Ancestral Homeland

I am drinking cold TsingTao from a can, eating the crumbly almond cookies (think pecan sandies, but with almonds and even sandier) that are, according to the bucket-shaped red tin they came in, a local specialty.  I bought the cookies at the convenience store just next to our hotel, where I was also able to buy a razor, shaving cream, two notebooks, a roll of toffees, more TsingTao, some Coke Zero, and a soft-ball-sized roll of the red plastic ribbon used to tie stuff in China (where we have that hairy brown twine, they have this ribbon, giving even packets of printer paper a festive air).

These needs have all come up (and been satisfied on our doorstep) in the three days we’ve been in Zhongshan, one of the 100 or so cities in China with a population over a million that you’ve never heard of.  Zhongshan is in the south of the country, in the Pearl River delta, with Macau just to the south and Honking just to the east.  It is, as the local official who ate lunch with us today (roast chicken with the head on, roast squab, sweet buns, sautéed greens, steamed fish with ginger and scallions) told me, famous for the export of  Chinese people.  “There is nowhere you can see the sun where there are not Zhongshan people,” he told us, which of course got my arguing hackles up (outer space? Antarctica? Wyoming?) but I got his point.  He also said that 80% of Hawaii’s overseas Chinese are originally from Zhongshan. 

So, from his vantage point, the fact that the Chang/Leung/Choy family, whose common primogenitor was born in Zhongshan, is here seeking their roots may be typical to the point of cliché.  To me, though, the record-keeping on both sides that makes this quest possible is staggering.  On the American side, the temptation to let the past—which, sketchy as the details are, we know produced a strong desire to emigrate and a woman with mutilated feet (the girls’ great-great grandmother)—die must have been strong.  Since the families’ ancestors arrived in Hawaii, the distractions—two world wars, motion pictures, Facebook—have abounded.  It doesn’t make the history any easier that there are only a hundred or so common surnames in Chinese (one way to say “everyman” or “a regular Joe” translates as “the old 100 names,”) or that the same name’s spelling outside China varies wildly (the single character denoted by “Leung” above has also been spelled Liang, Luong, Yang, Nio, Niu, and Neo when converted into systems using the Roman alphabet). 

Yet MTH’s father and his cousin have not only kept the family tree their parents provided them, they’ve converted it into PDF’s, had it translated, and, in the cousin’s case, traveled the world in search of relatives (a quest hampered by the fact that the clan assimilates quickly, so that by the time he made it to Peru, for instance, he and his relatives had no common language with which to comment on their common characteristics).

On the Chinese side, of course, since the C/L/C ancestors left, there’s been a couple of revolutions in addition to the world wars; then the mass murder that was the Great Leap Forward (the people ordered to neglect their fields and instead build backyard smelters in which to melt their own woks serving as a nightmare illustration of the quibble I have with the Chinese idea that success is possible through hard work alone); then the Cultural Revolution, with its insistence on destruction of the Four Olds (Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas) making it a federal offense to do anything so bourgeois as care who your grandfather was, and encouraging the public burning of the family and village records that were, until then, religiously tended.  And now, of course, the distraction is the cut-throat, every-man-for-himself, dog-eat-dog capitalism that China is still, with tragi-comic results (on our street it’s not uncommon to see a woman navigating her pink Porsche—dashboard loaded with pink teddy bears—past a guy in earth-colored fatigues grimly pedaling the bicycle cart he piles with cardboard to recycle for a living), attempting to disguise as communism. 

And yet still, at village after village that we visited, each one arrived at after a drive long enough to require some advanced-level kid-entertainment techniques (thus the red ribbon, for cat’s cradle lessons, although it eventually had to be confiscated as the boredom quotient increased, and with it, the chance of self-garroting), we were met first with the non-committal stare that I’ve come to realize represents intense curiosity here, then by a policeman or low-level official, then an elder or higher-level official.  And then, after initial wariness and  confusion, eventually we would be led to a sort of community hall, and “the books” would be laid out before us.  In one case they were bound in brown paper, in another red, with characters inked in black on them.  In one case we were never allowed to see them, but the relevant bits were xeroxed for us.  In each case, though, there was page after page of family relationships, mapped back hundreds of years.  Photos were brought out, more elders summoned, notes compared, and, eventually, the connection made (with, in at least in one case, extra wives discovered).

When the twenty of us were at the Village of the Red Books, one of us asked our guide to ask the locals where they’d hidden the books during the Cultural Revolution.  “I won’t ask that,” he said, “it’s like asking ‘where do you keep your mistress?’.” 

And that, I suppose, has been the hardest thing about the trip for me.  Separated by language, culture, politics, and time constraints (with three separate families seeking information about their respective maternal and paternal lines, we approached each village like an attacking battalion, with roles—videographer, cartographer, close-up photographer, background photographer, stuff-toter, red-envelope stuffer--meted out on the bus beforehand), we had to try to make some kind of connection with the people we met, without even the capacity to satisfy our natural mutual curiosity about each other.  And so we sat, and traced lines in books, and took pictures and videos, and gave gifts. 

But I, for one, am left wishing that we could have forgotten the books and just sat down and asked them, these folks leaning on their motorcycles and toting babies on their backs; the ones sitting in drafty gray rooms at work, the bright thread atop their sewing machines the only spots of color in sight; the old ladies missing teeth and the calcium to keep their spines straight; the guy burning shipping pallets in an otherwise pitch-black garage; asked them, the great-great-grandchildren of those who stayed, what their days are like, and their nights. 

I have always found Easter the most surreal of jubilees

Today the girls celebrated Easter at school.  And how does a public grade-school in China, a school which exists as an arm of the staunchly anti-all-religions-but-the-religion-of-government government, observe this holiday, a holiday whose Chinese name, 复活节, literally translates to “resurrection festival”? 

According to the Princess, the celebration started off, as all momentous occasions at school seem to, with “some seventh or eighth graders coming to say what we would have.” Per her, the big kids informed the smaller ones that “Easter is a holiday that includes eggs.  On Easter morning, all the kids wake up and eagerly go to see what they have in their Easter baskets, because they’re full of candy, and colored eggs, and toys.”

And then, the Princess told me, “they said ‘today we are going to have an Easter egg hunt,’ and they told the rules: ‘nobody can take more than two eggs. If you still want to find more eggs, find them for other people.’”

“Then,” the Princess reports, “We waited for five minutes and then we went down, and we saw eggs laid all over the grass, and we rushed for them, but I didn’t get any that were on the grass, I got some that were hidden by some trees.  And there were some people that got more than two,… and they gave theirs in to the teacher.”

The Princess got her brace and called it a day, but, naturally, there followed the post-hunt haggle. Apparently the eggs came in two sizes, a choice as mysterious to me as the choice to celebrate Easter in the first place.  The Princess’ original two were both of the bigger variety, but not for long, as someone—she swears, however improbably, that she can’t remember who—convinced her to trade her large egg for his small one.  “But then I switched back,” she reassured me. 

Why, pray tell, would you switch a big egg for a small egg in the first place? “Because that first time someone asked, I didn’t want to say no.  But then the next time people stopped me and asked me, I just said no.” 

And how about the hapless dupe whom she then induced to trade his big egg for her newly-gotten small one? “He was fine with it, he wasn’t happy or unhappy, he just gave it to me.”  Which may be true, as it seems that each egg, whether big or small, contained two pieces of candy. 

I saw none of the small eggs, but the bigger ones were metal enamel, decorated with Victorian-looking images of bunnies playing cellos, surrounded by fuzzy chicks and red-cheeked flute-tweedling cherubs. 

And the Rooster, did she do any wheeling and dealing with her eggs? “No, because I’m the kind of person that just doesn’t really like trading.” To which she added, immediately, “After I finish my homework, I’ll show you how to play Mad Eggs.”

The Princess looked up.  “Like Mad Birds?  How do you play?”

The Rooster, thus encouraged, set aside her homework right then and there and demonstrated her newly invented game by bashing the eggs together, fiddling bunny against fiddling bunny, repeatedly and resoundingly, while the Princess, quickly losing interest, moved on to a demonstration of how she’d had her knees in her jacket all day (to stay warm in the heatless confines of the classroom) and fell off her chair sideways.  This scene I present to you without commentary.  

Lantern Festival

On Lantern Festival day (a Sunday that marked the official end of the Chinese New Year season but that came a week after the girls had already started back to school), we spent four hours doing homework, maybe five.  The girls still weren’t done, but we went outside anyway.  It was dark by then.  After we got our coats and shoes on, we all ran to the terrace to catch the fireworks exploding at the foot of our building.  Then we raced outside so we wouldn’t miss any, stalled only by my last-second dash back in to grab matches for our sparklers. 

Just past our compound’s gate there was a fountain of crackling sparks rising from the concrete, its igniters huddled nearby, accompanied by the banging and rumbling of more fireworks, and their echoes, bouncing between the tops of the skyscrapers we live among.

When I was a kid in the US, sparklers blossomed, shooting out and raining down, like glittering dandelions.  And they were, generally, white.  Or golden, if you’re feeling nostalgic.  They came to you naked in their putty-coloredness, or grouped in oddly muted boxes, like 1940’s office supplies. 

The present-day Chinese sparkler packaging is more in keeping with its contents’ ultimate glory—the ones we’d bought were sold singly, each wrapped from tip to tip in shiny green-and-silver foil, a bit of pink tissue paper licking out from one end, a faux-flame.   We stopped to light them, then promptly discovered that the matches I’d run back to get were made for Tantalus—they scratched, they sparked, they smoked, they snapped, but they would not light.  

Having spent the whole afternoon at the dining table, squeezed between the guilt of torturing my kids and the panic that this time we actually would not get the work done, our apartment felt to me like the Death Star’s trash compactor, and I was not about to leap back inside it.  I struck and struck and struck again. Was it possible that, with the addition of the smoke from millions of fireworks, Shanghai’s air quality had become so poor that it lacked oxygen enough to keep a match-flame alive?

Eventually--maybe it was an errant spark, or perhaps it was the heat of my cursing after MTH thought it important to note that I was littering as I dropped the tiny BIODEGRADABLE wooden matchsticks on the streets of Shanghai (already covered in a thin layer of urine, sputum, and kale slime—also biodegradable, I guess)--but one finally did catch…and then immediately went out.

Some more cursing, and the next one stayed lit.  It was immediately snatched out of my hands by the quick-thinking MTH, making up for his infuriatingness by holding it out of our writhing children’s reach while he lit more from it, then handed them out.  Once lit, these sparklers burned more like Calla lilies than dandelions: all in one direction, only opening up at the last minute, shooting off and up instead of sprinkling out and around.  But what they lacked in volume these made up in kaleidoscopy, their sparks spouting first gold, then purple, then green and back again.

We headed for the river.  Before we got there, a glimmering orange orb rose silently above the trees at the entrance to the promenade, wafting in the smoky air.

Have you read Danny the Champion of the World?    Only if you have, after you found it for yourself in the library or on a forgotten shelf, at an age when selecting your own books still felt bold, and only if it was that book that taught you how wonderful, and different, a childhood could be imagined to be, only if you used that book to escape to a warm night where secret fun was planned by a dad for his kid and seen through, frictionlessly, can you imagine what it was like to see that floating lantern. 

We went on. The boardwalk was dotted with little clusters of people, each in different stages of the sky lantern rite: some writing their wishes on the lanterns’ tissue-paper sides; others shaking the lantern open; still others lighting the wickless candle at the base, then coaxing the fragile package upright without allowing the flame to lick its paper sides.   Then there were groups carefully holding those sides out, waiting for the heated air to rise and distend them.  Waiting to feel the lift, the tug, the sense—a trick of physics on our lonely brains—that a new life is born.    

Of course, sending these lanterns heavenward is littering (in the end), not particularly green (given the single-use product coated these days in flame retardant), and dangerous.  So I had, in a fit of insanity, banned us from participation. (Or so says MTH.  The actual decree-er is lost in the mists of time, but let me ask you this—who do you think is a more likely suspect, the one whose lifelong dream was to set off a fire-balloon, or the one who spent the sparkler-lighting crouched on the ground retrieving errant matchsticks?)

 The universe would not allow this affront, however, and the instant we arrived, a young woman pushed a folded lantern into my hands, telling us it was a gift from them to our family. 

Absolved by the requirements of courtesy, we set about lighting it.  At which point, of course, I had to chase them down again—I think it was them—and beg for a light.

Our lantern was green, and it got a tiny hole scorched into it as we struggled to get it upright, which made its initial progress more galumphing than majestic, and it nearly got hung up on the railing between the walkway and the river, but a last second tip by one of our helpers and a breeze coming off the water lifted it.  All around us, across the river and on our side, fireworks were exploding.  And there were the usual neon signs, entire buildings lit to look like waterfalls, laser searchlights sweeping the sky.  Our lantern sailed away down the river, a tiny glow in the Shanghai light show.  We hadn’t written a wish on it, but what could we possibly wish for?

Second Thoughts, part 3

Sometimes, on a busy shift, when I’m torn over what to do next with a patient, it helps to picture the case as a test question: 70-year-old woman with a history of heart attacks and high blood pressure presents with vague malaise, shortness of breath, mid-upper back pain and decreased exercise tolerance for one day.  Do you A) Send home with decongestants B) Admit to the hospital for possible heart trouble C) ...

Due to patient preference or my own laziness, the temptation toward one course or the other can tend to overwhelm the facts. But because so much of our training is in the form of written tests, this re-casting method clarifies the situation in a way the patient’s full story--muddied as it always is by details like the daughter’s cold she might have caught and how she slept funny in the arm chair at the old folk’s home--doesn’t allow.  Another trick is to imagine the case as it might be presented in a deposition--this tends to throw certain aspects, details that you might otherwise be tempted to blow off, into relief.

As the elevator headed toward the first floor after the Princess’ announcement, I found myself performing a similar exercise with my life.  The temptation to take the Princess’ attitude was enormous: My own kids didn’t get hit, and chances are they never would, the odd glo-stick incident notwithstanding.  This was a non-issue.  The girls didn’t seem concerned; it was impossible to believe that there would be any significant physical injury to any of the children; both my parents were subject to corporal punishment and survived with few psychic scars and a couple funny stories (my dad, in particular, likes to recount the day he had a bottle of honey in his pocket when he misbehaved, a shield that spared him the pain of the ruler-wacking to which he was sentenced, only to substitute a sticky, glassy mess)..Doing something about this new information would require talking to other parents (shiver), facing the teachers (horrors), and re-writing an entire blog-post (unthinkable).  Inaction was the only sensible course.

Once seated in a taxi, though, I began trying to draft a sentence for this account, something witty that simultaneously acknowledged and made light of the teachers striking kids.  The sentence refused to be written.  Then I tried to imagine telling my sister, in an offhand way.  “Oh, yeah,” I would say, airily, “so now if the kids are bad at school they get hit with a ruler, just like Mom and Dad!  Hey, did you see the latest episode of HoneyBooBoo?”

And so, of course, I decided to do something.  Not having forgotten the Window Incident, I started with seeking simple confirmation.  I started with The Craggy Midwesterner, an American guy whose son is in the girls’ class.  I don’t know him that well, but I needed an American, or so I thought.  He listened to my story calmly, then told me that his wife--Chinese--was out of town, that she dealt with all the school stuff, and he’d have her get back to me when she got back into town on Saturday.  This was Wednesday.  I hung up, wondering if the Craggy Midwesterner, who looks closer to my parents’ age than mine, might have a few ruler-wacking stories of his own.

Then I dialed Lunch Lucy.  She, at least, displayed an appropriate level of concern, tempered, perhaps, by the fact that she has not forgotten my panicked calls about the Window Incident, either.  She told me she’d check it out.  Moments later she called back: Her son had corroborated the girls’ story, and he, unlike my kids, he himself had been hit.  

It was then that I realized how, underlying all the above angst, I’d basically been assuming that the Princess and the Rooster were mistaken.  Lunch Lucy’s call didn’t just confirm the hitting, it threw into question the entire past year and a half.  My gut feeling about Lotus Grove has always been that, language barriers, politics, and homework insanity aside, their core values are the same as mine--get the kids educated well, and keep them as happy and healthy as possible while doing it. Even as meetings had happened without me, and sudden bills arrived by text, I’d clung to this idea, and to the girls’ appearance of thriving, which seemed incontrovertible.  

I’d been convinced that I’d read the other parents well, too--I couldn’t imagine that the same parents who complained (only in spates, but still) about the volume of homework would really be OK with this.   But what if I had been wrong about everything?  

As dismayed as I was, I was reassured by Lunch Lucy’s reaction, which was, if not outrage at full Berkeley-mom level, at least a low-grade anxiety.  She would talk to the teacher the next day. As far as I was concerned, she could talk all she wanted, but this was it--I couldn’t keep my kids in a school where the issue of whether or not it was OK to hit kids was even on the table.

I struggled through a coffee-date with a colleague,  where I couldn’t even eat a pastry at the European bakery she’d selected, a state of affairs that, if you know me, is testimony to the depths of my distress. Then I went home, and caught the girls, just finishing homework two hours after I’d left them starting it.  They seemed tired but satisfied, and definitely not in fear for their physical well-being.  

I waded in.  “So, Princess, tell me again about this thing with the hitting?”

She and the Rooster rolled their eyes in that “we already TOLD you” way, and then started talking over each other in a manner that made transcribing their utterances--which I’d fully intended to do--impossible.  The upshot, though, appeared to be this: they are currently doing a lesson on “ancient times.”  This, in the view of a Chinese school-child, can mean anything from the Middle Ages to early twentieth century, but I didn’t press for clarification.  Apparently, as a way to make the lesson come alive to the kids, the Chinese teacher had told them that, for one day only, they would be subject to the kind of punishment in vogue at the time, and called all misbehavers up to the front to get their hands struck with a ruler.  

“Do you think it hurt the kids?” I asked the girls, who shrugged.  “Well, did it LOOK like it hurt them?” I pressed.  

“Not really.”

It was around then that my phone beeped, alerting me that I had a text.  It was from Lunch Lucy, who must have been doing her own interrogating.  The text said: “no worry any more, they did just play a game, today they had new lesson, its about how teacher punished students in past day, so teacher played game with them.”

As an apologia, it left some chinks.  But the irony that, by doing the kind of exercise I think should be part of grade school (and that has thus far been notably absent from the girls’ account of school) the Chinese teacher had nearly thrown me into what the girls have taken to calling a “conniption cow,” was not lost on me.  I got a lot of advice after the last couple of posts, much of it conflicting.  The best advice, though, was to ask the girls. I asked the Princess and the Rooster if they’d had a good day at school, to which they responded in the affirmative.  I asked them if they were looking forward to going to school tomorrow, and they said yes.   I searched their eyes for any sign of fear or caginess, and found only pure seven-year-old hope and excitement.  And I decided that, just like in the ER, you sometimes have to go with your gut.  We’re staying.  

Second Thoughts, Part 2

The school I visited, which I’ll call Tai Gui International School, is right across from La-La Land.  La-La Land (which isn’t quite named exactly that), is what its website calls an “integrated complex,” meaning that, if you’re the type who requires a Gap and a Starbucks and a luxury manicurist at your doorstep to survive the rigors of living in Shanghai, and don’t mind living in a mall--surrounded by other like-minded mall-dwellers and their well-heeled offspring--to achieve that goal, then your needs are all integrated in a single fountain-spangled, retail-scented campus. 

There are hundreds (probably thousands) of people, Chinese and ex-pat, who have opted to make La-La land their home.  I have been to La-La Land many times (for birthday parties--they have a party-spot with a set of vertical-drop slides that are thrilling to the point of terrifying, and could not possibly be legal in the U.S.--for ritzy mom-lunches, and, yes, for pedicures). We know people who moved to La-La Land because it was so close to TGIS (The school and the complex itself would be the only reason to move there--as far as I can tell, there is nothing else in walking distance, and you see no one on the sidewalks.  The whole neighborhood looks like a piece of Los Angeles plunked down in China.), and another couple who confessed that, despite having lived there for a year, they’d never used the kitchen in their apartment, preferring to eat at the complex’s brew-pub, or the multi-station Asian-fusion restaurant, where you swipe a magnetic card to order your meals.

It’s not the school’s fault that it’s so close to the LLL-IC, but, unfairly, it suffers in my estimation from the proximity. When I got there, though, it didn’t look too different from the girls’ school--from the outside, at least.  Tall walls, gate with guardhouse, slightly desolate feel.  There is a play structure, but it looks designed for littler kids, and somehow made me more homesick for the girls’ Berkeley school’s jungle-gym than their current school’s complete lack of play structure has. 

I met my friends, and we went in to the chilly lobby area (they apparently heat only the classrooms, not the halls and common areas--a policy TGIS shares with the girls’ current school and one that, no matter how ecologically and fiscally sound it is, I find hard to get accustomed to), where we perched on benches and spoke with a carefully made up Brazilian Chinese American, who presented us each with a string-handled matte paper bag full of glossy brochures, a package whose duplicates I have received at every conference, focus-group, and corporate shin-dig I’ve ever attended.

Ms BCA used her iPad to show us the children’s schedule, which includes weekly library time (!), art, the usual math/science/English/Chinese, and something called ICT, which stands for Information and Communication Technology and takes place, I later learned, in a computer lab rivaling any I saw in my years at a certain Silicon-Valley based university:  20-inch flat-screen monitors in front of each child’s tiny chair, walls hung with perfectly formatted charts of weather trends (done by the children, complete with clip-art of smiling suns in glasses and sad-looking gray clouds).  On the day we were there, a second-grade class of kids were sitting on a carpet in the front of the room, receiving instructions from a kindly-looking Indian woman on how to use a graphic-design program to make holiday cards. 

Before our visit to the computer lab, though, the four of us chatted a bit about the curriculum and educational philosophy at TGIS.  Ms BCA was heavy on enthusiasm and light on specifics, but I did glean from her that: Every class has a Chinese teacher in the room, but no class except Chinese itself is taught 100% in Chinese.  Per Ms BCA, the children simply know that when they are addressing a Chinese teacher, they are to speak in Chinese, and when they speak to a non-Chinese teacher, they are to speak in English. 

Also, there is something called “Golden Time” every Wednesday, a period in which the children are allowed to do whatever they want for 45 minutes or so (a lovely idea that, I happen to know from my younger patients, has a darker flip-side: Golden Time can also be taken away as a punishment, something that wasn’t mentioned by Ms BCA).  When she came to the class called Pastoral Care Assembly, Ms BCA took great pains to assure me that it wasn’t really anything related to Christianity, really. More Moral, she said, than Christian.   “And Morals are important!” 

Dismissal is at 3:15 every day, and there were vague mentions of “a lot” of after school activities, but none were specifically mentioned, highlighted, or acknowledged.

What was specifically highlighted was the mandatory violin training, which takes place twice weekly through third grade, and the cafeteria. For reasons that, when I inspect them, don’t seem particularly rational, I don’t love the thought of the girls and their classmates stuck at their desks for lunch, as they are now--it just seems so dreary.  Never mind the fact that, as a child, I would have KILLED for a chance to just stay at my desk for lunch, rather than brave the malodorous mayhem that is a children’s school cafeteria. 

I have loved the absence of a ban on peanut butter.   Although it feels like there’s not a school left in the U.S. to which you can send anything resembling, born of, having had contact with, or otherwise related to a nut,* the memo doesn’t seem to have made it to the Chinese public schools yet, a fact I’ve been taking full advantage of--the girls have eaten peanut butter with every lunch since they decided to forego the school’s offerings. 

TGIS, however, is very progressive in that regard, and Ms. BCA assured me, as we entered the cafeteria, that theirs is a nut-free campus, which threw me into a momentary panic.**  But then, I saw their salad bar, full of crisp-looking pristine lettuce, and carrot slices, celery sticks, hard-boiled eggs, and cubes of cheese.  And then the buffet, where the kids could choose tiny slices of pizza, noodles, fried rice, chicken, broccoli.  This was as good as the girls’ school in Berkeley--better, even, because unlike the girls’ school in Berkeley, this cafeteria has enormous windows and big French doors opening to the outdoors, no noticeable odor, and comes with--according to Ms BCA--ayis who will heat up food sent from home (after retrieving it from the school refrigerators, of course). 

I was starting to feel an itching in my sign-me-up finger.  Then we went into an art class.  The kids, a 60/40 mix of Asian-looking and Other-looking, were all standing around some structures they’d been working on.  Some of you may remember my dismay during our first weeks in China, when I discovered that the “houses” we helped the girls build out of old oatmeal canisters and yoghurt cups for kindergarten were what the other parents and teachers called “creative,” while their eyes--roving wildly as if seeking to ensure a safe exit should our obvious mental illness manifest itself--telegraphed “outlandish.” 

These kids’ structures would have thrown those folks into conniptions--sprouting antennae, bulbous towers, oddly-shaped windows, and painted in colors from ballet-pink to deepest eggplant, they looked like the original creations of children’s minds. The teacher looked tiredly supportive, and her blonde hair was coming undone the way an art teacher’s should.  I was clearly in an actual Art Class. If we enrolled the kids at TGIS, they wouldn’t be subjected to the cookie-cutter ideals that have made me crazy at their current school.

There was no Chinese teacher in that class, though (it was taught by a friendly looking blonde), and no Chinese teacher in the ICT room, either.  We looked in on a science class, taught by another white woman, where a bored-looking Chinese woman, presumably the other teacher, was doing something at a computer while all the kids clustered around the white woman.  Then we looked in on another class, with another bored-looking Chinese woman answering a child’s question in the corner, while yet another white teacher held forth at the front of the room.

By the time we got to the math classroom, the kids had all left to go meet up at the salad bar, and I was left to peruse the walls of what turned out to be a third-grade math class.***  It was while the math teacher (Haitian? Cuban? African? Mexican? Brownish skin and accented English) was ignoring my claims that my kids could speak, read, and write Chinese at a native level (in favor of explaining to me, twice, that there would be remedial Chinese classes available for them), and I was, in turn, ignoring his assertions that the math might be difficult for our girls (while absorbing the hand-writing on the wall, in the form of corrected test papers, which demonstrated that the math the girls would be doing in his class next year, if we chose TGIS, would be mainly a repeat of what they will have already done this year), that I began to feel the inklings of a decision coming on. 

Then, as I left, Ms BCA--right after explaining to me that no actual Chinese citizen can go to TGIS, since entry into the school requires a foreign passport--insisted that I wait while she ran to “grab a small gift for the girls.”  This gift turned out to be the most genius bit of marketing I’ve ever seen: two small, plush, soft, and irresistible Cutesie-Poos, each wearing a TGIS cap and TGIS shirt. 

What is the opposite of Kryptonite?   If you’re a seven-year-old girl, it’s Stuffed Cutesie-Poos, and sending these toys on the school’s behalf seemed both extremely unfair and wildly irrelevant, like an accountant giving you a tiny dose of really high-quality heroin to advertise his actuarial practice.  I put took them home and put them in an inconspicuous place, planning to dispose of them later.

My children, however, were born equipped with one super-power: they cannot fly, turn into fireballs, or cook soufflé’s with their laser-gaze, but they can sniff out any new stuffed Cutesie-Poos in a 100-yard radius.  After I picked them up from school, we just were through our front door, but the girls did not yet have their shoes off when I turned around to find them delightedly snuggling the SCP’s, crooning and exclaiming. Then the Princess noticed: “Mommy, these Cutesie-Poos go to the same school Angel does!” 

Angel, called that here because she is pretty much the perfect specimen of ex-pat childhood--friendly, confident, open but not cloying, and tri-lingual--made me waver for a moment; as an advertisement for the school, she is a mom’s Cutesie-Poo. 

The girls were too interested in the Cutesie-Poos to ask me much about why I had two of them from Angel’s school, and I changed the subject to snack time.  But a few days later, I was in a taxi with the girls, and the Princess, who always grasps a situation’s essence sooner or later, asked me, out of the blue, “Mommy, why did you have those TGIS Cutesie-Poos?”

I was surprised into telling the truth, and even more surprised by the chorus of dismay from the girls, led by the Princess herself:

“No!” 

“We don’t want to leave Lotus Grove!”

“We’d have to leave our friends!”

“And our teachers!”

“Mommy, PLEAAAAAAAASE don’t make us change schools!”

Now, to be fair, I didn’t tell them about the salad bar, or the art class, or the English-speaking teachers.  But it’s clear to me that the girls love their current school.  And then there’s the incredible education they’re getting (in Chinese, obviously, but also in math--where they’re learning not just division but also the words for “divisor,” “dividend,” and “quotient” in Chinese--and science, a lot of which has been incorporated into their Chinese class recently, with texts about dinosaurs and blood platelets leading, accidentally or not, to the kind of curricular integration that is all the rage now in the enlightened private school circles).  There’s my extreme discomfort with the idea of living in China but sending my kids to a school where actual Chinese teachers appear to be side-lined and actual Chinese kids aren’t even allowed.  Last on the list, but by no means negligible, is the fact that simply to apply to TGIS costs about the same as a semester’s worth of the girls’ current tuition.  Should we decide to send the girls there, the tuition would be seventeen times what we pay now, and that’s not including the salad bar.  Sure, we could afford it, but that kind of difference forces you to think about what, exactly, you’re paying for. 

Lately--after the Princess made “a home for a platelet!” out of clay given to her by a classmate; and the Rooster wrote a 300-word essay in Chinese on how to make a periscope out of cardboard and mirrors, a skill she learned in one of the girls’ after-school activities; and as the girls have shown a willingness to volunteer to go first and demonstrate in their hip-hop and taekwondo classes that I simply cannot imagine being imparted to them by a Western-style school--I have been feeling like whatever it is that you get for the TGIS tuition, it’s not more, or even better, education.

So I was feeling extremely comfortable with my choice to have the girls continue at Lotus Grove for the rest of this year and next year, and to re-evaluate again for their fourth-grade year, after a wider survey of international schools.  In fact, I had already mentally drafted an email to Ms BCA informing her of our decision, but had yet to send it, when I headed out for a coffee-date with a friend from work.  The girls were just getting started with their Chinese lesson and I was putting on my coat, when I heard the Rooster say something in Chinese to me and her Chinese tutor.  She seemed delighted about whatever it was, so I gave her a distracted but happy “Really?!” in Chinese and went on out the door, just catching the teacher’s dismayed look as I left. 

I was late, though, and figured it couldn’t be that big a deal, which is why I was already in the elevator with the first-floor button pushed when the Princess came out to translate for me: “Mommy!” she said, with the glee of a child who knows what she has to say will make an impact.  “Today in school Li Laoshi decided that she was going to hit the kids who were bad! On the hands!”

“What?!”

“Yes!”

“Did she actually hit anyone?”

“Yes, I just TOLD you!”

“Did she hit you or the Rooster?”

“No, of course not, we weren’t bad!”

At this point, the elevator doors were closing.  “We’ll talk more about this later,” I called, through the narrowing crack.

As the doors closed and the elevator started to move, I heard the Princess ask, voice fading as the elevator started to move, “Why do we need to talk about it later?  She didn’t hit us….”

And so I was left where I will now leave you, descending, inexorably, back into doubt and confusion.

*At least, not in the types of places where you can get the daily fresh baguettes our family requires for subsistence.

**As an ER doctor, and the friend of several nut-allergic families, I feel it my duty to state that A) I have nothing against nut-free policies and B) to the extent that it is safer to not have nuts in school, such policies are clearly necessary to protect children from lazy moms like myself, who will otherwise not take it on themselves to abstain from nut-sending. 

***They have a slightly different grade numbering system at TGIS, but I’m sticking with the American system to avoid my own confusion.