(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.
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.
posted by Cat Platt at 8:47 am
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