What We've Been Reading

A recent request made me aware that I have been over 1 year tardy in posting what we've been reading.  China's history, culture and rapid development continue to fascinate both of us, as well as plenty of prolific authors.  So, here's a list of the good books we've read over the past 2 years.

Previously reviewed:

Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong, a simple police detective story set in modern Shanghai.

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler, a fascinating and wonderfully written memoir of Hessler's time as  Peace Corps volunteer.  Possibly my favorite non-fiction on China.

China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power by Rob Gifford, Hessler's rival for my favorite non-fiction on China.  Also fascinating and wonderfully written, Gifford travels across China chronicling the modern rise in the daily conversations he has.

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, a classic in modern literature, this book tells the story of a peasant family and makes rural Chinese culture beautifully accessible to the Western reader.

The Three Daughters of Madame Liang by Pearl S. Buck, written decades later and set in the middle of this century, the protagonists are a patriotic Chinese family with Western experience, this time making mid-century China accessible to the Western reader.

New Non-Fiction:

Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China by Colin Thubron.  Thubron travels China in the early 1980s, one of the first writers allowed into the country.  He chronicles his experiences and conversations in the newly opening country - this story can not fail to be interesting, in a land so full of change.

Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China by Paul Theroux.  Theroux does a comparable trip to Thubron, traveling through China in the early 1980s - but he writes a much more compelling book.  Theroux both speaks and reads Mandarin and clearly loves the Chinese people and their culture.  A travel writer known for his curmudgeonly observations and never seeming to enjoy his trips, Theroux clearly loved every moment he spent in China.  His travels cover much of the country, describing diverse geographies and peoples.  And from my experience, every description of his is spot-on.  Hands down, this is the best travel writing on China.  Apparently Theroux recreated his trip recently and a new book has been published - I read the one published in 1988.

1421: The Year China Discovered America by Gavin Menzies.  Menzies does impeccable research on a relatively unknown subject - that the Chinese knew the world was round and had visited most spots on the globe long before the Europeans discovered any of it.  A very interesting topic, and a very interesting book for the first few chapters.

Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng.  A dramatic and piercing memoir, Cheng details her persecution both by the Chinese government and her neighbors during the Cultural Revolution.  Amazing in its detail and shocking in its truth - this book explained China under Communism in a way that I had never read.  Emotionally, a difficult read - but one that I highly recommend.

Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie Chang.  Chang began researching her book as a newspaper reporter and clearly found her protaganists so compelling that she devoted herself full-time to their research.  She enjoys her subjects and enjoys comparing their plight to that of her migrant great-grandparents, and now-American parents.  Had the book been 1/3 the length, it would have been fantastic.  Another one worth reading, and worth putting down halfway through.

New Fiction:

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan.  Tan is a beautiful author, and her books are well worth reading on their own right.  They also teach Chinese culture in a tremendously powerful way - through a Chinese parent (or aunt) telling her story to her American daughter.  The aunts explain the protagonist's history in their own voices, and in a way that the American daughter fully understands.  Tan chronicles life in a Chinese-American family, and in so doing makes Chinese culture accessible to all American readers.

The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan.  All of the above is true for this book as well.  What I found particularly compelling about this book was its period of history.  The mother in this story lived through the Civil War and Communism in China, and told her story in a very personal and beautiful way - made even more powerful by the comments and questions of her American daughter.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by Lisa See.  Set farther in history, See tells the story of women and foot-binding in rural China.  A lovely story of friendship and womanhood, See describes the process of foot-binding and the choice to bind one's child's feet in a very real way.  The author makes me begin to understand the choices these families faced, and the challenges and joys these women faced in their society.

Bug Infestation

About a week ago, our kitchen began to mysteriously fill with small, triangular shaped, black winged bugs every evening.  At its worst, we would kill 20 bugs on a morning trip around the kitchen, coiled magazine in hand.  Our landlord visited one of those days, saw the problem, saw fruit on the counter and soundly proclaimed that this was not his problem.

After only a few days, I began to despair.  It seems that the route to fixing a problem in China involves proving that the problem exists, finding the source of the problem yourself, and fighting long and hard for a solution.  I had no desire to fight the good fight with twenty to thirty bugs appearing in the kitchen every morning.

Then, last night inspiration struck.  The drain!  The floor of our kitchen houses a drain - a drain which happens to lie very near the triangle bug hang-out.  So we covered the drain with a glass bowl last night, and this morning came to find loads of little bugs flying about in our bowl.  Wendy, our ayi, arrived impressed by our ingenuity.  But when she left, I was impressed by hers.  We both knew that convincing the landlord to fix the problem would take a long time.  To save ourselves the trouble, she cleaned out the drain and covered it with cheesecloth.  Presto!  No more bugs!

Necessity and good teamwork are the mother of all invention.

DTC

We received congratulations yesterday from our adoption agency.  As of February 19th, we are DTC - or Dossier To China.

This means that all of the paperwork we painstakingly gathered over the last 9 months have been gathered together into a dossier and mailed to China.  These were mailed by our agency and in a batch.  Presumably, we will pick up Mei Mei with this same batch of people.

Now we wait for our Log In Date (LID).  That is the date that CCAA enters our information into a computer and we officially join the line of expectant parents.  That should happen in the next few weeks, although it may happen notably before we hear about it.

As an expedited family, the current expectation is that we will receive our referral 19-20 months after our log-in date.  If all goes at current rates, we will follow the following schedule:

March 2009 - Log In Date

December 2010 - Receive Referral

This is when CCAA mails information on a specific child to us, giving us the option of accepting or refusing that child as our own.  Once we accept our referral, we begin a busy 6 weeks or so of preparing to travel.

February 2011 - Pick up Mei Mei

In adoption circles, this reaches its pinnacle on Gotcha Day.

The interesting question is where we will be living once it is time to travel, and how difficult it will be to make those travel arrangements at that time.

Uncertainties aside, DTC still feels a bit like a positive pregnancy test.  Wow - this will really happen!

Up the Yangtze

Upon recommendation from my parents, Dave and I recently screened Up the Yangtze in our apartment.  The film was a visually stunning telling of a family forced to move uphill due to the flooding of the Yangtze.  The Three Gorges Dam is a gigantic hydroelectric dam stopping the Yangtze River, and causing the height of the river to raise dramatically.  This rise has led to the resettlement of over 1.4 million people and the environmental loss of the Three Gorges, scenery no less dramatic than the Grand Canyon in the United States.

The portrayal followed a young lady, no more than a girl, as she leaves her family to work on a cruise ship riding the Yangtze River toward the dam.  The dramatic scenery, the documentation of the rising waters, and the emotions they capture from the people affected by this forced migration make for a very interesting movie and is well worth adding to your Netflix queue.  Frankly, we were surprised that we were able to find it in China.

Yung Chang, the director, grew up in Canada but his grandparents had migrated from China, presumably in the 1940s.  The China his grandparents escaped differs greatly from modern China, the last 70 years having encompassed the Communist Liberation of China with its catastrophes (the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution) and its rise into practical capitalism and dramatic economic growth.  The narrator often notes that his grandfather would not recognize today's China, a point which I have been thinking about all week.

I often feel that I would enjoy life in China more if it had more to offer.  The drawbacks to life in Shanghai are numerous - wild pollution, crazy congestion, people everywhere, a lack of green space and beauty;  and the struggles for me within Shanghai are numerous as well - difficulty communicating, difficulty cooking and shopping, difficulty finding suitable medical care and safe pharmaceuticals.  Watching a movie set in Europe, I noted that Shanghai offers very little back to me.  No strong sense of culture or history envelopes the city, very few charming alleys or ancient little shops.  The charming, ancient and culturally rich were all destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.  And the people living in China are the survivors, those who have pulled themselves through the chaos of the recent past and into an era of growth.

I suppose it should come as no surprise that Shanghai offers little in the way of culture and history.  To enjoy my experience here, it is incumbent upon me to find the charms of this city and nation as they are and not as they were.

Those charms exist, in the food and the travel, the people and the dynamic growth.  For history and culture, I can read a book.

Adoption Moves Forward

We're one step closer to Mei Mei's arrival into our family, and this one feels like a big step to me.  We have received permission from the U.S. government to adopt a child from China.  This is a major milestone - all documentation must have been gathered and correctly submitted to USCIS (the US immigration service) to receive this permission, and this is the last piece to gather before we may submit to CCAA (the Chinese adoption agency).

Unfortunately, my understanding may have been a bit off.  I thought that once the U.S. approved us for adoption, our dossier would move directly to the Chinese government.  It appears there are more steps before submitting to CCAA.  Our entire dossier must be translated into Mandarin.  Once everything has been translated, notarized, authenticated and certified by our adoption agency then we are DTC - and no, I don't know what that stands for.  At that point, they submit to the Chinese government and we become "logged in."  Essentially, we begin another long wait.

The time it took the US to process our application was half what we expected - how wonderful if we should be so lucky anywhere else in this process!

An Enviable Problem

We were so excited.

We had learned of a new church which would perfectly suit our needs.  It meets near our home, and within our general community.  It meets in the morning, meaning no interruption for naps or meals - a standard 11:00am start time.  They speak English.

We tried it upon arrival, and enjoyed the service.  The worship leader was strong, the song choices were good, and everyone sang robustly.  The preacher was fine, and we both got something out of the service.

But this church had only 1 room for nursery - and that nursery takes children up to age 4, with a limit of 4 children.  Our first Sunday, I estimate 75-100 children were in the service.

Last Sunday we tried again, with the assumption that we would stay through worship with our girls and then leave once the message began.  Worship lasts an hour, and this seemed like a strong compromise.

We walked in 15 minutes late, to be met by a sign in front of the door.  The service is full.  Please join us at the Hengshan Lu location at 2:00pm.  Turned away from a church riled us up a bit, so we asked if we could enter the standing room only crowd.  With permission we filed in, but could hardly find a place for the 4 of us to stand.  This room was filled with people - the children under 4 easily surpassed 125 and the room certainly exceeded the fire code.  Were a fire to erupt in the room, there is no way everyone would have escaped.

And what a wonderful problem - many church in America would be green with envy.  Unfortunately, I worry that we may be one of the casualties.  I am particularly aware of my family's safety while in China, where rules and regulations meant to keep people out of harm are rarely enforced.  But even if the building does not catch fire, standing room worship meant that we couldn't read the words for the songs and that we constantly worried about our children being stepped on by the constant flow of newcomers.  

China runs an aetheist state, and only allows houses of worship under strict control of the Chinese government.  The state has sanctioned plenty of Protestant churches in the Chinese language, which we are welcome to attend.  But the state has only sanctioned 4 Protestant worship sites in the entire city - and remember, this is a city larger than Los Angeles in population and area.  Clearly, the English speaking Christians of the city are crying out for more church homes and too many people are being left unfed.  

If the church continues to grow, we may not find ourselves able to return.  But I hope we will persevere - what a sad reason to leave!

Fired

I sometimes feel as if I'm building my resume just by living in China.  I learn wonderful interpersonal skills by building quick friendships;  I learn good budgeting skills by maintaining a household in multiple currencies; and I learn good management skills by managing a full-time staff of two.

Wendy has worked for us since mid-September, and we love her.  She comes to our home around 7:30 every morning and stays until 2:00 in the afternoon.  Essentially, she works while L-- is at school, so that I can take L-- to school and back each day with the option of leaving S-- at home.  She spends her mornings playing with S--, but also cleaning and cooking.  And her cooking beats any Chines restaurant I've eaten at, hands down.  Because those hours bring her to 32.5 hours a week, we also have room for a date every week.  Most Saturday evenings, Dave and I leave the girls with Wendy and spend some grown-up time on the town.  Her total lack of drama, her wonderful grasp of the English language, her willingness to listen and also to find work that needs to be done, and of course her cooking make her a valuable part of our household.

Jordan worked for us since March 1st last year.  He owns the van that we rode in, and he provided us with a driver.  Essentially, Jordan acted as a middle-man.  Longtime readers may remember that we fired the driver he initially provided.  Michael was a very nice man, always sweet to the girls and always attentive when I became upset.  But Michael was not a very good driver, too passive in an uber-aggressive driving culture and with no knowledge of the streets of Shanghai.  After trying him for 1 month, we had Jordan over for the evening and told him in no uncertain terms that Michael was unacceptable.  Jordan listened well, empathized with everything we said, and then told us that Michael is his friend and that Michael would continue to drive for us.

After driving for us for nearly a year, we had trained Michael fairly well.  His sweet disposition carried him well, so that he allowed me to direct him through the streets of town, he accepted constructive criticism quickly, and I enjoyed his company.  But Michael quit 2 weeks ago to return to his hometown and run a mahjong parlor.

Within 3 short days, Jordan had replaced Michael with Henry.  Henry knew his streets fairly well, although not as well as Dave or I.  Henry knew how to drive a utility vehicle with no rearview mirror, but had clearly never driven a passenger vehicle.  Henry never looked behind him when he changed lanes, leading to more honking than I have ever heard in Shanghai.  Henry listened to his music while we were in the car - loudly.  Henry fell asleep while waiting for us - so hard asleep that he would miss our phone calls for up to 15 minutes.  Henry was not a nice man, and Henry was not a nice driver.  So, much like a year ago, we called Jordan and explained in no uncertain terms that Henry was no good.  I told him that the man was not safe, and that the man did not treat me with respect.  Jordan disagreed, and told me to keep trying.  Every day since, I texted Jordan with Henry's every mistake.  After 2 days of this, Jordan let me know that he would find someone else.  I don't think he spent any energy looking, and unfortunately for Jordan, I did.

Mr. Zhang owns his own Hyundai van, comfortable and in good condition - and with a CD player rather than a tape player!  Mr. Zhang understands English, and has driven for expatriate families for 4 years, and this after having driven a taxi in Shanghai for 7 years.  Mr. Zhang and his family live in Shanghai and he seems to be a very nice man.  The girls both took to him immediately, and I have full faith in his driving.  Overall, I am quite confident that Mr. Zhang is a better driver for us than Jordan.

This meant that I had to fire Jordan on Friday.  On the first conversation, he seemed saddened and surprised but otherwise dignified and even understanding.  Apparently, over about 30 minutes that understanding changed to righteous indignation and he called back quite angry.  He tried to convince me that I had done a bad thing, and I stood my ground that I had kept him quite informed of how upset I was for the entire 2 weeks.  At the end of the conversation, his grasp of the English language not strong enough to find a proper insult, he said quietly 

You are a very bad person.

Lynne:  Did you just call me a bad person?

Jordan:  Oh, you are not a bad person at all.  I just think... I just think you are unkind.  No, you are not unkind.  I just think that what you did was unkind.

A sign of how sweet a man Jordan is - this is the nastiest he ever got.  Jordan is a nice man, and it makes both Dave and I very sad that we could not continue to do business with him.