where two (or three) wheels can take you

These commuters drove past me just a few minutes apart on the same Chengdu morning. A local wouldn't even give them a second glance.

Have a large piece of foam core that needs to get somewhere?

Just make sure you can still reach the handlebars.


Need to go where where cute shoes and tights are appreciated?

One of you can just stand on the running board.


What about a family of three?

Hop on. You can even fit a bag of groceries between the driver's legs.


Have some cardboard that needs to get recycled?

Just tie it on and don't get hit by the truck with the tree trunks while lighting your cigarette.


And this stuff with a lady's face on it. Can you get it where it needs to go?

Of course. I can even cross my legs along the way.

this is not fog

Today the AQI was 453 when we woke up. For those of you who happily don't need to know such things, this means the air quality was scientifically defined as "hazardous." At levels beyond 500 the chart simply says, "Beyond Index."

With these levels of pollution the air takes on weight. It makes the dog's fur feel gritty. It obscures the view. Just ask the buildings in the photo above.

Buildings? Yes. A whole missing backdrop of them. (See below for a day when the air quality dipped to about 80.)

I wore a mask when I went to walk the dog (and take these photos) but most people did not. And I was surprised to see that the neighbors still had their windows open. 

Sure, high levels of pollution are considered normal here. Anything even close to the numbers that we regularly see would cause alarm elsewhere. For example, New York was at 35 the last time we checked and on a trip to Singapore we saw newspaper articles in a state of panic when their numbers spiked near 80.

But today's pollution was bad even compared to Chengdu normal. The photo above is from this morning. The photo below is from the same spot a week ago. 

I'm not asking for blue skies. I know better than that.

At this point I'd be happy just to see the buildings on the ground.

not the same as usual

This is the Chengdu fog. 

This is too.

People here have a habit of calling any grey pall that fuzzes the city “fog.” Admittedly it’s way less depressing than pointing out the brew of chemicals and particulate matter that we’re all sucking down daily.

But this past Sunday if you said it was foggy you weren’t sugarcoating the truth. We woke up and couldn’t even see the building whose appearance we normally use to gauge the pollution.

Our first thought was to check the AQI. It was only “unhealthy” so we turned to nature.

Nature?

It’s good to be reminded there is such a thing since we don’t go outside much. We also don't let the air come in if we can help it.

We might be alone in that. We were talking with a western doctor about air pollution and he said his local patients don’t believe him when he says they should close their windows. They respond that fresh air is healthy and that living in a closed house isn’t good for you.

He explains how 50 years ago it was a good idea to open the windows - what with diseases at the time and the cleaner air - but not anymore. Now… now fresh air is no longer good for you.

He told us they don’t believe him.

(We believed him and we enjoyed the fog from inside.)

what do you want for your birthday?

A cake.

It’s a simple answer but not so simple when you get to the part about making the homemade caramel and whipping together the buttercream; trimming the cake ends and cutting the layers. This is what 15 eggs, 8 sticks of butter, and 5 cups of sugar can become. A brown-sugar layer cake with salted caramel buttercream frosting. Made from scratch. 

Thank you Shi-wen.   

what's wrong?

The quiet woke me up.

I could hear the baby shift in his crib. And rain falling outside.

These are normal sounds, true, but they are small sounds. Tiny, really. Especially in the whirring slur of air purifiers with which we share our home.

Waking around midnight and hearing baby pajamas on bedsheets and rain striking leaves was lovely but then I wondered what was wrong.

Simple answer: no power. The electricity was out so the purifiers were off.

Later, waking for the day, we found flashlights and candles to fill the dark morning with light.

But the silence? We kept it and listened to it like a concert.

road-tripping with Chinese characteristics

We can cross "road trip" off our Southwest China must-do list. 

As well as: "Decide against using gravel road with no guardrails to descend mountain." 

And: "Rely on gas station good samaritan to lead us to impossible-to-find highway."

Our caravan left Chengdu on Saturday morning and went 200+ miles to the Southern Sichuan Bamboo Sea in a not entirely direct manner due to a quick pass through the city of Neijiang. My visiting parents and our infant son had all begged to see Neijiang (not really) and when we took a wrong turn on the way to Zigong their dreams came true.

We might have turned back onto the correct path sooner had several advertised rest stops not been blocked off due to not being constructed yet. Note: Perhaps it would be best not to put signs on the highway announcing rest stops that don't exist. But then again I went on a Chinese road trip with neither a map nor a functioning GPS so maybe I'm not the best person to comment on travel management.

On our way to the forest we had lunch in Yibin with a table full of dishes that my parents really liked. And this brings us to the next item to cross off the list: Leave our own fork -- a fork that we had taken from our house that morning so my chopstick-impaired mother wouldn't starve -- at the restaurant. This meant that at subsequent dining locations we had the opportunity to mime the universal hand-sign for fork when the server didn't understand my Chinese. It's basically three fingers pointed downwards making a scooping-up or poking-at motion. Surprisingly the first reaction to this strange pantomime was rarely "bring customer a fork." Turns out I'm bad at both the Chinese language and charades.

When we finally got to the Bamboo Sea it was a rolling swath of dancing green. The name Bamboo Sea kind of gives you the idea but it still doesn't capture what it's like to have crawled slowly up a twisting mountain to look across the sky and see bamboo for miles. The road was a beautiful experience in and of itself. Ferns crawled the sheer walls and when the road wasn't clinging to the mountain it was running beneath an arched tunnel of lithe trunks that looked as if it they had always meant to connect in the middle. 

The paths up the mountain were slender and twisted and dotted with rocks, stray dogs, parked cars, slow moving bamboo trucks, and children. Drivers not infrequently swerved across the yellow line. Sometimes there was oncoming traffic and sometimes there was not. Thankfully we saw no accidents but this was after driving several hours on the highway so we were a bit desensitized to the state of Chinese traffic in general. When you've seen one truck driving with two other trucks on top of it, you've seen them all.

Back at the hotel we had a clown car kind of dinner where room service brought so many dishes, carried by so many people, that my parents reported there wasn't enough space in their room for either. When I finally got there (the server had raised her hand high above her head to ask my parents where the tall person who had ordered the food was) there was a platter of ramen noodles balanced on top of two plates of dumplings on a small coffee table. On the other side of the room the desk was supporting a bitter bamboo dish along with a greens and mushroom dish and a grotesquely large platter of rice. There was also a fork, a successful result of our earlier game of charades. 

The next morning there were giant horned beetles and stick insects in the parking lot. We walked over waterfalls and there were smoked ribs for sale along the wet hilly paths. There were rafts you rowed as a group using what can best be described as oversized croquet mallets. There was a man hiking the path with a small leather portfolio, orange loafers, and a fluffy dog. And there was the aforementioned gravel road which made my stomach sink as we left the park's east gate. All gravel. All steep. No guard rail.

We opted to perform a U-turn that required our car to drive to the edge but not over, and then all the way back through the park to the west gate where the road was slightly less rustic.

While lost in the outskirts of Yibin we experienced our first Chinese rail crossing sitting behind a manually-dropped gate as a long chain of rail cars slugged their way into view. Then they came to a stop. And sat there. And then faster than we could have imagined they reversed back from where they came and the gates went up.

At this point I should mention that on our side of the tracks the cars and scooters were lined up across the full width of the road. It looked like a one-way street. But it wasn't. And the other side looked exactly the same.

But when the gates went up it worked. I still don't know how, but everyone found their way forward. Traffic here is obscene and ludicrous and exceptionally dangerous but it flows and finds its way. And we found our way with it. (And managed not to lose the good samaritan scooter driver who had offered to lead us to the highway after we'd asked directions at the gas station where he was filling up.)

(Oh, and I had Xiao Guaiguai on my lap because we had incorrectly assumed there would be enough time to feed him as we waited for the world's slowest train. Wrong.) 

Coming back to Chengdu was fairly soul crushing. It was like returning to a lunar landscape that was dead and barren and in absolute contrast to the green depths we had just explored. Back in the city it was hard to even remember what we had just seen.

Which reminds me of one last item to cross off the list. "Avoid being bitten by humungous mosquitos in bamboo forest and bamboo forest hotel room only to get bitten inside own home within ten minutes of returning." 

Welcome back to Chengdu.

when the air is clear

Usually when someone invokes the phrase “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone,” they mean that you don’t realize a situation’s greatness until that greatness goes away.

Like if your neighbor bakes cookies every day and always gives you some. You eat so many warm wonderful cookies – every day, fresh cookies – that it seems quite normal and run of the mill. Then the neighbor moves away and bam! no more cookies. That no-more-cookies slap in the face is when you realize how good you had it.

That's sort of like life in Chengdu, except that instead of cookies think pollution. Every day a fresh smothering of pollution. But then bam! just like the neighbor and the cookies, the pollution is gone. And you’re left with blue sky and clear air.  The slap in the face is the realization that living in Chengdu made you forget just how clean the air can be. 

Pollution… you don’t know how much you’ve got ‘til its gone.

A clear day here is jarring. It proves that Chengdu, at its roots, is a crisp city. It’s not that the buildings are ill-focused or that the bridge up the road was constructed with steel wool instead of steel. The reason life is blurry is that the city is too often cloaked in a scientifically measurable chemical layer that obscures the view.

When we woke to a shockingly clear and beautiful Saturday, we spent most of the day outside. It was as much a joy as an obligation. As we traipsed through the city, chasing the fresh air, a taxi driver told us that the excellent air quality was the result of several days of rain. After rain, he said, comes good air. My only response was a sincere hope for miserable weather.

It’s not like we regularly see the sun here either. One morning last week when the lady who watches Xiao Guai Guai got to our house, I asked about the weather. She said it was beautiful, you could see the 太阳. Hmmm … 太阳? I ran through my Chinese vocabulary knowing that I recognized the word but couldn’t for the life of me remember its meaning. 太阳… 太阳… Definitely haven’t said that in ages. And then, as she’s pointing out the window at the sky, I remember…. 太阳 is the sun! She’s saying that today you can see the sun!

Still, it seems our appreciation for a day in which the air quality index dipped into the “good” range was not necessarily matched by the rest of the city. (Note: "good" is much better than “unhealthy for sensitive groups” which after a steady stream of “unhealthy” days can start to seem downright rejuvenating.) All around us people were doing their personal best to knock the "good" rating up a few unhealthy pegs.

There were the sidewalk sweepers pushing piles of dust back and forth which the wind caught up in swirling clouds and deposited in our hair. There were the smokers at Bamboo Park who lit cigarette after cigarette and played endless rounds of cards as their smoke trails wound past every teacup in every shady corner. And there was the woman sitting on a bench along a main drag with her family who in quick succession sneezed several times, coughed juicily, spat, and then farmer-blew her way to a clearer breathing passage.

But none of this could stop us. We loved being out of the house. Loved seeing the guy making tofu breakfasts off the back of his bike. Kept remarking on how clearly we could see this and that.

We high-stepped it through the construction under the belly of the 2^nd ring road, tripping past more workers than jobs to be done. There they stood with their scooters, waiting for work with their handsaws, paint rollers, whatever they might need, all piled up on the backs of their bikes.

Workers were on cell phones as they repaired the city by hand and trowel. And the egg delivery guy rode past it all without breaking a single one of his dozens.

We were looking at Chengdu without its chemical cloak, without the metal aftertaste. We saw it with eager eyes knowing that once the unnatural cloud covered our lives all over again, we’d have to forget just how nice this city can be.

April 20, 2013

It turns out that earthquakes and childbirth have some similarities. To start, both are sharp-turned upheavals in which nature repeatedly drops its fist on your head and demands to know who’s in charge. I’ve experienced both recently and the answer in both instances - and without hesitation - is nature.

The earthquake began around eight in the morning as a curious rumble. Soon the house swam and the walls swayed. Our reaction was to scoop up the baby and the dog and get out. Leaving the house might or might not have been the proper thing to do but after Shi-wen declared “Earthquake!” neither of us opted to wait under the dining room table to see if the ceiling held out. Instead we rushed outside with the rest of the neighborhood and waited.

It reminded me of the moments after childbirth where everyone’s slopping around in slippers and pajamas looking a bit whiplashed and trying to call the relatives. People were dressed for early Saturday morning but cell phones were pressed to their ears instead of pillows.

For our neighbors, the date of the quake recalled a far deadlier earthquake just five years earlier. In that quake, which occurred just 50-some miles from this one, 90,000 people died or went missing.

News passed quickly through the pajamaed crowd as everyone milled around and tried to reach friends and family. The magnitude was 7. The epicenter was in Lu Shan County in Ya'an, about 70 miles southwest of Chengdu. The foreigners (meaning us) have a baby and a dog.

In this quake, Chengdu at large was spared serious harm although nearly 200 people were killed elsewhere. Just hours after the quake the city was back to business as usual. The aftershocks, however, went on for several days; when we thought we felt shaking, but couldn't be sure, we’d look to our gently rocking chandelier for confirmation.

On the day of the quake there was one person we didn’t get to meet from the neighborhood: a middle-aged man in pink pajamas who was walking circles near the swing set. As for recognizing him now - without his pajamas - I’m not optimistic. I’m probably as likely to be able to find him in a crowd as I’d be in identifying one of the ladies from my childbirth class without her giant belly.

In the midst of life’s big shifts every detail is vivid and sharp and unforgettable. But soon the rumble of trucks no longer makes you think the ground is shuddering and the pain of childbirth becomes harder and harder to explain.

It’s this gentle-ing of memories that lets you sleep soundly in a house where the walls once shook. Not that we’re sleeping much. Earthquakes may eventually stop their shaking but the roar of an infant feels like forever.

the next adventure

Dear Mom and Dad,

We just got back to Chengdu after spending three months with you in Chicago in the house
where I grew up. I came to you quite pregnant, moved along to being very pregnant, and then
went into oh-yes-I’m-definitely pregnant labor in what used to be my little sister’s bedroom.

Before the baby came, we all did the things that people do. We walked the dog and we went
to the zoo. We watched the TV shows you highlighted in the TV schedule each morning and
we ate ribs and hot dogs and steaks and marinated pork from TV trays in the living room. We
were together for Christmas and New Years and Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day. We
celebrated the aforementioned little sister’s birthday. Grandpa died and my son was born.

It was both a life changing and a normal life – and usually I’m an ocean away from both. But
not this time. This time I was close. I was so close that I was sleeping down the hall from you
and napping on the sofa across from you.

I was there.

And it was perfect.

You know when I say perfect I don't mean that nothing bad happened. That no bones were
broken. That no one cried. You know that I mean just being there – being with you for
everything that did happen – was perfect for me. How saying goodnight to you each of those
evenings almost made up for the time I’d been away.

Coming back home gave me precious time with you as your daughter, and it gave our son his
first moments with you as your grandson.

I watched you hold him. I watched you kiss and coo him. I watched you pace and dance and
hug and snuggle this tiny little boy who is to me what I am to you.

My son won’t have the same childhood that you gave me. He will move far away and he will
keep moving. His house will be everywhere and nowhere all at once.

As his mother my job will be to make sure that he also has a home. Something that feels sure
and constant and full and that is made with love and heart instead of bricks and mortar. I
can do this because you did it for me.

Thank you for being my parents. And thank you for being there when I became one too.

I hope we can visit again soon.

the egg

Yesterday my friend gave me a hard-boiled egg. It was a brown egg with deep cracks at one end and he gave it to me in the early a.m. when it was cold and black outside. If I didn't know better I'd say it was foggy except that what felt like fog was bad air smelling of smoke and burning. It was just your regular Chengdu a.m. and my friend was at his post eating breakfast. He works the night shift and when I take our dog for a morning walk he's still at his post. So each morning he says hi, and I say hi. Then the dog says hi. But we're in China so what I actually say are things like, “Still working?,” and he asks questions like, “Are you walking the dog?,” and then we both pause while the dog licks his hand. We all seem happy with our routine. For me it makes the neighborhood feel like a real home, but I doubt my friend feels this way. He already feels at home. And when he gave me the egg from his own breakfast, it made me feel at home too. Like there’s someone who knows me and maybe considers me a part of their daily rhythm. If at this point I'm thinking of the chicken or the egg conundrum I'd say the egg definitely comes first. It's the start of things and sets the roots for everything that follows. And besides, at that hour, it's way too early for the roosters to start crowing in Chengdu anyway -- something, I suppose, you only know if you call Chengdu home.

November 22

It’s another Thanksgiving in China.

We’ve got two pumpkin pies with streusel on top, one just out of the oven. There’s a box of Stovetop sitting on the counter just waiting for its butter and water. And I can hear Shi-wen peeling the four potatoes which will be boiled and mashed and subjected to copious amounts of gravy.

This year our turkey came roasted in slices from a shop that sells sandwiches and salads and other things western. Admittedly this is not quite as dramatic as roasting our own bird but it'll do. Especially with gravy on top.  

The only necessity we couldn’t find was the can of Durkee onions that would have allowed the guilty pleasure of a French onion casserole. Despite being very hopeful, and going to several stores where western stuff is sold, Shi-wen was told that the places that once had the onions were now sold out. And the places that never had them, still didn’t have them. So no French onion casserole for us.

A missing casserole is admittedly a small thing in a big picture with lots of be thankful for. This is the middle of southwestern China after all. There’s no Cool Whip either and we’ll survive that too.

And while China won’t allow us our Durkee onions or our Cool Whip, it has nudged us towards being grateful for things that folks back home aren’t likely thinking of today.

 I’m thankful my pants have bottoms.

I’m thankful my favorite sofa is here for napping.

I’m thankful for the supermarkets and butchers who prepare meat the way I recognize it.

And I’m thankful I haven’t fallen in a manhole.

All this is to say, I’m thankful for the way my worldview changes each time my home does. Admittedly, gratitude is not the first emotion that wells up when I’m avoiding the open manholes and the no-bottomed pants, but you get there eventually.

Happy Thanksgiving Chengdu.