And I’m not just talking about interacting with locals -- I spend just as much time trying to decipher other foreigners!

So on one hand, I suspect that there are a lot of questions floating around out there about the proper way to behave at a wedding, how much to put in a hongbao, what to bring as a guest at someone’s home, and the meanings of various rituals.

But there’s another side to the idea of multicultural living as well. I'm married to someone who grew up in a different country, speaking a different language and raised in a different culture, and we’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how to articulate and work with those differences over our marriage. And since want our kids to feel comfortable in both cultures and languages, “multicultural living” has been a kind of domestic experiment: how can we raise our kids to be able to move across boarders and feel at home in different places?

Even for people who are not in a cross-culture marriage, this may be something that you are interested in for your children -- especially for the kids who have grown up abroad.

So whether you have
- questions or insights about cultural differences living here in Shanghai,

or
- ideas or questions about ways in which to incorporate multiple languages and cultures in your own or your kids' lives

THIS is the forum for you!

Welcome to the forum, and post away!

The age of criticism

First, a belated response to some comments.

David, thanks for the warm comments. I hope you are all well, and that we'll be able to see each other soon -- maybe in HK or Shunde? We miss you all. I love seeing the pictures of Susie. No matter where you end up, I think hearing Korean from a young age will help her down the line, even if she doesn't continue with the language. I suspect that part of the reason I've been able to pick up Korean and Chinese relatively quickly is that I was exposed to Cantonese when I was young.

Micah, thanks for your comment! I agree with what you said about memorization. One of the reasons I'm content with Pinghe right now is because they do, through subjects taught in English with American texts, include more creative expression than I was expecting. Aiden's doing a speech to run for mayor of the class today, he made a poster to save the sharks before that, and made a model of ancient Egypt before that... those were the kinds of activitis I did in public school in the U.S., and I think I had a very good education. These projects involve some relatively long-term planning and a variety of forms of expression: verbal, 2-dimensional art, 3-dimensional art. I'm not sure what the U.S. is like these days (and of course the U.S. educational system is very regional); but while I think the U.S. in general is good with creative problem solving and critical thinking there seems to be strong distaste for memorization. And sometimes I think memorization is good. You've got to memorize the times tables. You've got to memorize spelling. And when it comes to learning a language you've got to do some memorization. Even in a speech, you've got to be able to hold the structure in your head and talk around it. So my comment about memorization wasn't to embrace it wholeheartedly, but to recognize (as someone who also has had a distaste for it pedagogically) that a little memorization can be a good thing. But I should have also commented that in his curriculum overall memorization has been accompanied by other more creative and critical techniques.

This is a bit tangential but I really like the writing textbook they are using. I've done a lot of teaching of writing (to graduate students and for younger children) and I was really impressed but the book. But (as I'm finding now) this kind of work (creative writing, projects like those described above) requires a lot of participation from the parents.

Some kids are more self-sufficient (most girls seem to be able to do these things by themselves, if my quick survey of the other moms counts as evidence) but with Aiden I have to spend a lot of time helping him break his projects (and test preparation) into steps, making him work on those things daily, helping him through the process of revision. As any writer knows, most of writing is being able to step back and think through a piece of work in multiple ways, to be able to sense structure and flow, and then to revise. Aiden’s a “let’s finish this quickly and play” kind of kid. Helping him with projects -- helping him tame his ideas and make them presentable and polished -- requires a lot of patience (I’m failing in that area) and attention. Memorization, from the parent’s perspective, is easier. It doesn’t require much thinking on the parent’s part. Maybe my standards are high (I don’t think they are) but this kind of schooling (assuming the projects are done at home -- the kids in American schools have very little homework) requires a lot more of the parent than the other kind does. I’m very glad that I’m not working and can spend this time with him, because he really needs the help. Max is a different animal. He sits next to us at the table and works with a great deal of concentration on his workbooks and drawings. I’m guessing that he’ll be able to do his work more independently. I don’t know how much of that is related to birth-order (he likes to do what his brother does, even if it means sitting at the table and “studying” for several hours every day) and how much is personality. Max has always been more detail-oriented, better with small-motor control, more into drawing. I’m teaching him to read Korean now and he’s catching on surprisingly quickly.

On another tangent, my blog and my other writing has suffered from this lack of time. I’m in school all morning and I have to save energy and patience to help Aiden with his homework all evening. I have a few hours in the afternoon to split between building my social relationships, doing household things, and working on my own long-term writing project. It tires me out.

What I’ve been meaning to write about: the age of criticism

Until a certain age Mommy and Daddy are just Mommy and Daddy, not People -- but the main sources of comfort, security, and knowledge of rules and boundaries. Kids Max’s age can’t think of their parents as people, they just are. But at some point kids start to realize that their parents are not perfect, that they can be criticized like anyone else. And once that criticism starts, it never stops, does it?

Aiden’s reaching the age of criticism. He’s old enough to have accumulated a large set of evidence -- make that grievances -- about the way that we treat him. He’s been around the block and seen the large discrepancies in the way people parent in different families and different places. I have taken care to explain to him (many times, I tend to run at the mouth) why I make certain decisions that are different from his friends’ parents: why he’s not allowed to watch much TV, why I won’t buy him a Nintendo DS, why we have to move, etc. There are unintended side effects to everything. A few weeks ago we met the daughter of a friend and after a few minutes Aiden sidled up to me and whispered, “Mom, that kid is really spoiled.” He then spent the rest of the evening making whispered analysis of all the ways in which the mom encouraged the kid’s spoiled behavior. So he’s able to see the ways in which parenting choices mold the behavior of children, and I think that’s generally a good thing (as long as he keeps it to himself in the name of politeness) but it’s also encouraged him to increasingly turn his critical eye on my parenting choices. Some days I’m feeling a little like a Big Three Executive meeting Congress. But with a little more to show, I hope.

The other day he was being extra fidgety with his Chinese tutor (who has learned that days when Aiden doesn’t have gym class are days in which he cannot sit still) and she jokingly said, “If you don’t listen to me maybe I should start hitting you.” He said, very seriously, “You can’t do that!” She said, “Your mom doesn’t hit you?” He said, “No, of course not! If she did I could leave and go to another family.”

Where did he get that idea? But this idea seems to have taken over his thinking. I guess I have, in retrospect, presented parenting, living, behavior, etc. as a series of choices, emphasizing the ways in which we can pick and choose how we want to be, and it makes sense I suppose to extend that to family. The other day he was complaining that an old reward system that had existed in Korea was no longer (I had taken advantage of the move and let it expire). I explained that since he was older he no longer needed to be rewarded for that particular behavior; he was mad and said, “I don’t want to be a part of the family anymore. I want to go to a different family!” I laughed at him. Not a nice laugh, I was pissed. “You want to leave your family over a piece of CANDY???” Because I forget that although he can be supremely rational about some things, he’s just an 8-year old, unable to look past the blow of a loss of a piece of candy and remember all the ways in which his family is really good.

In other kid news...
Both kids are speaking so well it is a little scary. Aiden now has character dictation once a week and they’ve progressed to some tough characters. His stroke order is more correct than mine, and he can now understand grammatical patterns without ever learning them as such. (It’s so different with the adult learner. Though I do remember finding myself using grammatical patterns I never learned in Korean; one day they just started emerging from my mouth. Surprised me as much as anybody else.) Max can now have short conversations in Chinese, and he speaks whole sentences easily.

I’m so jealous.

Aiden came home one day to tell me a story about an incident in gym class that included the following: “...and he hit me with the 쇠 hula hoop and then the 후반장 said, “下课了？“ And the teacher said, “没有。” It made me laugh. We tend to mix a lot of Korean and English at home, but that was the first time he threw some Chinese into the mix. It used to be Korean with a little English, then it was something like, “Mommy will you 고쳐this 장난감for me? 빨리!" (Max) And now it’s more like, “Mommy can we have some 계란for dinner?” Just a word here and there. Though they still tend to talk to each other in Korean. We’ll go back to Korea for a few weeks in January and I think their Korean ratio will rise at that time. I’m just playing with percentages now.

***

I’m not sure how long I can keep the Santa Claus charade up. I took them to see Santa at a fair at Concordia school last month and Aiden said with suspicion, “Is this the real Santa?” One of the volunteers said, “Is there any other kind?” Then just before we sat on Santa’s lap he asked me, “Can I speak to Santa in Korean?” I was mentally kicking myself for having told him last year that Santa can speak all languages in the world. The circumstances necessitating that declaration are fuzzy but I think it was probably because he wrote his letter in English and Korean last year. This year it was all in English. Anyway, I told him something lame like, “This is an English-speaking fair and for the sake of politeness maybe you should stick to English.” And then a week or so later we went to see the lighting ceremony at the Hongqiao Marriot where there was another Santa. Aiden said, “Mommy, this is a different Santa!” I think the jig is almost up.

From last year, here’s my post on “Lies I tell my kids.” It still makes me laugh.

Four Months in

I can hardly believe we’ve been here for four months. I’m feeling more settled. I really love our apartment and neighborhood. Now that the weather has turned cold and I spend the mornings shivering in an unheated and damp classroom, I am supremely grateful for our apartment with its heated floors, double layers of windows and sunlight. So many Shanghai residents spend the winter (so I hear) with their windows open and no heat. I suppose that’s better for the environment but I’m such a wimp about cold I can’t imagine it.

Speaking of the environment, I meant to mention some of the features of our place that I really like. We control our water temperature, so we only heat the water when we need to use it. The boiler doesn’t run all the time; you turn it on before you need to take a shower or run the floor heating system. (Our apartment has ondol heat which is not common in China but since we sleep on the floor we looked for an apartment with this feature; our neighborhood has a lot of Koreans and therefore a good number of ondol apartments.) You can turn it off when you’re not using it. Same thing with the condenser for the air conditioning and the heating system. Also each room has controls for both floor heat and ceiling level air conditioning/heating. And, like in Korea, there’s a switch to shut off the gas when we’re not cooking. Gas, electricity, and water are relatively expensive in Shanghai and we use them as sparingly as possible, although I have been going a little crazy with the oven (having not had one for the last 5 years) and I do like to make the floor nice and warm when I get home in the evening. Sometime in the middle of the night I’ll turn everything off. Our apartment is pretty well insulated (unusual for China) and retains the heat well.

I also love our neighborhood. The complex itself is very nicely done, when I look out my window I see trees and water and the effect is very peaceful. Cars can’t come into the interior of the complex so it is quiet and safe for the kids to play. There are lots of hidden paths which Max loves to explore. In the mornings there are always a lot of people doing taeqiquan and some sort of sword-dancing. In the afternoons the interior areas are dominated by kids riding their bikes or playing badminton. Just outside of our apartment are shops and cafes. A Sephora and Zara are opening across the street which may pose a danger to my budget. The subway station is a little far compared to Seoul but I found that it only takes me 15 minutes to walk at my pace, and the station is on line 2, which is a really good line for going to Lujiazui or Puxi.

The big language news this month is that Max has started speaking. He started perhaps a week or two ago -- I noticed it when two of his friends came over to play. One of his friends doesn’t speak much English (though she speaks Spanish and French) so the three of them were fighting in Chinese: 这是我的！不，这是我的！ Max was saying it also. After that he took off and seems really keen to speak it. He asks me for translations so he can say all the things he wants to say. One day he came home upset because, “Michelle told Julia ‘I won’t be your friend anymore.’ But she said it in Chinese.” So he understands more than what he can say, and he’s able to respond to questions appropriately most of the time. I’ve also made some headway teaching him to read 한글. Considering how much time I have to spend with Aiden on his homework, this is quite an accomplishment. KC brought back some workbooks from Korea on his last trip and now when Aiden is busy doing his homework (if Max is not still working in his dinner) Max sits at the table and does his homework too. He can now recognize 가,나,다,라, and 마. Poor second child, completely neglected by mommy. He’s also doing better with English lower case letters and phonics. Good thing he likes to draw and write.

Aiden’s recognition of characters is very good now and they’ve started to write and have dictation in the last few weeks. Like me, he can recognize many characters but blanks on how to write them. He also has trouble remembering stroke order. He continues to do 2-3 hours of homework a night. After yelling at him for a half an hour about why he can’t remember the difference between plural and plural possessive I have to remind myself that I’m asking him to absorb an awful lot of information at once and asking an 8-year old to concentrate for that long is, well... asking a lot. The other moms are telling me to give it 6 months; they say after 6 months it gets a lot easier. Overall he’s happy and cheerful although he often complains about having to go to school.

Lately Max has been asking a lot about death. I remember Aiden having similar questions at around 3 or 4 years of age. Max asks, “Why do people have to die? Will Mommy die? Who will cook me food then? [this made me laugh] How will I die?” I told him that everybody dies and that this is why we should live each and every day well. So Aiden said, “But how can I do that when I have to go to school every day? It’s a waste of time! I can’t play, I just have to study.”

As for me, I feel like I’ve hit a plateau, but that may not really be the case. I remember in studying Korean that my progress seemed to follow a step-lilke pattern -- I’d feel like I was stagnating and not learning anything for a while, then all the sudden I’d make a lot of progress. But the hard thing is that often you don’t realize how much you actually are progressing. It’s not noticeable. It’s hard for me to get a sense, for instance, of how much my Korean improved after moving to Seoul. I don’t have a clear memory of what I knew at the point at which we moved, but I do remember that I only understood about half of my conversations with my neighbors. I also remember that there were so many words I didn’t know when KC and his parents talked to each other that I didn’t bother to ask what they meant. By contrast, I understand almost everything they say now; if they use a word I don’t know I ask about it.

The problem right now is that I am a very poor student. I don’t do the homework and I don’t review. For shame. Also I skip class whenever I’m too busy or feeling sick (like right now). The other problem is that I don’t interact enough with Chinese people. I talk to Aiden and KC’s teacher every day, but you have to talk with a variety of people in order to really learn to speak and listen well, especially in China where there’s so much variation in usage and pronunciation. When I was in Korea meeting with other school moms I got to hear a lot of Korean -- they talked a lot and were generally nervous about speaking English. But here when I meet the school moms they are all comfortably bilingual. They speak to each other in Chinese but speak to me in English. Their English is so good and my Chinese so poor by comparison that it feels inappropriate for me to inflict my Chinese on them, therefore I have less chance to practice.

One thing about moving abroad is that you learn that you have to work at cultivating social relationships from the moment you hit the ground. I’m willing to skip class more than I should if it involves meeting people, because I know that I need those relationships for psychological and practical purposes. The biggest accomplishment over the last few months is probably that we have connected with a bunch of other people through our schools, neighborhood, and random other ways.

Three months in

We’ve just passed the three-month mark in Shanghai. I haven’t settled into much of a writing routine yet but I’m trying to continue to jot down notes on our language acquisition.

Max still hasn’t started to do much speaking. He had almost no exposure to Chinese in Korea so I know his listening time will be longer. He has surprised me by offering translations lately -- he’ll tell me “Mommy ‘gei wo’ means ‘give me.’ Gei wo blah blah” where blah blah is some Chinese-sounding thing he makes up and explains to me as “the ghost that killed the bad guy and has to hide under the table” or something like that. As far as I know translation is a different skill than being able to speak so I’m surprised to see him so actively translating. Perhaps this offers some insight into the way he thinks. I think of him as a very verbal kid, a kid who easily repeats what he hears, but looking back I guess he’s only repeating that which he thoroughly understands. That explains his recent Korean explosion, I suppose -- he’s finally verbalizing that which he had heard before but hadn’t understood well enough to say.
Max is also very conscious of who speaks what languages. He seems to categorize the kids in his class by what language they speak well and seems a little suspicious of being good friends with the kids who only speak Chinese -- at least, that’s how he sounds when to talks to me about them. But his teachers tell me he gets along well with everyone and he’s pretty chummy with a little Japanese-Chinese girl who doesn’t speak English. It’s hard to figure out how much weight to give his self-reporting.

Recently Max likes to say, "aiyah!" He says it very seriously and tells me that that is what his piano teacher says when she gets mad. Ha.

I forgot to write about this funny incident in my last post: Max takes piano lessons in school and told me, one day, that his teacher speaks a lot of Korean. I was surprised and asked him, “What Korean words does she say?” He said, “Do rae me fa so la ti do!”

One of Max’s best friends is a little girl named Julia who is black. Max has lived his whole life in Asia and hasn’t seen that many black people, so when we’d go out every time we’d see a black woman he’d tell me that she must be Julia’s mom, and any black kids must certainly be Julia’s siblings. Ha. Anyway, Julia’s mom and I had been exchanging text messages trying to get the kids together to play. (aside: One bad part about being a second child is that your social life always takes a back seat to your older sibling’s. I have been trying to make an effort to find Max a close circle of friends and give him more play dates.) We finally met on a school field trip and then they came over to our place to play afterwards. Julia’s mom is from South America and speaks Spanish, French, English, Chinese, and a little Portuguese. Her Chinese is very good and she’s doing a masters degree at a local university. It was very interesting to talk to her; she’s lived in Asia for a long time and her older son in particular has had a more difficult time finding friends because they stand out so much. Shanghai’s foreigner population feels much higher and more integrated than Seoul’s but most foreigners are white, Asian, or Indian. Her son is local school too (not the same one as Aiden) and it sounds like its been a rocky experience. Julia speaks very good English and Chinese and is quite the social butterfly in kindergarten, but her brother had some trouble with language confusion too. Julia’s mom used to have a good Korean friend (back in HK?) and was talking to me about how she reached out to some of the Korean moms here because she missed her Korean friend, but how hard it is to break into that social circle. I can totally understand that -- it took me a long time in Korea to really break in, even though I spoke Korean well. But I haven’t had any trouble here, I guess it is like riding a bike. I kind of know when to speak, when not too, what to say, how to time my approaches. Talking to her I thought that if we had a third kid I’m not sure how I’d introduce the languages -- three at a time? Or two first?

Aiden has just really started to speak: I see it and he is also reporting to me that he can now participate a little in Chinese during “tai quan dao”-- no longer “taekwondo.” He now will answer his tutor in Chinese. He has covered 30 chapters of their current textbook in class and can recite almost all of them by heart -- he’s got a good memory. I was a little uncertain about the value of so much memorization (especially since the text includes some pretty difficult and bizarre passages) but he does pull out relevant sentences and use them in real life.

We just returned from a weekend trip to Shunde in Guangdong, where my paternal grandmother is from. They speak Guangdonghua there which is totally different from mandarin. We were last there three years ago and Aiden played with a bunch of my cousin’s kids; at that time, they didn’t have any languages in common and communicated with body language and “argh, pew pew, zzzt,” etc -- fighting words, basically. This time they spoke putonghua (Mandarin) to each other -- we were all surprised and delighted to see how well Aiden could get along with putonghua, English, and body language. Aiden doesn’t know how to tease in Chinese but his textbook has a passage about a “mommy chicken” so “mommy chicken” became his new teasing insult, complete with chicken-like head bob.

Aiden’s progress is truly amazing, and his pronunciation is incredibly clear. I think I have pretty good pronunciation, but he puts me to shame. He has also really gotten the hang of pinyin and can spell correctly based on sound. He doesn’t always get the tones right though.

I heard guangdonghua when I was growing up because my parents spoke it to each other (mostly when they were trying to talk about me and my brothers without us understanding) and to their friends, and I always thought it was normal, and putonghua (Mandarin) was a sissy, wussy sounding dialect. Well, after not really hearing guangdonghua for many years I went to Hong Kong a few weeks ago and was shocked to find that guangdonghua is really, REALLY weird sounding. Actually, it sounds awful. It has a lot of sharp, guttural sounds. At first I was so surprised I couldn’t pick out any words. After a few days I started remembering some words. Then this weekend we were in Shunde with my relatives, all of whom were speaking guangdonghua (but speaking putonghua or English to me and KC) and I could pick out more words. Now that I’m learning putonghua I can start to translate word for word (when there is a word for word translation) and appreciate how different the dialects are. “Mei wenti” (putonghua) is “Mo wentai” (guangdonghua), but “xihuan” (putonghua) is “jongyi” (guangdonghua, my romanization). Totally different. Even though I’m a slacker student, putonghua is feeling more natural to me these days, and sometimes if I’ve been speaking Chinese I have trouble switching to Korean.

KC’s made a lot of progress. His ear has improved a lot so he can guess the general meaning of a lot of conversation despite having the least time to study (he’s still the worst one in the family). His knowledge of characters has helped a lot and also I think his general very utilitarian attitude -- he doesn’t try to sound perfect, he just tries to communicate. Shanghai people are pretty used to trying to figure out what others are saying despite differences in accent and in normal conversations I’ve found listeners to be pretty forgiving. I can make all sorts of mistakes (that will cause me to blush and hit myself on the head later) and they will still understand. Perfectionist tendencies must be pushed to the side during the beginning stages of language learning.

Starting now I'm making more of an effort to speak Korean at home. All of us have naturally begun speaking more English (and better English) as time has passed. I think we have to make a conscious effort to make Korean our home language before we get out of the habit of speaking it altogether. If we don't make a habit of speaking it we'll all forget it (especially the kids and I) pretty quickly.

Languages aside, I’m finding that three months in we’re still really adjusting. I know that the process takes a long time but I have to remind myself that even though we have a routine and things have gone smoothly that the psychological toll of moving to a new place (and a new country) is a long-term one. We’re all a little rough around the edges, we all have trouble holding our tempers, we all find ourselves less nice than usual. I’m usually the temperamental one and KC is usually pretty even-keeled, but we’ve both been equally affected and for myself, at least, I need more time to spend alone with my own thoughts so that I can be on better behavior with others. This is the tricky thing about moving -- it’s not a wound you can see or a hurt you can sense, but something that just makes you feel a little less like working and a kind of rawness that makes you get angry before you can think about why. I think that much of the dissatisfaction expats have with their new country of residence has to do with those unrecognized psychological discomforts than with something that is really there -- of course, there are difficult parts, but often the anger at those difficulties seems irrational or overblown. Another American friend of mine who also recently moved to Shanghai after living in Seoul for a long time told me she worries she is depressed. She doesn’t really want to go out, she’s happy to be alone, she just hasn’t been herself. I told her I think it’s just the move and to give it some time. I think it must be even harder when you’re older (she’s probably 20 years older than me) and have lived in the previous place longer.