The Shock of Being (Almost) Totally Normal

20 hours down, 10 to go

The first day back in America I think, “The trip was too short.”  Believe me, I this is NOT a thought I have at hour 20 of the trip with 10 more hours to go. But while 30 hours seems like a long trip with three kids in tow, it also seems like such short a time to hop between worlds.

We get on the plane in Beijing and we get off the plane (or another plane) in Los Angeles or Atlanta in a completely different world.  The world seems too big, encompassing too many worlds. Or perhaps it is too small, enabling us to jump from one world to another in a long day’s time.

Walking through the airport, suddenly we are normal. There are so many different kinds of people that we could be almost anyone and still blend in. No one is staring at us, our white family with three little girls. Why would they stare, when there are lots of people who look like us, are the same size and shape as us, even wear the same kind of clothes as us? Three children is absolutely unremarkable.

We can understand what other people say.  It is easier to tune out Chinese speakers (unless they are yelling into a cell phone) because I have to consciously pay attention to understand.  Now I overhear dozens of conversations, and my brain tunes in because it hears English. I have to think more carefully about what I say because everyone can understand me.

Everyone gets into their own cars and drive down the road.  Of course everyone has a car. How could you survive in a spread out city like Atlanta or LA without a car?  Everyone has a car with car seats, and no one seems to have wooden-runged seat covers.

We drive past so many western restaurants.  In fact, they don’t even call them western restaurants, just “restaurants.” You can eat pizza or hamburgers or burritos and everybody thinks that’s a totally normal thing to do. You can go right through the drive through, since nobody wants to get out of their cars.

You can stop in the bathroom and there is toilet paper right there on the wall! The sink is equipped with soap and even free paper towels for drying your hands. “Don’t worry - we just give away toilet paper and paper towels. No biggie.” Want to buy a ginormous Coke the size of your small child?  No problem! So is everyone else!

The houses are huge. Even the normal sized houses.  I feel strange showing students pictures of our family houses sometimes, because they must think we are incredibly rich.  Most are single family homes, separated from everyone else. Even if you live in a neighborhood, you may only see a dozen homes from your window.  As opposed to say, hundreds right across from you.

The houses are filled with things like closets. Not just closets, but entire room-sized closets.  Bedroom closets and hall closets and entry way closets. Sometimes I’m going to have to tell our Chinese friends about the closets. They wouldn’t believe it. Not only closets, but also basements and attics.  No wonder why we have so much stuff - we have to fill up all that storage space!

Most houses have multiple bathrooms.  Most people wouldn’t dream of sharing one small bathroom with their entire family plus guests. People have whole upstairs portions of their house not even seen by guests. I realize I have seen the entirety of almost everyone’s China house, generally visible from the living room. Our students know what we eat, what shampoo we use, and how clean our bedroom is. There are no secrets.

Kitchens are huge (huge) and filled with all manner of convenience. Pots and pans and bowls of all sizes. (But no rice cooker or electric water boiler - I can’t get over that). Pantries are filled with cereal and full loaves of bread, refrigerators are filled with cheese and shoot ice right out of the door!  Ice, people!  This would be so mystifying in China.

Most houses have backyards. At this point in life, my sin of covetousness pretty much revolves around backyards. And maybe dishwashers, avacados, and boundless energy. But mostly backyards.  You literally just walk right out your door and you are outside. Boom. You don’t even have to put shoes on.

“Hey kids, run play outside. You don’t have to worry about cars, and you are close enough I can hear if you are screaming. You can scatter your toys around because you aren’t taking up anyone else’s space. Run through those puddles - get all wet and muddy - nobody will look askance. Ride your bike around - there is no one to run you over.”

You hop on an airplane and 30 hours later the things you do make sense. Nobody thinks you are weird for having three children, eating cereal, drinking cold water, letting your kids get all dirty, wearing flip-flops, using a car seat… In fact, people kind of freak out if you don’t use a car seat. Do you know how weird it is to be normal?

Of course, we still soap up our vegetables and shed shoes the moment we enter a house and speak Chinese to the guy on our flight and wander aimlessly around the grocery store. Our children still confuse the US and China flags and look suspiciously upon ice water and throw toilet paper in the trash and get a little too excited about drinking fountains and mailboxes. So maybe we aren’t quite normal.

Feeling too normal? Just hop on an airplane and thirty hours later everything you do will be weird. That’s good to know isn’t it?  There is a crazy different world waiting just thirty hours away.

Still Pretty Foreign

I am sitting in a tiny chair, listening to Juliana's kindergarten teacher rattle off a bunch of instructions to parents, thinking, “I don't know Chinese. At all.” The other parents are looking glassy-eyed after two hours of sitting around, but at least they can understand what the teacher is saying. These are all the specific things your child should have in their backpack. Don't just pack all their favorite snacks (I'm looking at you grandparents). This is the new procedure for picking up your kids. And fifteen minutes of other stuff I have no clue about.

I have the idea that after this many years, living in a foreign country should be easy. It should, right? We have lived here for the most part of twelve years. I have spent nearly a third of my life – pretty much all of my adult life – in China. It feels like home. Sort of.

It also never ceases to feel like a foreign country. The habits and customs of our childhood culture run deep. I am fascinated by culture because it influences us so profoundly in ways we don't even realize. After all these years, a lot of the things that bother me are not necessarily bad, they are just still so different.

I grew up in the suburbs and then in the country, where my family were the only inhabitants of 6.5 acres of peaceful nature, 30 miles from the city. Now I live in a country with 1.3 billion people, in a city, on a small campus with 20,000 students packed 6 to a dorm room.

The walls of our fifth floor apartment seem thin. In reality, I hear little from our neighbors, but I am aware of their nearness. I am particularly aware of the ones below us, who undoubtedly hear plenty of jumping and stomping and screaming. They kind of scowl when they see us outside. We hear the laughter of students, the rattling of carts, and the roar of trucks bumping along the road just below us. Over a hundred windows look into our own.

Outside, we are watched. Not in a creepy way, but there are always people around, and they are always curious about the foreigners. Random strangers turn to watch us every day, every where we go. Students gasp as they catch sight of the girls, taking their pictures or summoning the courage to say hi. The girls are used to this attention but they do not always receive it benevolently.

Even Juliana, attention lover that she is, gets tired of people touching her. After stopping a random stranger on the street who is trying to pick up Adalyn, I explain to her, “You don't have to let people touch you and hold you. If you don't like that it's okay to say so. But you do need to be kind.” I watch Nadia closely to see how she responds – is she comfortable with the attention or do I need to intervene? Will this person be gentle or pushy? Why do people love playing the “I'm going to steal you away from your parents” game? What kid thinks that is funny?

Our own neighbors are familiar with us. They watch us kindly as if we are unusual but relatively normal people. At the park or the supermarket or on the street, however, we are more of a spectacle. In their excitement or curiosity, strangers sometimes forget we are real people, not just a fascinating display for their viewing, touching, picture taking pleasure.

Our weirdness comes out in the most normal of circumstances. I think about it whenever I drink cold water or eat bread instead of rice or put on a bike helmet or home-school my daughter or write with my left hand or step outside the door with my white face. I am foreign. I will always be foreign.

There are other stresses in China that I am realizing will never go away. Language has always been a stress. Even after all these years, it is still a big challenge. Chinese is no joke! Kevin teaching English and me spending so much time at home with kids does not place us in optimal language positions. We can do all the basics and carry on conversation, but there are always things I don't understand.

Almost every Chinese conversation involves stress. Even if I do understand everything, or enough to get the general idea, there is always the fear that I won't understand and will look like an idiot. Or I will understand but won't be able to think of all the right words to respond. When I interact with Juliana's teachers I want to say, “Really, I'm smart! I know I sound like your kindergarteners, but I actually have a masters degree!”

I feel stress whenever the children are sick – will they need to go to the hospital, where I don't fully understand the doctor and don't necessarily trust what he says anyway? Will people blame me for not putting enough clothes on them or feeding them the right food or letting them sit on the tile floor?

There is the stress of travel – the ridiculous 30+ hour trips to see our family and the jetlag and the suitcases and the children shuffled from one place to the next with too little routine and too little sleep.

I feel the stress of uncertainty – What if something happens and we have to leave China? What if the school decided they didn't want us to live here anymore? Will Juliana be able to go to primary school part time next year and how will we figure out the system? Will Adalyn's kindergarten teachers know what to do with a foreign kid, and how will she handle being the only foreign kid in an all-Chinese environment?

There is the stress of responsibility – Am I using my time well? Is it worth us being here? Are we spending enough time with students? Why don't we know our colleagues better? Are we friendly enough with our neighbors? At the end of the day how do you ever do enough?

Many things about life are easier than the used to be. We understand the culture much better, but with children we are constantly venturing into new aspects of life. Just like everyone, we worry about their schooling and their social life – and we also worry about how they are handling always being the weird ones.

So what do we do with these stresses? That is what we are trying to work out. I think the first step is recognizing these areas are still challenging so we can give ourselves grace.  Beyond that...well, I'll let you know when we figure it out.

Chinese phone conversations

By Kevin

I have a confession to make. I hate making phone calls, particularly to strangers.

It was one of my least favorite parts about being a journalist. I hated being the interruption to somebody's day. I hated the impersonal nature of it. But it was a necessary evil. If I wanted the story, I had to make dozens of calls a day. So I sucked it up and did it. For an introvert like me, it was always a task. It wasn't something I did on the spur of the moment. It took deliberation. It was a means to an end. I even got to the point where I didn't mind it so much because I can type much more quickly (and legibly) than I can take notes by hand.

If I hated making phone calls in America, imagine my hesitation in China. For my first year in China, I didn't even have a cell phone. I enjoyed the freedom of being able to go for a hike in the hills behind campus and not have to worry about it ringing with some pressing need. My students and superiors all had my home number. That was good enough.

I only broke down and bought one because Ruth and I were dating and I wanted another way to talk to her on the days when our Internet in Tonghua cut off at 11 p.m., making Skype useless. I also decided I'd need something I case I needed help getting out of inevitable travel difficulties on my first solo domestic China trip to see her in Yangzhou. But I only spoke English. Only to friends. In fact, the only people I gave my number to were friends -- and if they were my friend, at that time, they could speak English. If someone on an unrecognized number spoke Chinese to me, I apologized, told them I was a foreigner and my Chinese was bad, and hung up. If it was important, they'd find an English speaker to help them call again.

Year three, when we moved to Weinan, I was forced to pick up the phone and call my first Chinese stranger: the water delivery company. In China, you can't drink the tap water, so you must purify your own water with a boiler or filter or buy bottles of purified water (a bit like those 5-gallon Sparkletts bottles you can sign up for in the States). The first words out of my mouth (in Chinese) were: "I am a foreigner." Then, reading from a script, I informed them that we needed them to deliver a bottle of purified water to my door. I crossed my fingers and hoped that they'd understood. Thankfully, the water company had gotten the routine down from the previous foreigners who lived there, so as soon as they saw our telephone number on their caller ID, they knew the drill. Before long, I just had to tell them I was the foreigner on the third floor. An hour later, water would magically appear. Success. I could speak Chinese. As long as it was written out in script form. If they varied from the script, I was utterly lost. I usually just went back to the top and repeated myself. In Tonghua, this wasn't an issue mainly because I had a water purifier in my apartment, so I never had to order water delivery. This continued for years three through five. My Chinese improved incrementally in that span of time, but not enough to branch out beyond the now memorize script, plus a few variations.

Year six in Yinchuan was the start of language school. Day one, we repeated the water ordering routine we'd established in Weinan, first informing them I was a foreigner, then explaining our need for water and where we lived.

A month later, one of our homework assignments was to call information and ask for a particular phone number. I was so spooked when the operator asked me to repeat my request (the name of a park) that I had to call back a second time to get the number right. I continued to avoid phone calls.

Halfway through the year, I signed up for a Taobao account (kinda like an Amazon.com of China, though China also has Amazon.com). I figured it would be easy, I'd use Google translate to sort out any problems I had with ordering, then the items would arrive. The delivery guy would either call or send a message upon arrival (most domestic deliveries in China don't arrive via the standard postal service), but it wouldn't be too difficult, even with beginner Chinese. Then one of the orders was bad. Apparently sometimes Taobao merchants continue to list items that are out of stock. So one day, after ordering something, the merchant called to explain to me that they didn't have the item. It took me awhile to figure out that she was asking if I wanted another similar item or if they should return the money. Eventually I figured out to just ask for a refund. It didn't make me enjoy talking on the phone any more.

An aversion to talking on the phone isn't exactly a great trait to have as a language student. Some students might relish the challenge of a phone conversation. They might be excited to see how well they can communicate. They may be excited to see if the other speaker is able to guess that they aren't Chinese. Generally that isn't me. I just want utility. Usually talking on the phone is nothing more than a necessary evil.

The one highlight to my phone experience in China was when one day, I had to order more propane. Our apartment has a small 10 gallon propane tank underneath the counter to run our stove burner. It needs a refil every 8 months or so. Anyway, when the delivery guy arrived, he was shocked that I was a foreigner. It was the ultimate compliment: I hadn't made enough pronunciation or grammar mistakes in my short phone conversation to reveal myself as a non-native speaker. I was ecstatic.

I should probably put today's phone calls in the "language win" column. After all, in the end I was successful at completing my task. I think. But after a rash of miscommunication, it feels like it belongs in the "loss column."

Let me explain. We will be moving next week. Ruth is 6 months pregnant and I fell down while jogging two weeks ago. Nothing was broken, but I scraped the knuckles of my left pinke badly enough that I still can't bend it and sprained my wrist badly enough that twisting bottles and lifting heavy boxes is out of the question. Not ideal timing for us to move. Since we live on the sixth floor and will be moving to the third, we need to hire movers to do the heavy lifting. Thankfully hiring movers plus a van here costs less than renting a moving van in the States.

So I called up some movers recommended by my Korean classmate (who ironically taught at the same college in Tonghua as I did the year after I left -- but that's a different story). My classmate said they charged them 200 RMB for the move, which is half of what some American friends paid for their move. The caveat -- their new building has an elevator. So the operator answered and cut quickly to the chase: where were we moving from and to, how much stuff and what floors. She didn't recognize the new apartment complex, so I explained that it's just across the street from our campus gate. I explained that we have very little furniture, just a wardrobe and a crib and 40 or so boxes of various sizes. Then the floor - sixth to third. It took her a few seconds and she gave me a quote: 350 RMB. Reasonable, but I figured I'd try another mover.

Yesterday, my classmate Kevin -- whose apartment we will be moving into -- had arranged to move some other furniture and boxes belonging to our friend Kaylene into his apartment at Cai Xiao (the name of the complex). Kaylene had to leave early last year for medical reasons and plans to return to a different city in China after she recovers. So we packed up her stuff, bought some of her furniture (since our new apartment is mostly unfurnished) and decided to store it all in our apartment while we are in the States awaiting the birth of baby #2.

Kevin had also bought some of her stuff, so he called the movers and got a quote that he could move the stuff -- from floor 2 to floor 3 of Cai Xiao -- for 260 RMB per truckload. Plus, the movers would charge a little extra for big stuff like refrigerators and giant wardrobes. He set it up for Tuesday morning. Kevin said the guy's Chinese was a bit hard to understand, but he'd worked things out fine. Granted, of everyone in our class, Kevin's Chinese is the best. Every semester he gets the award for being the best student in class.

So, since I also needed movers, today, I sent the same mover a text message with the details of our move and asking for a quote, hoping to avoid a phone conversation that would immediately reveal me as a foreigner. But when he hadn't replied after an hour, I decided to give him a call.

I asked if he'd received my text message and told him I wanted to move from Ning Da to Cai Xiao (our new complex). Immediately, he seemed confused. "You called earlier about moving on Tuesday, right?" he asked. I feigned ignorance."No. That must be someone else." I didn't want to admit that I was a foreigner. Often the price quoted to a foreigner is significantly higher than that offered to a Chinese. I didn't want to be a target for being cheated. I just told him that I wanted to move on Friday. I didn't mention that my friend had spoken with him yesterday. He said that he'd already said that it would be 260 because He charges by the truckload.

A couple hours later, he called me back. "I just saw your text message," he said. "If it's not the second floor to the third floor, but the sixth to the third, it is more agonizing (Sometimes Chinese is a bit melodramatic -- word used to explain difficulty -- 痛苦 -- literally means pain and bitterness). "The price will be 350 RMB." So, a bit more than 20 RMB extra per extra floor.

Then he asked, "Aren't you the international friend I spoke with yesterday?" I told him I wasn't. I'd been foiled. So had Kevin. How he figured it out I'll never know. Was it my limited vocabulary or my repeated requests for him to repeat himself. Who was I kidding? I'd mostly hoped he would think I was someone from a different province, whose Mandarin was poor. "But you are moving to Cai Xiao also, right?" "Yes." I gave in. "Yes, my friend spoke with you before. He is moving from another apartment to Cai Xiao on Tuesday. I am moving from Ning Da to Cai Xiao on Friday."

We'd thoroughly confused the poor guy. I was afraid that might happen. Now I'm hoping he still shows up on Tuesday. Maybe I'll wait till then to decide if it goes in the "language win" or "language loss" column.