The Honeymoon is Over

I have a phone full of photos to download and blog about but never seem to find the time.  It's been a month since I last wrote and over four months since we arrived in Beijing.   Since my long history is that 3-4 months tends to be the honeymoon period (jobs, moves, houses, relationships), I'm checking in at this phase:  The Honeymoon is Over Phase

The big things:

1.  School.  LiLi's school is imperfect.  The Chinese side is the national curriculum crammed into half a day.  The teachers are, naturally, native M speakers.  Some of them have not entirely left behind the motivation-by-shaming they were likely exposed to as kids.  Perhaps even trained for.  This doesn't sit well in a lovely small sweet nurturing environment.  Nor does it sit well with me.  Parents are upset and complaining.  We have yet to see what the admin will do about it.  LiLi's Chinese is good but her confidence is failing as is her English.  I'm torn between just plopping her into the local school like another family from our SF MI school did.  What the heck.  If she's going to have to deal with the shaming, why not have her get the full time CN.  I'm torn between that and, on the worst days, packing our bags.  This is hard.  Much of parenting is hard and I've been super fortunate to have a relatively easy and fun kid  to parent.  But there are still these phases that feel like crossroads and feel like there is a "right" answer and I need to figure out what it is.  Complicating matters is that tuition went up and I just paid the huge huge tuition for the fall semester.   Again, maybe the local school?

2.  Work.  I still love my job and the work but some of the other foreign attorneys are on my nerves.  I remain impressed with the CN lawyers.  But I'm happy I never shared this blog site with work!  Hahaha.  I need to renegotiate my contract and figure out how much longer to stay, to commit to, here.  There is a lot of work to be done, it is great fun doing it, and I've gotten used to the maddening "things change on a dime" aspects of it all.  Things keep happening about which my boss, who is over a decade my junior, says, "I can't wait to see how you write this up in your memoirs."  I'm not quite old enough to be thinking about memoirs but it's also true that some of this stuff is pretty noteworthy.  Funny and weird and hard and sad and absurd and funny.

3.  Home.  Well, what does that even mean?  Someone asked me yesterday, shocked, that LiLi still thinks of San Francisco as "home."  There are so many layers to what constitutes "home" and it is very hard to live where you're not known.  I was so comfortable with being known, for years and years on a professional level, on friendship level by folks I've known for two decades, by my neighbors in my sweet SF 'hood, as a mom active at school, and in other arenas.   And I put myself in a place where I am not known at all.  I'm liking that part in a way, but it is also exhausting.

Then there is the home that means my house.   I had a lovely Sabbatical-ing couple in my house in SF but they're done at the end of this month.   I was fairly cavalier about leaving in January, packing our stuff but leaving my rugs, antiques and art.  For some reason I felt that it would work out.  This time feels less that way and I'm wishing I had moved it all into long term storage.  I have one gigantic painting that needs some sort of climate controlled storage that I got when I was much younger and darker.  It's an intense painting and I am not even sure I like it anymore.  Then there's all this other stuff that I love and when I look at pictures of my house I miss.  Oddly, I don't want it here though.  I talk to people all the time who move to BJ with shipping containers of stuff and I really don't want that. Which leads me to....

4.  Apartment.  We still like our BJ apartment but I wish I'd gone for the smaller unit with 2 BR and a better view.  We almost never use the third bedroom which has a huge desk (from a South African woman who was moving home) and sofabed (from that CN-brit couple who have actually slept on it here when they got back from Cambodia).  I envisioned working long nights in that room but I almost always work with my laptop in my bed instead.   Also, despite that the original stated plan (not sure I ever believed it) was to only stay 6 months, in month five I continue to buy furniture.  We just bought a second sofa bed, great Ikea bright red, from a mom from Tajikistan (or one of the other post-Soviets) who is moving to India, and another air filtering machine.   At this point we own furniture previously owned by folks from:  UK; South Africa; China; Tajikistan; Denmark; Brazil and others.   Our apt still has the feel of an open and not very well-furnished place, but it suits us.  If we were going to stay here longer I'd want to stay in this complex for its proximity the the park, shops, restaurants, but I'd want to be in the penthouse (if I, say, won the lottery or something.)

5.  Friends.  LiLi has a passel of buddies and even had her first slumber party last weekend.  I'm the one who is missing having friends.  I feel lonely and though I have lots of warm acquaintance relationships like in my CN class and at work, it's not the same as having someone to talk with who has known you for years and years, whom you can share the parenting worries like from my #1 here, relationship woes, and that kind of thing.  It's also true that most adults who are living the ex-pat life feel this way, and in a way we have each other.   I did go out in the evening over the weekend with a woman who is a contemporary, also CN-AM and roughly my age, at least in the same time zone, also divorced, etc.  She's not drinking so instead of drinks and dinner we had foot massage and dinner.  That was awesome and fun.  And has some potential.  I'm involved with a women's professional networking group too and have some potentials there.

Also, a set of friends from SF are visiting and we spend Sunday with them.  It was so comfortable and fun and reminds me how much I miss these friends in particular and just fitting comfortably in general.  We're going to Qingdao w this family via bullet train this weekend so it'll be a great break from BJ.

6.  Language.  My own acquisition of CN has gone much more slowly that LiLi's.  My class is two mornings a week for two hours and I've missed a handful because of work obligations.   But the whole set up is imperfect since I learn maybe 20 or so new words and sentences a lesson but then immediately go to work and begin working, reading, writing, meeting, etc so the new words just fly out of my head. Or maybe my hard drive is full and I need an upgrade.

I continue to make mistakes like, for example, we took our visiting friends out for Peking Duck.  Last time we ordered two plates of duck and this time we had a larger group so I meant to order three.  But instead of three "plates" of duck, I actually ordered three whole ducks.  I became alarmed when they brought the wrappers and sauces to the table and then the plates of duck started to arrive and arrive and arrive.  One of the moms speaks CN and asked the waitress why she didn't tell me my mistake, and the poor waitress said she tried.  In any case it was delicious and even still not very expensive.  And we've enjoyed having leftover duck with our Ayi, who has made more wrappers from scratch.

But obviously I need help with the language.  I'm planning to renegotiate my work contract to take an intensive language study course for a few weeks over the summer.  I feel pretty stuck and like I am not communicating but in a taxi with a summer intern yesterday, the woman said I was speaking CN and the driver who was understanding me.   So, perhaps there is some hope for me.

7.  This City.  I have to say that I still love BJ and China so I can't really say the honeymoon is totally over.  The bad air, the spitting, pushing,  and the dog-eat-doggedness are still terrible and some days I'm just sick of it all.  But the level of energy and excitement, the sense of a rumbling underground, the rapidity of change, the anything-is-possible, those things are addictive and I'm not done experiencing those things just yet.  Not yet.  :  )