Shopping in Metro– think Chinese Sam’s Club– when we see this sign. Something about hot pot? Super special hot pot!
Beware the mythical hot pot! What is it? No one knows! Welcome to the world of Chinglish!
Beware the Mythical Hot Pot!
Reply
Category Archives: Gwen
Catching Up
So, helloo…. Here in China many things have been happening. But basically after Bali, it has been school, school, and more school. Henry is chafing at the possibility that he might actually have to finish out the year at his current school. Why he thought he would be moving to Lucas and Ava’s school in the middle of the year is anyone’s guess. He has been telling his teachers since August that this week is really his last. Enjoy his wit and wisdom while you can, suckers! Henry isn’t going to be here for you to kick around much longer! Of course, he eats those words every Monday morning as I march him right back to his classroom. He has begun to parrot back to me all the things we tried to say so diplomatically when it became obvious that Ava would need to make a change last year. “It just isn’t a good fit for me!” he will announce as he attempts, once again, to have a sick day. No dice, little buddy. Every day he asks how much longer until summer vacation and scowls when I inform him that it is a long, long way away.
Ava is thriving at her new school. This is a big deal for her after last year and I am relieved. So, so, so relieved. Her most recent parent teacher conference involved me seeing her progress and then bursting into tears. Ava was leading the conference so I was forced to explain that they were ”happy tears”. I looked less ridiculous when her teacher started crying too.
And Lucas is, well, Lucas. He likes his school but complains in the morning. He likes riding the bus. He does well in his classes. He is playing the clarinet. He loves the swim team. He likes China but sometimes wishes we could move back to Maryland and settle back into our cozy yellow house. But usually he is happy.
They are all speaking more Chinese than I ever imagined. Henry mumbles to himself and sings Chinese songs. Ava and Lucas argue over the pronunciation and meaning of characters. All of them love correcting me, of course. I am the Mandarin idiot around here, still struggling with the most basic things. Lucas has needed to translate for me with workmen more times than I would like to admit. Even Henry congratulated me a few weeks ago after a trip to the wet market. It had been so smart of me to bring him along. He had helped me so much with his “translating”.
I am still less settled in than the children, I think. Being a tai tai* is less exciting than one might think. I go to my Chinese class twice a week. I spend an obscene amount of time procuring food for the family. I go to the fabric market and the fake market and the flower market to buy more crazy things. I have lunch with my new friends. I work on my never ending dissertation. I try to wrap my head around daily life in China and usually fail miserably. Why do Chinese people do that? I have no idea. Don’t ask me. I am thinking about next year and how I want things to be. I am considering going back to work but I am unsure of how that will pan out. We will see. So things are fine. Things are good. Thanks for asking.
*Tai tai means wife, but since I am White and unemployed by choice it is the equivalent of “ladies who lunch.” Yes, this is killing me. Let’s never speak of it again.
Chinese Halloween
Halloween in China looked like this:
And like this:
And like this:
The kids got to trick-or-treat twice because while the North American parents thought we should hit the houses on the 31st, the management office thought we should all beg for candy on Saturday night. Not surprisingly, none of my children complained! Two nights of trick-or-treating thoroughly confused everyone. Some of our Chinese neighbors had decorations up unaware that this meant kids would be ringing their doorbells looking for candy. They certainly weren’t expecting it on two different nights. Ava was surprised to be given three large grapes by one perplexed Chinese woman who apparently thought this was either the equivalent of a chocolate bar or better than nothing. The kids were also less than excited by some of the other items that ended up in their bags. Many, many things here are individually wrapped for no good reason which resulted in things like fancy looking prunes being part of our Halloween treat mix.
I planned ahead and made the kids pick costumes over the summer when I could order them easily. There was less selection, but I didn’t spend weeks running around looking for things. Henry was supposed to be a Power Ranger, but since he needed to dress up as a pirate for school (the reasons for this are still less than clear for me), he opted just to wear his pirate things for one round of trick-or-treating and his other costume for the Saturday round. I try not to ask too many questions.
Other than the expected difficulties of missing our house and all of our Halloween decorating– this would have been a knock out year for our political jack o’lanterns!– the one thing that turned out to be the most difficult was the candy. I had a hard time finding bags of candy and ended up traipsing around on the hunt for fun size candy bars. I ended up with some questionable Chinese candy from the bulk bins at Carrefour mixed in with some teeny tiny Dove chocolate bars. By the second round of trick-or-treating I had some bags of Chinese candy and a few of these cookie bar things.
How can you go wrong with “Classic Candy”?
It was the first time Lucas was able to go out in the neighborhood with his friends and NO ADULT SUPERVISION! Are you surprised that this resulted in one kid needing stitches on his face? Of course you aren’t! Luckily, it wasn’t Lucas but one unhappy family had to make a Halloween trip to the Chinese hospital.
Ava and Henry went around the neighborhood with a friend since Mark was delayed at work. I handed out the candy and actually missed the days of Hawthorn Road with the fog machine and the glow in the dark eyeballs. The kids came home to sort their loot and ate the imported candy first, followed by the Chinese candy made by foreign companies. Now we are down to the Chinese candy that none of us recognize. Almost half of these experimental tastings result in a run to the nearest trash can. At least their dentist can’t complain.
More China Hijinks!
It has been brought to my attention that on this blog I often complain about Shanghai. What?! Me? Complain? Certainly that is not the case! There is nothing to complain about over here. The weather, for once, is reasonable. Sunny, even! Although I have been told the air quality is horrendous and we should not be outside breathing the toxic air. I ignore these warnings! I step outside and breathe with reckless abandon. The construction noise from across the street has started to sound as soothing as birdsong. Who can complain about the rhythmic hum of a jackhammer? I am surrounded by an army of helpful folks who have absolutely no understanding of what I want or why I am even talking to them in the first place, but I am not complaining!
The management office is currently staffed with many of these helpful people. They are very eager to answer the phone and then proceed to explain to me why something that should take five minutes is about to ruin my entire day. Take for example, my current light bulb situation. I have no problem changing light bulbs. This is something I do all the time. Never before have I paid someone to change light bulbs for me. But China is different, and after spending far too much time searching for the light bulbs I needed and then being unable to change them without electrocuting myself, I had the management office send someone over. I paid him 5rmb per bulb! After I supplied the bulbs, naturally. He was also kind enough to show me that in many cases the problem wasn’t my ineptitude, but our house’s faulty wiring. He repeatedly pulled singed wads of wires out of the ceiling to demonstrate just how “bad” certain parts of the house happened to be. He fixed these, and contorted himself and his ladder into various spaces until he had managed to replace seventeen bulbs. Seventeen! But the lights were working again so I am not complaining!
The bulbs in the living room require a special ladder. When they put the drapes up, they actually built scaffolding inside the house to reach the top of the windows. When the management office mentioned an extra charge for the “tall ladder” I was pretty sure that was what they were talking about. I am willing to pay a fee for this, of course. No complaining here! But I need to provide the light bulbs and I have no idea which ones to buy. They are up in the ceiling, you see, and they require a special ladder! Can anyone from the management office tell me which bulbs to buy? No. Can they sell the bulbs to me? No. After multiple phone calls they find a solution. What they can do is have the guy come, take down the bulb, hand it to me, and wait while I go and frantically try to find the bulb. At some mystery store, apparently, because nothing thus far in my hours of searching resembles these crazy bulbs I see in my living room ceiling. Then, when I return from my shopping excursion, he can climb the ladder again and put the new bulb in. Very simple.
Well, I hate to complain, but this is not so simple. This is ridiculous. This made me yell at a nice little Chinese woman who was baffled that I could not understand why no one had saved the packaging from these light bulbs. I cannot possibly be the first person ever to need these bulbs to be changed, can I? Every townhouse in the compound has these light bulbs! So now I am waiting. I have arranged for the special ladder to come today and will pay for one of the workmen to go and buy the light bulb for me. I will also pay the ladder fee and maybe overtime while we all wait for him to return with the coveted bulb. I will then wrestle him to the ground to ensure I have the packaging that might help me when another one of these bulbs decides to stop working. I can almost guarantee that another one will need replacing tomorrow. Not that I am complaining or anything.
Wet Market!
Have I mentioned the wet market? Have I mentioned my fear of dying due to some ailment that I might catch there? Surely I have! Since moving to Shanghai, I have been given many, many lectures about food safety in relation to the wet market and anything one might decide to buy there. Henry’s school even gives a tour of the place that I have been told mainly consists of scaring people to death. Of course, I have been making judgments based on what I have been told because I have never actually ventured out to the wet market myself. Ahem. Up until now, I have confined myself to the supermarket and the occasional fruit truck parked on my street in order to feed Team Erickson. I must admit that the things I buy from the fruit truck are far superior to the things from the supermarket. The cute little lady at the fruit truck helps me pick the best watermelon and gives me free stuff because I am a good customer. The supermarket could never compete with that! To top it off everything I buy at the supermarket is more expensive than the fruit truck. And it frequently tastes like sawdust.
When we returned from our Bali trip, there was absolutely nothing edible in the house, not even of the sawdust variety. Faced with the prospect of spending the day going to multiple supermarkets only to arrive home with nothing I decided to put off the inevitable by staying in bed as long as possible. This only made the natives restless and more dangerous. By the time I drug myself out of bed they were all “starving”. A neighbor friend called to see if Lucas wanted to come over. They had just arrived home as well and the mom invited me to come with her to do some food shopping. Her driver was working (yeah!) so we could hit a few places and have it be relatively pain free. She knew I hadn’t yet made it to the wet market. She apparently goes twice a week and, in her words, “hasn’t died yet” so we decided that would be our first stop.
You know what? It was awesome. And not in the sarcastic way, it was really genuinely awesome.
In Baltimore, I love the farmers market. Thirty minutes after Henry was born I was calling a friend, not to announce the happy news, but to tell him to make sure he went to the market to pick up our CSA share since I was going to be busy for the rest of the day. I famously risked public scorn by packing up my two week old and heading to the Waverly farmers market. My mother insisted on coming and sitting with him in the car, but the next Saturday I was there with him in the stroller so great is my love of the fresh veggies and fruit. My children have been known, particularly in the summer, to turn up their noses at something “from the supermarket” when they suspect there is the possibility of really fresh stuff from the farmers market or our garden.
So why, oh why, did I not check out the wet market? I have spent the past few years loving a farmers market that takes place under an overpass, but I was sure there was nothing for me at some urban veggie market in Shanghai? For shame. The wet market was actually very similar to the Baltimore market downtown only with fewer homeless people. No one was selling designer dog treats, but there was pretty much everything else. There was a slight smell as we walked in, but it wasn’t anything worse than Carrefour, and, let’s be honest, the underpass farmers market has its own odor at times, if you get my drift. Would I buy meat there? No. But I never bought meat at the Baltimore farmers market, either.
I was surprised that the produce was really gorgeous and so cheap! I bought bags and bags of stuff for what I would normally have paid for a few apples in the supermarket. They had great tomatoes and all sorts of mystery items that I had never seen before. I was able to walk around thinking about what looked the freshest and then decide what I could make rather than glumly considering whatever was available at the supermarket. My friend showed me the places she normally frequents and I wandered around the aisles a bit. Was it organic? I have no clue because shopping there required using Mandarin and sometimes I had no idea what people were saying to me. But all in all, it was a positive experience. Can I make it there in a taxi once a week? Not sure. But I will have to find a way to make a trip or two to the wet market happen because so far, even in my tiny kitchen, cooking with nice vegetables is really making a difference. Score one point for Shanghai, finally.
The Shower Debacle (or Why I Have Been Spending More Time at the Gym)
A few weeks ago, the shower door came off its hinges. Lucas was the unlucky one taking a shower, and just as he pulled the door handle to get out, the top hinge snapped and the entire door fell forward. In this house we have only one shower so this was bad news for anyone else who was interested in personal hygiene. Well, not entirely. We do have two bathtubs here, but for those of us who prefer a shower, we would have to wait until the guys from maintenance could come over to fix it.
Our Chinese bathrooms, like much of Shanghai, are decorated in what can only be described as excessive sparkle. They might not be showcases for usable space, but they glitter like nobody’s business. These bathrooms are an appropriate place for jazz hands if ever there was one. The shower is one of the many things in the bathroom that, at first glance, looks fantastic. It is a rectangular glass box with all sorts of jets and nozzles–a certifiable fancy shower. Once you step in, however, you immediately notice a few shortcomings. The space inside is surprisingly small and the door has these strange plastic pieces all around it that are intended to keep the water inside the shower. These pieces fly off frequently, and rarely if ever become a barrier of any kind. This means that showers, particularly ones taken by the under twelve set, result in large lakes being formed on the bathroom floor. Using the fancy jets only exacerbates this problem, so we have had to use the shower’s most exciting features sparingly.
The door isn’t the first thing to go wrong with our super shower. At one point Mark made the startling discovery that the shower only provided cold water no matter how far you turned the temperature nozzle. The kids had taken showers the night before and the rest of the house had plenty of hot water so the problem appeared to be only in the shower. Off to the gym went Mark while I was left to deal with the workmen and the shower situation. After a lengthy discussion involving elaborate hand signals, the problem was fixed. Hooray! Hot showers for everyone! There was one glitch, however. The workman informed me that someone adjusting the water temperature had caused the problem. What? No one had done anything to the water heater or any of the complicated controls on the wall in the kitchen. I was sure of this because none of us could read what any of the buttons said. We were afraid to touch them. Oh no, he explained, someone had adjusted the temperature of the water inside the shower. That was a no no. No more changing the temperature to suit personal preferences. He had set the temperature and we were not to bother the handle in the shower. I had pressed him a little on this. What if it was too hot for the children? That was crazy! No, he insisted, it was not. If we wanted to shower we would need to use the water the way it was. No more fooling around! Needless to say, we all ignored this and haven’t had problems with the water temperature since.
The door was another matter. It was heavy and I was afraid to try to move it or reattach it by myself. The glass hadn’t broken, but there was always the possibility that the bottom hinge would snap and the whole thing would come crashing down. Mark moved it a bit when he came home from work, but other than that we left it and I called the management office in the morning.
While many things are frequently left undone by our management company, a shower door hanging by only one hinge apparently sounds some sort of alarm. A workman was sent over right away to get the door reattached. I showed him the problem and he immediately decided that it was a job requiring more than one person. The door was bulky, and it took one person to hold the door and one person to fix the hinge. He got on the phone and management sent one more guy over. Together they started the work and I went back downstairs.
A few minutes later there was a loud thump. No crashing, no cursing, and no screaming– just a very loud thump. I thought about going upstairs to check, but wedging myself in the small bathroom as two guys tried to fix the shower had been unpleasant the first time I tried it. And once I joined them in the bathroom, I would need to try to explain myself in Mandarin. I decided that if there was a problem I would certainly find out. No need to rush bad news by going upstairs and poking around, right? Not five minutes later one of the workmen scurried down the stairs. He had wrapped his right forearm completely in toilet paper and was holding the mummified appendage above his head. He didn’t make eye contact with me. He just walked out the front door, got on his bicycle, and rode off. He was steering with his good arm.
Now I was forced to go upstairs and investigate. Sure enough, the shower door was broken and the other workman was three inches deep in glass shards. His arms were cut, but apparently he thought his wounds weren’t serious enough to warrant leaving the job site. He asked for a broom and some bags and started shoveling the glass bits off the floor. I got the vacuum in an attempt to contain what had exploded out onto the bedroom carpet. The management office called. The developer was on his way over. Ten minutes later five new guys appeared at the door and rushed up to the bathroom. They didn’t even bother to remove their shoes, which I took to mean this was serious business. Of course, it could just mean they were jerks that didn’t care about tracking dirt in my house. Either way, they brought glass downstairs with them when they left, spreading it all over the stairs and into the dining room.
Only the lone workman remained and he stayed all day. Once I thought the mess was reasonably taken care of I encouraged him to leave. I tried to explain that I could clean up the rest. He deemed this absolutely unacceptable and kept right on running his bare hands along every surface. He winced whenever he found another tiny glass shard, would pull it from his flesh, and immediately go back to sliding his hands on the floor again. He took everything off the counters and shook the glass loose. He moistened an entire roll of toilet paper and used it to basically mop the floor. When he was finally finished he apologized profusely.
We waited two weeks for the replacement door to arrive. When it did they delivered it at night, and left it lying in the tiny strip of grass between our house and the neighbors’. Mark only noticed it when he went out to make a phone call. It wasn’t in a box, just a long sheet of glass propped up on thick wads of paper. Luckily, no one stepped on it. The door was finally installed on Sunday morning and we are now back to flooding the upstairs bathroom every night. Unfortunately, even after all that, my triceps are still a bit flabby.
Having A China Day
Around here when things aren’t going your way and it all gets to be too much, we say we are “Having a China Day”. In casual conversation with a neighbor or expat friend if I say I am “having a China day” they know immediately what I am talking about. Maybe there was a problem with your refrigerator and you couldn’t manage to get someone to fix it. Maybe you spent all day trying to grocery shop and ended up with nothing to show for it. Maybe you just couldn’t get over your irritation with, well, everything. That is a China day.
I am having one today. There is no real reason. Just generally being annoyed with all the extra effort things take and my lack of progress in getting things done. It is like swimming in molasses to accomplish small tasks and small tasks are all that get accomplished around here. Yes, I went to the grocery store and the gym. But we have nothing for dinner because I only went to one store. And, frankly, going to the gym and the grocery store should not be major life milestones now. I tried to get some dissertation work done, but was stymied by the ayi’s need to vacuum and then mop directly underneath my feet while slamming into the furniture. Yes, she was cleaning the house while I sat there, but this only added to my frustration. How ridiculous is it to be angry at someone as they do your work for you? It is pretty ridiculous. You don’t need to tell me. Still, having someone in the house all the time adds fuel to a China day. Basically I am never alone, which for me makes for a high level of frustration. Shanghai is crowded—not exactly the easiest place to find a quiet spot—and I sometimes would like to have my house be a place of solitude and silence. This is hard to accomplish with three children and a Chinese lady hanging around all the time. Add a friend or two and I can be positively crazy acting.
But luckily, these days always pass. Things don’t suddenly get rosy, but they usually look better after I sleep on it. Or have a stiff drink. Or both. Check back tomorrow and the story might be different.
Back in the Swim
The kids are finally back in school and we are settling back in to life in Shanghai. Ava is adjusting well to her new school- riding the bus with her big brother and making new friends. Both big kids tried out for the school swim team which turned out to be a somewhat stressful endeavor. At the end of last year, the kids decided it might be fun to be on the team, so I popped by the pool office to meet the coach and get more information. I spoke with some of the other swim moms first to see how they felt about the time commitment and to see how their kids were enjoying the team experience. I got only positive feedback so I happily made my way to the pool and introduced myself. The coach seemed nice enough, but it took me only a few seconds to realize that his idea of swim team and my idea of swim team were two very different things.
In the United States, my kids swam for the neighborhood pool. We had maybe four meets and the coaches were all teenagers. Ok, some of them were “swimmers”. Maybe they swam for their high school teams or they might even be swimming in college, but it wasn’t ever serious business. I don’t think the season even lasted a month and a half. For the very little ones who weren’t yet strong swimmers the coaches would even jump in with them and propel them forward like tiny little missiles, keeping one hand under to help them stay afloat. But our neighborhood pool is only open in the summer and the hours aren’t great so there is a more serious pool where Mark swims. Oh, and Michael Phelps swims there, too. Maybe you’ve heard of him? The greatest Olympic swimmer of all time? Yeah, that guy. My kids have taken swim lessons there and participated in stroke clinic on the weekend, but they don’t swim competitively there. I have spent plenty of time hanging around watching the kids swim. This is why I can tell you firsthand how Michael Phelps actually looks in his bathing suit. It is the kind of sacrifice that mothers sometimes have to make. Mark had been pushing for the kids to start year round competitive swimming or at least for us to change summer pool memberships so that his future Olympians could be on the Meadowbrook summer swim team. He isn’t really one for sports, but when it comes to swimming he is worse than any peewee football dad could ever be. I mean, are we aiming for the Olympics or not?! Can we all just get serious here!?
I had always put my foot down about year round competitive swimming. After all, I was going to be the one running kids to and from practice. And they seemed so little. How could they know that swimming was really their thing? It was a big time commitment for small people. Mark argued that earlier was better and that if they hated it they could decide it wasn’t for them. I was skeptical that he could let it go that easily. He swam year round as a kid, even when he hated it, and I was sure he would expect the same from them.
But the school team seemed like a good idea. It is after school so it requires very little running around. There is even a bus that will bring them home after practice. What could be simpler? Two practices a week, a commitment for all Shanghai meets, and one meet outside of Shanghai each year. So manageable. But the school coach was clearly more in line with Mark’s way of thinking. He needed to know specifics. Where were we from? Baltimore got him interested. Had the kids competed before? I played it cool. I didn’t volunteer the light Roland Park Pool swim schedule. Did they swim year round? Um, sort of? I mentioned Meadowbrook and that they swam there. His face registered instant recognition. Oh, he knew that pool. Michael Phelps’ pool! This was technically true, but I was immediately aware that he now thought the kids were competitive year round swimmers working under the supervision of the coaches and staff that had produced multiple Olympians. Basically we were superstars! We were nearly fish!
The coach demanded to know more. What were their times? Um, their times? I had no idea. No worries, he assured me. Over the summer when they competed I would be able to compare their times with the ones on their website, right? Sure I could! Well, I could if they were going to be swimming on a team, which, they weren’t. He found this troubling, but helpfully suggested that I could time them when I had them in the pool. Yes, yes. During one of our many training sessions I would whip out the old stopwatch! Maybe I would just ask Michael Phelps to do that for me.
The coach could make no promises, because the team was competitive, but he liked that Ava had a late birthday. And Lucas was swimming in PE so he could check out his skills the very next week. They didn’t have spaces for everyone and some kids were going to be disappointed. You see, not everyone makes the team. Yes, this is elementary school. Oh, and they needed to be proficient in all four strokes. They were, right? How was I supposed to answer that? Could he be more specific about “proficient”? I was suddenly concerned that we were biting of more than we could chew.
Over summer vacation we worked very little on swimming so that when we arrived in Shanghai the kids’ preparation was not unlike cramming for college finals twenty minutes before the start of the exam. Mark had them in the pool on the weekends to fast track their flip turns and attempt to give them some more help with swimming butterfly. It was going to be close, but it would have to be good enough.
The first day of tryouts arrived. Lucas was decidedly positive but Ava was terrified. She has had some confidence issues these past few months. Issues that warrant their own post, but suffice it to say, not making the swim team might have been a giant blow to her already weakened self-esteem. She considered not trying out at all. Lucas tried to encourage her by telling her that she needed to believe in herself, but this didn’t calm her nerves and she left for school on tryout day in tears.
But she came home all smiles. She powered through and was so proud of herself for finishing the tryouts without falling apart that she said it didn’t matter if she made the team or not. Of course, I knew it probably did matter just a little bit, but she was so genuinely happy—so visibly excited to have had that little bit of success– that I really believed her. It had been scary but she had done it and she had done her best. Lucas was more concerned, however. The other kids had been better than he had expected. Some kids were trying out for the second time after being rejected last year and he wasn’t so sure his name was going to be there when they posted the team list.
We waited. Ava claimed to have seen a list of 3rd grade swimmers with her name on it posted by the pool. Lucas had no idea what she was talking about. Surely they would make certain the parents knew, right? When would they find out? Lucas thought Wednesday, but he wasn’t sure. We were on pins and needles. Finally, we got emails on Monday.
They both made the team! Michael Phelps is lucky he retired because I think there are a few new kids that just might blow him out of the water. I mean, once they get those flip turns down.
How Not to Buy a Blender
The blender in question
Oh, more tales of woe from the Shanghai kitchen! I mentioned in my post about the crockpot that I was having difficulty finding small kitchen appliances here in China. Either things are cheaply made, or crazy expensive, or just not available. And yes, it is not lost on me that all of the things at my old local Target were actually made in China. My recent trip home reinforced the irony of living in the country of origin for so many cheap products but being unable to find them here in Shanghai. Hilarious, I know. I am trying to be judicious in my selections when it come to the kitchen. There isn’t much room in the tiny Shanghai kitchen and I don’t have much storage space in the form of closets here either. The things I buy need to be worth the space they take up on the kitchen counter.
I had been burned before, so when I decided to purchase a blender, I was determined not to make the same mistake. I would buy the name brand thing this time—no crazy Chinese company for me!—and I would be sure I was buying something that would get the job done. This time I was even contemplating making a move to the expensive store with the imported appliances. One of the other students in my Chinese cooking class had told me about a store that was a short cab ride away where they had insanely overpriced name brand small appliances. He had suffered with a shoddy food processor, and had decided it wasn’t worth the hassle to spend the time and energy staking out all the local Chinese stores for miracles. He confessed to having been knowingly robbed by the shopkeeper, but claimed the prices were worth it to eliminate the aggravation factor alone. I was set on going that route myself when fate intervened.
Poor Ava decided she could no longer live without breakfast smoothies and she was begging for a blender to help remedy the situation. Mark needed to go to the hardware store so Ava and I tagged along. This hardware store isn’t like most of the places in Shanghai where Mark prefers to shop. He was planning on going to the equivalent of Home Depot. A Chinese big box store, if you will, instead of his usual hole in the wall specialty places where they only sell wheels, or rubber tubing, or specific sizes of screws. On top of this massive hardware store there is an equally massive store selling appliances. Mark assured me they had blenders–he claimed to have even seen a food processor–and, since I only needed this blender to make smoothies, I figured it was worth a shot. We browsed the aisles accompanied by an eager Chinese saleswoman. She and her colleagues were keen to talk to Ava and to tell me how pretty she was. They were happy to show us the blenders and to make recommendations about quality and style. At least that is what I thought they were doing since we were all trying to make ourselves understood in Mandarin. I could have been completely off base. They certainly seemed to be discussing the different blenders. We all agreed on which blender would be the best. One was most certainly the highest quality—a name brand number with a glass container. I indicated that I wanted to buy the blender and that’s when things got confusing.
Buy it? The salesladies were sorry, but I couldn’t buy that blender. After all that discussion it turned out that there were only two blenders available for purchase. Two out of at least twenty on display! They were made by some random Chinese company, and, while they looked sturdy enough, I had my doubts. So now the choice was only between the glass container or the plastic. Which one would I prefer? The instruction manual was completely in Chinese as were the indicators—only three speeds, mind you—on the dial. The saleswoman pointed me toward the one with the glass container. It was “very good”. The plastic one? Only “so so”. I reluctantly bought the glass one. I only needed it for smoothies, surely this thing could handle a few frozen banana slices, right?
This could say anything, really
Wrong. When I went to make Ava a smoothie the next morning, the blender was incapable of grinding up even the smallest morsel of frozen anything. Even paper thin frozen banana slices proved to be too much. I tried the other settings. I violently shook the container. I stirred in between each futile whir of the blades. The entire kitchen shook with the force of the blender’s motor, but every attempt produced the same result—yogurt with fruit chunks. Any dreams of making pina coladas with this blender died as I tried and tried again. There was no way this thing could handle ice cubes. And there was a curious smell–burning plastic, maybe?—accompanying every flick of the dial.
This may very well say “Not an actual blender”
Chinese blender? Epic fail. Sigh.
Limbo
One of the things that found most difficult this summer was the feeling that no place was really home. We went back to Baltimore with an offer on the house and every intention of finishing the details of the sale in the following weeks. We hadn’t seen the house since we left in December but had been assured it looked great and was showing well. We weren’t thrilled with the offer, but we wanted to be done with the stress and worry of having an empty house on the other side of the world. Well, I wanted to be finished with the stress. Mark would have been content to wait a bit longer or to hold on to the house indefinitely. After we agreed on the terms of the sale, the soon-to-be new owners wanted to get into the house early. A few weeks early, before the loan was approved and well before the closing. We didn’t want to do this, and were getting plenty of pressure to just relax and go ahead with things. You can guess how that turned out. No deal. No sale. Still own the Baltimore house.
After that disappointment, I went by the house to see how it looked. I made the mistake of bringing the kids, thinking they would like to see the house again. I had no idea the place would be dirty, with an overgrown yard that resembled a jungle. When we opened the door, we were slapped in the face by the overpowering scent of empty old house. Not the most pleasant way to come home. All three children burst into tears because their house looked abandoned, unloved, and forgotten. It made me sad, but more than that I was angry. No wonder no one wanted to buy the house! After seeing the shape our house was in after a few months unoccupied, I didn’t want to buy it either.
Our storage space wasn’t in much better shape. It had been unloaded by the movers and had been packed from front to back as tightly as possible. When I pulled up the metal door there was no way to move inside the space– the boxes and furniture were stacked all the way to the ceiling. Some of the boxes were already starting to collapse. This wasn’t surprising considering a few pieces of heavy furniture had been wedged on top of everything. My brother helped me pull everything out and rearrange things into a larger space. Surprisingly, not much seemed to be broken, but once again it was days of looking at things I used to love and knowing they were just going to be sitting unappreciated for who knows how long.
So the summer was all about letting go. Letting go of my pretty house, letting go of all the possessions that used to make that house feel like a home, and letting go of the expectation that those things would be in pristine condition when we eventually return to the US. In a way seeing things in their inevitable decline was good. I was less disappointed when we came back to Shanghai and I was once again in my less than perfect house and trying to cook in my tiny kitchen. Not that the Baltimore house is perfect, but now the grass is a little less green, I suppose. So here’s to being back in Shanghai and making another go of it, trying out some more new things, and plodding along with my Mandarin. Here’s to the next few months of adapting and changing and rolling with the punches. Here’s to making this work.
The Grumpy Laowai 