Poop coffee

One of the things we brought back from Vietnam was cà phê Chồn or weasel poop coffee.  They feed the beans to the civet cats who poop them out after the critters' intestinal enzymes break down some of the components of the beans.  That creates special flavor.  And how.

I saw the movie Bucket List recently and the Jack Nicholson character has this obsession over his special coffee that in the end is revealed to be poop coffee.  I thought it was all fiction until someone asked if I planned to try it in VN.

We found some in Old Town and I bought it so there's a chance it's fake (not pricey enough) or real, who knows.  Since it is my birthday I brought it to the office.  One of the IT guys (the American one) is a coffee connoisseur who knows his way around a French Press.

The coffee was really good, very different and more smooth tasting. It smelled very chocolatey but didn't have the chocolate flavor.  Still, it was fun and we were all really really wired today!

Typhoon Gaemi

To evacuate or not to evacuate.  We're on a tiny spit of sand between the South China Sea and a brackish river South of Danang, Vietnam.   It's near the World Heritage Site Ancient town of Hoi An and its  beautiful historic architecture, walk streets and giant Buddha statues.   A welcome relief to dirty, crowded, crime-ridden Hanoi.  Unfortunately, though, it is also the tail end of typhoon season and Gaemi is heading our way, expected to make landfall tomorrow. It was due here, or in Danang, but apparently made a slight turn and is now bearing down on Hue, a couple of hours North of here.  We've befriended an Australian family whose dad is a former Qantas captain so I'm watching their movements carefully figuring he knows weather better than I.   

Our fabulous resort is installing wood over the largest of the windows, sandbagging the beach access and Northernmost end of the huge, three-pool-with-bridges pool, and staking the gardens.  The sound of hammering brings to mind a hurricane my ex and I survived in Florida, as we escaped Key West to the sound of locals nailing shut their window shutters and made it to Melbourne in time for the hurricane to change course and land at home.  We were young and being evacuated to sleep on the floor of a school gymnasium was exciting and fun.  Now, middle aged with a 9 year old, I just want to keep us both safe.  

Fortunately, unlike our Florida days, I can keep an eye on the typhoon's eye via internet updated regularly including pics.   

First Day of School

Though the ramp up was the worst yet, the actual first day of school went well.  So did the afterschool homework helper.  Whew.  The past two weeks have been so so so hard.  Seriously, hard enough for me to actually question my decision to stay on longer.  Lots of meltdowns (hers and mine) and anxiety about getting all the ducks in a row (mine).

We only just interviewed the afterschool person on Saturday!  She came from a friend who recently took her three boys back to America.  The boys' mom must have spent hours and hours teaching this young woman how to turn memorizing characters into games and wow, is she great.  Of course, on Saturday she said "boys play games but girls like to sit and be quiet."  Hahahaha.  LiLi was doing backbend-flipovers all over the livingroom at the time.  So...this young Lao Shi (teacher) used her games tonight with our pool ball and all I heard was laughter coming from the other room so she was a huge hit with LiLi.  And me.  Whew again.

The school remains very very imperfect and I toy with the idea of just taking LiLi out of it.  The English half seems good but the Chinese half remains very challenging.  The opposite of nurturing, for sure.  Is it just the Chinese way?  I don't know.  We hired a new attorney at the office and she was telling me today that when she was LiLi's age all she did was study.  Go to school, come home, study for hours and hours, then do it all again the next day. She said she didn't play, didn't have activities, didn't have fun.  But, she said, it was worth it.  She's been doing international law, was abroad for a few years, seems very bright.  Is it worth it?  I'm not sure.  I think the French have it right.  35 hour weeks.  A couple of months vacation.  Great wine.  (We had a French intern who was aghast at the idea of going in to the office on a weekend one time.  She shared this with us.)

But yes:  fourth grade has begun.

Another new phase

It often happens that post-vacation-blues set in after returning from a beach.  This time, it is following not only the Hainan Island trip but also four weeks away from work studying Chinese and hanging out with LiLi.  Many of the schools in BJ have already gone back but LiLi has another two weeks off so she'll spend it on playdates and with Ayi.  Since Ayi does not speak English, it'll be good for LiLi's language too.

On our way up to Lido for tutoring on Friday, LiLi started counting the weeks until we go back to our home country:  18.   Though my plan had been to go back last week, I never actually booked a flight for us so on some level I knew that we'd extend our stay.  I wasn't ready to go back last week, and home wasn't ready for us either.  This time we have air tickets on an actual date.  We also have my (very global) sister coming to China in December and my (also a globetrotter) mother meeting us in SF in January.  So we have some things to look forward to in addition to seeing our friends and neighbors.

Speaking of neighbors, there was a NYT piece about my San Francisco neighborhood that generated many many comments from my neighbors and others and made me miss my hood more than ever.  I still can't imagine myself sleeping in my own bed but there are other things I long for there.  Including: my books.

I've started reading for pleasure again after a long break.   We didn't have tv at home for most of LiLi's toddlerhood so after she went down and after I took care of all those life tasks like putting away toys and washing dishes, I'd read.  I have a book lined library at home, along with three book cases in my bedroom which are filled with the as-yet-unread.  But once LiLi began school and once we got tv and once I started doing work that demanded evening hours, I stopped reading for pleasure.  I was simply too tired.  I continued to buy used books, though, like hundreds per year, driving my ex crazy.  So I bought those bedroom bookcases to house the books I would read "later."  That went on for several years.

And now I'm reading again.  Since this work break and since LiLi's own interest in reading has taken off we've begun to borrow books (English ones, we buy the Chinese ones to keep) from a cafe/bookstore in BJ called the Bookworm.  I think of all those books I have at home and wish I could somehow transport them here at least for 18 weeks.

Sometimes I have to intentionally stop, breathe, and notice, so I can remember certain moments.  Moments of life and moments of parenting.  One recent one was this:  I was lying in my bed with my head propped on several pillows with some novel (some fast-paced Swedish mystery maybe, no E.M. Forster right now) and LiLi was lying perpendicular to me with her head propped on my stomach engrossed in a kid mystery.  Reading together.  I recall a friend whose kid is five or six years older than LiLi saying, "Just wait until you can read together.  It will change your life."

So the next 18 weeks are what I'm calling a new phase.  Fall semester for LiLi and wrapping up work projects and continuing to study Chinese for me.  It will be a busy time--I know that already--but a sweet, poignant one.  I know that already too.  Maybe we will be consciously letting go of China, feeling lucky to have lived this part of our lives here.  Or maybe I will be plotting our return.  That, I don't already know.

Hainan: island paradise

We spent last week on Hainan China's version of America's Hawaii.  Hainan is an island and China's southernmost province.   Loads of tourists visit Hainan since it is a tropical paradise built up as a tourist resort destination.  It is apparently popular with Chinese as well as Russian tourists.  In fact, the signs where we were on Yanlong Bay (above) were in Chinese, then Russian, then English.

Last summer when we traveled around China with our group of four I had wanted to come to Hainan at the end of the trip.  But we weren't able to manage it and see everything else we had wanted to see.  We had heard too that summer is monsoon season and the rain could ruin the vacation vacation.  Indeed, last week our visit was sandwiched between several typhoons and we were lucky to have lovely weather during our week, with a bit of cloudiness and rain toward the end of the week.

We visited Nanwan Monkey island off Hainan, an island habitat for some 2000 monkeys accessible by chair lift.  Some monkeys were made to perform but most seemed free to roam.

Mostly we lazed on the beach, built sand castles, swam in the warm sea or in the many swimming pools of the resorts.  The air was clean and the fish was fresh.  I daydreamed about spending a month there next summer depending upon...well, depending upon where we are living by then.

The Heart 心 Words

I used the better part of my Chinese lesson today completely off the rails over these words:   The Heart 心 Words

Our Chinese afterschool homework helper in San Francisco is an amazing woman from Dalian.  She didn’t need the gig but wound up helping us out for several years because I couldn’t manage the MI homework and her real job--as a pastry chef--was baking in the mornings.   She’s one of the most charismatic people I’ve met in my life and we all—two families with three kids total—fell in love with her.   One of her usual phrases to the kids was “xiao xin, xiao xin.”  It means “be careful” and something to be said often to three squirrely kids coming home from school every day. 

I realized that the two characters that make that word are the characters for small (xiao): 小;   and heart (xin): 心

So here is be careful: 

小心

心 Xin (heart) is a radical that appears in many words and is well studied.   A quick google search for “Chinese words with xin” garners 11 million hits, for example. 

I was talking with friends about how I love the heart words and they started saying more of them including the one for “don’t worry”.  I asked my tutor about that word and it’s this: 

别担心

bei dan xin

or:  set your burden of a heart down.  Don’t worry. 

Love is “ai”  so  “ai xin” 

爱心

love heart

means having a social conscious or doing public-good work, like say, looking after the poor or elderly.  It could be just propaganda or it could be so deeply rooted in the culture it is imprinted upon their (our)  souls.  I get that worries about survival, about putting food on the table, about keeping our kids alive, might leave no room for ai xin.  But maybe it is so well engraved that this contemporary one-generation-distance-from-subsistence's greed isn't enough to erase it.   Ai xin.  

Safe is “an” so “an xin” 

安心

safe heart 

means to feel relieved or at peace.  Maybe once we have an xin, then we have the ability to express ai xin.  

And then there’s this: Kai Xin.   “Kai” means “open.”  So while there are about a jillion ways to say happy in Chinese, there is this one.   Here it is, the universe, the meaning of life, the point of it all:

开心

Open heart = happy.

The deluge

We survived the heaviest flooding in BJ in over 60 years.  On Saturday it rained 460 mms (over 18 inches).   We were supposed to have some friends over for dinner but in the middle of the day the sky got so dark it looked like late evening and the rain started.  It poured and poured.  Our friends called mid-afternoon reporting that they had taken cover and thought maybe coming across town wasn't a good idea.  We agreed and were happy to snuggle in bed with our books, later even turning on the t.v.  The rain continued and our street was flooded.  It looked like a river flowing.  I read later that the sewerhole covers washed away and folks fell down into them, or maybe were sucked inside.  A whole chunk of sidewalk caved in, too, according to a friend.  The sole surviving courtyard house now housing migrants working on nearby apartment projects was a lake.  Literally.  The lightening strikes illuminated the courtyard full of water.   Our friends emailed today saying they're glad they decided against coming over that night and sent an article.  Here are some pictures.

We were supposed to go to the beach yesterday but the bullet trains were booked so we bailed.  Now I'm glad we did because though today was super clear, more rain is expected.  I know it's the rainy season but even the natives say this is unusual.   Extreme weather.  Weather?  Or climate?