White Boy From Wisconsin

The Buzz, baby. Nothing but the Buzz.

2012-02-11T10:12:00.000-08:00

I was raised in upper midwest, so the concept of self-promotion sits uncomfortably on my shoulders. That said, according to my agent, when your first book comes out you have to suck it up and promote yourself shamelessly or face disappearing in the wash of books coming out every year.

And according to my editor, you need to create a "buzz," which will create sales, which will then create more "buzz," and more sales, and on and on. One way to do this, she says, is to encourage my friends and the various strangers who read my blog to go to Amazon and pre-order copies of my book.

So that's what I'm doing now: if you've read this blog or are now reading this blog and have enjoyed it, please go to the link below and pre-order a copy of Hong Konged in order to be part of the buzz.

If, on the other hand, you'd rather not spend your hard earned money to purchase this book, that's perfectly fine. What I encourage you to do instead, is wait until your children are sound asleep, sneak into their rooms, take their piggy banks, their iPads, their cherished coin collections, etc., and sneak back out again. Then smash the banks, hock the iPads, put the coin collections up on e-bay. Once that's done, go to the link below, and buy the book.

Because it's all about the buzz, baby. Nothing but the buzz. I'm sure your kids will understand.

http://www.amazon.com/Hong-Konged-American-Familys-adventures/dp/144054073X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1328881845&sr=1-1

This is just to say . . .

2011-12-27T09:53:00.001-08:00

that excerpts from our "White Boy" adventures in Hong Kong will be appearing in book form soon. HONG KONGED will be published in July 2012 by Adams' Media. Stay tuned for more details. And thanks, all, for your support. I'll be back soon with more tales of life in Virginia. I know you're all just dying to hear details about our trips to CVS and Kroger . . .

Confessions of a White-Knuckle Flier

2011-03-07T19:26:00.001-08:00

Ten years ago, the first time I went to China, the return flight took something like twenty-four hours. Aside from one slightly-overdone hamburger at the Detroit airport, my journey was more or less worry free: no excessive turbulence, no lost baggage, no half-digested meatloaf deposited in my lap by one of my seatmates.

And then, just as the small prop-plane I was one rose over the last ridge of mountains surrounding the Roanoke Valley--

—it suddenly dropped.

Like thirty feet. Or forty feet. Or a hundred feet. Or whatever. Because to tell you the truth, I couldn’t tell you how far it was, though I can say it was enough that it made the flight attendant scream and grab the arms of her little collapsible seat. And I can tell you that it was far enough that, after we landed, the pilot got on the PA and said, “Well.” Long pause. “THAT doesn’t happen very often.”

I hate flying.

I haven’t always been this way. I was twenty the first time I got on a plane and flew 33 (count ‘em: thirty-three) hours to Tanzania, East Africa. I loved every minute of it. Between then and 1999, I probably took upward of 100 flights, and was pretty much okay with them. Then, that year, coming back into Virginia, that plane flew into the Roanoke Valley, dropped . . . and, well: left most of my guts somewhere at around 3,200 feet.

My wife’s cousin, who’s an aeronautical engineer (like that qualifies him to say anything) just shrugged when I told him my tale of nearly dying in sight of my own threshold after coming halfway around the world. “The wings on those planes can bend thirty feet,” he said, “no problem. It’d take more than that to crash a plane.”

To which I have exactly two responses:

1) Great. I’ll be sure to tell that to my bladder the next time it cuts loose on a plane full of screaming people;

And 2) Bite me.

I’m mean, seriously: there’s what we “know” on an intellectual level—mathematical equations about tension and friction and bolt strength and joint flexibility and air currents and that sort of crap.

And there’s what we KNOW in a gut-level, testicles-climbing-back into the body-cavity, kind of way. You can talk to me all day long about wing warp and how they’ve developed special radar for detecting wing sheer. And I’ll nod and say, “Well, that’s nice to know,” and “Gosh, I hadn’t thought of that.” And then we’ll be flying together, somewhere over, say, northern Missouri, and the plane will start to buck and rattle and there’ll be that little ping! as the Please Fasten Seatbelts sign comes on, and immediately my head will be filled with visions of the front half of the plane being torn off before my very eyes, and of me plummeting toward the earth, along with 237 other people I barely know but who, I’m sure, very much like not dying after seven full minutes of free falling. And my heart will start to race and my palms will become clammy and I’ll not unoccasionally find myself crawling into the lap of the seventy-two-year old retired window salesman in the next seat.

A number of so-called friends have tried to alleviate my dislike of flying in general and turbulence in particular by pointing out that it’s all part of the adventure: “It’s like being on a roller coaster,” someone I know recently told me. “And for no additional fee! WHEEEEE!”

To which I have exactly two responses:

1) I love it when a roller coaster turns me upside down. A plane? Not so much.

And 2) Bite me.

It doesn’t help that I’m a writer and a reader, that I pretty much make my living by allowing my brain to create the most vivid images possible. What this means when I’m on a plane is that I find myself thinking things like, “I wonder if, after the plane goes down, the local paper will refer to me as ‘a beloved professor,’ or if they’ll actually do some research, read the comments on my ratemyprofessor.com page, and skip mentioning me altogether?” And: “I wonder if the female weightlifter next to me will hold my hand as we plummet toward the earth?” And: “This high up, will I pass out when the plane rattles into a thousand pieces, or will I be awake the whole way down?”

It also doesn’t help that the Roanoke Valley, where the nearest airport is located, is a notoriously difficult place to fly. For years I’d heard rumors that Air Force One pilots were taken there to practice taking off and landing in trying circumstances. It’s a valley after all: there are mountains on one side, then a runway, then more mountains. Not much room for error. Or, as I like to think of it: there are mountains on one side, then a runway, then WHAM!

As if that weren’t bad enough, this particular valley in this particular branch of the Blue Ridge Mountains is known for peculiar wind currents—which perhaps explains my post-Beijing drop. Just this morning there was a piece in the Roanoke Times (America’s last, best, independent newspaper) discussing a proposal for wind turbines on one of the mountains on the south side of the Valley. The FAA has yet to approve the plan, and may not, the paper reports, stating that Roanoke’s airport “has long been a nerve-racking place for pilots, who must maneuver the surrounding mountains and tricky weather they can produce.”

At issue is that pilots must fly 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle, which means that putting a 443-foot turbine on top of an already high mountain might expose planes to greater turbulence. “It’s already complicated enough to fly into Roanoke,” Matt Broughton, president of the IFR Pilots Club is quoted as saying. “We don’t want to make it more of a challenge.”

To be honest, I kind of liked it better when I just suspected flying in Roanoke sucked. I didn’t really need to hear that the very people responsible for making sure I don’t end up a mangled and bloody pile of pulp and bone fragments are scared to do it as well.

Now anyone who’s read this blog for more than, say, eleven seconds, knows that if I were any more of a left-wing Chablis sipping liberal I’d be serving caviar in Pyongyang. Gay marriage? All for it. A woman’s right to choose? Damn straight. Tax the rich into oblivion? Now we’re talking! Green technology and renewable resources?

Umm . . . well . . . let’s not be hasty or anything . . .

My father, who also hates flying (thanks, Dad; as if inheriting your hairline wasn’t bad enough) says that sometimes when he gets on a plane, he’ll count babies. The more babies, he figures, the better, because of course God wouldn’t kill a plane-full of innocent little children.

Last night, though, as I climbed onto the little fifteen row, four seats across puddle jumper that makes an almost hourly run from Charlotte, North Carolina to Roanoke, I did a quick count of cherubic beings under the age of twenty-four months, and came up with a nice round number: exactly 0.

Feeling desperate and slightly light headed, I did another scan, looking for priests maybe, or nuns, or Tibetan monks, or anyone with a direct line to whatever higher power controls the fate of three-ton cans of metal roaring through the sky at twenty-seven thousand feet. But I didn’t see a single clerical collar, no orange robes, and nary a wimple in sight. Damn.

Taking my seat, I noticed the elderly, grandmotherly-looking woman sitting across the aisle from me. For a second I considered craning my neck for another glance around the plane, searching out others like her. After all, God wouldn’t kill a sweet little grandmother, would he?

But then it occurred to me that of course he would, that octogenarians and septaugenarians are fair game, that those who’ve lived long and fulfilling lives are probably at the top of the list of folks God is perfectly fine with whacking, second only perhaps to violent dictators and the current governors of Wisconsin and Ohio (and yes, I know those are redundant terms). And thinking of this and my own relatively rich and pleasurable life, I suddenly regretted all the things that I’d been able to do in my forty-five years, a list that is easily long enough to make keeping me around another decade or two sort of negotiable.

It was right about then that I considered climbing out of my seat, strolling down the aisle, reclaiming my suitcase and hopping in a rental car for a four hour drive back to Virginia. But just as I’m about to unbuckle myself, I glance at the seat in front of me and noticed an elderly Indian man with strands of snow-white hair across a brown forehead and a sheaf of papers clutched in one hand. Leaning forward a bit, I can hear him chatting with his seatmate, catching just enough to understand that he’s an environmental engineer and that what he’s holding is a scholarly study of a new method of removing copper from air pollutants.

I lean back in my seat. I take a deep breath and consider. Yes, I eventually conclude. Yes, this may just work. For if God has no qualms about smiting the elderly or Jimmy Hoffa or those with relatively short bucket lists, I’m nevertheless fairly confident that he’s probably got a vested interest in keeping alive as many as possible of those scientists who are seeking to sustain the earth’s fragile eco-system.

Which is good. Seriously good. Because if old baldy save-the-tree-hugging-eagles up there is going to survive, then more than likely so am I, sitting a mere thirty-six inches from his goody-two shoes, copper-straining hide.

Falling back into my seat again, I close my eyes and breath easy.

Only then a thought strikes me. I sit up, think for a minute, then reach between the seats and tap the man on his boney shoulder.

He turns, startled, looks at me with deep brown eyes.

“Do you believe in God?” I ask him.

He stares at me for a long moment, trying to decide if I’m crazy or not. He must figure I am, because he gives a crooked smile and tries a joke: “I’m an engineer,” he says. “I believe in science.”

I consider for a second, then say, “So this plane will stay up? I mean, science dictates that it will, right?”

He pulls a face, his lower lip climbing toward his nose. “You’re asking the wrong man, I’m afraid,” he says. “I hate flying. Every time I get on a plane, I imagine it hurtling into the side of a mountain and bursting into flames.”

I stare at him for a long moment. He returns my gaze, half-smiling, half-apologetic. Finally, I shrug, nod a thank you, and lean back into my seat, feeling oddly satisfied.

At least I won't die alone.

Blog Widow

2011-01-19T10:23:00.001-08:00

It’s April and we’re at Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, just outside Li Jiang in southwestern China. Jade Dragon is at the very eastern tip of the Himalayans, and it looks like it: stark, black rock dusted with snow, alternately hidden by clouds and glaring in bright sunlight. Even from a distance, it’s forboding.

But we’re not looking at it from a distance. No. We’re up on the mountain, all five of us, in the clouds, shivering in our fleece as we walk through a pine woods to a clearing where we should—if the clouds lift—be able to get a close up look at the rocky peaks. It’s snowing, which is something of a shock after a year in Hong Kong—but it’s also gloriously refreshing: the air on Jade Dragon Snow Mountain is pure as water, the smell of pine just strong enough to clear your head, the snowflakes just heavy enough that you can hear them pat-pat as they hit the ground. Ellen and I are loving it.

The kids, on the other hand . . .

The annoying thing is that we did this—chose this activity, coming up this mountain—from a list of possible ways to spend the day specifically because we thought the kids would enjoy it. Two months earlier, we’d visited Ping’an in the Giongxi province, and as we’d hiked through the terraced rice paddies stretching up the karst mountains, Will had turned to me and said, “You know what, Dad? This is the best thing we’ve done this whole year.”

Well okay then: if it worked in February, why not it in April? “Take a cable car to a mountain meadow to see locals performing regional dances,” is what the brochure said. What could be better than that?

Well, a lot. Or so it appeared. Almost from the moment we’d started walking, Will had complained about the cold. Jamie had wanted to be held. And Lucy had just been—well, not her usual chipper self (turned out she would spend most of the night puking—as would I—but we didn’t know that, then).

“Come on, you guys!” Ellen or I call every eleven seconds or so, like speed-smoking cheerleaders. “Isn’t this great? Isn’t it beautiful?”

“Ehh,” Will says.

“Carry me!” Jamie demands.

“Urp,” Lucy, um, urps.

“Little turds,” I say to Ellen.

“Maybe it’s the altitude.”

“More like the attitude.”

But she’s probably right: LiJiang itself is well over a 1,000 feet, and we’ve climbed at least twice that first in the bus and then in the cable car.

But never mind. We trudge on. Eventually we see a clearing through the trees and feel a fresh breeze blowing across our foreheads. To the right are a number of small buildings—a food kiosk, bathrooms, and a long wooden walkway made of pine beams stripped of their bark. Hanging from every square centimeter of this last structure are woven prayer tokens—bell-shaped baskets with wooden tags dangling below, inscribed with the wishes of the person who’d bought it and hung it there. Dongba, the script of the Na’xi people, is one of the last hieroglyphic languages still in use, and many of the tokens are inscribed with simple characters: water, sun, children.

“Is this a natural meadow?” I say to our guide.

He’s a young man, a Pumi, with a nose like a dorsal fin, and he gives a small blush when I ask this question.

“No,” he says, “it used to be a lake. But they drained it.”

“Really? Why?”

A bit of a smile, a bit of a shrug. “It used to be for suicide. Couples would come here, you know—when they were forbidden to marry? And they would throw themselves in.”

Oh.

I glance at Ellen. Neither of us says anything for a minute as we walk on, dragging the three kids along. Then I see her shoulders begin to shake, just a little bit. And then mine are too, just tremors at first, but in a matter of seconds I’m trying so hard not to laugh that I actually hiccup.

We make a lap around the meadow. There’s a couple there in traditional western wedding attire, having their pictures taken in middle of the field. The boy is heavy, mildly spoiled looking in that one-child policy way you often see in male youths. The girl is gorgeous: tall, with black-blue hair and a regal air that intimidates me, even a moment later when, as she lifts her skirts to trek back to the muddy trail, I catch a glimpse of Nike trainers.

The kids race ahead, anxious to complete the circuit, get back to the cable cars, get the heck out of here.

Ellen and I, though, we linger: above us, a broad face of the mountain, deep and black as water, keeps flashing its sharp face our way, taunting us, promising to show us something really spectacular if only we’ll stick around long enough to see these clouds lift.

So we drag our feet. Enjoying the crisp cold, the wet air that seems to promise more snow, the sense of being someplace we’ll never be again, someplace that most westerners never get to—or at least, most westerners hailing from semi-rural Virginia. At one point we stop, lean our shoulders together, hold a camera at arm’s length, snap a photo of the two of us laughing. I can smell Ellen’s hair in the cool air, the sharp scent of her shampoo, the slight smell of incense from a museum we’d visited earlier that day. It’s nice, and I squeeze her a bit closer, feeling her presence through our two layers of fleece.

This is not like us. In no way is this like us: we don’t usually take those kinds of cuddly pictures—hell, we don’t usually cuddle, period. And we don’t usually laugh and linger and get all smoochy-faced when our kids are tired and grumpy, racing on ahead and threatening to disappear into the woods where we might never see them again.

I can’t emphasize this enough: we don’t do this. We have never, that I can think of in the ten years that we’ve had children, placed our own pleasures as a couple ahead of their desires.

Never.

Back when I was a kid, my parents used to drag me along to confirmation retreats for ninth-grade students. This is a concept, I know, that may be unfamiliar to some of you, so allow me to explain: twice each year—once in October and once in March—my Lutheran minister dad and several of his church staff drove a busload of 15-year-olds to a Bible camp in northern Wisconsin where there was a huge retreat center. We’d spend the whole weekend there, my brother and I and the other staff brats, basically screwing around, playing ping-pong in the cinderblock basement, stealing Cokes when our mom's weren't looking, and hiking down to the lake to skip stones.

The ninth-graders, though, they would have discussions and mini-bible studies and sing camp songs and pop popcorn and play Frisbee and sled down the hill and go on treasure hunts and listen to records and munch Cheetohs and watch whatever crappy movie the staff had rented for the weekend (I remember, and I’m not making this up, at least one showing of The Corpse Grinders, detailing the exploits of a cat-food company that took corpses and . . . well, I’m sure you can fill in the rest).

For some of you, I know, this sounds like pure hell, and fair enough—there are plenty of churches and plenty of religions that could turn a warm, fun, community-building weekend in an amazing rural setting into a nightmare. My sense, though, from my ten years as a tag-a-long and my two stints when I was myself a ninth grader—was that these were pretty amazing weekends. Up north and in the woods, everyone got away from the usual middle-school cliques, the posturing, the constant low-grade Columbinesque bullying that goes on most of the time when folks are in that not-quite-kids but not-quite-adults stage. I remember very clearly coming away from those weekends feeling both better about myself and my place in the world, and about my classmates, even the ones who usually drove me nuts.

The problem, of course, was that it only took a few hours wandering the halls of Woodrow Wilson Junior High to make this feeling go away. My father referred to this phenomenon as “Coming down from the mountain.” He was referring, I’ve no doubt, to some biblical thing—Moses or the Easter Bunny or some such business—but even if I didn’t fully get the allusion, I understood what he meant. It's like in the movie Breakfast Club (my generation's The Graduate) where the geeky guy played by Anthony Michael Hall gets all snotty-faced ad teary-eyed, asking his new-found friends what’ll happen on Monday—will they acknowledge him at all, or just walk on by? (Hmmm . . . that sounds vaguely like a song . . . )

Molly Ringwald’s character is blunt in her reply, directed mainly at Emilio Estevez: “If Ryan came walking up to you in the hall on Monday, what would you do? I mean, picture this, you’re there with all the sports . . . you know exactly what you’d do. You’d say hi to him, and when he left you’d cut him up so that you’re friends didn’t think that you really liked him.”

In other words, it’s one thing to be on the mountain, up there with God or Buddha or Ally Sheedy before she got kind of freaky: on the mountain, everything is holy, everything is pure, and we’re at our best, our most divine.

Coming down from the mountain, on the other hand . . .

There are some things you should know. Actually, you shouldn't know them, because they're none of you're damn business, but they help this story make sense, so I'm going to tell them to you anyway, just as long as you promise never to mention to Ellen that I told you, okay?

Okay then:

We've had some bad years.

A little background: Ellen and I met in 1989, on the first day of TA training in the English MA program at Iowa State. We spent two years in glorious Ames, Iowa, struggling daily not to kiss ourselves for sheer boredom, then moved together to Columbus, Ohio—another dazzling Midwestern city—where I started a Ph.D. program.

That last bit is important: where I started a Ph.D. program. Ellen liked grad school well enough. She wasn't crazy about the teaching part, but thrived on the ideas part. But five to seven years more of grad school, followed by a career in academia? It just wasn't part of her long-term plan.

So she followed me. This is key. Because five years later, newly-minted Ph.D. in hand, I was offered a job in sexy Salem, Virginia, home of, well . . .nothing really, other than a minor-league baseball team, a handful of mediocre pizza joints, and the college that hired me.

And a funny thing happened: given the choice between following me yet again to an amazingly peculiarly non-descript place that definitely wasn't Paris, and . . . well, not following me to not-Paris, Ellen chose the latter, deciding to go to New York and work for a large university press there. Part of her decision was purely practical: she's a university press editor, and there weren't any university presses in Roanoke so why move somewhere with me that she couldn't work?

Part of her decision was romantic, in the non-lovey-dovey meaning of the word: I mean, who wouldn't want to live in New York City, given the chance?

And part of it was principle: she'd already followed me once to a city where she knew no one; she hadn't been raised by adventurous parents, she hadn't gone to an extremely progressive college, she hadn't studied feminist theory and literature and drama, she hadn't done any of these things so that she could become the sort of person who just followed someone else from place to place for absolutely no reason.

Which is fair enough.

I know that.

Know. Meaning, "to be cognizant or aware of a fact or a specific piece of information."

Which, of course, if different from understand, meaning "to comprehend the nature and significance of." Not to mention different from feel, which means "undergo an emotional sensation or be in a particular state of mind."

So this is the part I'm going to gloss over, because: a) it wasn't really the best part of our relationship; b) it really wasn't the best part of my life; and c) like I said, it's not really any of your business.

Suffice to say it sucked. Oh sure, it was cool in some ways: we got to roam the streets of New York together every sixth week or so, alternating with visits to the Blue Ridge Mountains. But basically? Seriously? It sucked.

For me, at least.

I can't remember if it's something I read somewhere or something someone told me or just something I've always intuited, but pretty much from the day I was born I've known that, frankly and despite all the Hollywood stereotypes to the contrary, women are very often happier—and arguably better off—not being stuck in some house with some man.

Men, on the other hand, at least in my experience and again contrary to societal impressions—are really pretty dependent upon other people. Simply put, we just don't like being alone. We're too stupid, too shallow, and too scared of our own thoughts to be comfortable with an empty house and nothing to distract us.

Ellen and I were married by a man named Lowell Erdahl, who, years before, had confirmed Ellen and was one of the few clergy she trusted, which is kind of funny given that both her father and mine are ordained ministers. Lowell wanted to spend some time with us before the wedding, so one rainy day in the fall of 1992 we traipsed to his office in St. Paul and sat down for a conversation. One of the things I remember from that meeting was Lowell’s theory that there isn’t a single honeymoon—that, to the contrary, marriages wax and wane, that there are lots of okay times, yeah, and lots of bad times, but there are also times in a marriage—even, say, 18 years into it—when a couple will almost be back in that giddy, happy, just fresh off the hay-wagon kind of love.

Why do I mention this?

Not because Hong Kong was one long honeymoon, that’s for sure. It wasn’t. It was great, yes, and adventurous, yes, and scintillating on an hourly basis, yes. But it was also hard. Besides the basic logistical things—getting the kids to school, getting the groceries, wading chin deep through a language that’s way too complicated—there were emotional things: short-tempered moments, intense negotiations about who gets to exercise when, or who gets to go out and wander while the other stays home with Jamie, or who should do the dishes.

And I’ll be honest with you: I wasn’t the best partner a lot of the time. Partially this was work related: Hong Kong faculty are government employees. What this means, in practical terms, is that they keep very careful track of their hours: on the left side of my institutional home page was a small meter that kept track of exactly how many personal days I had accumulated thus far during the year. Halfway through the year, my institution asked me to take on additional, non-consultative responsibilities, essentially becoming an employee of the university. Once I did that, I felt obliged to act like a real employee, being more careful about my hours—going earlier, staying longer, taking fewer days off.

Additionally, though, I wasn’t the best partner because I also spent a lot of time writing. A LOT of time: every night after the kids went to bed—and this includes many Fridays and Saturdays—I would pour myself a glass of wine, grab a handful of chocolates, and go and sit on the couch with my laptop. And write. And write. And write—sometimes as many as nine or ten pages in a single evening. Writing was my way of coping with everything that was going on around me, with all of the new experiences, with the challenges at work, with the fact that every time I walked out the door—EVERY SINGLE TIME—I saw something or did something or ate something that was completely new and unexpected. Writing helped me make sense of all of this, helped me keep my head on more or less straight.

Ellen, meanwhile, would slog away at the family blog, posting the hundreds of pictures that she’d taken to let our families know what we were up to. And she’d do the laundry (something, in my defense, that she refuses to let me help with), and she’d do the dishes. This last was the worst: we only had six bowls, six plates, six forks and six knives. So if we wanted to eat breakfast the next day, one or the other of us would have to wash and dry dishes every night. I intended to help with this, really I did. But sometimes I offered, then got caught in a particularly difficult passage and wouldn’t get around to it soon enough so Ellen would just do it. And other times I’d get the dishes done, then get distracted with some idea, rushing into the living room to get it down before I forgot—and Ellen would go in and dry the damn things.

We have a “Birthday Club” in Virginia, a group of four couples that celebrates each of our birthdays, going out for dinner and giving each other gifts. One of our number is a genius at finding or having made message shirts that capture perfectly our personalities (one of mine says “Just shut the hell up!”). When we got back, we all gathered for a belated celebration of Ellen’s and my birthdays. Ellen’s gift from Ross? A black T-shirt with the white logo “Blog Widow.”

But, of course, there were amazing times as well. And one of the amazing times was up on that mountain, the cold wet flakes brushing our faces, that black wet face of rock towering over us, that feeling of being somewhere special, of seeing something amazing, of just—I dunno—being alive.

And there was this:

Early in June, a Fulbright colleague at another university mentioned to me that a German university outside of Hamburg was looking for an experienced general education coordinator.

“Really?” I said.

He nodded. "And it looks good. They seem to know what they're talking about."

That next morning, back at the flat, I logged into the Chronicle of Higher Education and punched in “Germany” and “General Education.”

And there it was: XYZ university in northern Europe had received a grant from the European Union to experiment with an alternative to Germany’s fairly strict, career-oriented educational system. And yes, they were hiring. In fact, not only did they need someone to oversee the GE program—something I’d been doing for years—they also needed someone to work with writing and general education—bringing my area of specialty into play.

Now I don’t want you to think this was a slam dunk decision for me, one of those easy “But of course!” moments. Just applying for a job like this would mean a ton of work at the very time we were trying to relish our last days in Hong Kong. And if I got an offer (and in the end, I didn’t, not even close) then moving to Germany would mean giving up a lot of security, tenure and a good job and good friends in one of the nicest small towns in America.

But even so . . . Germany!

“Ellen?” I called, my voice cracking. “Can you come here for a second?”

I heard her coming down the hall, talking to Lucy as she passed the kids' bedroom. Outside the office, she paused for a second, peering in at me. The last time I’d called her to my computer, my voice wavering, it was to announce that her father had died.

“Yes?” she said.

“Look at this.”

She came to the desk, glanced over my shoulder.

“Holy crap,” she said after a second, substituting an old, much-beloved Anglo-Saxon word for “crap.”

I looked at her. She leaned in closer, peering at the screen. Then she bent over, fingers clicking over the keyboard. Opening a new tab, she Googled the town, then hit image. Pictures of an old-style German city cluttered the screen: narrow cobblestone streets with brick houses pressed against the walkway; an open square surrounded by brick-arched building and narrow turrets with flags flapping overhead; a strange kind of castle-looking thing with two fat towers, one on each side.

“Wow,” she said.

“I know.” I was actually shaking. “What do you think?”

She read the ad again. “It fits you perfectly.”

“Yes.”

Straightening, she gave me a look. “It would devastate the kids.”

I nodded. It was true: they were more than ready to get back to Virginia, more than ready to be back in their own rooms, play with their own friends.

Neither of us spoke for a long moment. Then I said again, “What do you think?”

“We have to try.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. A chance like this—you can’t let it go by.”

I looked back at the computer, considered, nodded my head.

“Right?” she said.

“Absolutely.”

“Okay then!" She gave me a quick pat on the shoulder, then a little squeeze, a ripple of electricity passing through my shirt. "Hop to it, buddy! You’ve got a lot of work to do.”

I grunted, swung my chair back to the computer, reached for a pen. She gave me that little squeeze again, then left the room, calling to Jamie as she went back down the hall.

God I love her.

My Three Tailors, prt. 3

2010-09-22T18:23:00.001-07:00

Fortunately, there’s Rosie.

I first heard about Rosie from our friends Chris and Valerie who lived upstairs from us and who had a strange habit of saying, in the middle of, for example, an Indian dinner, “Oh, you really must go and see Rosie.”

For the longest time I assumed Rosie was just another one of their imaginary friends (don’t ask), but eventually I clued in that Rosie was a real person who actually existed—and what’s more, that she was a tailor.

You would have thought that by May, the first time I met Rosie, I would have given up on this whole tailor thing. Sure, I’d come to love the suit and trousers I’d bought from the Chinese tailor in central, but even so, all of it was such a hassle, so stressful, the measuring, the money, just getting from our remote corner of the New Territories to wherever the tailor was. Easier just to go back to the States, wait for the first of our 17 weekly editions of Eddie Bauer, and pick out some boring piece of crap sown in some factory in India.

But no, I had one more thing I was questing for, and I was hoping Rosie was just the person to help out. I have this shirt, you see, a black, short-sleeved cotton-linen number that I’d picked up at a mall years ago. It was an amazing shirt: light, comfortable, loose on my frame and slow to wrinkle. Short of a Packer logo and someplace to store a Cosmopolitan, what more could I ask for?

Well, how’s about four more like it for starters?

My plan, then, was to take this shirt up to Shenzhen, just across the border into China, and show it to Rosie, asking her if she could make more just like it for me. And that’s just what I did. One Sunday morning late in May, Chris and I got up early and took a taxi up to Tai Wo, the MTR station just north of where we lived. In a matter of minutes we were at the Chinese border and through customs. We spent a couple hours getting body, foot, and head massages, then had a good stiff lunch of turnip cakes in XO sauce (which tastes much better than it sounds—not that that would take much) before going in search of Rosie.

I’m at a loss as to how to describe the Shenzhen mall. Think about your local shopping center: a Starbucks on every floor; an Ambercrombie and Fitch with its pedophilic pornography in the entryway; Bed, Bath, and Body Works leaking the scent of sarsaparilla-grapefruit toe scrub into the Insta-Sushi shop next door. Mothers and daughters, teenage couples, and old men with walkers and fire-engine red Chuck Taylors stroll along wide well-lit walkways between shops. Babies gurgle. Doves coo.

Now take that picture and scribble over it with a black magic marker dipped in dog crap. Add a dash or two of insane dystopia (think, Blade Runner on acid), throw in pickpockets, hookers, hustlers who’d sell you the shirt off their grandma’s back, mix well, and you’re about halfway to what the Lo Wu mall looks like.

For one thing, it’s maybe six stories high, low-railed balconies circling a narrow open space. Shenzhen has been in the Hong Kong news a lot lately, because of a spate of suicides at a Taiwanese plant that makes iPods and iPads. Conditions there are so bad that employees—some as young as 18 or 19—have been hurling themselves out of windows, preferring death to 14-hour work days. Standing there, at the foot of the Shenzhen mall, all I can think is . . . well, let’s just say I wished I had a hardhat.

For another thing, everywhere you go in this mall folks are trying to hustle you, calling out to you, asking if you want sun glasses, shirts, shoes, a girl, some food, “What you want?’ What you want?” The only way to get through it without getting suckered into buying, say, a 6-trillion dollar rug, is to put your head down and plow on, avoiding eye contact, shrugging off offered hands, shoving old ladies cuddling infants out of your way.

We go first to the third floor, where Rosie has her shop, a three-walled, white shelved space maybe 8 foot by 10. She’s busy with another customer, so Chris leads me one floor higher, to the material center.

Like the mall as a whole, it’s hard to describe this room. It’s maybe 100 yards by 100 yards and packed, floor to ceiling, with bolts of every kind of material imaginable: tweeds, linens, cottons, silks, wools, stripes, checks, plaids, seersucker, mesh, 60’s psychedelia. All of it is packed into individually-owned booths stacked 10 feet high with the stuff. Pause for ten seconds to run your fingers over this or that fabric, and some pretty young thing will pluck your sleeve and lead you down alleyways nine inches wide, insisting you must see this linen or that wool, that it’s the best they have, that they’ll give you a good price.

That most of the salespeople are women—and noticeably attractive at that—is more than a coincidence, I think, not unlike the conference book dealers in the US who hire mostly skinny women in their twenties to walk the floor.

Here you find the usual wheeling and dealing you’d expect in China: they start high (super high, if you’re a gweilo), you start low, they act offended, you refuse to budge, they cut their price in half, you come up maybe 5%, they lower their price some, you add another 5%, they refuse to go down anymore, saying, “No money, no money,” meaning, “At these prices my children will starve!” You shrug, start to walk away, they knock another 50% off the price, and the two of you shake hands, grinning at each other, both satisfied.

On this particular day, I find a man who sells linens almost exclusively and pick up a few that I like: one dark blue, one olive green, and one salmon-pink-orange-sherbet color that makes my eyes water just looking at it. Chris gets a khaki and a dark blue for trousers, then finds a nice linen color he wants for a long-sleeved shirt. I like it too, so buy a couple yards for my own shirt, which I know sounds a little creepy, I know, but the fact is I’m a foot taller than Chris and he’s got this decidedly un-midwestern Italian-Irish-Czech-Portuguese type thing going, so there’s very little chance anyone will mistake us for twins.

Then we go back downstairs to Rosie.

It is impossible not to love Rosie. This is not because, as you may be thinking, Rosie is a buxom larger-than-life bleach-blonde, cheery, smiley, loving woman like you’d see tending bar in some World War II-era film. No, in many ways—indeed, in almost every way—Rosie defies her name: she is not immensely, overwhelmingly cheerful. She’s not particularly buxom or particularly pretty or particularly—I don’t know—rosie in anyway, shape or form. And she’s definitely not blonde.

What she is, though, is calm. I’ve seen snotty white women in Rosie’s shop rage away because they actually had to wait a whole seven minutes while Rosie took care of another customer, and Rosie has just nodded and looked straight at them, as if to say, “And what would you have me do?” And I’ve seen those same women back down almost immediately.

And what Rosie is, is honest. The first time we were there, I ordered four shirts and a sports coat. She took my measurements, listened patiently as I explained my irrational fear of overly snug armpit seams, then set everything aside on a shelf over a sewing machine.

I reached for my wallet. “How much deposit?”

She waved her hand. “No deposit.”

“Are you sure?”

She laughed. “It’s your fabric. You already paid for it.”

And what Rosie is, is a good tailor. When Chris and I came back two weeks later (spending the morning, again, getting our admittedly ample bodies rubbed down tip to toe), Rosie handed me my weird salmon/pink/orange shirt to try on, smiling a little as its glow blinded three old men passing in the hall.

I was wearing a t-shirt, so didn’t bother with the changing room, just slipping the linen over my head.

And here again I find myself at a loss for words. Have you ever walked out of doors and felt as though the air and your body were exactly the same temperature, as though the air could pass right through your skin and into your bones, and you’d be perfectly fine? Or have you ever risen from bed in the morning and gone downstairs to find a pot of hour-old coffee waiting for you, and taken a sip and just felt—I don’t know: as though this cup of this coffee with this cream in it, was meant for you?

That’s exactly how this shirt felt, slipping over my shoulders: my arms passed through the sleeves as though they’d been there a thousand times before, my chest and pits felt nice and roomy, it hung comfortably around my waist, hugging my belly a little but not too much.

It was, in short, the perfect shirt.

And it remains that way. Even now, two months after our return to the States, I let out a near-silent moan of satisfaction every time I slip on this shirt—or one of its three brethren. They are not just my favorite shirts right now, but arguably my favorite shirts ever, surpassing, even, the black shirt that they were meant to copy.

And if this sounds over-the-top, well then, so be it. The fact of the matter is that I love Rosie, love her deeply and truly and in a way that I’ve loved very few women in my life.

And if that, in turn, sounds disloyal to Ellen, well then you need to know that after I returned to Tai Po with my first—note that word—completed order of custom-tailored Rosie originals, babbling incoherently about Cinderella rainbows and pink unicorns licking my earlobes, Ellen grabbed a skirt or two that she really liked and headed north for her own visit to the incomparable Rosie—and returned as smitten as me.

Ah, love . . . . ain't life grand?

Especially in this shirt.

My Three Tailors, prt. 2

2010-09-21T18:21:00.001-07:00

I met my second tailor on the street on day, waiting for Ellen to arrive for a doctor’s appointment on Hong Kong Island. She had the kids with her, and I must have been poorly dressed, because a young Indian man strolled up to me.

“Need a tailor?” he said.

“No.”

“A very good tailor.”

“I have one.”

This got his attention. He grinned. “You have one?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?” he said, still grinning. “Where’s your tailor?”

I pointed west down Queensway Road. “I don’t know: 79, 85, something like that.”

He obviously didn’t believe me. “I can get you a good suit. For 300.”

Now it was my turn to stare: “300 dollars?”

He nodded.

“No way,” I said. “No one can do a suit for 300 dollars.”

He gestured with a thumb. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

“No,” I said. “I’m meeting my wife.” Pause. “And I already have a tailor.”

“Come on,” he said again. He was a good-looking guy with that easy-going attitude of the salesman who knows he’s got you. Walk down Nathan Road on any day, at any time, and you’ll see 50 or 60 guys just like him, all asking if you want a tailor. According to Martin Booth in Gweilo, Chinese tailors consider this demeaning—standing on the street, hawking your wares—and look down on Indians for doing it.

“Seriously,” said the guy now. “It’s my brother. He’s a good tailor.”

“Seriously,” I said back at him. “I just bought a suit. I don’t need another one.”

“How much you pay?”

“No,” I said, looking away. I wasn’t about to tell him $900.

Again that grin, confident, conspiratorial: “How much?”

“It’s okay,” I said, “thanks anyway.” And then I walked away.

Half an hour later, having met Ellen and sent her off to her doctor’s appointment, I take the kids up the escalator of an indoor market to a free, unlocked bathroom I’d discovered there some weeks earlier. After seeing Lucy safely into the women’s, I escort James and Willinto the men’s. And who should we see there, standing daintily at the urinals, but our young Indian friend.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hey.” I took care of Jamie first, then myself. Then I went over to the sinks, where the man was washing his hands.

“You meant US, didn’t you,” I say.

He looked at me politely.

“When you were talking about the suit. You said you could do it for $300. You meant US dollars, didn’t you.”

“Oh.” And then he nodded.

“Because I was thinking, ‘Man, no one could make a suit for 300 Hong Kong.’”

He laughed and wiped his hands on a paper towel. “You should check it out.”

“Tell you what: give me a card. I’ll stop by sometime.”

He tilted his head toward the door. “It’s just down the hall. Come look.”

Every once in a while it’s easier just to give in. So after gathering the three kids, I pushed Jamie’s stroller down the hall and around the corner to a glass-fronted shop with a number of nice looking shirts in the window. It was, I was startled to realize, a place that I’d glanced at a few times before—what’s more, I’d always admired the shelves of tightly-wound shirt material stretching floor to ceiling along one wall. I know it sounds bizarre, but I love dress shirts and nice silk ties. I’m a bald, middle-aged man, you have to understand. Short of adding one of those bald-guy pony tails or getting another earring (or six), there’s very little I can do to accessorize my life and change my appearance. I can’t even grow a beard, not so much because I’m a white guy with Norwegian ancestry, but because, man, those whiskers itch.

Dress shirts, then—and lovely matching ties—are about as close as I can come to, well, looking pretty. Never mind that I never wear the ties, and only use the shirts once or twice a week during the months of December and January: I like having a closet full of fancy button downs and brilliant, gem-like ties. What can I say? Everyone needs a hobby.

Or a fetish. Whatever.

Anyhow, I’d seen this shop before, passing by on my occasional morning outings with Jamie. I’d even stopped and glanced in a few times, though I’d never entered. And now, here I was, being ushered in like some kind of fat, bald, pasty-white royalty.

And what’s more, as I maneuvered Jamie’s stroller through the door, I noticed a rectangular sign in the front window. It read: “Shirts: Six for $1,500.”

For those of you a little slow with your math—or who just don’t care that the HK to US dollar conversion rate is roughly 7.8—$1,500 Hong Kong means roughly $190 US. Divide that by 6, and you’re looking at more-or-less thirty-two bucks per shirt

Per dress shirt.

Per custom-made dress shirt.

Long-sleeved, no less.

I tried hard not to giggle.

Our man from the street introduced me to another Indian fellow, this one bald-headed with a bear and sideburns—a look, I’ll admit, I’ve always found a little disconcerting, the coiffeuristic equivalent of going to work wearing a shirt and no pants.

The second Indian man made a big deal about the kids, offering them cookies and candy and urging all of us to take a seat.

“I’m actually in a bit of a hurry,” I said. “My wife is at the doctor’s, and we’re meeting friends soon.”

“No problem,” said the second man. “You want a suit?”

“No. No suit.” I pointed to the sign in the window. “I might be interested in some shirts, though.”

“No problem,” he said. “We can do shirts.”

“The thing is,” I said, “I don’t know your work. I’ve never been here before, no one has recommended the place to me. How about I only buy three shirts for $750, and then if I like them, I’ll get three more.”

The man smiled so broadly his eyes almost disappeared. He shook his head.

“But how do I know,” I said, “that they’ll be good shirts? I’m not some tourist. I live in Tai Po. I’ve seen some bad shirts.” It was true. Hong Kong is well-known for its tailors, and notorious for its crappy tailors—think shirts that are single-stitched, that literally fall apart at the seams, that are so thin of thread that you can see a man’s chest-hair through the cloth.

“I’m serious,” I said. “If I like the first three I’ll buy more. I’m going back to America soon. I need lots of shirts.”

He nodded slightly, no quite committing, but not not committing either. Leading me to the wall of narrow shelves, he chose two or three bolts of cloth he thought I might like. We went back and forth, him choosing, me rejecting, me pointing, asking for similar fabric in different colors. Everything I chose, I made a point of holding my hand behind the cloth and holding it up to the light. Like most bald men, I’m annoyingly hirsute in other places—though I have managed to avoid the guerilla back thus far. And the only thing more annoying than getting a crappily made shirt, is getting a great shirt that you can’t wear because it makes you look like you’ve pulled it over a wool sweater.

Eventually we settled on three nice materials—one a plain gray and two white with stripes. I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing, when a third man strolled in. He’s older, heavier, better dressed, with a thick head of black hair. Clearly he’s the boss.

Introductions all around, and a word or two exchanged in a dialect I didn’t recognize regarding the particulars of my situation. He nodded at the materials I’d picked out. “Very nice.” Then he gestured toward the back wall of the shop, toward set of shelves we haven’t examined. “You might consider this,” he said, taking down two more bolts that were very nice.

Very nice.

Really very nice.

Crap.

So of course I ended up ordering six shirts. He took my measurements courteously, the antithesis of my Chinese tailor. “What kind of fit?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

He gestured toward his young assistant, a thin, handsome man with a slightly crooked nose. “You want close fit like him?” Then he gestured down at his own, voluminous shirt. “Or looser fit like me?”

“Looser,” I said. “You and me, we can’t do what he does.”

He laughed, jotted a few notes, then strolled over to the counter where he began making up a receipt.

“How much down?” I asked, reaching for my wallet.

“Twenty percent.” He tapped two of the fabrics, a bluish-gray one and a white and red pattern that looked almost pink. “These two, though, these are nicer fabrics, so it will be $1,800.”

“No,” I said. “The sign says $1,500.”

He tapped the clothes again. “But these two—“

“No,” I said. Six months ago I would have caved, I’m sure, thinking I was out of my depth, that there was something going on that I didn’t understand, some nuance of culture where I was clearly in the wrong. But multiple trips to the mainland in the last few months had toughed me up. “First it was come in just to look around. Then it was three for $750, then six for $1,500. And now it’s $1,800. You know what? I think I’ll just skip it.”

I shoved my wallet back into my pocket, honestly determined to walk out.

“On no,” he said, and waved his hand. “Okay. It’s okay.” Then he gave me a smile like, It was worth a try, and went back to writing the bill.

I wish the rest of this story were happier. I was really excited about those shirts. Pretty, you know? Jewel like. Bald dude accessories.

I came back a week later. The shirts looked fine in the package. They even looked fine out of the wrapper. It was only when I got into the dressing room and pulled the first one on that I began to see problems.

For one, it was short. Like, it came down over my waist, sure, and I could tuck it into my pants okay—after that, though, I’d need to staple the tails to my underwear to keep them from coming untucked.

And then it was tight. Or tightish. I’m a big man, and not exactly what you’d call buff, so I tend to like my clothing loose, both to hide the fat and to keep the fat from getting pinched or chaffed. This shirt wasn’t exactly lose-a-limb tight, but it was more snug than I’d hoped for, and nothing like what the owner had been wearing the week before. It rode up into my armpits, and restricted my movements whenever I pulled—or tried to pull—an arm across my chest.

And it was thin. Not I-can-see-your-nipples thin, but thin enough that I spent two or three minutes standing there in the dressing room, thinking back to the week before and asking myself if I had, indeed, tested each fabric up against bright light. I had, I was certain of it. Staring at myself in the mirror and seeing the foreboding outline of my chest hair move like a thunderstorm beneath that white and red pinstriped fabric, all I could conclude was that the store had two sets of material—a thicker one that they showed customers, and a thinner one that they actually used to sew the shirts.

And now, I have a confession: I talk tough, I know, swagger a lot and act like I’m never afraid to speak my mind.

The truth of the matter, though, is that I’m a wimp. It’s not so much that I want people to like me—it’s that I’m terrified they won’t. I just can’t handle the thought of looking deep into someone’s eyes and seeing nothing there but disdain—though, I’ll have to admit, I’ve seen this look more than once in my career.

In the end, I think I’m just terrified of confrontation. I’m no good at it, not good at having people yell at me, not good at standing my ground, firm in the knowledge that I’m right—or more right then the idiot across from me with spittle flying off his lips and a crease the size of the Mississippi flood plain in the middle of his forehead.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying this: I knew I was being ripped off. I knew they were selling me shirts that were cut short, where the material probably wasn’t what I’d paid for. I knew that chances were slim to none—barring a crash diet where I lost 30 pounds and six inches in height—that I’d ever be able to wear any of these shirts once I returned to the States.

I knew all this, yes. I knew it all. And even so, I paid for those shirts and left the shop with a broken heart.

My Three Tailors, prt. 1

2010-09-21T05:16:00.000-07:00

Lexington, Virginia has very few faults, but one that’s glaring is the lack of places for a guy like me to buy clothes. To be fair, I’m big, unusually big even, with both height and girth, and, well and if you must know the truth, kind of stumpy legs and a weirdly flat butt. So it would make sense that it’s difficult to find clothes in my size. But that’s not really the issue in Lexington. No, in Lexington the issue is that, if you’re a man and you want to wear clothes, there’s Walmart and, well . . . not much.

And let’s be frank folks: excepting Fruit of the Loom and sweat socks, there ain’t much I’m buying at Walmart.

So you can imagine my joy when I learned that Hong Kong is to shopping what Mecca, Heaven, and Disney World are to religious fanatics who love helium-sipping mice. No more on-line ordering for me! No more shoes that were half a size too small or shirts that looked great on the screen but hung like a door frame off my chest. No more funky fabrics that tried to pass as cotton or pukey greens that make you eyes ache. No more trips to the post office to return all of this junk to L.L. Bean and Eddie Bauer.

Eddie Bauer. Brrrggghhh.

No. Now I would buy at Armani and Versace and Gucci and bunch of other really fancy places that I’m not even sure sell men’s clothes—or any clothes at all, for that matter. But never mind: I was going to be a clothes horse.

Except for the part where I wasn’t. Because when I got to Hong Kong, I discovered that what they call “Large” we call “Pre-teen,” and what we call “XL” they call “tents.”

Seriously, nothing fit me. Even on the rare occasions I was able to track down XXL, I’d have to get someone to help pull the damn thing off after I’d gotten it stuck half-way over my nose. So I was screwed: pretty much a year in one of the most fashionable places on earth, and I was going to have to wear the same three pairs of khakis and four L.L. Bean polos over and over again.

And then in January, one of the other Fulbrighters, a native Hong Konger, sent the rest of us an e-mail offering to introduce us to his tailor. “It depends on your size,” David wrote, “but a good summer weight suit will usually run about $900, Hong Kong.”

“But you don’t wear suits,” Ellen said when I told her I was going to Central to pick out material.

“Who cares,” I said. “That’s, like, 115 bucks, US. For that price, I can buy it and use it for a handkerchief.”

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from a Hong Kong tailor—or any tailor, for that matter, since I’d never been to one before, unless you count the guy who tried to force me into the baby blue tuxedo before my senior prom. I suppose I pictured a pretty civilized affair: myself standing in the middle of a room lined with mirrors and paneled oak. A gentile Chinese man in shirt sleeves and a vest would take down my measurements, barking out figures to a bespectacled assistant scribbling in a notebook. Nearby, two or three other customers would be milling about, sipping tea maybe as they fingered bolts of pin-striped material.

In the end, I was at least right about one thing: my tailor was indeed Chinese.

Other than that, the experience was pretty much exactly what I hadn’t imagined: taking an elevator to the fifth floor of a non-descript marble building off of Queensway Road East, I stepped across a hall that looked as though it were designed for the easy removal of bloodstains, and into a windowless room roughly the size of a fat man’s coffin. Two of the four vinyl-paneled walls were covered with aluminum shelves bearing dusty bolts of cloth. Above them, hanging from an exposed steam pipe, were suits and shirts and trousers waiting to be picked up. In one corner, a customer with receding hair and glasses was trying on a suit behind a waist-high wall.

Two harried looking Chinese men pushed their way through the 9 or 15 customers crowded into the small space. Along the far wall was a low counter holding an ancient cash register and twelve thousand photograph-sized books full of wools and pin-stripes, linens and seer suckers.

I froze in the doorway, unsure of how to proceed. Eventually one of the tailors—a stooped, dark-haired man with big ears—paused as he stuck pins into a spotty-faced Chinese youth, glared at me and said, “What?”

“I—um—“ I glanced around. I could see my friend David and two or three others from the group, but all of them were busy picking out materials.

“Pick up or measure?” the tailor barked.

“Pick up,” I said, then realized what he meant. “I mean—measure!”

He gave a grunt, rightly figuring me for some high-maintenance moron who was going to eat up his time and profits. Gesturing with his head, he led me to the counter covered with samples books. “Look!” he said, and walked away.

I looked.

It was overwhelming. I mean, there must have been 100,000 samples on that counter, organized in not ascertainable manner. I flipped through a few of the catalogues, fingering materials, trying to find some colors that I liked. Already I missed the simplicity of Eddie Bauer, the four predictable choices on each page, the friendly associate at the other end of the line waiting to answer all of my stupid questions. Eventually, though, I managed to find a charcoal gray mid-weight that I sort of liked. Holding my place with one finger, I went over to where the tailor who loved me so much was holding a yellow-tape up to a college-aged Malaysian dude with long shiny hair that he couldn’t stop touching.

“Um,” I said, holding up the book like Oliver asking for more.

Tailor man glanced at it. “Out,” he said. “No more.” Then he went back to his tape measure.

Shuffling back to the stack of samples, I turned more pages, pinched more materials. Eventually I came up with two or three I didn’t hate completely, and waited until my man was free to measure me. He seemed to approve of my choices—or at least not hate them completely—and demonstrated his approval by jamming his tape measure up my groin as though I were a goose being placed on a spit.

I kept my mouth shut as he measured me, afraid he knew of even more creative ways to torture me. When he got to my shoulders, though, I managed to stutter out a request that he not make the area around the arms too tight.

He stopped what he was doing and peered at me through his glasses. “What?” he barked.

“The-the-the shoulders,” I said. “If they’re—I won’t—too tight and I can’t wear them . . . “

“Hmmmpf!” he said, and went back to his measuring. Four more minutes and a few questions more—“Pleats? Three? Side pockets? You sure?—and I was back on Queensway Road, blinking in the sunlight.

This is the point, of course, where more likely than not, you’re waiting for me to say something like, “It was all worth it, though, once I went back and tried on the first custom-tailored suit of my young life,” or, “I’ve never had pants that fit that well, before, or since, and I don’t expect ever to,” or at the very least, “I went back in, punched that guy in the face, and torched the place.”

But alas, such was not the case.

I went back a few weeks later for a fitting, leaving again slightly dazed and confused. And when I returned finally to pick up my one suit and two pairs of pants, I just wanted to grab the clothes, pay, and flee. He and his assistant, though, insisted that I go into the “changing room”—e.g., the cupboard in the corner—and try on my new suit. I did, coming out in my stocking feet to stand in front of a floor-length mirror.

I looked—how can I say this? Old.

It wasn’t the bald head, mind you, or the increasing abundance of gray in what little hair remained. Or even my ever-growing dim sum belly.

No, it wasn’t any of those things. It was the rise.

Now for those of you who have know idea what I mean, “rise,” is the length of material between your, um, groinal region and where-ever it is you situate your belt. Why they call it “rise” is something I’d rather not discuss at the moment, so suffice to say that on some pants—say, trendy jeans—the rise is rather short, while on other pants—say, those worn by immensely fat men whose bellies need their own seats and an extra-large popcorn at the movie theatre—the rise is roughly the size of, say, Wyoming.

Anyhow, the pants I was wearing now, standing in front of the mirror at the tailor in Central had a rise that was, shall we say, rather nostalgic. Think Charlie Chaplin, perhaps. Or Johnny Cash way back in the 50s, dressed smartly in black with a cowboy shirt and the top of his trousers somewhere just under his armpits. Or any of the lead characters from Revenge of the Nerds.

I mean, these pants had Rise, with a capital “R” and italics. I could have pulled those suckers over my head, unzipped, and eaten pizza through the crotch, that’s how much rise these bad boys had.

My tailor stood beside me, hands on his hips. He met my eyes. “Okay?”

I glanced back at the mirror. I looked like Harold Lloyd, with less hair. Then I looked back at the short, large-eared Chinese man standing beside me. He was small, yes, and old, yes, and kind of scary in a way that men who know what they’re doing always are. But right now, he was also smiling a little, proud of his work.

“Yes,” I said. “Okay.”

Back at our flat in Tai Po, I went into the bedroom and tried the suit on again. Strolling out into the living room, I held my arms out for Ellen to see. “What do you think?”

She glanced up from the floor where she was playing with Jamie. Her eyes roamed over the gray flannel, following the lines from cuff to cuff, crease to ankle. Ellen cares deeply about many things—her kids, her family, her work, books, art, politics, even me sometimes. But clothes, to her, are generally little more than a nuisance, something to be acquired as quickly as possible and washed as seldom as acceptable.

“That,” she said, “is a beautiful suit.”

It took me a minute to get my breath back. “Really.”

She nodded. “Really.”

I stepped back. “What do you think of the pants?”

She glanced down. “They look great.”

“You don’t think they’re old man pants?”

She looked again. “They look comfortable.”

I did one of those dorky, lean back and suck in your gut moves, trying to get a look at my own outfit from a distant perspective. “Huh,” I said.

Padding back down the hall, I considered this. Back in the room, I took off the jacket and stood before the mirror, giving the trousers another look. Ellen was right: they did look comfortable. What’s more, their lines were classic, the pleats graceful, the creases sharp, the cuffs perfectly sized. I took a few steps, back and forth, watching myself from the side. The pants moved easily with me, nowhere too tight, nowhere catching or sagging or twisting unpredictably.

“Huh,” I said again, still looking in the mirror.

And then I did what any reasonable man would do: I took those trousers off, packed them up, put on my blue jeans, and headed back down to Central to order three more pairs.

Things Burn Up On Entry

2010-09-11T11:06:00.000-07:00

As the plane dips a wing over Chicago a little after 3:00, Ellen glances across the aisle at me.

“Different landscape,” she says.

Definitely. The view out the window shows block upon block of low, flat buildings laid out in predictable squares. They stretch to the horizon, as does the dull beige sky. Gone are the mountains, the blocks of Leggo skyscraper apartments, the wide blue ocean filled with cargo ships and ferries.

It’s 11:45 PM on 16 July, the day we arrived back. Excluding the four or five hours of moderate dozing on the plane, I’ve been awake for something like 30 hours. Ellen is in bed, the kids are asleep, and I’m on the phone to Hong Kong. Specifically, I’m trying to explain to the clerk at the hotel we stayed at on Thursday night exactly what I mean when I say “stuffed killer whale.”

“It’s a toy,” I tell her. “A child’s toy. A-a-a plush toy.”

“Plastic?” she says.

“No, no. Soft. Like a pillow.”

“You left a pillow in you room?”

It doesn’t get any easier when I have to explain the concept of killer whale. I’ve only been in the US for 8 hours, and already I’ve forgotten the complexities of a bilingual conversation in a region where few people are actually bilingual and almost everyone in the service industry was kicked out of high school at the age of 15.

Finally, she gets a clear enough sense of what we’re discussing to put me on the most expensive hold of my life. I’m sweating. I know this is stupid, know I should go to bed, know I’ll be more clear headed after some sleep. I’ve already gone through all ten of our suitcases twice, unzipping the compartments, digging through the dirty clothes, the souvenirs, random toys and books, the detritus of 11+ months of living abroad. I can’t find Will’s killer whale anywhere—Will’s killer whale, his favorite stuffed animal, his constant bedtime companion, the receptor of all of his secrets, for all practical purposes his best friend, even now, on the verge of ten.

Even worse, it was my job, that morning—if you can call something 30 hours and twelve time zones ago “that” and “morning”—it was my job to gather all of the kids’ toys and blankets and stuff them into the various small spaces remaining in our ten suitcases. I had thought I’d placed dear old Killie in Will’s backpack so that he could have him on the 15-hour flight home, but when I’d searched there come bedtime in Wisconsin, all I’d found was a stuffed orang utan we’d bought in Borneo. Making all of this worse is the fact that Will has an earache and barely slept on the plane, is exhausted, and has seemed incredibly vulnerable as we’ve made the transition from Hong Kong back to the US.

Eventually the clerk in Hong Kong comes back on the line and tells me they hadn’t found any killer whales in our room, but if we wanted to reclaim the mud-covered duffle and half-eaten sack of Doritos we’d left there, she’d be happy to send them to me, C.O.D. I hang up and pace into the living room. My mom is there, reading a book. She’s still glowing from all the hugs and smooches and the sheer joy of having our three little rug rats back in her life.

“You should go to bed,” she says.

“I know.” My joints ache and I can feel a slick of sweat on my forehead. My clothes are so saturated with body oil and dirt and airline grease that they actually stick to me when I move.

“Get some rest. It’ll clear your head.”

“I know,” I say. “I just can’t stand the thought of our trip ending like this.”

We make it all the way to 4 A.M. before Lucy comes in to the room and says, “I can’t sleep anymore.”

“I got it,” I say to Ellen, who groans something in a dialect of Portuguese I hadn’t known she knew, rolls over, and begins to snore immediately.

I take Lucy in my arms, carry her downstairs into my parents’ basement. We click on the TV. I curl her up on a couch, and wrap her in a blanket.

“Cartoon network,” she says.

“Fox News,” I say back. “Close enough.”

I hope, of course, that we’ll both fall back to sleep, but neither of us does. Eventually I go upstairs and collect one of those plastic-wrapped packets of 10 different cereals, all in little boxes, all with bright labels, all packed with sugar.

“Take your pick,” I say to Lucy. “Anything but—“

“Fruit Loops,” she says.

“—Fruit Loops,” I finish. “We need to share those with Will and Jamie.”

She chooses Corn Pops and I swear under my breath—they’ve always been my favorite. As she eats, I crawl over to the suitcases, pull the first one flat, shocked again by its weight. Back in Hong Kong some—what? 36 hours ago?—we’d borrowed the hotel scale and weighed each of our bags: 24.6kg. 23.9 kg. 24.9 kg. On the advice of one of the previous HK Fulbrights, we hadn’t shipped anything coming over from the States in 2009. Instead, we’d stuffed 10 suitcases full of everything we’d need, from undershirts to kitchen knives, and lived off of that for the next 11 months.

Unfortunately—in a “No Duh” kind of way—living in Hong Kong for a year we’d accumulated a lot of additional stuff. Some of it we’d sent back with family who visited as they returned to the States. Others we’d shipped in postal boxes. The rest we’d thrown into the trash, given to friends, or stuffed into our ten bags, weighing and reweighing, making sure we were under the 25 kilogram max.

Except that, um, when we got to the airport and I put the bag on the scale, grinning broadly as it posted 25.0, the ticket agent frowned and said, “But the maximum is 23 kilograms.”

I must have looked about to cry, because in a very un-Hong Kong moment, she waved all of our bags through—all of them, and didn’t charge us a penny.

Now, down in my parents’ basement at 4:36 am, Ben-10 on the TV, I zip open the first of the bags, running my fingers frantically through the loose clothing, the plastic toys, the zip-loc bags of shampoo, searching for one soft, cuddly, much-loved football-sized killer whale.

It’s a nightmare, I have to admit. Or more accurately, I’m moving in a nightmare-like daze. I’ve had maybe 8 hours sleep since what was Friday in Hong Kong but Thursday in Wisconsin. I’ve also had more sugar, more bad food, more caffeine, fewer showers, and less exercise in that time span than I’m used to, making me feel slimy, exhausted, mildly buzzed, and thoroughly depressed. Making all of this worse, some stupid show about spinning tops—the kid’s toy, that kind of top—is now flashing across the TV screen. Tops? Are you kidding me?

And then, in the fifth bag, half-asleep, I tug on what I think is an old towel and pull out a small, black-and-white killer whale.

Will comes down at 5. I give him a huge hug and hand him Killie, grinning ear to ear. He takes it from me, grins, and says to Lucy, “Is this Cartoon Network?”

The tops cartoon is over now and it’s something else, something weird with super-heroes, only they’re all really short with big faces, like they’re little kid super-heroes or something. It’s a cartoon I recognize as something the kids watched when we were in Cambodia and Bali, and maybe as far back as Vietnam, and the thought of those places and their white beaches and the smell of lemon grass just drives my head into the ground, it’s so depressing.

Will’s tugging on his ear.

“Still hurt?” I say.

He nods. The ear in question is cherry red.

Jamie makes it to 7, wakes up his mother (who will owe me those three additional hours of sleep until the day she dies), and comes downstairs. By this time, the grandparents are up and Lucy and Will are running around half-buzzed on sugar cereal, half-drunk on lack of sleep. I hand Jamie his share of the Fruit Loops and leave for the bathroom. When I return, Ellen is sorting through a pile of souvenirs I’d set aside during my search for the illusive baby whale.

“Some of these are gifts, right?”

“Better be,” I say. “We don’t have room for that stuff back in Virginia.”

I go upstairs, get a glass of water, say a few things to the kids, and return to the basement. Jamie is crying.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Probably tired,” Ellen says.

“Jamie,” I say, “are you okay?”

He just sobs.

“What’s a matter, honey?” Ellen asks.

“Does your tummy hurt?” I say.

Jamie sobs some more, stammering out, “Y-y-yes.” And then he opens his mouth and green vomit flies everywhere.

It’s 3:20 in the afternoon, and Ellen has come in to the room where I am stretched out on the bed. “Paulie,” she says, “you need to get up.”

“%#$&,” I say, albeit in a very loving way.

At 3:41 she returns. “Paulie,” she says, “you need to get up. You won’t be able to sleep if you don’t.”

She’s right, I know, but I don’t care. Right now, my brain feels like someone has wrapped it in a warm wool blanket and dragged it down a very very deep hole. I’m not so much on the bed, as of it.

We laid down at 2, swearing we were each going to take a one hour nap—just enough to clear our heads after our pre-dawn cartoon-watching.

Bad idea.

Really really really bad idea.

Fortunately, I have to go to the bathroom, so I literally must drag myself up—though, I admit, I do spend a good ten minutes of half-sleep trying to convince myself that there’s no shame in wet underwear.

Will and Lucy are still asleep as well. “Kids,” I say, leaning in the door to their room. “Time to get up.”

Silence. It’s like there’s a black hole of sound in that room.

I nudge Will with my toe. “Will,” I say, “you really have to get up.”

I expect a moan, but get nothing. I look at the clock: 4:00. Which means, what, 5 am in Hong Kong? Or 3 am? It’s an hour off, one way or the other, but my head is so stuffed with dried seaweed and turkey sausage, I can’t even do a simple calculation, much less come up with a reasonable metaphor.

“Will,” I say, and get down on my knees. I poke his knee. His leg shifts some, but falls back into place. I rub his back, give his buttock a pinch. Nothing. I lift one ankle by the pant cuff, let it go. It drops, limp.

“Ellen,” I call into the living room, “they’ve gone boneless.”

It takes us 20 minutes to get them up and into the living room. Propping them on the sofa, I run into the kitchen to get a drink of water. When I return, they’ve slid on the floor, their eyes shut.

“Crap,” I say. We poke and prod, nudge and elbow, promising them ice cream if they’ll just wake up. “Culvers,” I say. “We can go get frozen custard.”

Finally we have them in the Volkswagon. My head still feels like someone’s filled it with marshmallow fluff and lit it on fire, but I put the car in the gear and we lurch forward.

When we get to Culvers, we pile out and walk across the flat, black, hot asphalt under the flat, beige, hot sky, into this non-descript blue restaurant that looks like someone took an A&W, gutted it, then installed the dullest furniture they could find. We buy 5 ice cream cones. We go sit in a booth. We lick, silently. The kids are still blurry eyed. I still feel like my bones are made of wax that’s been sitting in the sun too long.

“I’m not hungry,” Lucy says after about five minutes.

“Really?” I say, even though I’m not either. “But it’s ice cream.”

She just shakes her head. Jamie, ever the lemming, says, “I’m not hungry either.” Will nods.

Will’s ear is still hurting. Walking to the car, Ellen points to a Walmart. It’s on the far side of a long, black parking lot the size of Conneticut.

“We should probably stop there and get some Tylenol.”

The thought of going into the big W a mere 24 hours after our return to the States depresses me almost to the point of—well, it’s hard to think of something to compare it to, because going to Walmart is in and of itself the most depressing thing in the world, but you get what I’m saying.

But Will’s ear is hurting, so we trudge across the mega-gigantic supersized parking lot. Inside, we’re greeted by a short woman with triceps the size and consistency of steamed buns that have been left in the rain. Both of her ears are studded with black posts, lobe to crest. I wonder, for a moment, why it never occurred to someone who spends that much time and money trying to look fashionable that maybe a few dips to shape the upper arms would be a useful thing.

We’re searching for three things: Kids’ Tylenol, sandals for Will, and books on tape for our long drive up to Minnesota. Stumbling through the aisles, we find none of them, though we do come across more of the sorts of people you only meet in America: a bespectacled woman so large she looks like she’s pushing one tractor in front of her and pulling another behind; a teenage boy with a pencil fuzz moustache holding hands with a little girl in a pink Packers jersey; a skinny African-American girl who appears to be wearing a girdle-corset thingy outside her clothes.

This last one particularly strikes me, and it takes a minute to figure out why. Is it because she’s only the 5^th or 6^th black person I’ve seen in the last 12 months? Is it because Manitowoc is such a whiter than white place, that she stands out?

But then it hits me: it’s because, for the first time in almost year, we’re not the minority.

We find no Tylenol, no sandals, no books on tape. Crossing the parking lot again, a rusty Chrysler K cruises by us, moving the wrong way down the parking aisle. Inside is a man in a grayed t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. Old papers—phone books, newsprint, envelopes with plastic windows—are shoulder high in the back and passenger seats, as though he’s swimming in a sea of paper.

We’ve decided to drive back to Virginia together—it seems only fitting after a year away that we all pull up to our home together—so we stop at the U-Haul store to reserve a trailer.

It’s a low, square building sided with beige tin. A row of orange and white trucks is lined up near the back door, so that’s where I go in. Inside, three rows of diagonal tables—the kind you find in church basements—are set up with piles of paper, bottles of glue, and scissors. Six or seven women rest on their elbows, cutting and pasting. It’s a scrapbook shop.

In front of me is a barrel-shaped man with close-cut gray hair. He’s wearing a black Harley Davidson t-shirt adorned with a huge American flag. This is an alliance, I’ll have to admit, that I’ve never really been able to figure out: Harleys, in my mind sheltered, academic mind, are driven by gangs like the Hell’s Angels. And Hell’s Angels, in my mind, like things that are decidedly un-American: marijuana, gang violence, and crepes suzette, just to name a few.

“Howdy,” the man says as I stroll in. “What can I do you for?”

“A million dollars,” I’m tempted to say, “though that still might not be enough,” but I keep my mouth shut, except to tell him that I need a trailer.

He asks me a few questions—where, when, how far, for how long, did I have a hitch—and eventually get to the point where he starts tapping into his computer.

We go through a few more details—do I want insurance (No), do I object to a trailer with Rush Limbaugh on the side (Yes). He types away, clearly filling in some on-line form. Eventually, though, he frowns and punches the return key. The frown deepens. He taps the key again.

I expect him to say, “Dag nammit”—I mean, what more could I ask for on our first day back in the States?—but instead he puts on a pair of half-moon glasses, scans the clipping and pasting women, and says, “Bev? A little help?”

A woman with short blondish gray hair comes over. Her T-shirt is white, bearing the words “Scrapping: Girls Gone Wild.”

“What’s up?” she says.

He points to the screen. “I just put the number here, and then press enter, right?”

She tilts her head back, peering through her spectacles. Her glasses, like everything else about her, are wonderfully practical. Over the years, I’ve known maybe a thousand women like her, aunts, and neighbors, teachers and friends—they’re a particular brand of Midwestern women, sturdy and smart and quick of wit and judgment. They won’t hesitate to squeeze you in a bear-hug or slap your hand, depending on just how stupid you’re acting at any given moment. Watching her, I actually find myself choking up, salt misting my eyes.

“Here,” she says, “what’s the number?”

He tells her. She hammers a couple keys with one finger, then presses enter. The machine beeps.

“There you are,” she says.

“Thanks, hon.”

“No problem.”

Back in the car, we drive toward Lake Michigan, heading to Osco in search of the illusive Childrens’ Tylenol. We drive along curving neighborhood streets, past houses I’ve known my entire life. Even after a full year in Hong Kong, none of it feels weird—indeed, if anything is weird, it’s how absolutely normal all of this feels. It’s like we never left.

Along the way, Lucy notices the moon, pale in the afternoon sky. We talk about this, how the moon and earth and sun are on a three dimensional plane, how that impacts what you can and can’t see and when. I mention that among my hometown’s other claims to fame—a real-life WWII submarine in the harbor, a sadistic murderer featured on 20/20—there’s the story of meteorite that fell to earth right in the middle of 8th street, one sunny morning in the 1960s.

“What’s a meteorite?” says Lucy.

“It’s like a meteor,” I tell her, “only lighter.”

She doesn’t get the joke, and neither does her older brother who goes on to explain to her the difference between meteoroids, meteors, and meteorites—the first it turns, out, is just an object traveling through space, while the second is the same object entering the earth’s atmosphere. The third is what actually hits the ground—if anything at all actually makes it through the friction of re-entry.

By 5:00 we’re in the parking lot of the pharmacy down by Memorial Drive. It’s not an Osco anymore, apparently having been bought out by CVS. This is significant, because one of my most horrible moments before returning to the States involved having a sudden mental flash of myself sitting in the parking lot of the CVS in Lexington Virginia, digging desperately through my glove compartment for a gun, a knife, a tire gauge, anything I could use to end my miserable life in a miserable town in and miserable country dominated by a chain of miserable pharmacies known only for their innocuous ability to be stunningly the same no matter where you are.

I don’t know where this sudden hatred of CVS came from: I’d never been particularly bothered by the chain before our trip to Hong Kong. That day, though, sitting in our flat in Tai Po, the tall green mountains outside our window, the hustle and bustle of one of the most fascinating, stimulating, constantly surprising cities in the world not 30 minutes away by train—sitting in that world and having this sudden vision of the dull, flat, predictable sameness of the CVS in Lexington, I’d felt utter despair.

And now, barely 25 hours into our return to the States, here I am sitting in the parking lot of a CVS, the air conditioning cranked as we wait for Ellen to search yet another store for some medicine to cure my son’s ear-ache. Stretching out in the front seat, I slide one of my favorite CDs into the player, turn the volume up just a little as Will and Lucy and Jamie chatter away in the back seat.

I listen for a while, idly hoping Ellen will remember how much she loves me and grab a two-pound bag of Twizzlers before purchasing the medicine. Eventually a song comes on that I like, and I sing the first few lines:

I think the kids are in trouble,

Do not know what all the troubles are for

Give them ice for their fevers

You’re the only thing I ever want anymore . . .

“Daddy,” says Lucy from the backseat, “how do you know the words to that song?”

“Because,” I say, turning so I can see her, “Daddy’s magic, remember?”

They laugh, and Will gives me what I’ll claim here is a loving tap on the back of the head with the heel of his shoe.

“Really,” she says when they’ve helped me wipe up the blood, “how do you know?”

“Because I listened to this CD every night for a month.”

“In Hong Kong?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you get it?”

“At the HMS,” I say. “Remember? Down in Central?”

And then it happens: my body is in my car in a small town in eastern Wisconsin, the flat Midwestern sky stretching out above me, but my mind is flashing suddenly on a particular corner of Queens Road Central, just outside the MTR near Peddar Street. Two doors down from the record shop is the mosaic-tiled restaurant Ellen’s friend Michael brought us to. West leads to my tailor, the best noodle shop in Hong Kong, Shueng Wan and the Market and Hong Kong University. To the East lies St. John’s Cathedral, Hong Kong Park, the trams and the tastiest Macau restaurants in the world, where the pork chops are tender and the rolls have a thin crust, like the best French baguette you’ve ever had.

And then there’s another flash, and I’m back outside CVS, the Wisconsin sun beating down on the car, the parking lots stretching out for miles all around, the radio loud and trailer tractor trucks rattling by.

And all I can think is, “Damn. It’s gone.”

And it is. It’s over.

How You Know It's Time to Go Home

2010-08-25T06:11:00.000-07:00

It’s not Bali’s fault. To be fair, it didn’t have much of a chance at success. For one thing, even though our fancy Sanur beach resort was supposed to be our last stop before going back to the place we’ve now come to call “Tea Party Nut-Job Land,” because of a weird series of events involving Filipino pirates, orangutans, and sea shells in the shape of John the Baptist’s left buttock, we ended up spending five days in Malaysia at a fancy beach resort there. Two weeks of crazy travel ending in a beach resort equals really cool vacation. One week of crazy travel ending in a beach resort and then going to another beach resort equals—well—anti-climax.

Then there’s the fact that when we first showed up in the Bali we stayed in Ubud, which is arguably the coolest town in pretty much anywhere. Years from now when I think back to Ubud, I’ll remember circles of men at the fire dance chanting words from an ancient play, a busy street full of markets and laughing women, restaurants where they greet you with scented towels fresh out of the cooler, and waking up in the morning to find monkeys on our porch, searching for food.

Okay, so the monkeys were a little scary—I mean, they’re cute from a distance, but when they’re chasing your six-year-old daughter with bared teeth, the charm sort of wears off.

But even so: Ubud was awesome. Our hotel was surrounded by rice paddies and had a little open-air swimming pool full of cold cold water. The people were gracious and kind, there was music everywhere we went. We loved Ubud.

So Bali—or at least our beach hotel in Sanur—didn’t have much of a chance.

Of course, they didn’t do themselves any favors.

“We’ve given you an upgrade,” the hotel clerk said as we checked in.

“I love you,” I replied.

He looked at me, a little startled. I smiled. He frowned.

“Um,” I said, “Have you met my kids?” I gestured toward the far end of the open-air lobby where Lucy was doing cart-wheels, Jamie was head-butting Will, and Will was trying to read something involving dragons and boy geniuses.

I expected this would ease the tension some, but his frowned deepened.

“Um,” I said, “and my lovely wife?”

The clerk nodded at Ellen, then said something in rapid Balinese to the concierge. The other man answered back, then rose from his desk and came over to the counter. The two of them chatted back and forth for a minute, then the concierge gestured toward the kids.

“These are your children?”

I nodded. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but despite the concierge’s attempt at a warming smile, I could tell there was a problem.

“Please,” he said, and nodded toward his desk. I followed him over.

“You have been given an upgrade,” he said.

“That’s very nice.”

“Unfortunately,” he said, “there are rules in The Club.”

“The huh?”

“The Club,” he said, and started typing at his computer.

Turns out a lot of fancy hotels have a “club” section, an area reserved for special customers. Sometimes this section has its own pool, sometimes it has a special bar. Generally the rooms are substantially nicer. What exactly makes the customers “special” varies from resort to resort, but at our Sanur hotel, that special features was—

“Excuse me?” I said to the concierge. “I’m not sure I heard you right.”

“No kids,” he repeated.

I looked at him. He was busily typing away, eyes intent on his screen. He didn’t seem to be joking. Then I turned a looked at my kids. Lucy was still doing cartwheels, flashing her bright-pink designer bloomers (“Francie-pants”—look them up on-line), Will had given up on his book and was strolling the lobby fingering the objet-d’arts on display, each of which stood over a small cardboard sign that said, “Do Not Touch.” Jamie was—well, I’m not sure, but it looked like he was digging through the garbage.

I turned back to the concierge. “No kids?” I said. “Really?”

I’ll admit he was very nice. He explained that The Club area was set up for couples on their honeymoon, older folks looking for a quiet get-a-way, and other people who generally hated kids.

“But didn’t you know we had kids?” I asked.

He shook his head, still typing. “Your reservation said ‘Mr. and Mrs.”

“Well, yes,” I said. “But we also asked for two rooms.”

“But all it said was ‘Mr. and Mrs.’”

“Two rooms, for five people. Who did you think the other three people were?”

“’Mr. and Mrs.’”

I gritted my teeth. He kept tapping. What was he doing, filing his tax returns? I wondered for a minute if maybe he, too, had a blog, if maybe his was called “Why Kids Suck.blogspot.Com,” or maybe, “Stupid White Men Who Are Even Dumber Than Most of the Other Stupid White Men.blogspot.com.”

In the end, he was forced to compromise. Since no other rooms were available, we were “allowed” to stay in The Club for one night. After that, our “up-grade” would be down-graded and we’d be thrown into some rat-hole with the rest of the breeder riff-raff. As if that weren’t bad enough, for our one night n that Shangri-La they, we were warned to keep the kids very very quiet.

“So as not to disturb the other guests,” the concierge informed me.

“Sure,” I said. “We wouldn’t want to annoy any guests now, would we?”

As we followed the bell-boy along a palm-lined path, I turned to Ellen. “I knew I should’ve brought some fire-crackers.”

“The annoying thing,” she said, “is that they clearly upgraded us because they were over-booked. It was their mistake to begin with.”

Which is true enough. And it’s also true enough that when Ellen makes a comment like that, things are seriously out of whack. Ellen is, after all, the kind and gracious half of our dysfunctional little marriage, and seldom has a mean word to say about anyone or anything.

The Club rooms were gorgeous, with a capital “GORG”: tiled floors, high ceilings, plush beds, big balconies overlooking a terraced series of cool blue swimming pools (forbidden to the children of course). In short, pretty much the nicest room we’d had during our travels in Asia.

“Hey!” Lucy said, when she noticed the big French doors. “Look! A balcony!”

“Balcony!” roared Jamie.

“Noooooooooooo!!!!!!” Ellen and I hollered simultaneously, leaping across the room and slamming the doors shut just as the two of them, followed by Will, were about to head into the open air, hurling kiddy cooties and noise pollution before them like Pig-Pen at an Ozzy Osbourne concert.

The kids just stared at us, frozen in their tracks.

“No,” I said, just to make sure they’d gotten the point.

They continued to stare, trying to cipher why their parents were being even more bizarre than usual.

“You can’t go out there,” Ellen said.

“Why not?” Will asked.

“Because—“ I said, then couldn’t figure out how to explain it. “Because you can’t.”

“Why not?” This time it was Lucy.

“Because,” Ellen said, “children aren’t allowed out on the balcony.”

The three of them took a moment to digest this, and then Jamie—who learns quickly, particularly when it’s something his parents would rather he didn’t—said, “Why not?”

“Because,” I told him, “this is the place that hates children.”

Okay, so that’s overstating it a little. But just a little. The resort—or at least The Club portion—definitely had a bit of a Vulgaria feel—the land from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang where kids are illegal—as though kids were not just forbidden, but hunted down, bagged, tagged, and fried with onions. It wasn’t just that you couldn’t hear the sound of children, laughing, splashing, farting with their armpits. You couldn’t hear anything. There was no noise. Anywhere.

“Weird,” said Ellen, coming out of one of the bathrooms.

“What?”

She held up a hairdryer. “The instructions are in German.”

“So?”

She shrugged. “The signs in the lobby. They were in German too.”

We looked at each other. “Now that I think of it,” Ellen went on after a moment, “the guide book did say this side of the peninsula was sort of reserved for German and Austrian retirees.”

I frowned. “Really?” I’d always imagined Bali as a kind of laid-back, free swinging place, sort of an Indonesian Jamaica, minus the dreadlocks and that really bad movie about the guys with the bobsled. After a year in Hong Kong, where every building, every bus, every public toilet almost disappears under a shingling of signs forbidding this or that behavior (Bouncing a ball is illegal? Really?), Bali seemed like welcome relief. Now though, I pictured a parade of sun-dried geriatric Germans parading by my chaise lounge in string bikinis and sling-shot Speedos, frowning in that Hessian way because my children were breathing too loud.

“Maybe we should switch hotels,” I said. “What’s on the other side of the peninsula?”

“Drunken Aussie college students.”

“Then again . . .”

Dinner didn’t help. It was already late, so instead of our usual routine of wandering the streets until we found something that looked good, cheap, or both, we decided to eat at the hotel restaurant and make an early night of it. We knew this would cost us, but it seemed the best option at the time. Besides, we reasoned, hotel restaurants are usually very nice.

And this one was too. Sort of. Right next to the beach, it featured a long tent-like structure under the swaying palms. The only problem was that it was breezy, so they’d lowered a series of thick plastic sheets to block the wind. Which would have been okay, had the plastic not been so sand-blasted and scarred as to be opaque, making you feel as though you were sitting in a styrofoam cup. We could hear the surf, sure. But see it? No way.

The food was okay though, and not overly expensive, particularly as we made the children share a pizza. Between the protein and the wine, we were feeling a little better, a little less cranky. Then Ellen stopped mid-conversation and stared. I looked at her, waiting for her to continue, but she didn’t. Finally, I followed her gaze.

Across the sidewalk, back toward the main body of the hotel, stood two huge—I dunno—gryphon-dragon-phoenix-type thingies, their green figures shining in the glare of two ground-level spotlights. I’d noticed them earlier, but hadn’t spent any real time thinking about them. Now, though, Ellen couldn’t seem to take her eyes off of them.

“What?” I said.

A rueful smile creased her face.

“What?” I said again.

“Look,” she said. “Look carefully.”

I did. Two winged dragons, dark green with gold and red trim, highlighted by halogens. I looked back at Ellen.

“I don’t get it.”

She was still smiling, or maybe it was more of a grimace, it was hard to tell in the refracted light of our particular styrofoam cup.

“Can’t you tell?” she said.

I looked again, more carefully this time.

“They’re facing the hotel,” she said. “Away from us.”

And then I got it. All night I’d been looking at the dragons the wrong way, thinking they were direct toward us. And I couldn’t understand why their faces were so peculiar, why their eyes seemed so strange, why their mouths were pursed like that. Now that Ellen pointed it out, though, I understood that what I’d thought were their shoulders were actually their haunches, that what I’d assumed were eyes were just decorative paintings on their hind quarters. And what I’d thought were their mouths were . . . well . . .

“Wow,” I said. “That’s the largest sphincter I’ve ever seen.”

And detailed, too. Elaborately so. As we could tell, even from ten feet away, because—you know—of the two very bright spotlights shining right at them.

This isn’t to say that Bali was bad. It wasn’t. Every where we went their were palm trees and rice paddies and sandy beaches. Stormy-faced god and goddess statues stood on every corner, and the Balinese had decorated them all in white and black plaid skirts and golden sashes. Below each---and sometimes in random trees or along fences—folks had left hand-size baskets woven of palm fronds and filled with rice, flowers, and burning incense: offerings to the gods for good luck.

So Bali wasn’t bad.

But we were. We were tired—tired of traveling, tired of hotels, tired of restaurant food. The kids were tired of being away from their own beds, tired of not being able to play with their friends, tired of having to get breakfast at a buffet every morning. Ellen and I were tired of them fighting over which channel to watch as we took our morning showers, and tired of walking past dusty market stalls and having folks try to sell us stuff.

Indeed, we were sick of stuff, which is saying something. Whereas we’d spent roughly 80% of our waking hours in China and Vietnam buying artsy little crapola for our friends and family back home, in Bali we could barely focus our eyes on any of the beautiful wood carvings, woven placemats, or shell necklaces.

The one exception to this rule were the prominently displayed carved wooden penises that seemed to be everywhere—and I do mean everywhere: we must have seen 10,000 of these things in 4 days. Ranging in size from infantile to gia-normous, they were nearly as detailed as the dragon butts. Some of them were attached to bottle openers or carved ashtrays, but most of them were just, well, standing there, if you know what I mean.

“What’s the deal?” I said.

Ellen just rolled her eyes.

“I’m serious,” I said. “We haven’t seen anything like this anywhere. Why Bali?”

I’m sure we could have found out easily enough—by asking someone, or even cracking open the index to our guide books and looking under, I don’t know, “weird willie obsession”—but we just couldn’t be bothered.

None of which is to say that we didn’t have any fun. We did. We spent three or four hours a day in the hotel pool, frolicking with the kids and thanking god that most of the Germans were wearing one-pieces. We wandered up the beach some, taking in the parasailors and brightly-painted fishing boats.

We had some good food. There was a nice English-style pub down the road from our hotel, and hotel itself had a breakfast buffet that included—I’m not making this up—chocolate-covered strawberry and banana pancakes.

And right outside our down-graded up-graded hotel room—which was, I must say, a dump—stood a beautiful straw-roofed pagoda surrounded by a cool dark goldfish pond. It—the pagoda—was carpeted with woven straw mats and triangular pillows that you could lean against as you read, or chatted, or napped. I love watching goldfish, and I love the smell of straw, so this place quickly became one of my favorite spots on earth.

So we did enjoy ourselves. Really we did. And eventually we even stopped referring to our hotel as “The place that hates kids.”

But . . .

I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was just that we’d seen one crazy nice hotel, one crazy nice beach, one crazy nice country too many.

Maybe it was just that we were tired—two-and-a-half weeks on the road is a long time, especially with three kids who think that having an raspberry contest in a the middle of a fancy restaurant is an appropriate way to pass the time.

Or maybe we were just ready to get home—home home, in Virginia, not Hong Kong. Ready to get back to our own beds, our own toys, our own friends.

Or maybe it’s not that we wanted to go, but that it was time to go, whether we wanted to or not. Because maybe when you’re sick of these things—the hotels, the beaches, the people, the food, the countries—maybe when you have to struggle even to notice these things, to not feel blasé about them—maybe then it’s just time to get out of Dodge, whether you want to or not.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that we’ll go back to Bali someday. Simply put, we haven’t done this country justice: we need a good two, three weeks to roam the entire island, get out of the tourist areas, sample more of the food, really see the people, really try and understand the place (and their weird obsession with willies). Our last morning there, an elderly Frenchman came over and tried to play with Will and me (don’t ask). Anyhow, once I’d determined he wasn’t a child molester, he seemed friendly enough and we got to talking about our countries and our travels. And he told Ellen and I about this amazing place, way up in the hills of Bali, were there were no tourists, no airplanes, no jet skis and souvenir shops—“Just,” he said, and then gestured with his hands and looked up at the sky, “just—stars.”

So yeah, we’re going back there. I know that for sure.

And then there’s this: after our last morning at the resort, after we’d stuffed our faces with banana-chocolate-strawberry pancakes and swum in the pool one last time, after we’d packed our bags and knelt to look under the bed, after we’d paid our bill and left a nice tip for the help (including our favorite concierge), I took a minute and wandered out of the room and across the path to the big pagoda surrounded by a fish pond.

Settling on the straw mat, I inhaled that dry-grass smell one last time, wondering if I’d ever be here again. Below me, dozens of brightly colored fish curved and slid through the dark water. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the big surprises for me in Asia is how I’ve come to love these fish. I love their colors, their bulk, love the way that muscularity glides through the water—so silent, so graceful. So peaceful. You can be anywhere in Hong Kong, in Tsim Sha Tsui on the peninsula or even in Central, at some restaurant full of noise and heat and waiters hustling by with steaming trays of dim sum—you can be at one of those restaurants and have to go to the bathroom, and follow a hall toward the back that takes you to an open-air sink and men’s on the left and women’s on the right, and there, right there in the middle of this massive city in this busy region on this gigantic continent—

--right there you’ll find a small pond with a tiny fountain in it and a dozen orange and black fish sliding back and forth in crystal water.

And you’ll breath deeper. And longer. And your pulse will slow—and you’ll just know that you’ve added three years to your life.

So now, sitting in Bali on that open-air pagoda, I watch these fish and breath deep and feel the anticipatory stresses of packing and travel leave my chest. I watch as the red and blacks slip past the oranges, as the pure whites glide by the red and whites. A giant black one slips out from the shadows and makes his way back and forth among the rest. He’s huge, maybe five or six times the size of the rest of them, so big he takes your breath away.

“Big dumb fish,” I say, “don’t you know you don’t belong here?”

I watch him for a while, observe the way he seems never to touch the other fish though he passes them so closely, indeed, seems to disturb their patterns, their swirls of motion. Where did he come from? I wonder. Why is he so big? Is he cruel? Do the others fear him? Might he not actually feed on them every once in a while?

These are silly questions, I know. A friend of mine once told me that fish memories only retain information for three seconds. “Hey look,” said my friend, imitating the large grouper we were admiring in a restaurant tank. “A castle.” Then—seconds later—he did it again: “Hey, look! A castle.”

Which would be a miserable life, of course: who wants to live with no past, no moments, only the now?

But then again, I suppose, there are times when such an approach is good, when it’s best to live in where you are right now, not thinking about your next move or mistakes you’ve made or whether or not this hotel or that beach is as good as the last one you were at.

Maybe. I don’t know. But I stay there as long as I can, resting on that woven mat, shaded from the warm Bali sun by that straw roof, watching those gorgeous, muscular fish gliding back and forth, their colors flashing in the afternoon light. And most of all, I watch that big black fish—that giant black fish, so anomalous, so unnecessary—drifting in and out, searching, restless—until he disappears into the shadows as though never there at all.

Our Intimate Relationship with Borneo

2010-08-14T10:41:00.000-07:00

I want you to know that it wasn’t meant to be like this. When we decided back in March that we were going to spend a week or so in Malaysian Borneo, we set out to rough it. We booked “rooms” at some camp out in the wild: looking at pictures on the internet, what we saw were rustic huts, up on stilts, with what looked like one wall missing.

“Cool,” I said, “We can get malaria.”

“There’s no malaria in Borneo,” Ellen said.

“Then we can just stay up all night with mosquitoes buzzing our ears.” Just to make sure she knew what I meant, I leant toward her and went, “Neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”

She swatted once, then clicked to the registration page. “You want to see wildlife, right?”

“Neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”

This time she connected. “Ow,” I said. Then added, “Yes.” Our friends Joe and Jennifer had told us about the wonders of Sabah, how you could see orang utans (closely related to, but not exactly the same as orangutans), proboscis monkeys, monitor lizards, and snakes big enough to eat a large baby, which was fine with me because Jamie was still refusing to poo in the toilet.

I’d always wanted to visit Borneo, every since I’d seen the video for Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like a Wolf,” with its scenes of dusty noon-day cafes, steaming hot jungles, and women in bikinis crawling around on all fours. Subsequent research that told me the video had actually been filmed in Sri Lanka did little to dampen my passion for Sabah—which likely tells you a thing or two about logic, sex, and the nature of my brain.

Anyhow, we were all set: for six days we’d rough it in Borneo, lulled to sleep by the croaking, chirping, and howling of Malaysian wildlife, forgoing the usual four- and five-star hotel buffets for a breakfast of mealy toast and roasted pebbles, lathering our legs with Deep Jungle Off in a desperate attempt to tame mosquitoes the size of large bats. This was just what the doctor ordered—that, and cloroquine—to cap our year in Asia.

Then, sometime in mid-April, I was in the kitchen doing the dishes (I try to do this every month or so, just so that when Ellen complains about how hard she works, I can frown sincerely and murmur, “I know just what you mean,” before handing her the scrub brush and nudging her toward the kitchen.)

--Anyhow: I was in the kitchen doing dishes, sometime in mid-April when Ellen called: “Paul.”

“Yes dear,” I said. (I try to call her dear every month or so, just so that I can—oh, never mind . . .) I went into the living room, where she was hunched over her laptop.

She just pointed at the screen. Settling next to her, I pulled on my glasses. She was at a site run by the US State Department, looking at a travel advisory:

U.S citizens should consider the risks associated with travel to eastern Sabah in Malaysia due to the threat from both terrorist and criminal groups. There are indications that both criminal and terrorist groups are planning or intend acts of violence against foreigners in eastern Sabah, notwithstanding the Government of Malaysia's increased ability to detect, deter and prevent such attacks. The Abu Sayyaf Group, based in the southern Philippines, has kidnapped foreigners in eastern Sabah in the past. Criminal elements are also responsible for kidnapping and piracy committed against foreigners. Of present concern are the resorts (and transportation to and from them) located in isolated areas of eastern Sabah, including Semporna and the islands of Mabul and Sipadan. Please avoid or use extreme caution in connection with any travel in these areas or locations.

I sat back, rubbed my eyes, and looked at the posting again. Then I looked at Ellen. She was frowning. She’d spent the better part of every evening during the month of March planning this particular leg of our trip. It was hard to tell if the look in her eyes was fear, sadness, or just plain anger.

“Huh,” I said.

She nodded. There wasn’t much else to say, really.

We mulled things over for a few days, trying to figure out if this was a recent warning based on recent activity, just a casual warning—“You better bring your umbrella; it might rain.”—or a dire threat—“Go only if you want to see members of your family drawn and quartered and served on a really big pizza.” Did, we wondered, the warning apply to the part of Sabah that we were in—yes, we were in the east, but we were in the north east, and most of the activity described seemed to be happening in the south east.

Eventually we sent an e-mail directly to the consulate in Malaysia, asking for their assessment of the situation. The reply we received—after six days—wasn’t really very helpful: “The threat is real, if not imminent. While we would never prevent American citizens from traveling where ever they wish, if you choose to go to Eastern Sabah, please do use caution.”

Long story short (like I ever do that!), we finally decided that we weren’t comfortable taking our kids into a region where pirates were doing more than saying “Arh,” and handing out balloons. Were we on our own without the kids, the story might be different, but there are some things so stupid that even we won’t do it.

Which is how we ended up at the Rasa Ria hotel in western Sabah. Of course, “hotel,” isn’t really the right word. More like, I dunno, maybe “big fat fancy mansion for a lot of rich people who might as well be in Flagstaff for all the contact they have with Borneo”?

Now I want to be fair: connected to the Rasa Ria is a reserve for the rehabilitation of juvenile Orang Utans. I mean, if you’re going to be a big fancy hotel that makes bucket loads of money, the least you can do is dedicate some small portion of that money to weaning gangsta apes of their addiction to fermented bananas and Green Day.

And trust me when I say that the Rasa Ria is a fancy hotel. Imagine a place where, when you pull up in your car, they welcome you by striking a gong. Imagine a hotel with one of those fancy pools that twists and curves through stands of palm trees, where you can get drinks with little umbrellas brought to your chaise lounge, where there’s dawn to midnight childcare, where they not only come into your room in the evening, fold back your covers, and leave little mints on your pillows, but tiptoe back in as you’re drifting off to sleep and massage your temples.

This was, to put it bluntly, not just the nicest hotel we’ve ever been in, but a hotel so nice that I actually broke into hives just crossing the threshold.

“We don’t belong here,” I whispered to Ellen as we followed a team of bellboys carrying our luggage to our room on a solid gold chariot. “I have family who drink wine from a box.”

Ellen gave me a look. “You’re wearing a shirt that says, ‘I’m with stupid,’ and has an arrow pointing to your crotch,” she said. “I think wine in a box is the least of our problems.”

Okay, so I’m exaggerating slightly: we’ve been to places on par with the Rasa (as I like to call it) before: the Brown in Louisville, the Palmer in Chicago, some fancy-schmanzy Japanese-style place in San Francisco that I can’t remember the name of. Even our last hotel in Vietnam was pretty cool—also on the beach, also with a huge buffet, also with a fancy pool and nice waiters who would serve us Vietnamese coffee as we lounged under palm trees.

The difference is that, by the time we got to our fancy hotel in Vietnam, we’d already been in-country for two weeks, had forged our way through the heat and dust of Hanoi, had trekked cross-country to get to Ha Long Bay, had taken dragon-boat rides in Hue. And even when we were at our ritzy hotel, we made a point of going into Hoi An almost daily.

In other words, in Vietnam, we felt like were getting to know the country: we’d interacted with merchants and tour guides and taxi drivers and waiters and hawkers on the street and the roughly 6,000 people who wanted to touch Lucy’s hair. I’m not so stupid as to claim that—after a mere 14 days—we knew Vietnam. But at the very least, we were starting to get a good sense of it—of the people, the food, the values, the priorities, the daily life of folks.

Not so in Borneo.

The first evening we were there, Will and I were standing by the dinner buffet, checking out the options. There was roast chicken, prime rib, Swedish meatballs, crab legs, six different kinds of soup, sushi, spaghetti, and on and on and on. Everything my little heart could desire, complete with a chocolate fountain at the dessert bar.

“Is this all Malaysian food?” Will asked.

I glanced at the gigantic platter full of meatballs. I’m not much of a fan myself, but I have to admit they looked pretty good sitting there, surrounded by grilled vegetables and some sort of prawn-cracker type thing.

“Yes,” I said.

He looked at the placard in front of us, then at the meatballs, then up at me. “Swedish meatballs?”

I frowned at him. “Are we in Malaysia?”

He nodded.

“And is this food?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Need I say more?”

Seriously, the sad thing about all of this is that I really can’t, finally, name a single Malaysian dish for you. Sure, we had some “real” Malaysian food a few days later when we were in Kuala Lumpur, but by then we were already thinking about Bali, and would have stuffed a pickled goat into our mouths if they’d put it on a plate with garnish.

This is not to say that we came away with absolutely no sense of Borneo. We discovered, for instance, that when Borneons greet someone, they place their right hands on their heart. This, I think, is pretty cool, although I have to admit that more than once when I was greeted in this way I was carrying Jamie on my right arm and thus used my left hand to touch my heart, something that caused more than one person to stare at me, cover their eyes, and flee in horror.

And, of course, we spent one steamy morning in the nature preserve attached to the hotel grounds watching orang utans branchiate above our heads. Which was pretty cool. Hotel grounds or not, the rainforest that they took us into was the real deal, filled with thick foliage, moist earth, and surreal sounds, including one high, keening drone that continued the whole time we were there. We sweated like crazy and took maybe 2000 pictures between us—even the usually unimpressed Will took nearly 100—but dang if we didn’t get to see our ancestors eating bananas and having pee fights.

And on one fine day, we signed up for a trip south to see Proboscis monkeys. Now I know what those of you who’ve seen me in person are thinking: Proboscis monkeys? Those simians with the huge snoz? And you paid for this? Why not just go look in the mirror and save yourself some money?

Because, smartass, my kids have already seen my huge snoz, and have ceased to be impressed with it long ago (emphasis on “long”). And besides, Ellen and I were hoping that by getting off of the compound we’d have a chance to see some of the real Malaysia, beyond the bikini-wearing masseuses doling out sunscreen by the poolside.

And we did. Driving south, through Kota Kinabalu toward Penampang, we rolled past low hills and thick brush, weather-beaten homes with pick up trucks and Toyotas in the front yard, rusted basketball hoops, billboards advertising hotels and restaurants.

“Dang,” I said to Ellen as we glided along. “It looks like Virginia.”

The monkey trip was a hit, though. Pulling up to a long boardwalk leading into the jungle, we marched toward a base camp where they fed us a few small snacks, tried to sell us some really cool masks and carvings that I now wish we’d bought, and led us to a long boat which they steered up the river.

Our guide, a small man with a thick accent, cautioned us about getting our hopes up. “They are very shy,” he said of the Proboscis. “We may be lucky. But maybe not. Who knows?”

We were lucky. After trolling up the river for maybe 5 minutes, we saw several groups of makaks and two or three monitor lizards the size of either a really small Oscar Meyer Wienermobile or a really large Oscar Meyer wiener,. Ten minutes after that, our guide pointed to a distant tree, bare of leaves. We looked. Strewn among the far tips of the branches were either squirrels’ nests or really really huge bags of laundry. We got out our binoculars.

Sure enough, they were proboscis monkeys—orange-furred, with white spots around their eyes and those unmistakable noses. We watched them for a while, concentrating hard getting some good shots with our cameras. Soon enough, our guide started the boat again and we moved further downstream. We were satisfied: we came, we saw, we took fuzzy gray pictures of monkeys with huge noses. What could be better?

And then we rounded a bend and everyone in the boat went, “Ahhhhh.” Not two hundred feet away was a huge tree, right by the river, filled with monkeys. The boat’s driver steered us as close as he could without running into the trees and shrubs overhanging the river bank. We just stared.

“Seven,” said a Filipino doctor at the back of the boat.

There was silence, then his wife said, “No, I see eleven.”

“That one,” the guide said, “has a baby.”

We stared in silence again. The monkeys were so close we could see the different shades of fur, the features of their faces all without binoculars or zoom lenses. True, none of this was completely clear, but even so.

“Fifteen,” someone finally said.

But there were more than that. One branch alone held three, all lined up as though having a meeting. On the opposite side of the tree were three more: a male, a female, and a baby. And every time we thought we’d counted them all, some bit of branch or vegetation—or what we’d thought was vegetation—would move, and we’d have to add another to our total.

We probably stayed there a good half hour, taking pictures at first, then passing around the super powerful binocs Ellen and I had purchased in the Cheng Du airport—you could read a newspaper at gate A5 from A31—then just sitting and watching, simply enjoying the cool evening, the broad, white sky, and the unfazed monkeys staring back at us calmly, then ignoring us completely.

After that, it was back to the base camp, passing several herd of water buffalo cooling off in the water. We had dinner there, then our guide insisted on taking us back on the river to see the fireflies. We did, were duly impressed, then motored down toward a village not far from where we’d left our van.

Climbing out of the boat, we followed our guide through the nearly pitch darkness along a number of bamboo walkways. We passed a school, then made our way onto a paved road. I had Jamie on my shoulders and was sweating even though it wasn’t really that hot. I could feel his fingers on my ears, stroking what little hair remains on my head. In the distance, a chime sounded and we could hear Muslim chants blasted over a loudspeaker. The smell of smoke and cooking came from somewhere nearby, and all in all, as we marched down that road in the black night, I found myself wishing we had a few more days in Borneo, that we had more time to get out of our hotel/resort/compound and get to know the people a bit more, the food, the culture.

But alas, we didn’t. In another day or so, we’d head off to Kuala Lumpur, then it was down to Bali for what was to have been the relaxing final leg of our journey—indeed, of our year in Asia.

So no, there was no more time to explore Borneo, no more chance to get to know anything other than this dark road, this smell of bamboo and palm fronds, this croaking of frogs and chanting in the darkness. This was it.

And we all know who’s to blame.

Duran Duran.

And Then There Are These Moments

2010-07-29T20:22:00.000-07:00

Traveling through Asia, there are sometimes moments like this:

We’re sitting in a restaurant in Kuala Lumpur. No, actually, it’s a not a restaurant, it’s a bistro, which means that the booths are high and wooden, the floors are tiled, the bar is elaborate with mirrored shelves lined with shiny bottles of Tanquaray, Citroen Vodka, seven different kinds single-malt scotch. Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and other well-known Malaysian jazz singers blast from the tower speakers at the far end of the room.

Two hours later, back at our hotel, we’ll discover a market street one block over, full of busy cafes and vendors hawking smoked squid and soya fish and cold cold beer. We’re in KL for only half a day, en-route to Bali, and this—the market, the atmosphere, the noise, the wonderful urban chaos—is exactly what we were looking for for dinner. But no. We’ve got a bartender anxious to make us cosmopolitans, and Lena Horn singing, “If you aaask me, I could write a book. About the way you move, the way you talk the waaaay you look.”

Oh well. I’m tempted to be angry. Or at least annoyed. We’d set out to find the “Little China” area of Kual Lumpur, but had only gotten as far as an indoor market with overpriced dragon kites and scorpions set in glow-in-the-dark key-chain plastic. For dinner, we’d wandered toward “Little India,” but never quite found it. So, hungry and tired and bordering on the sort of desperation you feel when you’re with three smallish kids who are hungry and tired, we’d settled on the bistro. Oh well.

“At least it has real Malaysian food,” Ellen says, as we sit there, trying to chat over the strains of All of Me.

Except that—well, I hate to say this, but there’s a reason you don’t find dozens of Malaysian restaurants in cities world wide. Imagine Thai food, with less spice, less lime, more sugar, more peanuts and more, I don’t know, sort of an overcooked potato taste, only with no actual potatoes in sight—and that’s your basic Malaysian dish.

Which makes it all the more a pity that we couldn’t find Little India. And didn’t know about the street market just behind our hotel. So we sit at our marble-topped table, sipping our Sprites, listening to Ella Fitzgerald crooning about how she don’t get around much anymore.

And sometimes there are moments like this:

After dinner, we make a bathroom run. Our bistro is, of course, attached to a large mall, so we straggle in, searching for the usual blue and red man and woman signs. We find them, and slide down a narrow hallway between a (undoubtedly very Malaysian) deli and an international grocery store. After attending to business, we stroll into the latter, searching for bottled water and maybe some fresh fruit for the next day’s flight.

We wander. We’ve been traveling 10 days at this point, been in three different hotels, had maybe 9 hours in the air. We’re tired, and bored, and a little depressed. Slogging past cans of squid and chili-pepper-flavored Pringles and beef-flavored potato chips, we blink dully. Then we turn a corner, and Will says, “Hey.”

We stop. He points. On the second shelf down stands a row of white Quaker Oats boxes, the little dude in the blue hat and coat with the fluffy ascot.

“Quaker chewy granola bars,” Will says. The listlessness has left his face. “I’ve been missing those all year.”

I look at Ellen. She nods. Traveling in Asia, we’ve learned to pack your own snacks, filling half a suitcase with granola bars and Go Aheads! an orange-flavored Garibaldi rip-off that the kids used to like—the operative term, of course, being “used to”: I know it sounds strange, but after probably a cumulative six-weeks on the road over the course of the year, gnawing their way through 27 packages of Go Aheads!, the kids appear to have gotten sick of them. Go figure.

I put a hand up, grab two boxes of Quaker chewy granola bars off the shelf. I start to reach for another, then stop, glancing at Ellen. She nods again. I get two more, and she grabs a fifth, and we make our way to the check-out counter, suddenly lighter of heart.

Or moments like this:

We’re at the smiley-face temple. I’m sorry I don’t know the actual name of it, but we’ve been to so many temples in Cambodia, and the language there is so unlike Chinese, filled with silent “h”s and “v”s that sound like “w”s and stuff like that that the minute our guide, Vulthy, (pronounced “Woody”—see what I mean?) tells us the name of the next place we’re about to see, my brain switches to “Good Ship Lollipop” mode and I just fall asleep on the sunny beach of peppermint bay.

Which is not to diminish any of these temples. On the contrary, they are spectacular—every one of them mysterious and historically interesting and architecturally atmospheric. Indeed, Cambodia as a whole is a delight. The people are gracious and kind (Jamie has his own entourage at our hotel), the food is a delightful mix of Thai and Vietnamese, massages are cheap and professional, and the country-side is beautiful: red-brown dirt soil and palm trees, huts on stilts and dogs barking in the warm evening light. And if all of that isn’t enough for you, at the end of the day, you can walk down any street in Siem Reap, pay a woman a dollar, climb up on a platform, and stick your feet into a large tank of water where hundreds of small silver fish with “massage” your feet by nibbling off the dry skin and salt.

You heard me.

Anyhow, we’re at the smiley-face temple, and it is glorious: a massive pile of stone and rumble, 37 out of an original 100 towers still standing, each of them with four smiling Buddhas, one carved into each side. We climb several sets of stairs, trace our way along a terrace, weave in and out of the various entryways and towers. It’s a fantasy world only real—like being in an Indiana Jones movie, or something starring Angelina Jolie with a long knife. I keep looking for the Disney signs.

It’s the perfect place for a nine-year-old boy with an imagination, which is great, since we have one of those. The only problem is, Will is not having a good time. For one thing, it’s hot, and poor Will hates the heat. For another thing, it’s late in the day, and this is the fifth or sixth temple we’ve visited, and Will’s feeling very sorry for himself. Then there’s the fact that I, wonderful father that I am, have been grumpy with him all day, telling him to pull it together, to stop worrying about the heat, to just enjoy being here and seeing these ruins.

But he can’t. Because he’s 9 and he’s been away from home for a year and now he’s away from his home away from home, and it’s hot, and the food here seems kind of weird, and we stayed up late last night watching some dumb dance show, and got up early this morning so we could ride some elephants that were bigger and scarier and—well—bumpier than any of us had expected.

So we’re wandering through this maze of buildings, and Will is trudging along, every angle of his body determined to convey to us his utter dissatisfaction with the heat and his parents and this stupid place, and one more stupid twelve-hundred-year-old temple. At one point, Vulthy suggests we pose for a family picture, and Will sighs so loudly and so deliberately that I want to strangle him:

“Get a grip!” I say. “We’re here for a whole 45 minutes—just relax and enjoy yourself.”

My voice has more edge than I intend—or maybe not. Maybe it has just the exact amount of anger I’m feeling right now, anger for the way he’s behaving, anger for the fact that I put him in this situation, anger that I can’t do anything to help him now, anger at my own anger.

Regardless, it’s a frustrating situation—late in the day, hot, with no food and everyone’s blood sugar plummeting into the depths.

We wander a bit more. I’m tinkering with the settings on my camera, playing with the black and white and the color modes, trying to get some really good photos. Eventually I look up and realize everyone has moved on without me. I pick up my pace, darting between stone pillars that are older than anything I’ve seen or touched before. I stumble up a flight of stairs, into a dark cloister. Boards have been laid out on the uneven floor, and I follow them first to the right, then to the left. At the end of a long corridor, I hear Lucy say, “Daddy!” and I take another quick right. Up ahead, I see a golden glow, and figures moving on the edge of the light. I stumble forward.

Within seconds, I’m in a small enclosure, open on all four sides, yes, but open only onto long, low corridors that stretch for twenty or thirty yards. The only light comes from a small wax lantern next to a Buddha figure and a sand-filled urn holding smoldering joss sticks. Two men with bare feet and worn trousers rest on their haunches beside the makeshift alter, offering unlit incense to passersby.

Except for Ellen and Vulthy, everyone has moved on, feeling their way down one of the corridors into daylight or something like it. I glance at Vulthy. He nods at me, gives not so much a smile as a warming look.

“This,” he says, “is the most holy place.” And he bends his head back, looking straight up.

It is then I realize that we must be in the center of the temple, at the very heart of it, under the tallest tower. As Vulthy nods to the two men and departs, Ellen and I linger, taking in the small, festive canopy over the Buddha, the silken yellow sash over his shoulder, the stone walls that look coal black in the flickering light from the lamp.

Standing there, I feel a deepening of the air, as though it’s grown darker, cooler, as though we’re on a silent lift that is sinking further into the temple, deeper into the earth. The air is musky with the smells of soil and joss and old water, all of it edged by the slightly acrid scent of the two men and my own sweaty shirt.

I glance at Ellen. She looks back, raising her eyebrows just a touch, showing the hint of a smile. My inner poet rises to the surface, and I say, in my usual profound way: “Wow.”

She nods. “I know.”

I look at the two men. One of them holds out the incense, gestures with it slightly. He’s imploring me to buy, but not aggressively so. Years ago, when I was finishing grad school and Ellen was beginning to wonder if being married to a high-strung, task-oriented, obsessive-compulsive Victorianist was really her idea of happiness, the two of us took a trip to France and found ourselves, late one night, in Sacre Couer, a wind storm raging outside, the interior of the domed cathedral lit by a thousand prayer candles. Figuring it couldn’t hurt, I lit one, and said a little prayer for our marriage, for Ellen, and for her thinning patience.

16 years later, she’s standing next to me her patience, if not stronger, at least boosted by a willingness to recognize that I’m not annoying all of the time. I reach for my wallet. The way I see it, if a French, Catholic god is willing to help a Lutheran boy from the upper mid-west, maybe a Buddhist god would as well. Pulling out a 5,000 riel note, I hand it to the man with the incense, holding out three fingers, one for each of our children—though I’m thinking particularly of Will.

The man takes it, lights three sticks, and hands them to me. I hold them upright between flattened palms, close my eyes, and bow silently, three times in the Chinese way. Then I open my eyes, breath in the incense, and nestle the three sticks in the sand-filled urn.

But it appears I gave the man too much money, because he’s handed Ellen three sticks as well. She, too, closes her eyes, bows silently three times, and places the sticks in the sand.

And then I feel a gentle tug on my hand. The second man has my palm between his fingers, and is pulling it toward him. I watch as he takes a piece of red yarn—I later realize it’s a thin, tightly-woven bracelet—and wraps it around my wrist. He attempts to knot it. But my arms are too big. He says something to the first man, who laughs quietly and selects another piece of yarn from a sheath of them. Again my man attempts to knot it around my wrist, but again it seems to short.

“Here,” I say, and show him, rolling it off the bones of my wrist to the narrow part just above, where the bracelet fits nicely.

The other man is tying one around Ellen’s wrist, now, and as they proceed with their work, they break into a murmuring prayer, warm and low and as gentle as—I don’t know—water over smooth river stones, a breeze beneath a shade tree, two puppies gnawing a bone? We stand there, Ellen and I, these two men on their haunches in the ancient dark, whispering to us, for us, to some ancient power, and feel immensely blessed.

And then it’s done. They release us, and we nod our thanks, and step away from the lantern and the shrine and into the coal black that surrounds everything.

We’re moving toward the doorway when I stop, remembering Vulthy in this same spot. I look up.

I don’t know how to explain what happens next. Maybe it’s just fatigue. It’s been a long day, after all, and a long week, and a long year with lots of stresses and lots of change. Or maybe it’s the kids—Will and his weariness, the stress of constantly worrying about three children under the age 10 in a country far far from home.

Or maybe it’s religion, a remote Buddhist god reaching down and tapping some part of my rib cage that hasn’t been prodded in a long time. I’m a Lutheran boy in a strange land, after all, and even when we’re home in Virginia it’s not like I make it to church but once or twice a quarter—and that’s a generous estimate.

Or maybe it’s just the age of it all, this twelve-hundred-year-old tower rising up above me, these stones set in place by men and women so long dead their dust may well be part of my own bones. Gone, for an instant, is the world of cell phones and digital cameras and intense-blue mode; gone are oil spills and computer viruses and the 200,000+ landmines still buried in Cambodian soils. What I see, when I look up, is a light, a small square of sky, two or three hundred yards distant, random silhouettes of stones jutting at odd angles, the occasional flash of wings accompanied by a fluttering. We’re a thousand years ago, in the heart of this temple, in the middle of a jungle filled of vines as thick as trees and trees as tall as sky-scrapers, a jungle stretching for a thousand miles beneath a sky that is wide and blue above a red-dirt earth.

And looking up, taking in all of this, feeling Ellen beside me, air catches in my lungs, my shoulders rise and fall—and out of my throat comes a single, tangible, sob.

The Adventurers

2010-06-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

Years ago, I was riding with my parents and brother on a train through England. It was winter, and cold outside, and even in the carriage we were bundled up in our winter jackets.

Across the aisle from us was a young American couple. He was bearded and bespectacled, and earnest in an English-major sort of way. I don’t remember what she looked like, frankly, because he did most of the talking. He was telling my dad about their semester studying in York, all the things they’d done, all the places they’d been. The program they were on was in the school-afield system—where 20 kids from a US institution go to a foreign country and live together in a big house, taking classes from their accompanying professor and getting the occasional lectures from local faculty.

My parents listened to all of this, nodding politely and smiling encouragement—they have a habit of doing this, I’m not sure why—while I was quietly rolling my eyes. You see, I was living in England for a year, not some measly semester, and I was studying with real English professors and real English students, not bunking in some condo somewhere with a bunch of people from Kansas, then coming home after four months with a Yorkshire accent.

I let hirsute boy ramble on for maybe an hour. It was clear he thought we were just touring for a few weeks, an all-American nuclear family leaving their white-picket fenced cottage to see the sights of ye olde Englande. I tried to keep my mouth shut, really I did, tried hard not to be a jerk. Eventually, though, I just had to let it drop.

“So your teachers were Professors, then?”

He glanced at me jaw still open, mid-sentence. “Excuse me?”

“Your English instructors? They were professors? Because most of them at Durham at lecturers. There are some readers, too, but we don’t get many real professors.” I went on for another three minutes, explaining as best I could the Byzantine elaborations of the British rank system.

When I was done, he closed his mouth, glanced at his girlfriend, then looked back at me.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Durham,” I said, and then, just to receive full credit in the How to Be a Jerk certification process, added, “At St. Aidan’s College.” No Kansas roommates for me.

He looked at me again, carefully. Then he said, “Oh,” leaned back in his seat, and didn’t say five words the rest of the trip.

I have to admit, we were pretty impressed with ourselves when we found out we were going to Hong Kong. How daring of us to rip up our family, travel half-way around the world, settle in a new region, a new country, a new institution! Talk about doing some major-league carpe dieming. And to do it with three little kids? My, weren’t we just the most adventurous family ever!

We still feel pretty cool, frankly. We’ve had a great year. We’ve seen things we never thought we’d see—Ho Chin Minh’s body, up-close-and muddy pandas, floating children—eaten things we never thought we’d eat—I just had left-over pig’s knuckles for lunch, last week we had stuffed duck, and both Ellen and I can eat chicken feet, if the situation forces us too. We’ve woken up to 30-degree temperatures inside, have strolled through Vietnamese villages by candle-light, have taken the magnetic train in Shanghai. A month ago, I rolled into the flat at 1:30 and announced we were leaving for Chung Chau island at 2:15. At 2:00, the kids turned off the TV, went to the bathroom, and put on their shoes. Fifteen minutes late, we marched out the door, carrying a single suitcase and a backpack full of granola bars: no whining, no fussing, no dawdling. It was a powerful moment: we’re a couple in our forties, with three kids under the age of ten. And we can go anywhere in the world. Anywhere.

So yeah, we still feel kind of cocky.

But we weren’t here two weeks before we realized we were in the minor leagues. First, there were our friends the Smiths. They’re Canadian born, both in unrelated areas of education. Their careers have taken them and their four kids from Canada to New Zealand, back to Canada, back to New Zealand, to Hong Kong, back to New Zealand, and now they’re in Hong Kong to stay. And it’s not like they have to do this, like they move to find jobs: he’s well-thought of enough in his field that he travels all over Asia speaking at conferences. They could have stayed in Canada and been perfectly happy. But they chose to wander.

Then there was this guy we met in Vietnam. We were at the Citadel, meandering way back in the gardens when I came across two kids swinging from a vine loop in a tree. They were maybe 13 and 11, a boy and a girl speaking English. A little further along, I met their father. We talked about the gardens some—he thought Angkor Wat was better—and then about traveling with kids. He asked if we were in Vietnam on vacation.

“Yep,” I said, then felt that usual swelling of pride as I told him we were actually living in Hong Kong. “For the year,” I added, just so he knew I understood the real Asia, not the six countries in two weeks version.

“What about yourself?” I added.

“Oh,” he said. “I’m with the defense department. We live in Malaysia now, but before that, it was Japan. And before that, South Korea.”

Talk about karma.

“Oh,” I said. “I’m from Kansas, actually.”

Next up were the Gringortens. We met them in Hoi An, on the beach. They live in Suzhou, China, where they are teachers. They used to live in Toronto, but having experienced a wonderful pre-child stint in Korea, decided they wanted to take leave from their jobs and take their two kids, ages 7 and 10, to Asia. So they signed on for three years at an international school just outside of Shanghai. When we saw them again in March, they’d decided to extend their leave by another year. Which doesn’t sound like much, until you realize it means that both of them had to resign their jobs back in Canada.

Gulp.

And there are others like them: in Yangshuo, we met a couple living in Hong Kong for three years so that he could work at the consulate; then there are our friends, the Wells, who are on a three-year stint outside Chengdu, in a place so remote their entire family is near-fluent in Mandarin after only ten months.

The clincher, though, was the family we bumped into at a Norwegian restaurant (yes, you heard me) in LiJiang. They’d both graduated from the University of Virginia, and had had good, stable jobs in the US. Until they decided to move to China and study Mandarin intensely for three years before going into the medical supply business. When I asked how long they were planning on staying in China, the dad, a square-faced strawberry blonde with glasses, shook his head.

“This is it, we figure. We’re here for good.”

Of course, for the record, they don’t have three little kids, like us.

They have four.

So we’re cool, yeah, but only in relative terms. We’re adventurous, yeah, but not compared to some. And we’re nuts, yeah, but only—well, actually, we’re still more nuts that most, but you get my point.

Not long after we got here, colleagues from at least three different universities began to make inquiries into my long-term plans: might I be interested in staying in Hong Kong? they asked. Would I consider applying for a position here?

Though this may seem impressive, it’s worth pointing out that: a) at least one of the people making an inquiry forgot my name almost the instant I walked out of the room; and b) because of the restructuring of secondary and university education in Hong Kong, 2012 will see a double-cohort of students leaving high school and beginning university. In short, every Hong Kong university is scrambling to staff twice as many classes as usual. In such a context, my guess is that a trained monkey with relatively good penmanship could get an offer in this city (my penmanship sucks, by the way).

When these suggestions—I can’t really call them offers; no figures were mentioned and no contracts were set in ink—when these suggestions first came up, I protested gently, pointing out that if people knew the quality of life I had back home, they would understand how even a really good offer from Hong Kong—or anywhere else for that matter—probably wouldn’t be enough. I very distinctly remember describing Lexington to my friend Chris: It’s Mayberry, I told him. The sidewalks are cobbled, they’ve maintained all the old storefronts, everyone waves at their neighbors as they drive by. We have a beautiful old house on a half-acre of land in the middle of town. Any given evening, we can stroll out our back door, down the hill in our yard, through one of the oldest cemeteries in the commonwealth, and be in the middle of town within five minutes. Once there, we can get homemade ginger-lemon ice cream, or go to the chocolate shop for dark-chocolate covered orange peels. Most summer evenings, we go to the pool, where we hang out with our friends while the kids play Marco Polo. It’s gorgeous there, offering a 360-degree panorama of the Blue Ridge Mountains. On the 4^th of July, the whole town gathers at the Virginia Military Institute parade grounds for a fair, balloon rally, and fireworks.

Seriously, I don’t think that anyone’s lived the way we do since 1952. We’d be nuts to leave, I told Chris. And I meant it.

But the more we explored Hong Kong, the more we got to know Asia, the more we thought, “Then again . . .”

Simply put, Hong Kong is an amazing place. There’s Central, of course, with the trams and the Peak and the shopping and the tailors and the noodle shops and the temples burning so much incense you can smell it forty yards away. There’re the Star Ferries, the junks in Victoria Harbor, the nightly light show incorporating all the skyscrapers on both sides of the water. Kowloon-side, there’s TST and the Spring Deer, the Hong Kong History Museum, the Art Museum, the Science Museum and the Space Museum (admittedly, a bit weird, since HK isn’t really known for its rocket programs). There’s Mong Kok and the flower and bird markets, the Spicy Crab and the night market where you can get your fortune told by a little bird who hops out of his cage and tugs your cards from a Tarot deck.

But beyond that are all the little corners that the tourist books never tell you about: the Chi Lin Nunnery, one of my three favorite places in the world (Eagle River, Durham, Chi Lin). There’s the 10,000 Buddhas, of which there actually are 10,000, and there’s the amazing goldfish pond at Chinese University, and the beaches near Sai Kung. There’s the best wet market in the world in Tai Po, and Man Mo temple, and a great temple up in Fan Ling as well. Jamie and I just spent a day roaming Sheung Shui, nobody’s tourist hotspot, and found a wonderful little market street lined with dim sum eateries and shops selling dried shrimp out of baskets.

In short, every time we turn a corner in Hong Kong we find something new to explore.

And that’s just Hong Kong. Consider: from where we are, it’s no more than a six-hour flight to Beijing, Mongolia, Katmandu, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Korea, and Japan. Add a few more hours and you can get to India, Australia, and New Zealand. So far? We’ve only seen Mainland China and Vietnam. Sure, we’ll spend a couple days each in Cambodia, Borneo, and Bali on our way out, but . . . what about all those other places? It’s not like you’re going to sign up (and pay) for two 20-hour flights to spend a two-week vacation in Laos (though, Thailand, maybe). So by leaving Hong Kong now, we’re basically admitting that our chances of lying on the beaches of Cebu or driving through the plains of Mongolia are pretty much nil.

In comparison, when you’re in Hong Kong, visiting these places is cheap. And getting to them is cheap. We have friends who are teachers who are able to sock away 75% of their pay, visit any place in Asia they want, and stay at nothing but five-star hotels. You know those pictures you see every once in a while of a glass-walled veranda, a woman in a white swimsuit holding an umbrella drink as she looks at the palm trees and white sand beach in front of her? That’s what we’re talking about, here. In Thailand, in Vietnam, in the Philippines, in Bali, in Borneo.

It doesn’t help that three weeks ago I was lying in bed, just beginning to emerge from sleep, the early morning heat suffocating the room, when I had a sudden flash of myself pulling up in my Volkswagon Passat to the local CVS on highway 60 in Lexington, Virginia. There was the familiar red and white building design; there was the freshly tarred parking lot, with its brightly painted yellow lines; there were the wide roads and the low buildings and that sky that seems so low and flat and broad.

There, in short, was life in suburban America.

And my heart sank.

Because Lexington is a beautiful place, yes. Truly beautiful, touristy “I can’t believe people get to live here,” beautiful.

But ain’t Bali.

On the same time, of course, Ellen and I both have very good jobs. She’s at one of the best university presses in the country, and they like her there. I’m at a decent small college with a great sense of community, and they, well, tolerate me there.

That said, tenure and professorship were never meant to be a trap, never meant to keep thinkers and scholars and life-long-learners in a life of predictability. My friend Joe makes the point that life is a series of gambles. He doesn’t mean that this is true just for those who become life-long expatriates, however: he means it’s true of everyone, the people who quit their jobs and move to Columbia (like my friend Brad, who just did this) and those who never leave their home towns. Neither approach guarantees success or glory, or even basic safety. People lose their jobs at the local factory just as often (or more) than folks who travel around the globe to take a new position; marriages end just as much when couples play it safe as when they explore the world together; children drown in the backyard pool just as often as they do in the Indian Ocean.

Even so, Ellen and I both know that the poetry of a one-year stint might not translate into the prose of a permanent move. The first is an adventure, occurring in a finite space of time with the knowledge that you will go back to your “real” life at the end. As such, you cram your year with as much experience as you can: you travel in emerging countries; you go into Mainland China not once but four times. You play occasional hooky from work and explore obscure corners of Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, or the New Territories. You make a point of eating bizarre foods (pig’s knuckle, anyone?) Everything is tinged with a shimmering edge of the ephemeral: you know you will be doing this only once, that you may never be in this restaurant or on this ferry or on this island or at this market ever again. Experiences are richer when they are rare, and when you’re overseas for only a year, everything is rare.

Coming back—or staying on—you risk losing that. This becomes your job, not your adventure. And let me tell you, if the pay in Hong Kong is outrageous (literally double my salary in the States)—so are the expectations. For a long time, Hong Kong avoided the exponential growth of publication expectations. When it finally hit in the early ‘90s, though, it came with a vengeance: twice now I’ve heard of folks who’ve taken on administrative duties to help out their departments being awarded shorter contract renewals because their extra responsibilities cut into their research. And I’ve met more than a few folks here who are blunt in their insistence that teaching is something of a bother, getting in the way of their “real” work in the library.

And then there are the hours: in the US, graduation at my home institution is on the first weekend of May. After that, I won’t be expected back to campus until the last week of August. That doesn’t mean I’m not working, of course—I spend all summer writing, trying to crank out the ideas that have been storming my brain all year. But I can work at home, in Wisconsin, or in Europe for all the difference it makes to anyone.

Not so in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, faculty are allowed 21 days leave a year. A year. Now I’m not going to debate this issue with those of you who have “real jobs,” where four weeks is the max “vacation” you can get—your life is harder than mine, I know that, and if you don’t believe me, read the rest of this blog. My point is that when you’re an academic from the States and you’ve spent your career with these expansive summers where you can balance the insanity of the school year with a more leisurely, contemplative pace—when you’ve spent your whole life with that schedule, being told you can’t return to the States for the summer, that you have to be in the office five days a week, even in August, really really really really really kind of sucks.

What’s more, were I to return, I would cease to be special. Were I to stay in Hong Kong for another year—at my institution, or any of the other schools I worked with—I would cease to be a guest (sometimes honored, sometimes not) and become simply an employee. Twenty years ago, after what can arguably be called the best year of my life living in Durham England, I returned to the States, finished my undergraduate degree, went to Colorado for a summer to earn some money, then headed back to the UK. That second year was great—really great, even. But not the same. And not as special as the first year. I ceased to be Paul, the American dude we’re lucky enough to know for a year, becoming instead Paul, the American dude who can’t seem to go away.

And, of course, the cohort of American students I’d been at Durham with were gone. Similarly, were I to return to Hong Kong, it would be without Hedley, Gray, Joe, Janel, and the two Davids—people whose presence here has shaped my experience, my year, my thinking, and—undoubtedly—my life. Taking the shuttle bus down to University station to head to Central for a meeting with the Education Board just wouldn’t feel right, knowing that Joe wouldn’t be waiting on the platform (car 6, every time) for me.

So we’re not staying. And though we’ll undoubtedly come back for finite periods of time and projects, we know it won’t be the same. My guess is that those short stints will be almost painful: no longer can we claim street cred by naming Tai Po as our “home”; instead, we’ll be living at the Hyatt, eating clams on the half-shell cooled over ice with the rest of the gweilos (not that that’s entirely bad). Likely we’ll forget much of our hard-won guandongwa, ordering steamed welk with XO sauce and receiving goose paws in vomit instead.

In the end, though, the reason we’re not staying goes well beyond any of these calculations. It can be summed up in 2.5 words: we’re wimps.

We’re adventurous, yes, but we’re not Adventurers, with a capital "A," not the real deal, not like the Gringortens or the Smiths or that family in Lijiang. We just don’t have it in us to sever our ties with our life in the States. We’re cowards. The thought of writing our bosses and giving notice, of giving up tenure (not to mention Full Professor), of selling our beautiful 100-year-old Queen Anne, of dedicating our children permanently to lives of second-language speakers, of knowing that our friends, from now on, are as likely to be Australians as Americans (not that there’s anything wrong with that, though we have Kiwi friends who might beg to differ). All of those things? We’re just not ready to do that. We don’t have it in us.

This is, of course, something of a startling realization for us. My whole life I’ve been that kid on the other side of the train car, sitting opposite the bearded boy from York University, believing that I was, if not meant to live abroad, certainly meant to be abroad often and intensely. I was twenty when I first left the US, and the first place I went was Tanzania, where I spent several weeks in a village, climbed Kilimanjaro, fell in love with this amazing woman from South Carolina (if any of you know someone named Sarah Sanford, tell me—but don’t mention it to Ellen), and got all sorts of food-related diseases I never could have imagined living in small-town Wisconsin. After that I was in Durham, in a college, living with real British students, playing in a real British band, wearing Wellies and drinking cider and ripping into dear old Maggie. And then I returned to the UK with nothing but three thousand dollars and the promise that I could sleep on my friend’s floor if I didn’t snore and promised to crash in the lobby if his girlfriend came by.

In short, I thought I was cool, if by that term we mean someone who’s unburdened by concerns about security and future comfort and that white picket fence thing I’ve spent most of my life scoffing at. Only it turns out the white picket fence isn’t actually a white picket fence: it’s tenure, and promotion, and three kids who miss their friends, and a town where they can walk to school and where, when you’ll be getting back from work late, your friends will feed your kids spaghetti and make sure they get to swim team practice and finish those math problems Miss B has been nagging them about.

So we’re going back to Virginia, yes. We have to. Our kids are happy there. They can’t wait to see their friends, can’t wait to have their own rooms again, can’t wait to be at that pool again and walk to school again and eat Kenney’s fried chicken again—with flash-fried biscuits, no less.

And we want to. I miss my friends the Chrisses and beers on the occasional Thursday night, and my body-pump class where I’m the only guy and no one is under 40. I miss those chocolate-covered orange peels, and knowing where I can get an awesome chicken-melt followed by kick-ass carrot cake. I don’t particularly miss mowing my half-acre of hillside, but I miss sitting out on my deck in the early evening, waiting for the pork chops to burn as the setting sun casts an orange glow over the two-hundred-year-old oaks in the cemetery.

And I’m not ready to give up my (safe) job that I like and am actually quite good at, and people at least tolerate me even if they don’t think my jokes are funny (It probably doesn’t hurt that I’m on sabbatical for all of the next year). And Ellen isn’t ready (now, or necessarily ever) to give up her job at one of the best presses in the country, with one of the best bosses and colleagues who push her and support her and respect her.

We have a nice life. A very nice life. Idyllic even. Hong Kong is great, the adventure has been fun, but we’re just not ready to commit to a life abroad.

Yet.

Typhoon Lucy, Mauler of Pigeon Heads

2010-06-25T18:18:00.001-07:00

Here are two stories about Lucy:

We’re at the Hong Kong Science Museum, in the basement, playing with some funky machines that blow air and keep balls balancing over nothing and make weird sounds when you hit them with hammers. It’s Sunday, and the museum is packed. Will has invited two friends along and the three of them pull us from one exhibit to the next at pinball speed. Eventually, the air and light machines lose their charm. One of the boys says, “What next?” Another shouts: “The electricity display!” And off they go, Lucy in tow.

Only when Ellen and I and our 10,000 lb three-year-old boy finally make our way up the escalator to the electricity show, Lucy isn’t there.

I search out Will by one of the circuit conductors. “Where’s your sister?” I ask.

He looks up, looks around. Shakes his head.

I find the other two boys. “Where’s Lucy?” I say.

They both shrug. They don’t know.

I feel the momentary urge to gather all three boys together and strangle them with a long, very thorny strand of razor wire, but a mild but rising panic pushes that feeling aside. I slide back and forth between the throngs of children, searching for my daughter. It shouldn’t be that hard: this is China after all, and her hair is the color of honey mixed with sunlight. But I can feel my eyes shuttling quickly, too quickly, the same way they do when I can’t find my keys and I move from room to room, not really looking. Where’s my daughter?

I see Ellen and sprint/walk toward her. “Where’s Lucy?” I say.

She frowns for an instant, but instantly figures out where this is going. “Oh my god,” she says.

I sprint back to the escalators, head down toward the massive underground display, with it’s 15 or 16 rooms and six or seven hundred kids and parents and grandparents laughing through the house of mirrors, wondering at the display that shows how the eye works. I’m don’t even know where to begin.

But then she’s there.

I’m halfway down the escalator, swearing at the old lady who’s blocking the left side of the steps, when I spot Lucy strolling toward me. Then she starts to skip. Skip.

What happens next, I’m not quite sure I understand. She’s skipping across the red museum carpet, her feet both leaving the floor at the same time, her hair flying flat out behind her, arms swinging widely back and forth. She spots me, and changes the angle of her gait, flouncing toward the escalators.

And just when she reaches the bottom, she bursts into tears.

I’m shocked I have to say. This is my little girl after all, the kid who likes to eat pigeon heads, pulling out the eyeballs and tearing apart the skull to get inside. I’m sure of very few things, but I am certain that I’m the only one of my Face Book friends who’s had to tell his six-year-old daughter, “No honey: we’re not taking the brains home, tonight.” This is my Lucy, the little girl who likes to play rugby with the older boys, who’s never been scared by any movie she’s ever seen or any book we’ve ever read (as opposed to, um, some other kids in our family who still won’t read Harry Potter).

But there she is, chest wracked with sobs, snot flowing from her nose, mouth a watery grimace. I hold her, of course, and tell her it’s okay, and press her against me as hard as I can, and tell her again it’s okay as we go up the escalator. Her mother’s there, and takes her from me (if, by “take” we mean, “rips her from my arms”), but Lucy continues to cry, huge gasping sobs that thump through my ribs just watching her.

Back in the fall, when I first wrote about the children and their transition to Hong Kong, I talked about how Will was the one who scared me the most (“Will: A Grandparental Update,” October). Very soon, though, Lucy became more of an issue. First there was the stuff at school, where she’d sit in class refusing to smile, even though she’d insist when she came home that she loved school. Then there was the stuff later on where she’d talk about scratching herself to make herself stop feeling angry. Needless to say, that set my little paranoid/worse-case-scenario/Norwegian-Lutheran alarm bells peeling.

Very little has come of any of this as the year has gone along: Lucy continues to love school, and when we look at her (brilliant) teacher’s web-site, some of the pictures actually show our little blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl smiling. More impressive than that, though (yes, our kid can do MORE than smile!) is the smart little kid that’s started to emerge from the goofball that’s always been Lucy.

This kid can read.

I mean, really read.

Will, our eldest, who spends most of his free time at home with his shoulders hunched into a book, came out of kindergarten able to read some pretty basic books (“I can’t find my kite. Is my kite in the car? No. Is my kite in the yard? No. Is my kite in the incinerator? Yes. Who the &%$@ put it there?”) but not much else. And though we tried to get him to read over the summer before starting first grade, he basically refused, preferring instead to follow the adventures of Jack and Annie leaning over his mother’s shoulder as she read.

Lucy reached that same point about, oh, 6 days into Year 1 (the HK equivalent of US kindergarten). By February, she was picking out words in the chapter books we were reading to her. By April, she was reading my e-mails as I wrote them. By May, she was using the money she’d extorted from me as a result of those e-mails to by herself French dramas from the early twentieth-century.

Okay, so not really: I’d never give in to extortion (and if you don’t believe me, just ask my ex-therapist—or the Chinese government).

But seriously, Lucy’s reading random signs (in both English and Chinese), whole paragraphs out of her chapter books, and at night will often read to Jamie when we’re busy washing the dishes or sneaking bites of Toblerone in the kitchen.

She has a good memory, too: three weeks ago, we started picking out photos for a post on her blog about our trip to China back in April. By the end of her first 70 pictures, she’d picked out 51 that she wanted to publish—and she had another 400 to choose from.

Then for some reason, we didn’t get back to the project for almost a month. When we finally did, I thought I’d be clever as I posted the photos and delete one or two (or 11) that she’d chose way back when, assuming she wouldn’t remember any of them.

She did. My little stunt nearly cost me my father’s day gift, which would have been a pity, since it was a wonderful card shaped like a shirt with a necktie that said, “Dear dad I love you! You are my FAORITE dad in the hol world!”

(Yes, I know: sacchriney-cute and total brainless breeder crappola. But given that Will’s card said, “Dear Dad, I guess you’ll do, which is good, because Mom says we’re stuck with you, at least for now,” I’ll take what I can get. And damn it, who’s to say that hol isn’t better off spelled without the “w” and the “e”?)

So Lucy’s doing fine. Great even. She loves school, she’s learned to read, she’s tried a billion new things this year, above and beyond the aforementioned pigeon heads. She bright, funny, occasionally kind, and always a hoot to be around.

But . . .

Well . . . let’s put it this way: Lucy has a bit of a dark side.

It’s hard to know exactly how to describe this. “Temper” might be a good word. But that doesn’t quite capture it. “Fury”? “Forcefulness”? “Self-absorbedness”?

Hard to say, actually. Here’s what happens:

It’ll be Saturday morning. The kids will be up before we are, mainly because they went to bed at 8:30, and we stayed up until 12:30 drinking red wine, eating salty buttered popcorn, and watching Kung-Fu Hustle for the 11^th time (Best. Movie. Ever.).

Anyhow, when we finally stumble out into the living room at the not-nearly-satisfying hour of 8:20 a.m. Lucy will be lying on the couch, still in her pajamas, looking peaked. As quick as we can, we’ll get her a bowl of Cheerios, a cup of the really good mango-orange juice we can only buy at the grocery store by the northern train station, and urge her to eat.

Which she’ll do.

For about 8 seconds.

Then she’ll forget, and start bugging her older brother, who’s lying on the other couch reading something by Ayn Rand. Or she’ll forget, and start bugging her baby brother, who’s crawled into the cupboard next to the TV console and is hollering through the crack between the doors, “Mommy! Mommy! Come find me!” Lucy will creep over to the cupboard, rip open the door, and go, “Boo!” To which Jamie will respond with a laugh. The first seven times. Then he’ll start to get annoyed that his game with his mother has been interrupted (even though his mother is perfectly happy to sit at the dining room table sipping tea and reading the paper) and he’ll start to say, “Lucy: noooo!” To which Lucy will respond by jerking the door open 15 or 20 more times, making her brother increasingly irritable, and me increasingly insane with her incessant, “Boo”s, each of which is sounding noticeably less playful than the previous one.

About two minutes into this, both Ellen and I will start saying things like, “Lucy, that’s not a good idea,” and “Lucy, you’re bothering your brother; go find something else to do.” Another two minutes, and we’ll be saying things like “Lucy, stop that,” and “Lucy, you’re going to be sorry.”

But she won’t stop. And sooner or later Jamie will be furious, and then we’ll be furious, and then Lucy will throw herself on the couch and scream, “It’s not FAIR,” which it’s not, if she means us having to put up with this kind of crap every Saturday morning.

Because, indeed, it happens every Saturday morning. And every Sunday morning as well. Each time, it’s as though she deliberately sets out to work herself into a frenzy. And each time, she’s very successful at executing her plan. After, “It’s not FAIR,” come “Uh!” which we’ll ignore, and then “UH!” which we’ll also ignore, until the fifth time, at which point she’s uttering this—what? word? grunt?—at the top of her lungs, emphasizing it each time by hurling her body back onto the sofa cushions.

Brilliant parents that we are, of course, we’ll respond in a measured, thoughtful manner, generally, but not always, resorting to words like “^%&$” and “#$%@,” and its close cousin, “#$%@@.” Usually accompanied by threats of groundings, lost allowances, a lack of bedtime stories, and 42 hours straight of listening to Rush Limbaugh pretend he’s not a hypocritical lard-head who used an ACLU lawyer to get him off a drug charge.

Inevitably, Lucy will be sent to her room, where she’ll scream for, oh, 7 hours, pausing only to sob, loudly, that no one loves her, that she doesn’t have friends, and that, somehow in the midst of slamming a cupboard door in her brother’s face for 20 minutes, she broke her leg.

The irony, of course, is that many of you reading this will recognize what I’m describing as, well, the way I’ve acted most of my life.

Yes, it’s true: I have a wee bit of a temper.

The trick in that sentence, of course, is my use of the word “have.” “Have” means present tense. Which allows me to use words like “wee”: as in, right now, these days, my temper isn’t that bad.

Which is true. These days.

As a kid, though, man, I was a living, breathing, tornado of fury. Set me off about this or that thing and the top of my head would actually explode, blood and brains and that morning’s grapefruit juice flying 57 feet into the air (I once blinded a duck). When I was in sixth grade, my classmates voted me most likely to be cast in a video for Nick Ferguson’s “Thunder Island.”

I’m not sure why I was like this. I didn’t want to be that way. Losing my temper actually hurt, like someone was taking the jaws of life to my rib cage and pulling me apart bone by bone, sinew by sinew. When something got under my skin, my face would turn bright red, my lungs would tighten, sweat would pour down my the inside of my skin. Sometimes it got so bad, I actually had to run off into the woods near our cabin, or into my room, or into the basement just to get away from the situation. My brother called these “hyperfits,” a phrase carefully designed to extend said fits for a good thirty minutes extra. But it was an apt term, because what I was experiencing extended beyond a normal loss of temper.

This has faded some as I’ve gotten older. Some. I’ve learned that exercise, for me, is a necessity, burning off stress and helping me keep perspective. And I’ve learned that too much caffeine is a bad idea, though I tend to test the limits of that theory six or seven times a week. And the older I get the better I am at keeping perspective. The kids help me with that: there’s very little that happens during the day that can’t be solved by lying on the couch and holding one or three of them very close to me for fifteen minutes. They help me breathe better, even as they crush my lungs.

Even so, I have to admit there’s something about me that—well, that likes my temper. Or if not likes it, at least respects it. I don’t mean, of course, the moments that my anger is self-absorbed or self-pitying: the New Yorker rejected my story again; the Packers lost to the Vikings again; I dropped a glass on the floor and have to clean it up when I’d rather be on the couch writing and eating Oreos—going over the top about that sort of thing is just stupid. I mean, get over it Paul.

But there are other times when my anger is evidence that I care about something that matters, and care deeply. When some numb-nut faculty member or administrator makes a decision that has a negative impact on students for years to come, and does it in a manner that insists on his own ignorance, I don’t have to respect that. What’s more, I wouldn’t respect myself for respecting that. Similarly, when a student does something in a class that undermines the efforts or thinking or learning of her classmates, that student is going to hear about it, and quickly, and in a way that leaves her nostril hairs singed. As it should be.

I remember years ago telling someone I respected about an ex-girlfriend from college who was killed in a car accident after a generally miserable life with an ugly family situation and struggles with eating disorder. The person I was telling listened for a while, then shrugged and said, “These things happen.”

I wanted to throttle him. I wanted to scream, “Yes, they do, you blurthering idiot”—(I like to use made-up words when I’m angry)—“and stupid attitudes like yours don’t help a hell of a lot, do they!”

What, exactly, I expected this dipstickdiot to do about Marsha’s parents’ divorce or her affection for starving herself to death is beyond me—but it didn’t matter: when faced with things that are wrong, my reasoning goes, you don’t just say, “Oh well, that’s life.” You get pissed. And you fight.

So part of me likes that Lucy is a fighter. Check that. Most of me likes it. I trust people who have emotions, even if sometimes those emotions are a little over the top. I want my kids to have strong beliefs, I want them to know that there’s right and wrong, and I want them to do something when they see stuff that’s wrong. Blake once wrote, “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” Damn right. Don’t just stand there following the rules: do something: speak, raise your voice. Be angry.

Even so, sometimes Lucy tests my limits. There’s self-righteous anger, after all, and then there’s self-absorbed anger. A lot of the time, these Saturday morning fits fall under the latter category. Or worse, really, since they seem to take my mantra—don’t just sit there, be angry—and turn it on its head. My point is that when something’s wrong, you should respond, even if the situation is hopeless. What Lucy seems to do on the other hand, is take a situation that’s perfectly fine and refuse to “just sit there.” Instead, she riles herself up and everyone else around her until what used to be a quiet, calm, Sunday morning, becomes a typhoon of invectives and tears.

Confusing everything for me is that I’m not sure if this is something she got from me, something abnormal (or both), or something every six-year-old girl does. I haven’t had any other daughters, after all, and I haven’t really hung around with girls that age for, well, let’s call it 40 years. For that matter, I’m not even sure this isn’t normal behavior for six-year-olds period. Sure, I had a six-year-old boy, once, but Will was always calm in a surreal The Omen kind of way. Whatever evil he enacted was quiet, and hidden, and undoubtedly led to some sort of sacrificial burning of marshmallows.

Then, too, there’s my stupid theory about life and control: namely, that people need to feel that they have the ability to shape their world. For some, this means repainting their living room every six months. For others, it means multiple piercings, many of which are in places that make sadists say “Ouch.” Still others write and paint and sculpt and choreograph dances.

Assuming this theory is true, what if Lucy has on some subliminal level decided that her “art”, her reshaping of the universe, is to sour the chemistry of every room she ever enters? I can’t remember who or when I heard this, but at some point in my life someone or some episode of Quincy, ME told me that there are kids who figure out that bad attention is better than no attention, and consequently spend the rest of their lives making sure they get as much bad attention as they can.

And then there’s that part of me that—again—wonders if all of the shouts and tears and and huffs and puffs are just the fatigue of being six in a foreign country. Lucy is away from her friends, away from her room, away from 2,376 of her 2,381 stuff animals. She had no say in this particular move, was given no voice in the wheres, whens, and hows. We couldn’t have given her less control if we’d duct-taped her to the wing of the 767 we flew over on. In a situation like that, who wouldn’t want to assert themselves—their “self,” their presence in and ability to change the universe—every chance they got?

As I write this, part of me is aware that this is familiar territory in my writing this year: I’ve worried about Lucy almost since the first month, all the more so since I assumed coming over that she was the last of my kids about whom I’d have to worry. There was the school stuff, the scratching, cutting, OCD stuff. And now there’s the hyperfit stuff. It all gets a little bit old. She’s just a kid, after all, her brain only 1/1,000^th developed, even if her personality is in the 99^th percentile.

In the end, maybe, it’s worth noting that I’m less worried than—well . . . just annoyed. No one wants to have their Saturday mornings ruined. Every week. By loud screaming. And “Huh”ing against the couch. And poking her brother with a stick as she slams a cupboard door in his face. And constant trips to the hospital to tend to those broken legs.

And I should mention that, in the midst of all of this, Lucy never really loses her sense of humor. Last Saturday, for instance, after the third or fourth episode before 10 a.m., I sent her to her room and told her to stay there until I got back from my swim (an hour, more or less). When I returned, I discovered a poster on her door, two sheets of 8 ½ x 11 paper taped together end to end. There’s a story in our family, about a time six years ago when Will got very angry at me, and drew two stick figures—one large, one small—with an X between the two. I loved that he did that, loved that he was smart enough to know that he needed to do something with his anger.

Standing outside Will and Lucy’s room, I saw those two sheets of paper with writing and pictures scrawled all over them, and grinned. On the top sheet, written in red ink, were the words: “DANGER DO NOT ENTER.” A large X was scrawled through the lower page, with images in each of the triangles of space created by the lines. The top triangle showed a hand, held up to stop a person in their tracks. The space on the right showed a fat exclamation point. The bottom area had an upside-down stick figure with x’s where the eyes should be. And the left-hand triangle . . .

Well, the left-hand triangle showed two round globes connected at the middle. A stick leg and foot came off of the bottom of each of the globes. And an arm and hand extended from the side of each globe. No head was visible, as though the pair of buttocks portrayed belonged to a person who was, well, bent over double.

And right in the middle of the butt, drawn in bright red ink?

A handprint.

Got to love that girl.

But now the second story, the last you’ll get of Lucy in Hong Kong:

It’s Thursday night. Ellen and Lucy have been down to the pool, and as they’re coming back, Lucy reaches up and grabs a berry from one of the odd-palmy-looking trees we have right beside the stairs of our building. I’m not sure why she does this, or what she’s thinking, because I’m not there with her. What I am sure about is that I can her screams from two stories up, half-way down the hall, in our flat, with the air conditioning running.

Apparently she popped the berry. And apparently the berry contains some sort of juice or resin that stings and itches, instant poison-ivy in a can, with added heat.

Into the flat the two of them tumble, Lucy roaring: “Ooowwwww!!! It hurts!!!!! It hurts!!!!! Owwwww!!!!!!!!”

The resin has gotten all over both of her arms, her legs, and parts of her neck. Nothing we say, nothing we do, helps. Hell, nothing we say or do can get her to shut up, to calm down, to come down from whatever mountain or acid trip or hallucination of damnation she’s on. She’s screaming, and ranting, and kicking her arms and legs and crying and screaming and pulling at her skin. Ellen tries to wash her down with a cold washcloth, but it doesn’t seem to help. So Ellen turns on the tub, and begins filling it with water.

“Owww!!” Lucy screams. “It huuuuuuuurrrrrrrrtttttts!!! Owwww!!! Owwww!!!!!!” It’s a horrible, bellowing, bullying howl she’s got going, and Ellen and I aren’t sure whether to hug her or get out the duct tape just to get her to shut up.

The water doesn’t help, or the soap that Ellen employs. Eventually, some emergency in the living room forces Ellen to head there, leaving me alone with Lucy in a tile bathroom that works to turning piercing whines into sonic screams that threaten to pop my eardrums. I stick several dozen rolls of toilet paper in my ears, and kneel by the edge of the tub.

“It still hurts?” I ask.

Lucy says, “OOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW—“

“Are you sure?”

“—OOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWW—”

I reach into the tub, searching for the washcloth. The water is freezing cold.

“—OOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWW—”

“Ellen?” I holler down the hall.

“—OOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWW—”

“Ellen?” I holler louder

“—OOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWW—”

“Screw it,” I say, and go back to the tub. I reach in. Pull out the plug. The water starts to drain.

“—OOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWW—”

“Breathe,” I say.

“—OOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWW—”

“Breathe,” I say again.

She stops. Looks at me.

“You need to breathe,” I say. “With your lungs. Remember?”

She nods, inhales, and then goes, “OOOOOOOWWWWWW—”

I put the plug back in, turn on the hot water.

“—OOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWW—”

As the water rises, the screaming increases in volume. The hot water makes it worse, she says, the itching is becoming itchier, the burning is becoming burnier.

“This will help,” I say.

“No it won’t!”

“Yes it will. The hot water will cut through the resin.”

She stops. “The huh?”

“The resin. Those seeds or whatever you popped were filled with oils that irritate your skin. Once we get rid of the oil, you won’t hurt anymore.”

She looks at her leg. “I don’t see any oil.”

“It’s invisible.”

She looks more closely, unconvinced. “Really?”

“You need hot water to cut through the oil. It dissolves it, and then we can scrub it off with soap, and you won’t hurt anymore.”

“Why does it dissolve it?”

I’m not a chemist, but I had a crush on one in college, so I give it a shot: “Hot water inhibits the ability of oil particles to bond. And when the particles are split up, it’s easier to scrub them away with detergents. Plus,” I add, just to make sure she doesn’t end up one of those serious scientificky girls who breaks the art of boy English majors, “everyone knows oil fairies hate hot water fairies, and will run away if they see more than one, especially if they’re eating ice-cream.”

She gives me a look, then says, “How do you know?”

“I used to get poison ivy all the time. Hot water and soap was the only thing that helped.”

“Mommy used cold water.”

“Mommy didn’t use to get poison ivy all the time.”

She watches as I scrub one leg, then the other.

“Better?”

She nods. She holds out her arms. I scrub them, too. Then she pulls her blonde mane to one side and leans her head away from me, stretching her neck like a swan. This is a motion I’ve seen Lucy make a thousand times before: at the pool in Lexington with her friends, sitting on her grandma’s lap listening to a story, stepping out of the tub and drying herself off in a thick towel. It’s an indescribably beautiful gesture: her hair is mouse brown at the base, but honey highlighted everywhere else. Her neck is narrow and graceful, the line of her jaw cutting at just the right angle.

Yes, it’s been a year—a hell of a year, both good and bad—full of storms and tantrums and screaming fits and thrown toys.

But this is the Lucy I know.

An Obnoxiously Schmaltzy Last Post on Jamie

2010-06-21T02:40:00.000-07:00

It’s a Friday in February, and I’m standing in Kowloon Park off of Nathan Road, watching Jamie running from play set to play set, whizzing down slides, swinging from swings, twisting dials and knobs and over-sized tic-tac-toe Xs and Os. No one, when they found out we had three kids, said to us, “Oh, you have to go to Kowloon Park! It’s a great park!” This is surprising because Kowloon Park is, indeed, a great park: set smack dab in the middle of the busiest part of the peninsula, it’s a world unto itself. You can see the skyscrapers, sure, but they might as well be a thousand miles away for all they impose their presence amidst the tall green trees, the cobbled walkways bordered with flowers, the mazes, the sculpture gardens, the pond full of flamingoes. There’s an aviary there, with parrots the size of chickens and these crazy double-beaked birds—the second beak inverted on the first—that simultaneously fascinate and horrify me.

And there’s a huge playground. Which Jamie is now making the most of, trying out every climbing wall there is, straddling the bouncy animals and cars set up on over-sized springs. Every 10 minutes or so he’ll circle back to where I am, trying to see if I’ll give him more candy. It’s the week before the Chinese New Year, you see, and every third stall at the market overflows with bins of candy wrapped in red, yellow, and green foil. Before leaving Tai Po that morning, Jamie and I had stopped at our favorite dried fruits stall and bought a pound of mixed. Now we’re working our way through the bag, trying to remember which ones are fruit-flavored, which are salty, which can hardly be called “candy” they’re so much like dried pork.

I hate playgrounds. This is one of my many weird, childhood associated quirks: I hate playgrounds, I hate circuses, and anything vaguely resembling a day camp sends me searching for a noose. I’m not sure why this is, but I suspect I was the sort of child that didn’t respond well to being pressured. And playgrounds, with their bright colors and faux castle mini-architecture, seem to scream: “This is fun! Have fun! If you can’t have fun here, you might as well hire a lawyer now, because sooner or later you’re taking a high-powered rifle to work!” I just can’t take it.

Today, though, I’m perfectly happy to be at the playground with Jamie. Earlier that morning, we’d gone to the Hong Kong History Museum and learned about the opium wars and the Japanese occupation. Now, we’re at the park, ignoring the winter gray sky by pretending we’re pirates or airplane pilots, or gorillas, or whatever image it is racing through Jamie’s head. In another few hours, we’ll stroll north along Nathan road, into the Jordan area, which will be an absolute blast. Eventually Jamie will fall asleep in the stroller, and I’ll push him along the moist sidewalks, beneath neon signs fighting the gloam to announce “Man Paradise: Enjoy Yourself,” and “Cyber-Sauna.” For the life of me, I have no idea what this last one means, but it sounds like a great way to get electrocuted.

I will buy some T-shirts, stroll through an old-fashioned Chinese department store searching for a chess set with real stone pieces (no luck; nothing but plastic). I will buy some pastries for an afternoon snack, and get one of those tea/fruit drinks with the little black jell-O things in the bottom (just as confusing as the cyber-sauna, though hopefully less deadly). Eventually, the sky will begin to darken and the streets will fill with people hurrying from work to the nearest MTR station. And Jamie and I will head for home, satisfied with our day.

When my host institution asked me to take on some additional duties, I agreed to do so under three circumstances: I would be appropriately compensated, I would have enough staff, and I could maintain a flexible schedule. I didn’t need this work, after all: I already had a job. And I would be an idiot to pull my family up, drag them half-way around the world, and spend all my time in an office, leaving 10 months later having seen only a tiny bit of Hong Kong. I had no doubt I could complete my work: I’m an efficient worker—OCD can be useful that way. And as long as all my work got done, I saw no reason why I shouldn’t spend some time exploring this particular corner of the world.

So once or twice a month, Ellen would go off to swim and Jamie and I would head out into the city, armed with a red stroller, a bunch of granola bars, and at least one peanutbutter and jelly sandwich with the crusts cut off.

We visited Tai Wai and the Hong Kong heritage museum, where we learned about Cantonese opera; we went to Chi Lin Nunnery not once, but twice, drawn by the amazing architecture, the lush green ponds, the low chanting; on the Island, we spent a morning in the Tea Museum, then spent the afternoon in Hong Kong park, where we saw pelicans the size of ponies with flexible beaks that they could turn inside-out over their own heads—a skill, I realized watching them, that I’ve always wanted for myself.

We spent one very rainy Monday riding the trolley cars as far east as we could before lunch, then as far west as possible in the afternoon. This last one had long been a fantasy of mine—I love the double-decker trolleys, with their veneered wooden trim, their narrow staircases, their single-paned windows that keep out the cool breeze but not the rain. And it was fun, though I have to admit that after a while the hard plastic seats got a little old.

That this year has been a real gift is obvious. That one of the most important ways it’s been a gift was by giving us another son perhaps requires a bit more elaboration.

Part of what I’m talking about is simply age related. Jamie was 32-months-old when we arrived in Hong Kong. He would walk, talk, and—well, that was pretty much it. Personality wise, he was cute and funny, but essentially an animated loaf of bread. During our time here, he passed from baby to toddler, shifting from object to subject: there was a real human being in there, and watching him emerge was a blast.

So that’s part of what I mean when I say that being in Hong Kong gave us another son. But there’s this other part, too:

I was 41 when Jamie was born. Ellen was nearly 40. In educational terms, he was what could be referred to as an “unintended outcome,” which is to say that he happened, yes, even if we hadn’t necessarily, um, planned for him to happen.

This is not to say that his outcoming, so to speak, was necessarily a bad thing—on the contrary, unintended outcomes are often the things that instructors most enjoy about their classes. This is just to point out that we’re neither Catholic nor gluttons for punishment, nor getting any younger or more energetic. We are, on the contrary, incredibly lazy and incredibly practical when it comes to things like, oh, being able to sleep at night, not having more kids than we can afford to feed, and not attending high school graduations at an age when, as you’re heading out of the house, your wife turns to you and says, “Did you bring the extra batteries for your hearing aid?”

But these things happen. And of course, within a year or two of Jamie’s being born, we decided we might as well give up pretending he didn’t exist and actually love him.

Joke. Seriously. Sorry, grandma.

In actuality, of course, we were smitten the minute he emerged from the womb, pink and gooey and looking vaguely miffed. Nonetheless, it’s worth pointing out that, for some large portion of his first few years, we occasionally forgot he existed. This isn’t to say we were horrible parents: we never left him in the car at the end of a long day of running errands; we fed and clothed him, cuddled with him before putting him to bed; he’s the only of our three children to whom we sang lullabies every nights, something for which he will likely never forgive us.

But the reality of our lives was that we already had two children. And they kept us very busy. Particularly as one of them was a Lucy.

You heard me: when faced with Will’s math homework, Jamie’s fascination with the bubbles coming out of his nose, and Lucy’s crawling onto the kitchen counter to get the butcher knife so that she could use the handle to knock the matches off the top of the refrigerator, and, it’s not hard to imagine where we put most of our attention.

As it turns out, ignoring Jamie seems to have been a pretty good parenting technique. The fact is, he the most independent of our kids, insisting at the age of three that he can brush his own teeth, that he can make his own PBJ sandwiches. He already knows how to turn on the VCR, where to find the spring water in the refrigerator, and how to make a nice roux for the Thanksgiving gravy. The day he disassembled our malfunctioning vacuum cleaner and reassembled it perfectly, Ellen and I looked at each other, wondering why we hadn’t been smart enough to ignore the rest of our kids as well.

So beyond getting to know the little human Jamie is becoming, we’re getting to know the little human we’ve been ignoring. This was particularly true for Ellen, of course, who spent roughly 167.5 out of 168 hours a week in Jamie’s presence: he came with her to the bus stop with Lucy and Will, to the grocery store to get mango juice, to the temple to, well, see a temple, to the malls in Sha Tin and Kowloon Tong to pick up clothes, or good bread, or cheese. They went to the playground together almost daily, ate lunch together always, cuddled at night before he went to sleep.

I, meanwhile, got whole days trolling around Hong Kong, chatting to the little blonde head in the stroller below me, listening to his questions: “Can we take a taxi, can we?” “Why can’t we take a taxi, why?” “Can I have a snack, can I?” That I never had this kind of opportunity with the other two kids goes without saying: when I’m in the States, I occasionally avoid my 1-hour commute by working at home, but then I’m forced by a tight teaching schedule to actually work, rather than searching for the best dumpling shop in Lexington Virginia (a search that would, trust me, take a very long time). The result of all of this was that I got to watch as my little loaf of bread developed a personality.

And what a personality. If Will is the kid most likely to marry a fundamentalist Christian who won’t let us see our grandchildren, and Lucy is most likely to get a tattoo before the age of 10, Jamie is most likely to become a professional surfer who accidently invents something that makes him a trillion dollars, which he then blows throwing a big party for all of his friends. Jamie goes with the flow. Sure, on occasion he gets a little huffy with his sister (like, for instance, after she pokes him six times with a sharp stick), but even on the rare occasion where his eyes become rimmed with red and he unbuckles those huge lungs of his and bellows until the mortar falls from the bricks, within a minute or two he’s over it and has moved on to the next thing.

And he’s funny. On father’s day, I went to the pool with the kids, then worked out for an hour, trying to shake off some of the stuffed duck we’d had for dinner the night before. Back at the flat, I stretched out on the couch and closed my eyes. Will curled up by my legs, book in hand, so quiet the only time I knew he was there was when he turned a page. I was just drifting off, when I felt someone climb onto the couch alongside my torso. I kept my eyes shut, hoping whoever or whatever it was would go away and let me sink into oblivion. No such luck, though; whatever presence this was remained beside me.

I opened my eyes.

A pair of gigantic blue pupils hovered inches from my face.

“Heh!” laughed Jamie. He was grinning. “Heh heh!”

Jamie still doesn’t talk much. When he does, he’s still a little hard to understand. And he has this weird linguistic hitch, which sounds vaguely French if you ask me, of repeating his question words. Most of the time, truth be told, he communicates through clicks and giggles, like an insane R2-D2.

“Hi,” I say to the gigantic blue pupils.

“Heh!” he says again. The skin around his eyes is crinkled.

“I’m trying to sleep,” I say.

“Hee, hee!” he says.

“You’re cute,” I say.

“Huh, huh, huh.”

“But I’m tired.”

A huge, bemused grin. He’s staring into my eyes intently, as though watching his reflection in my corneas.

“So maybe you could go away?”

He flat out laughs.

Other times, he’s funny without even trying. There was the rainy Monday morning in January, for instance, when he and I took Will and Lucy to school. Just before leaving, I checked my computer and discovered that the Packers were losing to the Cardinals in the playoffs by something like 27 points at half-time.

It was not a fun morning.

It got even worse when Jamie and I returned to the flat to discover that Ellen was still swimming and I didn’t have my keys. It was pouring rain, maybe 40 degrees out, and we had a good 45 minutes to wait.

Later, Jamie said to Ellen, “Why did Daddy say ‘God damn it,’ why?”

And just last week, he asked her, “Why did Daddy break the umbrella? Why?”

Then there was the time, maybe a month ago, when Jamie discovered Lucy in the bathroom, attending to private business. He was, himself, in the midst of a good streak with potty behavior (don’t ask), and had just that day received a lot of praise and a handful of M&Ms and Tic Tacs, in the vain hope that these would induce him toward a repeat performance for the next—well, for the rest of his life.

Discovering Lucy on the toilet, the door opened, he shouted down the hall, “Lucy’s pooing!”

He glanced at her, making sure he had his facts straight before delivering another update: “It’s really amazing!”

And he’s smart, our little guy. The other day he and Ellen were on a double-decker bus, riding down to Central. Halfway there, he turned to his mother and said, “Is this the 307?”

Ellen nodded, impressed. They’d only been on the bus once before, as opposed to the 26 and the 275, which we take roughly 6,211 times a week.

Jamie thought for a minute, then said, “Is it yellow?”

Ellen had to pause. She couldn’t remember. “We’ll have to wait until we get off,” she said. “Then we can see.”

They rode for another 20 minutes or so, passing cranes near the harbor and brightly painted apartments and office complexes. Eventually they came to the eastern tunnel and went under, then rode along the north edge of the island to Wan Chai. Reaching their stop, they descended the stairs and climbed out into the humid, June air.

Ellen paused, taking a moment to get her bearings. But Jamie stepped further along the curb, leaning forward to see the front of the bus.

“It is yellow,” he said. “And it’s the 307.”

As good as his memory is, he’s soon to be in for a bit of a shock: in slightly more than a month, we’ll pull into the driveway of our blue house on Houston St. in Lexington Virginia. Unlocking the door, we’ll step into a living room hasn’t registered on his 44-month-old brain. He won’t, to put it another way, remember his own home, his own room, the bathroom where we hang his monkey towel.

He knows it, too. We were on a bus the other day, heading down to University Station to catch a train that would take us to another train that would take us to—I don’t even remember where.

But there we were on the shuttle bus, and Jamie was quizzing Lucy about this fictional “house” thing he’d been hearing so much about lately:

“Do we have horses,” he’d say, “do we?”

“No,” Lucy would say.

“Do we have kitties, do we?”

“No.”

“Do we have birdies, do we?”

“Outside we do. But not inside.”

“Do we have tape?”

“Yes, we have tape.”

“Do we have scissors there, do we?”

So he’s unfolding. Sometimes his tone of voice is surprisingly grown-up, not unusual for third children, I assume. The other week Lucy did something that mildly annoyed him, and he marched around for half-an-hour, saying, “Lucy: I am very angry. Lucy: I am very angry with you.”

A lot of this is just imitation, of course: these are words his mother would say (as opposed to his dad who, well, you know . . . ). And a lot of what he does these days is imitation. He has learned from his brother and sister, for instance, the fine art of bug spotting: walking down the hill to catch the 26 every morning, he’ll sit in his stroller, pointing to this butterfly or that spider or that creeping, crawling snail.

He especially loves the snails, especially the tiny ones, loves to hold them on his finger and let them crawl towards his palm. One day, we walked all the way down the hill, got on the bus, rode it to old Tai Po, got off, strolled to the meeting place for the shuttle bus, waved off Lucy and Will, then turned around, strolling up Kwong Fuk Road to our favorite newsvendor, where we picked up a copy of the South China Morning Post.

After that, we trundled across the intersection, ducking up the pedestrian walkway to Jamie’s favorite little playground. I grabbed a custard bao along the way, and stopped at 7-11 to fill up my Octopus card. Then I came pushed Jamie’s stroller up the ramp to the playground, and urged him out.

He didn’t move.

I waited a moment, wiping the sweat off my brow, and looking around. As usual, the benches around the play area were filled with old men chatting in the shade. Two or three of them had their socks off, their feet up by their haunches.

“Jamie,” I said, “time to go play.”

Again, he didn’t move.

“Jamie,” I said—and then stopped. Leaning over, I tried to get a better angle on his right hand.

“What is that?”

He gave me a sidelong glance, not guilty, more concerned with not moving too much. “A nail.”

And sure enough, perched on his finger, was a tiny snail, the size of a bug.

“Where did you get that?” I said.

Again, that sidelong glance. And then he turned back to his treasure, gave one of those clicking giggles. “It’s mine,” he said. “Mine.”

Will--The Final Post

2010-06-16T08:27:00.001-07:00

Way back in the fall when the school sent home sign-up sheets for afterschool activities, Will decided he wanted to do archery. We were okay with this, even though it meant tromping all the way across town every Sunday afternoon and sitting in the hot sun for over an hour.

He loved it. Which makes sense if you know Will: it’s a sport that requires a lot of concentration, a fair bit of intelligence, and not a lot of sweating, which has never been Will’s favorite thing to do. The first few times he went, he came home ecstatic, talking about how many bulls-eyes he got, what his scores were, what he had to do before they’d advance him to another level and move the target back.

Then, maybe three weeks into it, he came over to where I was typing my stupid blog on my laptop, and said, “I don’t feel good.”

I looked up. His face was pale, dark red circles around his eyes. I could see sweat forming in his bangs.

“You’re probably just hot,” I said. It was October, but still steaming. “Sit in the shade for a bit.”

So he did. And then he went back to his bow and arrows, and shot a few more rounds.

I was lost in my computer again, when he reappeared.

“I really don’t feel good.”

“You think you’re going to throw up?”

He nodded.

I took him to a shady spot beside the fence, plopped him down on a stool, and made him put his head between his knees.

“Did you feel okay walking up?” I asked. It’s a good mile from the bus stop, with not much shade.

He shook his head a little. Then nodded a little, then shrugged, his face still between his knees.

We waited for a few minutes until he started to feel a little better. I got him some water and that seems to help. Some.

“You want to stay a bit?” I asked

He didn’t say anything for a bit. I saw his eyes glance from the bow, to the target, to the arrows. Then he shook his head. And we went.

Which wasn’t really a big deal.

But then it happened the next time, too. One minute, he was happily splitting straw as I typed away, the next he was standing beside me, pale as a sheet, forehead dewy with sweat.

“The heat again?” I said.

He nodded.

The next week, we didn’t even make it out the door.

“I don’t feel good,” he said, when I strolled into the living room, my lap top satchelled on my shoulder.

I stopped where I was. Something below my lungs twisted a little. I looked at Ellen, who was sitting on the couch downloading pictures onto her computer. She met my glance. Ellen and I aren’t on the same page very often (or even in the same book), and we’re arguably the worst parents ever (why else would we eat our kids’ M&Ms when they weren’t looking?), but every once in a while we get it right, and we get it right together.

So we sat down and talked to Will about archery, about his stomachaches, about what was going on. We never did figure out exactly what was happening—he said he loved archery, and we believed him. Who knows: maybe he was putting a lot of pressure on himself to succeed; maybe, standing there, bow raised, one eye closed, focusing on the target, trying to calm his breath, he just felt the heat swell through is body, felt something huge and unmanageable crushing his lungs. Who knows?

But he went that day. And he had fun. And he went every week after that, except for the ones where we had something else to do, and then he complained voraciously about missing.

Of all of my children, Will has come the farthest this year.

Partly that’s because he had the farthest to go. When I first wrote about him in the fall, I mentioned my theory that his was the earliest case of early-onset-Alzheimer’s, that his brain just plain lacked neo-plasticity, the ability to take in new information and link it to existing neural networks. He’s always been this way: when we brought his sister home six years ago, he spent two whole years refusing to acknowledge her existence. He just doesn’t take change well.

And this year has been full of change. Duh. Aside from the macro stuff—small-town Virginia replaced by Hong Kong, brats on the grill replaced by steamed chicken, moonshine replaced by tea—there are all the smaller changes, which really aren’t that small in the end: instead of walking 10 minutes to school, he had to hoof it fifteen minutes down a hill, get on a mini-bus, get dropped off in the middle of a busy intersection, wait 10-15 minutes, then take another bus. And the school wasn’t the school he’d known, the teachers weren’t the teachers he’d known. Kids spoke a language—check that: languages—he didn’t understand.

And the kids. They weren’t his friends. This isn’t to say that they weren’t friendly—they were, mostly. But you have to understand that Will has known his oldest friend, Lena, since he was a month old. And his second oldest friend, Maria, since he was three months old. And his third oldest friend, Charlie, since about that same time. And these are not kind of friends, people he waves at in the Kroger parking lot: no, these are close friends. Charlie and Maria and Will play every day after school. And Lena once pooped in Will’s bath. We’re talking really close here.

Which means, of course, that Will hasn’t really had to make friends that much: he’s just grown up with the same people attending his birthday party every year, seeing the same people at the swimming pool every night during the summer.

Until his jerk parents decided to move to Hong Kong for a stupid year.

That this transition wasn’t that easy for Will was evidenced in a million small details. He’s been more short of temper this year that before, particularly as the Spring has stretched on and we still haven’t packed our bags and headed home.

And he’s been self-medicating even more than usual, which doesn’t seem possible. Luckily, Will’s drug of choice involves glue, paper, ink, and a table of contents. And if you think I’m joking about books serving as medication, then you haven’t seen my son come home after a lousy, hot, sticky, sweaty, chaotic day at school, kick his shoes off at the door, drop his backpack by the dining room table, grab a book, and curl up on the couch, his head down. For the next hour, or so, he literally won’t hear anything that’s going on around him.

Which is fine with us. More than one study has shown that reading is like meditation, that it slows the heart rate, deepens the breathing, relaxes the mind. Even though sometimes it’s a pain in the butt having to tell someone for the sixth time that he needs to wash his hands for supper, I think Ellen and I are both glad Will has this mechanism for recovering from a hard day (writes his father as he takes a sip of wine and reaches for another Chips A’Hoy).

And luckily for us, my host institution has arguably the best children’s library in all of Southeast Asia. I’m not making this up. We’ve spent most of the year heading to a single aisle in the stacks where every series of note from the last 50 years is stored, in its entirety. Will has worked his way through Mr. Gum, The Magic Treehouse, some trilogy about prehistoric bats, Enid Blyton, and a dumb series about a mouse that pisses me off every time I have to read the damn things. Just this week he’s started the Percy Jackson series, and is already on book 3.

But even so, there’ve been some hard moments. Some of these I’ve chronicled already: earlier in the Spring, for instance, he was in the throes of a bullying situation. Bullying is always bad (says the writer who hates people who state the obvious) but probably its worst form is when the bully is someone the bullied really really likes, and really really wants to be liked by. As was the case this spring, when Will was told that he was “annoying,” that he read too much, that he was unpopular, that he should care more about sports—all by the most popular guy in Year Four.

Needless to say, stuff like this absolutely destroys any parent who has to stand by and watch it happen—and we have to watch it happen: we can only intervene so much. We can’t be there on the playing field, can’t throw out the retorts that we’re certain will shut up the idiot who thinks our son is an idiot, can’t, finally, control the will of a 10 year-old-boy who is trying to destroy the 10-year-old boy we’d die to save, simply because he (the first 10-year-old boy) wants to see if he can, wants to see if he can exert some force on the universe, can exert pressure on the world around him, can somehow shape a universe that’s intent on shaping him.

All of which is ground I’ve covered before. I mention it here simply because it leads to two moments that capture Will this year:

The first occurred maybe two weeks before Will was supposed to go on a class trip to Beijing. This is an adventure of course, particularly when you’re only nine. But it’s also a little scary, particularly when you’re only nine.

And it’s a lot scary when it means you get to spend five days, 24-hours-a-day, with two boys who used to be your friends, but now insist on making you miserable.

Anyhow, it’s about two weeks before the trip. Will and his mom are in the kitchen. She’s just asked him if he’d rather stay home than go. And after a long moment’s silence, he’s said yes.

The thing is, as much as Ellen and I don’t really want him to go, don’t really want him to be in that situation (without, say, brass knuckles and a book of really witty comebacks), we also know that—like the archery thing—he probably needs to do it. I hate clichés, but there’s one about a horse and falling off and—well, you know the rest (and if you don’t, then you need to stop surfing porn on the internet and read some real books).

So Ellen basically tells him we think he needs to do it. There’s a long silence. I’m lying on the couch in the living room, reading, or napping, or trying to pretend I should be answering work e-mails. Even from that distance, I can feel the resignation in the air, the utter loss, a hopelessness so hopeless it can’t even get up the energy to protest or argue.

After a few minutes, Ellen comes out of the kitchen and starts doing something on the computer. Will comes out too, and sits at the table, pencil in hand, not so much doing his homework, as just sitting, head down, staring at the paper he’s supposed to be covering with words.

“Hey Will?” I say from my spot on the couch.

He looks up.

“Come here,” I say.

When he stretches on top of me, he’s reaches all the way from my chin to just above my ankles. He’s heavy too, but not enough that I can’t breath.

He doesn’t say anything. And I don’t either.

And he doesn’t cry. And I don’t either, though maybe I’d understand if either of us did. Instead, I stroke his hair, his chestnut brown hair, slightly greasy, with my thumb.

We stay there for fifteen minutes: Me on the couch, stroking his hair, him on top of me, face down, melting into me.

The second story has to do with the day he comes back. The flight is late, so I’m standing at the airport at 9:50 on a Friday night, with a lot of people from the school I should know and should talk to if I weren’t so stupid and shy in situations like this.

Anyways, eventually the kids start to trickle out of the gate: there’s George and Mark, strolling together and laughing; there’s Sonja, the Norwegian-English-Argentine-ish girl that Will insists he doesn’t have a thing for, even though he’ll drop whatever he’s doing whenever her car pulls up to the bus stop; and there’s Will, wearing exactly the same shirt he had on five days ago, looking tired and disheveled, but walking with a loose and confident gait.

“How was it?” I say, as we stroll with Sonja and her mom to their car for a shared ride back to the hinterlands of Tai Po.

“Good,” he says.

“Are you glad you went?” I ask.

“Uh-huh,” he says.

“Really?” I say, because I read somewhere that one key to good parenting is to use every opportunity available to show your children that: a) you don’t trust their self-knowledge; or b) you think they’re liars.

“Yep,” he nods. “It was fun.”

Then he says, “Hang on.” And kneels down by his backpack.

“Here,” he says. He’s pulled out a small, decorated box, the kind you get in China whenever you buy a souvenir: the outside is green or red, with an old-fashioned pattern like your grandmother’s curtains, the inside is lined with a red, velvety material, into which is laid the bowl or spoon or miniature vase or whatever it is that you purchased.

He hands the box to me.

“What’s this?” I say. We’d given him a little bit of money for souvenirs, encouraging him to buy something for his sister, since she was certain the fact that he got to go to Beijing and she did not was part of a plot on behalf of God and the Universe to ruin her life

“It’s a present,” he said.

“For Lucy?”

“For you.”

I look at him. He’s zipped up his bag, has stood now. Glancing down, I realize he’s probably wearing the same sock and shorts as five days ago, as well.

“Will,” I say. “You didn’t have to do that.”

He nods.

“But you got something for Lucy, too, right?” I say, determined as always to do everything I can to ruin a good moment.

“Uh-huh,” he says, in a tone that implies, rightly, that I’m an idiot.

I open the box. Inside is small, cloisonné owl, red and blue and white and yellow, trimmed in intricate lines of gold.

“Will,” I say.

He looks at me.

“Did you know I love owls?” I ask. It’s true: I hate birds—too fluttery, with feathers, and beaks and claws and white-green poo—but owls are a different matter altogether.

He shakes his head. He’s not smiling, but his lips are pressed together, and I can see from the way his cheeks puff that he’s about to.

Now, were I a better writer, or more sympathetic to my weary, I’d stop right there. This is, though, the last post I’ll write of Will here in Hong Kong, so I’m afraid you’ll just have to suck it up for another 300 words, more or less.

For Mother’s Day, Will made a pop-up card: the outside is plain brown, maybe with a little picture or something. The inside, though, is a row of cut-out palm trees that stand straight up when you open the card. Below them is a little treasure chest, with a sliding bolt and a key. Open it, and you find the word “Mother” spelled out vertically, so that the student can provide a phrase that describes his mother for each letter. Here is what Will wrote:

M—Made of molecules

O—One of a kind

T—Takes me to school

H—Happy and Kind

E—Editor

R—Reassuring

Thinking about writing this post, I’d planned on focusing on “Made of molecules.” I mean, who doesn’t love a kid who comes up with a line like that? Especially when you know the he and his friend Eldon laughed like—well—9-year-old boys when he wrote that.

Typing this now, though, what I find myself focusing on is “Reassuring.” I know this word should scare me: “reassuring” implies the need for assurance, the existence of fear and anxiety and chaos in his world—things caused by situations at school, yes, but also by his mom and dad deciding the best thing they could do when he was eight was rip him out of his quiet peaceful life in Virginia, and drag him half-way around the world to a place where the food smells funny and the caterpillars are so poisonous you’re not supposed to touch them.

So I know this word should scare me. But it doesn’t. What it tells me is that I have a smart boy, a boy who knows what’s good for him, and who’s good for him, and where to go when it all gets to be too much.

This might have been a skill he had before we left. I don’t know. I don’t care. All I know—and all I care about—is that he has it now.

Things I Will Miss

2010-06-12T07:07:00.000-07:00

We’re on the 26, taking the kids to school, when a man waves from the curb. It’s not a stop, but the driver pulls over anyway, inadvertently blocking in an SUV just about to pull into the road.

No one honks.

Spring is amazing fruit time: first came the lychees and the mangosteen. Now, it’s longon—dragon eyes—season: they come in bunches hanging from twigs, about the size of a cherry, wrapped in a rough, papery skin. Peel back half of it, and you can pop the white fruit in your mouth. It tastes like a grape, only milder. And in the middle is a small, perfectly smooth, perfectly black seed.

Getting on the bus, Jamie heads for the seat while I prop the stroller up front. The driver must not be paying attention, because he starts before we’re able to sit. Jamie jerks back, takes a step. Three hands, from three different people, reach out to catch him.

Sitting on the couch every night, writing like a fiend, with the delusion that if I try hard enough, someday Oprah might want to meet me.

To cross the river from Old Tai Po to new Tai Po, you climb two flights of stairs to a covered walkway that stretches between two shopping malls. On most days, if you’re there late in the afternoon, you’ll hear the Ting-Ting man. He sells hard, chewy, slightly spicy white candy out of a bit silver tub he sets on a stool. To make sure you know he’s there, he taps a small spatula with the spike he uses to break free the toffee.

Every morning, after we see Will and Lucy off on the shuttle bus up to the primary school, Jamie and I will stroll up Kwong Fuk Road before heading back to campus. Half-way up, we’ll buy a South China Morning Post from a small, lean man, who moves quickly as he stuff fliers into today’s edition of six or seven different newspapers. He’s handsome in an ordinary way, not the less so because he very clearly takes himself so seriously.

When he sees us, he’ll flash me a quick, dry smile, then reach for an SCMP, folding it in half as he uses his other hand to snag a packet of tissues that come with the paper as a promotion. Once I’ve given him my money and he’s handed me the change, he’ll smile at Jamie and say, in practiced English, “Good morning!” Jamie will do his usual shuffle and jive, turning away, but looking from beneath his lids. “Good morning!” the man will say. “Good morning!” Then he’ll laugh.

That spark of energy I feel every time—every time—I step out of the Central MTR station and into the busy streets of Hong Kong Island.

They are asleep on the train to Hung Hom, side-by-side in their first-class seats, her head on his, his on a yellow pillow resting on her shoulder. Both of them are wearing black suits; he’s in blue with a tie, and she’s in a white blouse, the collar open.

They’re holding hands. As the train draws toward Kowloon Tong, she lifts her head, rubs her eyes, looks at her watch. Another moment and she pulls crimson nails, very lightly, over the back of his hand. He wakes, blinking. She kisses his head, then begins to gather their stuff—her handbag, a water bottle, what looks like the wrapper from a power bar. Picking up the yellow pillow, he rubs it, then stuffs it into a backpack.

The train slows. I watch as they press the wrinkles from their jackets, exchange a word or two. Then they rise, squeeze through the bodies toward the door, and disappear into the crowded platform.

Lok Say

2010-06-08T04:36:00.001-07:00

I’m walking across campus with Will and Lucy when they point to a long black poster set up between two buildings and say something.

“Huh?” I’m tired, and hot, and tired, and really hot. And tired. All I want to do is get back to the flat, crank up the AC, and lie on the couch with a remote control and something slippery and cold.

“It’s a six,” Lucy says. She points to a Chinese character in large white paint. Then she moves her finger. “And a four.”

“Yeah,” says Will. “A six and four. But just them. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Maybe it’s 64,” I say, leaning my body in the direction of home, hoping they’ll get the hint. But they’re standing their ground.

“No,” says Will. “Then it’d be a six-ten-four.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Lucy says, repeating her brother.

But it does, of course.

A month ago the members of the Gen Ed office were planning a meeting of three sub-working groups. In total, 15 people would be invited, and it was hard finding a day and a time that worked for everyone.

“What about the second week of June?” KS, the acting director said.

“I have a two-day workshop,” I said. “How about the first week?”

Everyone looked down at their planners. “The 1^st?” said William.

“I have practicum,” KS said.

“The 2^nd?”

I shook my head. “A conference at Poly. What about the fourth? My book is blank on that day.”

William’s head shot up. He stared at me. KS actually laughed. “You can come that day,” he said, “but I won’t be here.”

21 years ago I was in England, winding down the second year of my stint as a rock star in the nearly-almost-but-not-quite-ever-even-semi-famous alternative rock quartet Don’t Kick the Baby. My friend Steve was visiting that spring, and he and I were having a grand old time, going up to St. Aidan’s college and drinking beer, getting a wee bit tipsy, stumbling down to Dunelm where the kebab van was, stuffing our faces with greasy meat and raw onions, then strolling across the bridge and back to my flat, where we crashed out and stayed up talking about deep things like would we ever find a woman who would love us, and whatever happened to that band Big Country?

Evenings, we’d sit in front of the TV watching the news and eating takeout Chinese. The Ayatollah Khomeini died at the end of May, and I remember Steve and I leaping up when we heard that and actually slapping a high five, sort of a bizarre move for two would-be hippie-pacifist freaks.

And there was this thing in China, these students protesting in this square we’d never heard of before, in Beijing. They’d been there for more than a month already, and every night the crowds were getting bigger, the speeches more fiery. And the government wasn’t doing anything about it.

It was, I have to say, magical to watch. There was this sense, very tangible, that something big was going to happen, that the government was about to cave, that everything in China would change. This was the period of Glasnost, after all, when Gorbachev was rewriting the rules in Russia. And there was Lech Walesa in Poland, and the Solidarity movement. Quietly but steadily, the world was changing—the oppressive regimes were coming down. The world was becoming a better place.

Way back in October, our friends Anita and Collin took us to Victoria Park on the Island for the mid-autumn festival. Glowing red lanterns were strung everywhere and crowds of families wandered from one stage to another, taking in the Peking Opera, the shadow puppets, the traditional dance shows. There was popcorn, the first I’d had since coming to Asia, slightly burned and sticky with sugar.

“We do this in the fall,” Anita said. “And then in June we bring you back.”

We grinned. “Bring us back? Why? What’s in June?”

Anita, who usually smiles, stopped. She looked at us closely. “For June 4^th.” She didn’t actually say the words, but her voice implied Of course.

We must have stared a moment too long.

Her voice dropped in pitch but not in volume. “Tiananmen Square,” she said. “Tiananmen Square.”

So on June 4^th, 2010, we pile into Anita and Collins’ car and head down to Victoria Park again. We’d told the kids over dinner about the massacre, explaining that the students were unarmed, that they were protesting for more open communication with the government, for freedoms that we don’t even think about in the United States—like for instance, the right to sit around the dinner table and talk about the government. We tell them that this is a somber event, that they should take it very seriously, that we won’t tolerate any acting up.

On the drive down, Anita talks about the original vigil, 21 years ago, how nearly 20% of Hong Kong’s population showed up, spontaneously the night after the massacre to protest the slaughter of unarmed students by the soldiers of their own country. Anita is not one to get choked up, and she does not get choked up telling this story. Rather, you can tell that she’s very proud of Hong Kong, of the way this tiny region that, not 8 years after Tiananmen, would be ceded to China, refused to ignore this blatant act of unjustified violence.

Indeed, defiance seems to be the mood du jour. When we get to the park, there’s Canto rock blasting from a huge tower sound system set up on scaffolding. We’re escorted into a fenced off area about a hundred meters square, between two other fenced off areas about a hundred meters square. Anita pulls out a long roll of plastic sheeting, and we spread it on the muddy ground, making just enough room for all of us.

It takes me a minute to figure out what’s going on. Why the fenced in area? Why are we just staring at a scaffolding in the middle of a muddy field? Where’s the stage? Who’ll be speaking? Why the loud music?

The first question is answered almost instantly. Crowds pour through the open gates of the fenced in area: college kids in tight jeans and Converse tennis shoes; families like us with kids in strollers; elderly couples, him in gray pleated trousers, her in a flowered dress. Within seconds, it seems, our corral is filled up, and a pair of attendants pull a strip across the entrance, making sure we don’t get too packed in, directing traffic to the next area. This is Hong Kong, after all: we will protest, yes, but it will be orderly. For once, this sense of over-control doesn’t bother me.

“Where are we?” I say to Anita. “Is this the main area?”

She shakes her head. Overflow, she says. The main area is off to the right, in front of us, nearer a stadium. There, she tells me, there’s a stage, and microphones and huge video screens.

I’m about to ask her another question when there’s a shift in the music blaring from the loudspeakers. The pounding bass and grinding guitars pull back a little, and over them, digitally mixed, we hear the rapid fire of machine guns, the grind of tank engines, the roar of sirens. It’s a sampling, of course, and the song is a protest song, of course. Once that tune finishes, another starts, less bass and drums heavy, but its to-hell-with-you tone is evident even for people like me who can’t understand the words.

And then the speakers begin. Its all in Cantonese and Putonghua, which seems funny to me—why use the language of the oppressors?—but Anita tells me that mainlanders come down to Hong Kong for the commemoration each year, that remembering the massacre isn’t so much illegal in the PRC as just not done. This matches something one of my colleagues from the mainland told me earlier in the day, as we were strolling past those black banners on campus.

“Does anyone talk about what happened?” I asked her.

The words weren’t even out of my mouth before she was saying, “We do not talk about this. No one talks about this.” She paused, her eyes ahead of her as we walked. Then she said: “At Peking University, every year people show up on campus around this time to see who’s talking about it. No one does.”

This morning’s paper carried a story about witnesses to the massacre who’ve struggled over the years, trying to cope with what they saw, and having no outlet or way to express their anger. Many protest quietly: wearing a white shirt, for instance, the traditional Chinese color of mourning, or pulling on the same black shirt they wore that night, still stained with the blood of protestors.

Now, tonight, sitting on our strip of narrow plastic, we listen to the mother of one of those killed as she tells her story. Her voice is elastic, not quite lively, but gentle and rounded, restrained but full of emotion. Her pitch never changes. Behind her plays a single erhu, the traditional Chinese stringed instrument that can sound like an Appalachian fiddle or a mournful ghost, calling from the salt marshes. Over the year I’ve come to appreciate the erhu, but listening to it now, bending its way behind this woman’s voice, I can feel moisture gathering beneath my lids, and I realize I love this instrument, and will probably never hear it again without thinking of this place, this murmuring crowd, the glowing skyscrapers around the park, windows 40 stories up flickering with the blue-gray light of televisions.

The woman finishes, and then there’s another protest song, more mainstream pop this time, with a rousing chorus that, each time it comes, seems to swell the chest of the crowd. There’s a photographer in front of us, a lanky kid with long hair and an oversized t-shirt, and as he focuses his massive lens on the flickering candle glow, I can see his mouth stretching with rounded “O’s” and pulling wide with “E” sounds. All around us, you can hear people singing, heartily, lustily, almost joyfully.

They’ve passed out candles now, and the kids are fascinated, dripping wax onto their fingers, into the grass, trying to build wrinkled castles out of the melt. The next speaker is the wife of a dissident who was jailed for speaking out against the government after a recent round of earthquakes in China. After him is someone younger, who speaks eloquently and earnestly for a while, then breaks into a call and response, shouting phrases to the crowd, who holler them back, 100,000-fold. Each time, in the bare second between the shouts of the crowd and the next chant of the young man, you can hear a booming echo off the buildings around the park, all those voices rolling off of glass and steel, sounding not quite human but unquestionably holy.

It has to be hard to be a Hong Konger when it comes to the subject of China. On the one hand, being linked to the PRC is like being the prom date of the coolest guy on campus. Everyone knows China is rising. Everyone knows what’s coming will almost undoubtedly be China’s century. It has the resources, it has the labor, it has a strong centralized government that can keep businesses in line and keep the economy under control. Its economy has grown between 6 and 10 percent every year for the last decade. It was unscathed, mostly, by the recent banking crisis, and it only knows the idea of trade imbalance from the grip end of the pistol.

Who wouldn’t want to dance with that guy?

At the same time, of course, there is Tiananmen Square. Li Peng, the premier during what the PRC refers to as (if they refer to it at all) “the 1989 incident,” recently released his diaries for publication. In them, he says, repeatedly, that he was prepared to die in order to stop the protesters.

Almost immediately after the death of Mao, the Cultural Revolution was declared an unconditional failure, and Mao’s wife and her cronies were prosecuted for its execution. Twenty-one years after Tiananmen, there’s no move to revise history, no attempt on the part of the government to redeem itself by admitting overzealousness in attacking unarmed students with tanks, crushing their legs into the pavement as they attempted to flee on their bicycles.

Numbers like this are hard to read, but from 1990 to 1994, the emigration numbers from Hong Kong never dropped below 50,000 per annum, almost ten times the “normal” rate. Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that there are those here who are unapologetic about the big brother to the north. In a recent attempt to embarrass the PRC into allowing Hong Kong full democracy, a number of liberal politicians resigned from their posts, forcing midterm elections as a de facto referendum on one-person, one-vote. Turnout was so low the maneuver was declared a fiasco, even by those who supported it.

There’s more music. The organizers have passed out programs with words to all the songs and translations of everything that’s in Putonghua. A beloved dissident, dying now of cancer, speaks, and the crowd roars (albeit in a Hong Kong kind of way) its approval. Then a student from Chinese University gets up to speak.

CUHK, founded in 1949 by scholars and thinkers kicked out of the mainland by the red army, is one of the top three universities in Hong Kong, ranked 80^th, more or less, internationally. It’s a beautiful place, nestled on and around a range of mountains near Sha Tin. The students there are smart and engaged, and strolling across campus on a Friday night you’ll see clusters of them walking arm in arm and laughing in the dark.

And the students there are—like the founding fathers of the University—politically active. Earlier in the week they had asked the university council to place The Goddess of Democracy—a twenty-foot statue commemorating the sacrifice of the Tiananmen students—on campus following the peace vigil. The council, led by the university’s president, who is largely seen as pro-Beijing, declined, arguing that, “The university should not align itself with actions or activities which project a political position that would compromise the university’s principle of political neutrality.”

Besides being one butt-ugly sentence, this is also patently absurd—disallowing political activity is a form of political activity itself—and the crowd knew it. When the young man from the university repeats these words on Friday night, more than 100,000 voices roar with laughter.

Between speeches and songs, the announcers keep telling everyone how big the crowd has grown: 80,000 people, 90,0000 people, 100,000 people. The police have now closed down streets to allow the overflow. The police started to turn people away, but changed their minds. The police now estimate 150,000 people!

It is a night of numbers. I finally realize, for instance, that the protesters who were killed, were, of course, my age, that had they lived they’d now be handsome women or fathers of small children. How this could have alluded me at the time is bizarre: perhaps because China was so remote from Northern England. Perhaps because what they were doing was so much braver than anything I would have considered, have considered, or likely will ever consider.

Amidst all the Cantonese, I recognize a few words, but only a few: “Lok say,” for instance, both low, the second sharp and short. Six. Four. Of course. The numbers Lucy and Will saw and couldn’t decipher: June 4^th, the sixth month, the fourth day.

And there’s this: yi sup yut li. Twenty-one years. Twenty-one years ago.

And there’s this: 2047, the year China takes over Hong Kong for good. It’s a number I don’t hear mentioned, but one I don’t doubt is one everyone’s mind, even if at the back, lingering like a ill-trained guest. Sure, too, I’m certain there’s a quiet calculus that’s occurred in the minds of the parents in the crowd, the people who, like us, have children in their laps playing with the softened wax of their candles. This calculus begins with the child’s age, then adds, 37, the number of years until the hand-over, so that Enya, on Anita’s lap, will be 43 when it happens, exactly Ellen’s age now. And Angus, her brother, will not even be forty.

Then the math continues, adding 37 to the age of the parents. Thus, I would be 81, likely not around, and Anita, younger than me, would be in her late 70s. And of course this second calculus has nothing to do with self-preservation. Rather, it's all about the desire, projected 40 years out, to protect the wee ones sitting in their laps now, holding their fingers above the flames, trying not to get burned, trying to keep safe, as a nation remembers the night its own leaders sent tanks to crush the lives of students whose only fault was to ask for a better life.