Easy Come, Easy Glo

A few days ago, when I woke up from the fog built of travel, jet-lag, 24-hour shifts and one extremely vomit-laden and wail-ridden L.A. lay-over (during which I discovered--after riding all over town in the company of a jovially misogynist Eritrean taxi driver--that when I tell my patients that it should be easy to go out and fill the midnight prescription I just wrote them, they are one hundred percent correct in their assumption, which I have gleaned from the daggers flying silently out of their eyes in my general direction, that I am a lying con-artist of the very worst pants-flaming stripe), it was to the Princess telling me a story.

It was a true story, and requires only this background: That day they had gone on a field trip.  There are two, and exactly two, field trips each year.  One in Fall and one in Spring.  They are called Fall Trip and Spring Trip, and are so much a part of Shanghai school life that on that same day, when I told my driver (who was born in Shanghai but banished to the countryside for twenty years during the mess surrounding the Cultural Revolution, and since then has been busy building a car-service empire) that “TODAY KIDS LEAVE SCHOOL AND GO SOMEWHERE TOGETHER.  VERY FUN!” He responded immediately with “啊！秋游!” the forgotten words for fall trip. 

As I had to admit to the taxi-driver, I didn’t actually know where the kids were going, but, judging from last year’s experience, I figured it would have an amusement level approaching the debauched.  Last Spring, as you may recall, they went to something called the Shanghai Animation and Comic Museum, where the Princess spent a fair amount of time and money attempting to coax a prize out of one of those carnie claw-grab games.  Unsure at the time whose money it was, since I had not provided any, I let it ride, but I worried that maybe they were the only kids who didn’t bring their own, and had been floated by another kid or, worse, by the teachers.  So, just in case it was the done thing, I tucked twenty RMB, or about three dollars, into each girl’s bag before this trip.

All had gone well for the first part of the day.  The girls got on the luxury coach-liners the school procures for such trips (which will have forever spoiled them for the green-benched yellow cans they are doomed to if and when we return to the U.S.), and when they alit, the Princess recounted, they found themselves in an amusement park.  The group was just sitting down to enjoy a performance there, when along came a woman hawking glo-sticks. 

The Princess, having just had an extended pleading session with MTH wherein he resolutely declined the opportunity (provided daily by the holiday swag-stand they’ve set up in our compound’s clubhouse) to purchase just such a glo-stick, and with the money burning a hole in her Barbie mini-messenger bag, seized the moment and flagged the woman down.  She fished out her twenty kuai and bought one for herself.

At that point her best friend, the Little Martinet--who I can personally attest is no slouch at the pleading game--began a session of her own, whereat the Princess, lacking her father’s iron will but in full possession of her mother’s pecuniary heedlessness, immediately offered to procure one for her.  The Little Martinet, who, (the Rooster informs me with heartbreaking envy) routinely gets the highest score on their math tests, had no trouble figuring out which was the best value glo-stick for her, and requested that the Princess buy her the largest one. 

The Princess agreed to this plan, while simultaneously becoming jealous, since the one she was buying for the Little Martinet was larger than the one she, forced to weigh glo-stick size against the amount of her own personal outlay, had chosen to buy for herself. 

I am proud to report that rather than tell the Little Martinet that perhaps she should be satisfied with a smaller stick, it being free and all, the Princess elected to buy two of the larger ones, and pawned the smaller one off on The Rooster, who was initially thrilled at the unexpected windfall, since it would never in one million years have occurred to her to independently make such a purchase.

Then, apparently, several things happened simultaneously.  The Rooster noted the size differential between her stick and those acquired by the Princess and the Little Martinet, and the other kids all noticed the glo-sticks.  In rapid succession, the Rooster had given away the smaller glo-stick, pulled her money out of her little Adidas backpack and purchased a larger one, given that one away, and then she and the Princess spent all the rest of their money providing glo-sticks to what had, naturally, turned into a scrum of their classmates.  The Rooster had just realized, to her dismay, that she had neglected to retain a single glo-stick for herself, when this scrum attracted the attention of Wang laoshi, who, in the Princess’ retelling, swooped down upon them with great vengeance and furious anger, or at least with a very clear containment strategy, and confiscated all the glo-sticks. 

“Wang laoshi told us we should not have so much money,” the Princess told me, which, in retrospect, is quite clear.

The following school day, apparently, the teacher asked everyone in the class who had purchased a glo-stick to stand up.  All the guilty parties stood, including the poor Rooster, caught up in a scandal larger than herself.  The children then had to troop, one by one, up to the desk, where they had one of the cherished stamps in their xiao benzi, redeemable in aggregate for stickers, which are in turn periodically redeemable in aggregate for cartoon-spangled school supplies, slashed out. 

Whether it’s because I’m a foreigner or the belief in personal responsibility is so strong here, no one--not the teacher, not another kid, nor another parent--has contacted me regarding this incident.  The Princess told my mom that one of the girls in the class asked her, marveling at the whole episode, “Since when did you become a bank?”

The Princess’ telling was off-hand, and she seemed at peace with the whole event, sad only that her period of blissful glo-stick ownership had been so brief.  The Rooster, now, she lays low.  I have tried to probe, but have mainly gotten unanswerable questions in return: “Why does Wang laoshi think the stamps are SOOOO important?”  “Why didn’t she TELL us we weren’t allowed to do that?”  “Even though you tell me the stamps are not very important, I just can’t help feeling like they are.” 

Which last is not really a question, except that when it’s said with the patented Rooster lip-quiver and voice-quaver, the combination just begs you for a way to resolve this paradox.  She did give me one straight answer, when I tried to gently probe her reasons for giving away all her money, as part of the groundwork for a careful discussion I planned but never did have about the extraordinarily fine--and possibly mythical--line between generosity and stupidity.

“Why,” I asked the Rooster, “did you keep on buying glo-sticks for the other kids even when you didn’t have one for yourself?” 

“Oh,” she said, “I don’t know.  They just seemed so EAGER for them.”

What keeps me up at night

Reading David Foster Wallace’s biography recently,  I was--surprised? disappointed?--to learn that his parents apparently didn’t notice anything amiss in his psyche when he was younger, even though there were multiple days DFW had to stay home from school just because he was “too nervous” to go.  I mean, he was David Foster Wallace--how could you listen to one sentence he said and not be worried for his sanity? Even when he was essentially sent home from college with a sign on his forehead saying “needs help!” they didn’t do much but feed him and let him figure it out. 

Or so says his biographer.  One wonders if his parents might have a different memory or, if the account is accurate, what exactly they ought to have added, what more they could have done to help.  Maybe  DFW’s parents realized, long before high school, that he, like all of us, was on his own, that much as they might have liked to, they couldn’t add much beyond food, shelter, and a working knowledge of syntax.

Before you have kids, unless you’re world-famous, no one pays you much mind.  And then you have kids and it takes a while to get used to them: to their dependence on you, to their insatiable desire for your presence, to your celebrity status in their world.  Then, the second you start to get cozy in your new role, they rip that carpet right out from under you and take off, without you, for parts unknown.

It’s bad enough if you start out thinking you understand them.  The Princess, who I still feel like I pretty much get, is already headed where I can’t follow:  Even if everything she read was in English and I could stomach screening it (an impossibility: my last attempt at a spot-check found me wading through a tale narrated by a dog whose owner’s wife died shortly after having their baby, struck down by a brain cancer the dog had sniffed out early in its course, but couldn’t alert them to because, despite his having learned English by watching TV while his master was out zipping around the track in his career as a racecar driver, the poor pup was unable to train his floppy tongue and dog-lips to form the life-saving words), her world-view would still be shaped by the social pressures and distorted reality of the playground and the classroom, less accessible to me here--if that’s possible--than in the US.

And then there are the random strands of culture that snag on the matrix.  Today, the girls recounted for me a long story that Wang Laoshi told them about how the world was once an egg, and inside it was a god who decided to increase the distance between heaven and earth, and “all the blue things went up and turned into the sky, and all the gray things came down and turned into the ground, and his eyes became the moon and the sun, and his hair turned into all the stars.  And his blood became water.”

Unable to gracefully handle this sudden elegy for an unknown deity, I asked, “Then why isn’t water red?”

The Princess looked at me and said, without missing a beat, “Maybe his blood was clear!” 

Maybe.  And, with logic like that, it seems she’s unlikely to take this tale--which Google tells me is that of the god Pangu, aka Pan Ku, still worshipped in many Taoist temples--at face value.  Which it certainly wasn’t meant to be.  But I don’t know how it was meant, not in the way I would know what to make of the myths and legends (Athena springing from Zeus’ head, Washington and his cherry tree, benevolent white folks sharing a happy Thanksgiving meal with the Native Americans) she might hear at school in the U.S.  So the Princess is on her own, and I can’t help but wonder where it will go, how this story will fit with all the others and inform her world-view--when we go swimming in the Apple River, will she forever after, however briefly, imagine bathing in the blood of a man whose hair floats above us at night?  And if so, will she find joy in the image, or will it curdle around her?

But at least with the Princess I feel like she’s got her feet on the same ground I do, her path traceable on a map I can read.  The Rooster, on the other hand--she’s already riding that carpet through the air, soaring and plummeting and looping the loopy loop and who knows what else--she’s untraceable.  If I ever know what she will do, how she will react to a new situation, it’s not because I can follow her logic, but because I have observed her in prior situations.  I’m like the folks trying to make sense of the world by taking things cosmic and eternal--earth and stars--and rendering them in terms of the tangible world of hairy men and eggs.  I have no unified theory of the Rooster. 

For instance, one might have thought that the girl who, at three years old, adamantly refuted the existence of Santa Claus--Starting by noting the many physical and biological laws that would have to be suspended for a man in a reindeer-powered air-sleigh to travel through space and, necessarily, time, guzzling milk by the barrel and cookies by the ton; she would finish triumphantly by pointing out our house’s lack of a chimney--would not believe in the tooth fairy.  And you’d be right.  Sort of. 

When the Princess lost her first tooth, the Rooster was skeptical.  When money and a small stuffed toy appeared under the Princess’ pillow the next morning, you could see the gears whirring, the Rooster trying to make sense of this new bit of data, but not ready to take it at face value.  Her doubtful stance was bolstered by the tooth fairy’s spotty performance on subsequent lost teeth:  After several “late arrivals” of the tooth fairy (who managed to flit in and out sight unseen while the girls were in the bathroom after waking up and discovering the disappointment of a still-present tooth) and a crucial discovery by one of the girls of a suspiciously familiar tooth in a box on Mommy’s dresser, I actually ‘fessed up, afraid they were just going to think I was a liar--and a bad one, at that. 

This admission seemed to clear things up for the Rooster--“Oh,” she said, with relief, “You have wings!”

I kind of thought we were done after that debacle--teeth continued to be placed under pillows and money continued to, usually, appear.   The Princess acted--in her Princess-y way--like she’d forgotten the whole incident. She enjoys the fantasy, and she wasn’t going to let my spilling the beans get in the way of either the magic or the money.  My main concern was to keep the Rooster from using her grasp (skewed thought it might be) of reality to puncture the Princess’ bubble every time she lost a tooth, which she tends to do precipitously and bloodily, usually involving a collision with someone, a ruined shirt, and plenty of attention. 

The Rooster, though, is different.  One night, we were at dinner at a restaurant, and we noticed the Rooster was only using one hand to eat.  It turned out she had her tooth in the other hand.  It had fallen out during dinner, and she didn’t want to tell us.  It was the first tooth she’d lost, ever. 

Since then, she has never told us the moment when a tooth came out--but we were lucky, because usually the Princess would rat her out.  But then the Rooster pushed her resistance farther down the timeline: the last time the tooth fairy left money for her (actually remembering on time!), the Rooster left the money under the pillow, refusing to take it out or do anything with it, until finally the ayi confronted me with it and I snuck it into the Rooster’s money-box. 

And then came last Saturday, when, on the way to dance class from Tae Kwon Do, I marveled that the Rooster’s tooth--which I knew was loose--hadn’t come out in Tae Kwon Do, which was particularly vigorous that morning.  Something in the Rooster’s face made me stop in the middle of the sidewalk.  “Is it already out?” I asked her. 

Her face immediately crumpled, and she began to wail, inconsolably.  I thought she was upset that she’d lost the tooth, and asked if she wanted us to go back to search.  Nope, that wasn’t it.  I thought maybe she’d swallowed it, and was terrified it would make her sick.  Nope again.  Flushed it down the toilet?  Nope.  Given it to someone?  Nope.

It turned out that the Rooster had actually lost the tooth at school the day before, and not told anyone, not even the Princess.  She had carefully wrapped it in paper, put it in her backpack, brought it home, and, unbeknownst to any of us, put it under her pillow the night before.

“Is it still there?”  I asked her. 

“Probably,” she answered, with a scientist’s precision.  I never was able to get her to tell me if she’d done it to prove once and for all that there was no tooth fairy, or with the belief that I, since I am winged, am also omniscient. 

Later that week she lost another tooth (they are falling like rain in our house at the moment), which my mom again discovered when she noted the Rooster had been clutching something in her fist the whole evening.  The Rooster wept again when my mom called her out on it, and has absolutely refused to say what it is that upsets her so much about the whole process: Sorrow over the tooth fairy’s nonexistence?  Fear that she does exist and is creepily messing around children’s sleeping bodies?  Fear that her parents are going crazy, since we keep acting like the TF exists even when We All Know she doesn’t?  A natural fear for her bodily integrity when it turns out that some bits can just fall off?  The more we ask her about it, the more she weeps, and the more I am convinced that somewhere, somehow, I have done something terribly wrong, there’s been a terrible misunderstanding.  But I can’t fix it if I can’t find it, and I manifestly can’t find it.  She’s all alone with whatever the problem is, and all I can do is feed her--nothing too chewy--and let her figure it out. 

Ups and Downs

Monday was Teacher’s Day.  Why, oh why, is there not a school calendar?  As soon as I arrived at the school gate in the afternoon, vaguely wondering why there seemed to be so many flowers around, the girls accosted me, notified me of the holiday, and demanded to know why they had not been prepared with gifts for their teachers, as their friends had been.

One of my problems as a mom is that I lack the ability to formulate a plan and not tell the girls about it, which then means, that, as far as they are concerned, said plan is etched in stone.  The other problem is that I so readily come up with unrealistic plans.  And so, while trying to simultaneously shoulder the Rooster’s backpack, make sure the Princess wasn’t lacerating ankles with her rolling bag, field the girls’ clamor for a snack, and navigate the crush of grandma’s, parents, SUV’s and motor-scooters that surround the school gate at pick-up time, I muttered something about how maybe we could make brownies that night and the girls could belatedly hand them out in the morning.

It’s not even worth going through the number of things I had to forget to make that plan seem reasonable, if only for an instant.  Suffice it to say that, after cajoling and pleading my way through the three solid hours of homework that I’ve come to know as the Monday Special (during which time I barely allowed the girls to stop long enough to enjoy the fresh pork-buns the ayi had made at the Princess’ request), making cocoa substitute for baking chocolate and caffeine for sleep, the morning found me tying silver ribbon around little saran wrapped brownies, the dainty packages kind of losing their charm when squeezed amid elbowed-aside dirty dishes and set to a soundtrack of me shrieking ablution instructions (“don’t forget your Coochie and Booteeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyy!”). 

I was still naked in my room when I told the girls to push the elevator button, which is why they were

Knowing too much

When MTH took his first trip to China, a couple of years before we moved here, he got off the airplane, got in a taxi, and was driven just out into the peri-airport limbo, when his driver turned around, looked at his passenger, and shrugged.  Apparently, he had not understood when MTH gave his destination in English, and had thought it unwise to make this clear until he had driven far enough to eliminate the competition.  A phone call to the hotel solved the problem, of course, but the danger inherent in a complete lack of communication struck us both as something to be avoided in the future, so we set about learning Chinese.

What I didn’t realize was that knowing Chinese--or knowing only a little Chinese, which is where I find myself now--can be just as harrowing.  Take my communications with the ayi, for instance.  It’s important to know that I am flummoxed by the ayi in general.  Nothing in my prior life prepared me to have a servant; it is not something I ever once dreamed of.  This may surprise those of you who have witnessed the astonishing disarray of any of my living quarters, but it’s consistent--I think so little about cleaning that it never occurred to me to imagine having someone do it for me. 

But now I find myself with a woman who is in the house 25 hours a week, basically at my beck and call.  I don’t do any becking or calling--I don’t know how.  I just let her do her thing, and try to gloss over any imperfections the rest of the family identifies.  Sure, the Princess thinks she cooks too much fish, the Rooster would love it if she put stuff back in the same place all the time, and MTH has some spots--invisible to me--that he thinks could be cleaner.  But whenever I suggest that a complaining family member directly suggest an adjustment to the ayi, their volume goes way down, and they quickly find a reason they need to be in a different room.  I sympathize with them; I cannot bring myself to make even the smallest request--it seems so gauche or ungrateful, or just…too damn hard, without access to the verbal softeners and diffusers I need to be comfortable.

What’s funny is that the ayi doesn’t have the same qualms.  Well, maybe she does, but she gets over them in a way I’ve become very envious of.  It started when she realized that I was able to understand her well enough to grasp that the other family she worked for, in the mornings, was letting her go.  Would I be able to help find a new job?  That was easy enough; right around the same time a sort-of friend of mine advertised on an online community of ex-pat moms that I follow, and now she works for both families.

By then, though, the ayi, who had never used a computer before, had started to understand the power of the internet, and immediately began to--via me--harness it.  This, too, was no big deal.  Every once in a while she would come in to the office as I was working on the computer, and ask me “taitai, ni xianzai mang bu mang?”  Which means, depending on translation, “Ma’am, are you busy?” “Lady, are you currently occupied?” or “Boss lady, got a sec?”  It bothers me to not know which one it is, because it would allow me to judge her properly.  But in the end, the answer is that I am never so busy that I haven’t clicked on and viewed least one picture of a cute fuzzy animal on the internet, and I do think that helping another human being out is more important than playing online scrabble, if not always more satisfying.  So I tell her I’m not, and then she gives me the name of one of her friends who is looking for work, and I post it on the Shanghai Mama site. 

Two days ago, though, she asked if I was busy, I said no, and she launched into a tale that my Chinese is definitely not ready for.  Halfway through, she started to cry, which made it even harder to understand, but what I got from her is this:

Once upon a time, when she was just out of high school, the ayi fell in love.  Her paramour wanted to marry her, but her grandmother said that she could not get married, because her older cousin was not yet married, and how would that look? 

I did not understand several sentences after that, but it appears that for some reason waiting or expediting the acquisition of a suitable match for the cousin were not workable options.  Later, both the ayi and her sometime sweetheart married different people.  Whether the original beloved would have been a good match or not is up for debate, but it turns out that the man the ayi married in his stead was not--she has shown me her scars. 

She finally got successfully divorced a few months ago, and you could see the change in her--she appeared so much more relaxed and happy and energized.  She used that newfound energy, apparently, to go about tracking down her high school sweetheart.  How to do that in a country where there are only a couple hundred surnames, people rarely go by their first name, and basically everyone is in the process of moving or has just moved from a rural area to an urban area, is beyond me.  But track him down she did, and, while we were in the US, she went to go see him.  He lives a couple of hours away by plane, and I helped her buy her first airline ticket before we left (My performance on this, as on so many of my proudest China accomplishments, turned out to be less than perfect.  When she came back she showed me a bunch of pictures she’d taken from the airplane window, apparently by leaning across two people’s seats, since I’d failed to realize that obviously someone on their first flight EVER would prefer a window seat.).

She tells me she had a wonderful time, and she returned with an ipad that may or may not have been a gift from her long-lost love.  But she also told me he’s still married, although, she says…well, I’m not sure what she said.  I think it translates as something like “loveless marriage,” but it might have been “she’s a witch” or even “he could do better.”  Whatever it was, it was presented as a mitigating factor. 

I asked her if he could ever move here, she said no.  I asked her if she could ever move there, she said no.  I had to speak out.   “But I want you have better man!  Man without wife, man who lives in Shanghai!” I said.  And then she began to cry for real, and she said “for me, there is no other man.  I have been waiting 30 years for this man!  How could I look for another man?”  And that’s when I wished, just for a moment, that I was stranded in a taxi in an unknown city with a driver I couldn’t speak to.  

In case of emergency...

Yesterday, I went to speak to a group at the German Chamber of Commerce.  I haven’t seen that many blonde people in one room I was last in Iowa, but these were notably svelter, and with sharper glasses.  I was there to tell them what to do in case an emergency befell them in China. 

Because I’m an ER doctor, you can kind of see why they would think I would be a good person to give this talk.  But the logic doesn’t really hold up: I have literally never witnessed an emergency outside of the ER.  Well, unless you count the lady I saw lying in the street last month, just after she’d been hit by a car.  But at that time, I did exactly what the untrained bystanders were doing--told her to hold still and waited for the ambulance.  When they arrived I was able to provide a little information for them, since she spoke only Spanish and they didn’t, but let’s face it--they could have gotten her on a gurney without knowing how old she was and that she had hypertension and diabetes.  If she had been gushing blood and in cardiac arrest with low blood sugar, I couldn’t have done much more before the EMT’s arrival, certainly nothing more than anyone who has taken a CPR class is trained to do.  The fact is that, without our equipment, doctors are about as much use in emergency as a pathology textbook, and possibly less so, since you might at least be able to use the book to fashion a splint. 

But at any rate, the MD and my job give me a bit of credibility, and so, despite the fact that I haven’t done any of these things, I told them to:  get a first aid kit, make a phone list, get to know the neighbors, take a CPR class, know where the closest local hospital is in case you have a true life-threatening emergency and live on the far side of town (otherwise, of course, come visit us and our fresh-faced English-speaking staff at the hospital whose logo was prominently displayed in the mandated PowerPoint template I was using), think hard about whether an ambulance will really add much to their transport over a taxi, and keep a wad of cash around. 

It was, of course, the last two that got the group going.  Regarding the cash, they asked the next logical question about quantity.  I found it both impolitic and imprecise to answer “as much as you can afford to lose,” and punted to my boss, there at my side wearing his own slick glasses.  “Around 20,000 RMB” he said, without missing a beat.  That’s about $3000, and seemed as good a guess as any, until I started trying to imagine actually taking three thousand of my own dollars out of commission and leaving them on a shelf (or as he suggested, in a safe purchased for this sole purpose) in my house just in case some day someone in the family has such a severe and sudden illness that no one is able to get to the ATM.  I then tried to imagine scrambling to recall the combination to said safe, likely having gathered several years’ worth of dust by then, during that same emergency.  The Germans twisted the knife by asking, if they were to go sight-seeing to another area of China, were they really supposed to carry that kind of cash with them?  Which, I think, is the point when the intrinsic silliness of an American ER doctor answering such questions hit us all, and I moved on to the next imponderable.

One of the first things you notice after you move here is the tremendous amount of honking.   Chinese people seem to consider honking a mandatory part of driving, like checking your rear-view mirrors or using your turn signal, and they do it with the same regularity recommended for those commendable habits.  The second thing you notice is the lack of sirens amid the cacophony.  I don’t think I’ve heard a police, ambulance, or fire siren out my window in the entire time I’ve been here.  And I’d notice if there were, since it would be there for a while--the drivers in a typical Shanghai traffic snarl would be unlikely to be able to pull over, even if they were inclined to. 

Shanghai does have ambulances, though, and each one is supposed to be manned with a driver, a technician, and a doctor, which would make them apparently--if not in fact-- better staffed than US ambulances, as ours don’t generally carry doctors.  It wouldn’t, however, make them better-staffed than German ambulances, which all have doctors.  And all doctors are not created equal.  When I graduated medical school, I was technically a “doctor.”  I had done a full undergraduate degree and a full course of medical school, and had MD after my name.  But you wouldn’t have wanted me riding along in your ambulance, directing your resuscitative care.  It took another year of residency training before I was even licensed to prescribe drugs, and three more after that before I was released into the world to practice on my own.  In Germany it’s roughly the same. 

In China, however, high school graduates go to university for five years, and then they’re doctors.  Sure, they have to go work at a hospital for one to three years after that, which period sort of resembles a western residency program (or, more accurately, half of one), but from what I hear, the new graduates need to apprentice themselves directly to someone at that hospital, constantly demand that person’s attention, and learn to do things exactly that person’s way.  There is no formal curriculum, and no testing along the way until the very end, when they sit a licensing examination.  So even if it’s not until then that newly-minted doctors are allowed to staff an ambulance, if one were to happen to call one, and it actually arrived, you’d likely to be facing a worn-out kid familiar with only one way of doing things, manning a possibly ill-equipped van whose arrival-time was as dependent on the vagaries of traffic as any other vehicle’s.  Whereas, outside many of the compounds the expats live in, there is a line of seasoned taxi drivers waiting to whisk you away, any one of whom may actually know the quickest route to the nearest hospital. 

This puts anyone requiring transport to the hospital on the horns of a genuine dilemma.  The Germans asked me which to choose, but my time was almost up, and I was done pretending to have the answers, so I have them the same look I gave the Princess recently, when she asked me if she should choose the Barbie backpack or the anime girls one.  It’s my “You’re on your own, kiddo!” one, which has never been greeted with anything but head-shaking amazement at my unhelpfulness.  This was no exception.