pushing up the boulder of sisyphus

Sometimes that's what it feels like to take care of a place in dusty-aired China. If I ever live in the States again, I will never complain about doing dishes. It would be a luxury to not have to bend over a tiny sink and meticulously attempt to soap and wash everything without water dripping all over the floor so that I have to mop up and wash my feet after every session. And a washer and dryer! These contraptions, once taken so for granted, now seem like sci-fi magic-ma-jigs that maybe I'll get to experience again in the year 2040 when technology becomes more advanced. Once my son becomes potty-trained, this part should become easier. I wonder when that will be.

To rub salt into this (not really) wound, the many young working professionals (read: single and without children) often call me with fairly last-minute requests to help teach or do things since they figured I have nothing to do all day except "just watching the kid." This is true, in general, except their tone seems to convey their belief that this is somehow an idyllic vacation that I'm living:

"So, what else do you do all day besides looking after your son?"

"Hm... That's basically what I do all day."

"Oh, that's it?"

I could go into details about what that consists of, but I do recall to my shame that I pretty much felt as they did before I started babysitting a lot for my now-goddaughter and her sister.

Oh wellz. I don't need anyone's approval or understanding but God's. So after planning and leading my small group through our activity night, still trying to find time and energy to translate for a friend's dad's factory, and leading a group to visit the orphan's hospital tomorrow, I think it's all right if I said no to something I'm not really all that good at anyway last night, right? Yes. Let me get off this performance treadmill.

yay for small blessings

My husband's rigged up a proxy for this particular computer so I could access blogger more frequently (among other things). Hurray! I catch up on the websites I follow, and am astounded by so many things happening in other people's lives.

My own life is pretty placid in comparison. I take care of the apartment, our dinners, the child. I read when I have the time and clean as much as I could. Our house church here is starting to partner with an orphan's hospital. The only hospital for orphans in the entire province of Zhejiang, 20 minutes by bus from where I live. I held a baby who's awaiting a cleft palate operation; I wanted to take her home so she could belong to a loving family instead of mostly lying on a cot by herself all day. Our pastor's wife delivered their third child last Tuesday, and they're heavily fined for not opting for an abortion instead. We the church are helping them at this time.

It took a long time for my professional ambition to die, or at least, go completely dormant without the bursts of intense mourning of my personal goals in life. Which had never included a husband, kids, building a home. Quite the opposite--I dreamed of being free and completely independent during all the nights I rubbed my swollen, beaten wrists/arms/wherever while crying softly to sleep in bed.

Strangely, I feel more at peace now. I am learning to have a more thankful heart and be content in all circumstances (beginning with this one).

some days call for spending money like money

Today consisted of my son waking up two hours earlier than usual, which meant that by the time we should be heading to the bus stop to attend church service, he's ready to nurse and nap. Which he did. Then my husband started spewing bodily products on both ends (sorry for the tmi) in the early afternoon. Followed by my son melting again with need to nap. So. Both of them retired to the family bed and slept for the rest of the afternoon and the better part of the night. After they woke, I thought it might be good for us to get some fresh air and we ended up here. In a Western-style coffee shop that served panini and have internet that allows me to link up my vpn.

We paid 80RMB, which divided by 6.4 is the actual US price. Adjusting for my husband's current salary and thus our buying power, however, it's akin to dropping US$40 for a shot of expresso and two thin sandwiches. But the internet! And the getting out of the house! And the husband feeling much better!

Worth it. Just for tonight.

the taxi ride from hell

I don't know why I'm having such a hard time letting it go. After all, the baby's now napping. I finally got to stop smelling like baby piss and puke. And we still have three or four hours tomorrow morning to making things right. Hopefully.

The key may be to stop thinking about what might have been. What easily could have been. If the taxi driver we hailed from in front of the American Embassy didn't misread the direction to the Chinese Consulate and headed towards the fifth ring instead of the rightful second ring of Beijing. If I had said something when my husband pointed this out instead of holding our sleeping child in my arms, afraid of waking him up. If we had, despite the subsequent two hours of sitting in the taxi while it shuttled back to the opposite end of the city, still made the morning shift of the notary office.

As it turned out, we arrived at our destination just as the morning shift ended. The way the Chinese government treats its civil workers, they basically only need to work four hours a day, with an absurdly long lunch, and a minimal degree of civility and patience to the civilians they serve. So we puttered around the consulate entrance for two more hours, joining the queue that formed 20 minutes before the afternoon shift started, only to find out that the building we really needed to go to, the one on the other side of the building we were in, did not have an afternoon shift. So, basically, everything we've done since 9:30am when we got into the taxi had been completely in vain.

I hate stupendous amount of wasted time. And energy. And causing a baby to become whiny, crying, and super tired because he nursed constantly in the taxi for comfort, and then threw up milk all over himself and me, and then leaked urine all over himself and me as he screeched and yelled and pummeled his dad and me. I was sad for the lost nutrients, and annoyed by the sour smell that encircled me for the rest of the afternoon.

When the official at the Chinese Consulate told me that it's not their job to fulfill what we needed at that place, I literally felt a stab of white hot rage. I closed my eyes and stood still for just a minute so that I wouldn't scream. Or slam the pen I was holding into my eye. All this work for nothing, and losing the opportunity to tour other parts of Beijing during the afternoon with a happy sense of accomplishment.

We rode the subway from there back to the hotel. It took half an hour, one transfer included.

beijing snapshots

The water here is questionable... For the life of me, I don't understand why no matter how often I wash the cups and the kettle at our hotel, the water continues to have a white powdery precipitation. Apparently my friend H. had the same issue when she studied in Beijing for a semester. Without cleaning, the white powder would form a thick layer in her electric water boiler. I wonder if the odd element in the water is the cause of my somewhat distressed GI situation that's starting to become more pronounced. I'm grateful that my son seems to be fine and, in fact, is eating "adult food" a lot more since we arrived.

There's a cafe kitty-corner from our hotel that gave my husband a free pass for the two cups of coffee he had the second day we're here. The reason: appreciation for allowing the staff to play with our son. And here we were appreciating them for giving us some free time to ourselves. I love how the mainland Chinese culture is so...communal about children. How much of this is an adaptation to the one-child policy? Cousins call each other brothers and sisters, as do unrelated kids of similar ages. Public spaces are often filled with grandparents and their charges mingling with other parental figures and children.

The flip side to the above attitude is how nosy/interfering people can get. I suspect that the flight attendant who whisked my son away to the cockpit area (while I got a much-needed shuteye on the flight) fed him some cheesecake despite my warning that he's allergic to dairy. Chinese people on the whole don't seem to believe in allergies. And they also firmly believe in their own way of raising kids, like when I got pretty loudly berated on two occasions by grandfather figures for not putting socks on my son while we're outdoors. Dang it, it's 75 degrees! He is not freezing!

The aforementioned cafe also has a stray dog lingering around its entrance. The white puppy has been recently abandoned, it appears, and no one in the square of which our hotel is a part of has the heart to shoo it away. I've heard several employees persuading each other to adopt the dog. No takers yet. My son screeches excitedly every time we pass by. The dog shows remarkable intelligence in eyeing my son warily.

After two days of living with our hotel room facing the hotel parking lot, it finally dawned on me this afternoon that there's a small shanty-town forming on the far side of the parking lot. So far, about seven small make-shift shelters show indications of people residing in them. No wonder there's a clothesline strung up along the brick wall containing the parking lot, with blankets hung up to dry. It's so strange to see people living like that within this very affluent neighborhood. China's visibly growing gap between its rich and poor really is no joke.

a more coherent mind purge than previously

Lately, the random tendency to burst into tears and feel a bone-crunching despair is starting once again to interfere with how I take care of my son and husband. I took to re-reading A Praying Life by Paul Miller and then took a bus to a bookstore in Hangzhou that shares my son's Chinese name. For one, I love bookstores and the outing helped to cheer me up a little (yay, new place to visit! On my own - while ergo-ing my son) = independence. Joy!) and, for another, I was able to get a prayer journal. If any time is most suitable for constant prayers, it is now.

This is what I have realized about moving from the U.S. to China: life in China is harder on many basic levels, and freedom and civil rights no longer shout out in my consciousness on a mostly theoretical level. It has been easy for me to live well in the U.S. and not have to remember the suffering in the world if I didn't have the time or energy that day. It is less easy to avoid when the population is so dense and I see so many people from all walks of life simply by riding in our apartment's elevator. Or going to the canteen to eat. Or trying to get procedures approved by the government or basically any administration here. Or hear about friends who have to either get an abortion or deliver in hospital staircases because doctors weren't willing to get in trouble for helping to deliver babies without permission-to-birth permits. My husband says it leaves him drained, feeling helpless and angry. He says he is starting to understand why God cares so much for the oppressed.

In this weakened, sad condition, it is impossible for us to function without praying every time we feel the power drain. The impotence to do more. Because of this, I find myself now praying all the time. In a greater context, it is a huge relief to be struggling so much now. I had struggled in the U.S. too, before I left. That struggle was against complacency, the opium haze of comfort and (what I now recognize as) luxury, and my own inability to always remember the poor (of every kind). Now, the battles are clearer; the enemies are out in the open and I feel like it's a more honest fight. Like when one of our church friends get passed over in work because he doesn't want to lie for the company and shortchange clients. Like how my husband and I resolved to take significant financial loss instead of performing some shady exchanges as his department suggested in order to claim the promises his boss made.

Now we're in Beijing for the week. My husband will attend a math conference. We need to get our marriage certificate notarized in order to continue another ongoing bureaucratic nightmare. And in the meantime I will walk while carrying our son through the historic campus of Beijing University, the epicenter of so many civil uprisings in the past. Where my great aunt taught as a humanities professor before she and her husband committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution.

Time for bed. Signing off from the new Mac computer my husband got via his grant money. Whee.

蜻蜓點水

There were a few things I really wanted to record this past week, but freegate (the software that I've been using to get past the government firewall) hadn't been working either due to government interference or just because of kinks in the system. The current access may be short-lived, but I've briefly lost my musing mojo. Still, I feel pressed to write something, anything, just because I don't know if I'll have access in the coming week.

I recently started reading a novel that someone here said really captures the spirit of the age in China. How crazed everyone is to own a piece of real estate. How kids are raised. How money is king. How corrupt officials can be. Aside from the annoyance every now and then I have with simplified characters (honestly, it's just so...I have to keep reminding myself not to be so elitist about the history of language. I have to actively quash my linguistic training to stifle my exasperation at such butchery), it's been really eye-opening. And depressing. And illuminating. This novel had been adapted into a nightly drama, which the government has since banned because it casts how the government works in a dubious light.

The same said person (who recommended the above novel) had needed help finding an English class substitute to take over the work of a former teacher. The teacher had skipped town after receiving last month's pay and failed to notify the company until an hour before her class was to begin. At first I had thought she was asking me for help, of which I would gladly give, but it turned out that my husband was the one they wanted. Because he's ethnically Caucasian. They're still looking for a teacher they can hire on a more permanent basis, but I am not an option despite my masters degree and experience teaching rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon because... I am ethnically Chinese. Clearly, only someone who looks white is qualified. On one hand, I've gotten this treatment pretty much all my life. I've gotten used to working doubly hard just to prove I'm equally capable. Still, I'm pretty damned tired of fighting these old prejudices. It's been surprisingly easier for my husband to fit in here (I think). As a white person, he has the "exotic" factor i.e. everyone local wants to hang out with him and be his friend. He is excused for not understanding things. Meanwhile, I am recognized as being Chinese when they want me to do things that they don't want to do themselves. However, when they see me with my white husband and mixed baby, I am often judged (oh yes, I know that look) for marrying a white person in order to, they think wrongly, secure a green card and American citizenship for my child. I am often excluded from things that they consider someone of my background wouldn't understand or know, thereby making me feel like a dumb brute. Things are further complicated by the fact that I am, in fact, not Chinese culturally, but rather Taiwanese. (Or is it Taiwanese-American, as some other people see me?)

Who knows. Does it even matter.

This time has been and continues to be a very humbling time for me. My pride in having lived through the awkward, lonely years as an immigrant away from my parents since I was nine. My pride in picking up jobs to earn my own money. My pride in feeling "in control." My pride is being able to chat with people and have them interested in me for myself and not simply in relation to my white husband.

These things are good to let go, I think. It just sucks to feel like such a nothing. I am getting the smallest of inkling as to what a big deal it was for the creator of the universe to become a poopy, colicky baby and then ordinary, common human wandering around Palestine. To become nothing for us, the world. Wow.