(3) Out and About

We have started taking family trips to sites around Chengdu on Sunday afternoons. By the time Sam has woken up from his nap and we’ve all rallied ourselves it’s a short excursion, but an hour or two of public space is long enough for the boys anyway, and then we find somewhere interesting for dinner. We have tended not to do much of this until recently, partly because whenever we considered going somewhere at the weekend, we would think of the crowds and the attention the boys would get, and usually decide it was preferable to stay and play in our compound. But now that Sam is old enough to run around by himself we have decided to explore a little more.

Last week we went to Tianfu Square in the center of Chengdu. This is a large plaza overlooked by a 20 foot tall statue of Chairman Mao, his arm raised in a revolutionary salute. The square itself is new although the statue has been there for a long time. Ethan said that there didn’t used to be a central square in Chengdu, so during the June 4 protests local students had to gather at a nearby department store, which they burned down. Yes, here in Chengdu even political protest takes place in a shopping mall. This does beg the question of why the authorities would want to provide an alternative location such as a large central square. One can only assume that the square is extremely well monitored and protected from such possibilities. Apparently China is the second most observed society in the world...... second only to the UK.

Nonetheless we had a fun hour or so running round in circles and taking photos in front of the Mao statue. If the space is big enough the boys can run away from unwelcome attention. Sam was oblivious to it all until recently, but he has started to resent it. The sight of a group of strangers in formation, shrieking endearments and bearing down on you at high speed must be a little scary, especially if you are under 3 feet tall. So he has started taking tips from his brother, who tends to lash out at anyone who dares to approach him. The pair of them karate kicking together doesn’t exactly decrease the levels of attention.

The news from Xiao Long’s extended family is that her friend Xiao Wu’s ex-husband has been staying in her apartment for the past month. Xiao Wu is the friend who was driven to jump off a bridge by her husband’s behaviour, but after recovering from that sh eventually ran off to their hometown, taking all his money with her. He must have got some of it back because Xiao Long was telling me that he just lost everything again in some kind of phony pyramid investment scheme and is totally down on his luck. He was persuaded to invest by his older sister, who lost even more than he did. After Xiao Wu left him and they got divorced, but he followed her back home and they continued to see each other. Xiao Wu opened a tea house and mahjong parlour and he tried to help out, but the business didn’t do well. As Xiao Long said, you can’t make money from something like that if you are too fond of playing mahjong yourself. So Xiao Wu is thinking of returning to Chengdu, but Xiao Long said she won’t help her find a job this time, not after she walked out on her last family so suddenly. Not to mention letting her beloved Sam fall over and whack his head on a stone step.

I am amazed at the lengths Xiao Long and her family and friends will go to help each other out. They don’t have medical insurance or any kind of social welfare safety net, so they rely on each other. If someone is sick or has a financial setback, everyone else chips in and clears out their bank account if necessary to pay the bills. It’s a different kind of social welfare. People here can be indifferent to the plight of a stranger, cycling right by someone who has been hurt in a traffic accident, or pausing only for lengthy rubbernecking before hurrying on their way, but they will give everything they have to someone in their circle.

In the case of Xiao Wu’s husband, Xiao Long said she and her husband don’t have enough money right now to lend him any, so all they could do was offer him a place to sleep and eat for a while. So he is living with them and working as a pedicab driver. This is gruelling work, he is out of the door at 8 am and sometimes doesn’t get home until 2 or 3 in the morning, but he can make a lot of money from it, nearly three thousand yuan since he started a month ago. He and his first wife are jointly responsible for their daughter’s college tuition and living expenses. He is supposed to send her several hundred a month plus half of the annual tuition, but recently the mother has paid all the tuition herself from her wages in a factory in Guangdong. When he goes back to their hometown he lives with his younger sister, who is doing OK according to Xiao Long, a regular family who own their own apartment and earn about two thousand yuan a month. His other daughter, the one he had with Xiao Wu, lives with her grandmother. I’ve never met the guy but it strikes me that there are a lot of capable women keeping him afloat.

(2) Dinner Time!

Blog 2 Dinner Time

I was thinking this week about which aspects of being a stay-at-home mother are easier here than they would be at home and which are more difficult. There is no doubt that having Xiao Long and Xiao Zeng to help me is an enormous blessing. Partly what it does is compensate for the fact that the basic domestic routine is more time-consuming here: clothes get dirtier and have to be washed more often, there’s no dryer so they have to be hung out and the washing machine is an old fashioned top-loader, so the clothes come out all scrunched up and everything needs ironing. And the furniture has to be dusted and the floor mopped every day or so, otherwise layers of grimy dust accumulate overnight. I don’t remember that at home, I don’t think I dusted more than once a year when I lived in London, and it wasn’t a problem, although quite possibly my standards were lower. Without help there would be no end to it here, but two ayis more than make up for the difference and leave me free to do other things, so that is definitely an aspect that is easier. Nonetheless, there are certain things they cannot help with.

For me the most stressful time of the day is dinner preparation and consumption. Thinking about it, this is true to a certain extent when I am back in the UK, but not quite in the same way. Of course it would be a walk in the park if I just delegated all the shopping and cooking to Xiao Long, which is what many people and all working mothers do, but as we find her food virtually inedible that isn’t really an option. I do resort to it sometimes, when I have to be out of the door at 6 pm for a meeting, but I will then come home to find that Isaac refused to eat the meal and Xiao Long made him a jam sandwich instead. Plus, much as we love good Chinese food, our tastes are still essentially western and western food is what we all want to eat most nights of the week.

So shopping and cooking takes up a fair amount of each day, and this involves levels of stress not present at home. For example, getting to the shops in the first place entails waiting on the street for taxis, on the way back laden down with many small, heavy and easily-broken plastic shopping bags. Sometimes this is a smooth operation, with a friendly, helpful driver pulling up smartly to the curb in front of me. But other times it involves a lot of frustrating hanging around, hailing cabs which whoosh past with a supercilious glare from the driver, despite there being no evidence of a passenger unless he or she is prone in the back seat.

I have to digress here and say that if a cab does stop, it is frequently nabbed from under my nose by someone else, an elderly lady who was lurking in the shadow under a tree or more often a young woman in high heels who totters out from nowhere and grabs the door handle right in front of me. Men don’t do this to me as often as women, although they do to Ethan apparently. It is a particularly infuriating cultural quirk, one that makes the Little Englander blood in me boil with fury at the sheer rudeness of it. But like so many other things it just comes down to different rules. Getting a cab here is not a case of first come, first served, but first past the post. It’s the same basic rule as for driving: just look out for yourself, move towards your goal, avoid obstacles and ignore what everyone else is doing. If everyone does this, the system is surprisingly coherent; the problems arise when someone breaks the rules and pays attention to other traffic. The cab-stealing routine is based on the same principle: people spot a cab and try to get in it, oblivious of who else might be doing the same thing. I am one of those rule-breaking problems, giving everyone in the vicinity the evil eye to try and guilt-trip them into acknowledging I have been waiting longest. But it is very tempting to slide into this habit and I have to confess to sometimes turning a blind eye to the person who might possibly have been waiting before me. Is this acculturation? Or just plain bad manners?

The time I was most infuriated by it was when I was bringing the children home after watching the local ex-pat rugby team one Saturday afternoon. We strolled towards the main road with a couple of other long-term residents of Chengdu, making small talk as we went. We reached the road and the man next to us stuck out his hand to flag down the first cab. Oh, how helpful of him, I thought as I stood there clutching one child with each hand. But instead of helping me load the children into the cab, or even just waving me towards it and looking for another one, the man just jumped into it and sailed away without a backward glance. That is plain bad manners, in any culture.

Anyway once I get to the store, which is usually Carrefour, there are other challenges ahead. Yes, it is a large French supermarket chain and it does stock a certain amount of imported western food and some western things made for the local market. It also stocks many things completely unavailable at home, and on an adventurous day I may try my luck with some of them. Certainly I love the range of fruit and vegetables and the amazing number of different pulses and varieties of rice, not to mention the subtle varieties of green tea. The fresh market has higher quality produce but I usually end up in Carrefour because it also sells things like cheese and pasta and washing up liquid, which the market does not. Plus the meat is packaged and doesn’t still have hooves attached, which I cannot quite get used to.

With the food finally prepared, I usually sit down with Isaac and Sam at around 6 o’clock to feed them. At some point before this Isaac will ask in a wary voice, “what am I having for dinner?” If I say “spaghetti and bacon” or “pizza”, his response is ecstatic. If I say anything else, there will be whining and complaining. But our system doesn’t brook any complaints, so we sit down anyway and I set a kitchen timer to give him 30 minutes to eat. At some point, as he resentfully pushes his chicken and rice and broccoli around the plate he often asks me, “why can’t you make things I like for dinner?”

So then we have this conversation:
“OK, tell me what you like.”
“I like pizza with bacon!”
“Good, that’s one thing.”
“And spaghetti with bacon! And hot dogs!”
“OK, What else?
“Uh, cheese on toast…..and croque monsieur!”
“So that’s toasted cheese with or without ham in it”
“Yes, that counts as two things.”
“Fine. Anything else?”
“Hmmm…….quesadillas!”

You see where this is going: he’ll eat anything so long as it is a wheat-based carbohydrate topped with melted cheese, with or without some form of over-salted pork product.

I try to point this out to him gently. “Sweetheart, those things you like are all the same kinds of food. I do make you those things several times a week but you need to eat different things as well, from the food pyramid you leaned about at school, remember?”

“Yes, but the biggest part of the pyramid is bread and toast and spaghetti, it’s good to eat loads of those foods." “True, but you cab't only eat the bottom part and the top part, you also need to eat lots of vegetables and fruit and protein like meat and fish. Can you think of something you like that doesn’t have bread or cheese or bacon in it?”

A pause, then a triumphant exclamation: “I know….candy floss!”

In the meantime, Sam will have shoveled half of the food in his bowl into his mouth and spread the rest around his person and the surrounding surfaces. He will then shout, “bu zuo, bu zuo!”, (no sit) struggle out of his seat and attempt to clamber onto the table to gain better access to glasses of water, hot cups of tea, pepper grinders and other attractive objects. Isaac then wants to get up and play with him and we go through the ritual of pretending to glue his butt to his chair until he has finished eating. At some point this results in a cry of,
“No fair! How come Sam gets to play and I don’t?”
“Sam has eaten his dinner already.”
“Not all of it, a lot is on his t-shirt.”
“True, but he ate enough, he ate it while you were still talking. Back in your chair.”

Another level of stress is that while buying the food, and while preparing it come to that, and for several hours afterwards, in fact basically until we all wake up safely the next morning, I worry about food safety. This is a big issue in China at the moment, as I’m sure you have seen in the papers. There was a very good BBC Radio Four news piece on the subject this summer, by Fuschia Dunlop on From Our Own Correspondent. I cannot access it from where I am right now but you can probably find it if you search the bbc site.

The current scare in our area is a pig disease called “blue ear”, which has caused the price of pork to sky-rocket. I assume that a large, foreign-owned supermarket chain is not going to buy pork from blue-eared pigs, but I still wonder every time I cook pork, or any other meat for that matter, let alone seafood. Even with fruit and veg. there is the issue of pesticides. OK, pesticides are everywhere, but what if I just happen to buy a bunch of spinach grown by a farmer who, knowingly or otherwise, bought a cheap load of pesticide made from something really deadly? There was a recent scandal in Beijing about meat dumplings filled with cardboard softened with caustic soda, another about milk that didn’t contain any actual milk…and then there was the tub of chocolate ice-cream I bought last week, thinking at the time that it felt a little on the light side, only to open it up at dinner-time and find it was already half eaten! Think about it all too long and I’m ready to serve cheese on toast every night.

Finally, however, the meal is finished and the mood lightens. Sam, like me, gets very grumpy when he’s hungry, but immediately after eating he gains a new burst of energy and good humour. Isaac is relieved that the dinner ordeal is over for another day. After he has reluctantly jammed the last piece of broccoli into his mouth, usually just as his timer rings, and I’ve picked the clumps of rice from Sam’s clothes, and we have tussled with the dustpan and brush for a while, me trying to sweep up the discarded food and Sam trying to spread it around again, then it’s playtime. So that by the time Ethan walks through the door, everyone is happy, there is music playing and the boys are dancing around or playing hide and seek or jumping on the sofas. Then it’s time for dessert, as long as it’s not ice-cream.

(1) Catching Up

Catching Up

It has been several months since I posted anything, the long three-month school holiday being the main reason. We travelled to the US, the UK and, once back in Chengdu, up to the Tibetan grasslands for a memorable week.

But now we are back into the school routine, I have resolved to write one substantial post every week for the next year. Allowing myself a couple of weeks off, that will be 50 posts between now and September 2008. Assuming we stay in China, which looks increasingly likely, I should end up with a record of the highs and lows of life in Chengdu with a young family. It will be interesting to look back on and for the boys to read when they are older, if nothing else.

We have been back from our travels for 6 weeks now, but I am only just beginning to feel settled again. Having spent all summer telling friends and family how much we enjoy life in China and are looking forward to spending another three years here, I arrived back to the humid, smog-laden city and immediately felt extremely oppressed by the prospect.
I had forgotten how relentlessly urban and polluted the city is, but the drive in from the airport was a grim reminder. As the taxi rattles along the expressway, the view stretching out on either side is of uniformly drab low-rise buildings interspersed with billboards and garish restaurant facades. Inevitably it was an overcast day, which shades everything with the same grey wash of smog.

While you are away you forget minor, unpleasant details, such as the coating of sticky grime that covers everything, or the slightly metallic taste of the air on a heavily polluted day. It does come as a shock when you first arrive back. My British friend Louise returned a few weeks after I did this summer. I spoke to her the next day and asked how she was doing. Not too well she replied, she was so overwhelmed by the filthy air and hadn’t dared to step outside the house yet. I was a little taken aback and said what nice weather it had been over the weekend and in fact really not too bad since I returned from the UK. She then reminded me of the email I had sent her my first day back, describing the drive in from the airport and my general feeling of malaise.

So, within a few weeks I had acclimatised to the air quality and forgotten my initial reaction. This is probably a necessary survival tactic and may also explain the (if you think about it) unforgivable level of general public inertia about the environment. We all just learn to live with it. Certainly people in China do, where the concept of rights, such as the right to breathe clean air or live in a pleasant environment, is very tenuous to begin with. People who grow up in a landscape littered with trash or awash with toxic fumes just assume that’s how life is and rarely think to protest it until something dramatic happens. I have been thinking a lot about this recently, especially after attending a talk about economic growth and the environment in China and reading a New York Times article on the subject. Here is it is you want the grim facts: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/world/asia/26china.html

But whatever the air quality, here we are and gradually getting back into the swing of things. Isaac has begun a new year at school, which was a little hard for him at first because his two best friends moved away over the summer and all his other friends moved up to the next class. Because it is a small school, there are two year groups in each class, which has many advantages, but works against you when you are the only one left behind. Also, by some quirk, there are about 25 five year old kids in the school and only 4 six year olds, and the other 3 are all girls and either new or not particular friendly with Isaac. But we are working on the basis that it will be good for his social skills and sense of responsibility to be the oldest kid in the class, and we’ll see what happens as the year progresses.

The major event of the past week was the announcement from Xiao Zeng, our second ayi, that she is pregnant. Xiao Zeng is Xiao Long's sister-in-law, her husband's older sister. She came to work for us in May after Xiao Wu, her predecessor went back to her home in the countryside. She comes to clean our apartment in the mornings, then walks across the compound to our friends the Pills and cleans their apartment in the afternoons. Xiao Zeng is a tiny woman, small and slight, weighing only 37 kilos (this announcement imparted with disapproval by Xiao Long, who is rotund by Chinese standards). She told me that she has always been very thin, unlike the rest of her family. It did make me wonder....she is the middle child of 5, with an older sister and brother, a younger brother (Xiao Long's husband) and then another sister. The others are all the picture of health but Xiao Zeng has never been strong and as the middle child and a girl to boot, so perhaps she wasn’t as fast with her chopsticks as the others when they were growing up. She hasn't done so well later in life either, although she is a sweet and competent person. But, according to Xiao Long, she is the only one of the five siblings who hasn't really succeeded in the big city and does not own her own home. Xiao Long partly blames this on her poor health and partly on her husband, whom she considers pretty ineffectual. I am not sure what he does but he doesn't earn much money and the family live in a one-room rental with a communal kitchen and bathroom shared with many others. For this they pay 100 yuan per month, or about $13.

Anyway, on Monday morning last week we were changing the sheets on our bed, when she announced that she had something to tell me. I assumed that she might have found a better job or perhaps wanted to move away to work in another part of China. Instead she told me that she was pregnant.

“At first I thought I had a stomach flu”, she said, clutching the edge of the sheet, “I kept taking medicine but I didn’t get better, in fact I started throwing up a lot more. Then yesterday I went to have lunch with some friends and after I threw up a few times they said to me maybe I was pregnant, so I went and bought a test and found out that I am.”

“That’s great!” I said, “Congratulations.” But she didn’t look very happy, so I asked her if she was pleased. She looked uncomfortable. “Not really,” she said. “If I wanted another baby I would have had one much earlier, after I had my son. I did get pregnant again soon after, but I had a really difficult pregnancy with him and I wasn’t healthy for a long time afterwards, so I didn’t have the second baby and I never tried to get pregnant again. Our situation doesn’t really allow it, I would have to stop work for a long time and I’m 37 already, it’s too old, and our son is already ten.” She paused, then added, “Also, you know we have a one-child policy here in China, so it’s difficult”. “Would you have to pay a fine?” I asked. “Not just that. Because I used to belong to a work unit, if I have this baby I will lose my pension and other benefits from there.” I was not aware of this kind of penalty before. I knew that civil servants and others in government employment risked losing their jobs if they had more than one child, but I didn’t know that even if you had left your work unit ten years earlier, you still faced sanctions from them.

“What does your husband think?” I asked her. “He would like to have another child, but he knows it isn’t possible,” she said. “And my son would like a little sister, but he said he doesn’t want me to get sick. My mother and all my sisters said it would be too much for my health. My mother won’t let me have the baby.” That seemed to be the final word on the matter, and Xiao Zeng seemed resigned to the situation. I could just imagine the family conference, with all the sisters and sister-in-law putting in their opinions and the small but forceful matriarch laying down the law.

All the same, Xiao Zeng stood by the bed talking it over for some time, as though she couldn’t quite accept it. She went over the facts several times, not for my benefit as she could see I understood, more as though she was convincing herself. Everything lined up against it, but that didn’t stop her wanting the baby. She knew she didn’t really have a choice, but it was still hard to come to terms with it. She kept saying, “If I wanted another baby I would have had one earlier”, reminding herself that nothing was different now from the last time she was pregnant, except that she was older. I thought, the earlier pregnancy is still a painful memory and now she has to go through the same thing again. Abortions are completely normal here and accepted as part of life, but listening to Xiao Zeng I realized that that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to bear psychologically.