Today, we went out to brunch with my extended family. Mr. A and I ended up sitting next to my sister’s huband (BIL) who happens to be a cop. I don’t know how it came up, but he told us in his spare time at work, he and several friends plan what they would do in case of Zombie Apocalypse or full societal collapse.
I thought he was joking, but he had an actual, logical sounding plan. I started pondering my own plan which largely involved begging my BIL to take us with him to the 100 acre compound he and his coworker have planned. We also discussed what skills and qualities will be needed.
Due to my recent semi-success at squirrel killing (don’t ask), my sturdy build (good for long periods of low food) and my moderate workable knowledge of some basic survival skills (mostly gleaned from reading the Hunger Games and Little House on the Prairie), I had a decent chance of being admitted to the compound. I also have a strong will to survive and would gladly resort to cannibalism if necessary, so my odds of making it through the first waves of casualties are fairly decent.
Poor Mr. A, though, had very little useful abilities to offer at the survival stage. The only thing we could think of in his Post-Apocalypse pro column was the fact that his sister is a doctor. If he brings her, there is a chance he could get in. His only other life skill is an ability to bike very long distances which might possibly be helpful for foraging (though no one was impressed with this skill). Mr. A does have a good amount of muscle if I need to eat a person, so maybe I would keep him around.
My BIL and I decided that my sister had very little to offer also. She is pretty skinny (bad news in food shortage times!), can’t cook or garden and has a pretty poor ability to control her temper when she is stressed. We figured she would implode and get expelled pretty quickly. My sister argued that she would be happy to hook her way around the compound to keep the men happy and earn her keep, which amused everyone except her husband.
I have been making my mental apocalypse plan all day.
Onward with the questions!
Elise asks:
Why did you quit Chinese school?
We quit the year M was in a twice a week immersion program at a local university. (Post about dropping out here.) I was also doing private tutoring with both M and L so that was already three days a week plus Chinese school on Sundays. I felt like I was losing my mind. Chinese school was the least effective of all the Chinese we were doing, so we quit.
I did think about signing the girls up again this year, but honestly I hate spending my entire Sunday there. If it were on a week night, I would do it, but we see so little of Mr. A it is hard to force the girls to go sit in boring inefficient classes when the could be playing with him.
If I were really going to psychoanalyze us, I would also admit that Chinese school was a tough cultural fit. Mr. A often felt frustrated about being treated as a second-class citizen since he isn’t a native Chinese speaker. I felt frustrated because it was annoying, disorganized and we didn’t seem to fit in the classes for kids who speak chinese at home (because we don’t) and the very beginner level classes for kids who don’t know chinese at all. Criticize us if you must, but we just don’t have the emotional energy for it.
I have another post brewing about our Chinese language situation this year (frustrating, annoying), but I have to think more about it.
KT asks
Not an adoption question – more on the hapa-side of things. How does your older daughter self-identify? Is it evolving/changing? My hapa daughter (10)clearly is more in touch w/ her chinese-ness than her anglo-saxon-ness. Her closest circle of friends are all asian or hapa-asian. We aren’t sure what the significance (if any) is but we’ve noticed this trend with our hapa nieces and nephews. Is it the experience of being the minority in the community? Very interesting in who she sees as “cute” as well – the asian guys are always”cuter” in her opinion…
This is an interesting question to me because I haven’t actually checked in with M lately as to her hapa-ness. To answer, I asked her if she knew what “race” is in relation to people from different ethnicities/ancestries. She said she did, so I asked her what race she thinks she is. Totally seriously, she answered “human”.
I said no and reexplained “race”. I wish I had a camera to take a picture of her confused face. She looked at me like I was the dumbest person in the world. ”I am half Asian and half European!” she said “You know that, Mommy.” I asked her if she felt like she was more one or the other and she said no, just half of each.
I tried then asking her if she felt like she looked more Asian or white. She said, “Well, my eyes and skin and face are more Asian. My hair is more white. But strangely, I think some people think I am only white! Why is that?” We talked about people assuming Asians have darker/black hair and her hair is solidly brown. She generally does pass as white even though her individual features (except nose and hair) are very Asian, so I thought it was interesting that she picked up on that.
M has always seemed to be completely comfortable making friends with pretty much anyone. She does have a girl in her class who is also hapa and I have heard them discussing their half-chineseness often, so I know it matters to her/them on some level. She also seems to have matured in her understanding of “chinese” since our trip. Before that she always thought of “Chinese” as being someone who could speak Chinese (which excluded herself), but now she seems to have a more mature understanding of race/culture vs. nationality/language.
She isn’t especially interested in boys yet, so I can’t answer that. The other thing about M is she is a very exclusive kind of friend. She prefers a few very very close friends or interacting one on one rather than a bigger group. Her best friend is white and also loves Harry Potter (which M loves more than life itself) while most other kids at school seem uninterested in HP, so I don’t know how much that factors into the equation. Her school is about 25% nonwhite (including 10% of the school being mixed race) and her class this year is about 30% kids of color/mixed race. She has noticed enough to be able to tell me about their heritage (one family from west Africa, one from India, etc.) but I don’t think she is thinking of it with respect to social grouping yet.
______________________________________________
For the record, I am cognizant of the fact that both of these answers are going to make some people say hhmmmmmm and judge us. I am ok with that.
More questions:
Several people asked about the stalker aka the Dead Guy’s Girlfriend (see here here and here for the most recent posts regarding that saga).
Since I talked to her pastor, not much has happened. I didn’t get a restraining order because I wanted to see if she was going to back off. I still see her parking in the parking lot near our house when she is at the church on Wednesdays and Sundays, but I haven’t seen her lurking like she was. I haven’t seen her drive creeptastically slowly in front of our house or come into our yard or anything like that. I assume either her pastor or the friend the pastor was going to enlist in helping said something to her.
Basically, she has faded into the woodwork for the time being. I will admit I am suspicious about the fact that my car was keyed recently. I often park in the parking lot where she parks, but I don’t have any proof it was her. I don’t know that is where it was keyed and it could have happened anywhere. The good news is my van is not in mint condition anyway (it is kind of a hooptymobile with a missing hubcap and always filled with crumbs and crumpled papers from the kids), so I don’t really care.
Next Question
JLP asked
Whatever happened with the kid that Mr. A confronted about yelling racist things? The last I remember reading was that Mr. A had forgotten the kid’s contact info in the heat of the moment, and that you were going to try to track him down another way…. Did anything come of that? If so, how did the kid’s parents react to being contacted, and how did that conversation go?
We did get the kid’s contact information but Mr. A totally dropped the ball and did not call his parents. I could hypothesize about reasons why (avoiding confrontation, tired of dealing with that kind of bullshit, etc.) but I don’t really know why he didn’t call. He knows I disapprove of his decision, but at the end of the day, he was there and I wasn’t. (Also, he read the comments on that post and knows he let my blogreaders down. We should force him to apologize to you all for not providing interesting blog fodder. Or maybe we can make him do his own question and answer session as punishment).
Beep asks:
Are there any updates on the in-laws?
Things on the in-law front have been strangely quiet. I don’t think I have seen Mr. A’s mom since we got back from Taiwan. I think subconsciously I don’t want to give her the opportunity to ruin my very pleasant feelings toward her from the trip, so I haven’t instigated any visits. I think Mr. A took the kids up to see her once or twice since we got back, but I am not 100% sure. We will likely see her around christmas, but just thinking about that makes me tired.
My FIL has been just fine. He hasn’t had any major health issues lately (last year he had several surgeries when he was visiting Taiwan), so that is good. We see him every month or so, more often when we aren’t so busy. Mr. A has been crazy busy since school started (working lots of weekends, etc.) so we haven’t seen him so much.
Mr. A’s younger sister (the one who suffers from severe mental illness) has cycled through a pretty bad patch earlier this year. His mom finally got her settled in a group home, which is better for everyone, but pisses her off. She seems to have stabilized in the last few months, but she is still completely unthrilled about the group home. We, on the other hand, think the group home is the best thing since sliced bread.
I am enjoying the calm while we have it. Certainly some kind of extended family drama will be headed our way sooner or later, but for right now, all is well.
___________________________________________________________________
That is all for today, but I wanted to point out the Adoption Bloggers Interview Project is still registering bloggers who want to be interviewed. I participated when I was matched up with an adult adoptee who grew up in an open adoption and it had a huge impact on me. I would love to see a good diverse group of participants!
Also, I did an interview with Heather over at Production Not Reproduction. I answered some questions she had about our newly open International Adoption. You can read part one HERE and part two HERE.
I am just going to dive in and start answering the questions you all sent me for Nablopomo. I will try to post for 30 days straight, but possibly that means I can be done before Thanksgiving.
Here we go (in no particular order):
Anne asks:
We are planning a return trip to China this spring but do not want to go as part of a tour because the kids would probably hate China if we got on a bus at the crack of dawn, went sight-seeing and shopping for the whole day, and returned at nightfall. Is it reasonable to think we can go without guides? Our Chinese is limited. If we wanted to use a guide for a couple of days in a certain city, any ideas on how to connect with one?
I think the question is really dependent on what kind of travelers you are. Have you traveled extensively outside the the US? Do you speak any Chinese at all? Where do you hope to go? If you are traveling only in Beijing and Shanghai or to very tourist-heavy locations (Guilin or Xian for example), you will probably be fine. If you are going to any 2nd or 3rd tier city without any experience traveling in developing countries with no knowledge of Chinese, it could very well be a complete nightmare.
Traveling in China with kids is not for the faint of heart. My kids are great travelers, Mr. A speaks passable Chinese (and I understand quite a bit) and we have both traveled in China before (including Mr. A living there for a year). But let me assure you, there were days where I thought we were going to kill each other or throw in the towel due to the stress of trying to do the following:
- Manage the hotel- check in, figure out how to use the internet, explain that the internet is not working, figure out if the bill was correct, make sure our credit cards were not overcharged, make sure the cleaning people did not steal our stuff, figure out how to do laundry, make the TV work, get fresh towels, discover your carefully chosen hotel sucks and find a new one.
- Get to where we wanted to go in a timely manner- find a taxi if there isn’t one outside the hotel, communicate to the taxi driver where you want to go, find a taxi when you come out of the destination, explain how to get to your hotel, try not to die of asphyxiation from the taxi driver’s cigarettes, argue with/negotiate with the taxi driver over the price, find the subway station, figure out how to get over the one way streets and overpasses to get to your destination when you come out the subway exit, talk to the subway attendant about buying tickets, figuring out where the closest subway is, figure out why the subway you want is not coming, shove your way into the subway without losing the children, figure out how to buy tickets to shows you want to see, figure out wtf that thing is in the Forbidden City, figure out that you actually exited at the wrong end of the forbidden city and can not find a taxi/subway/place to eat, fend off thousands of hawkers while you try to read your map, realize the map from one year ago is hopelessly outdated due to the pace of construction in China, get scammed by guys who tell you the wrong information so they can force you to pay extra for their bus, manage the nightmare chaos at the small airport for your intercountry flight, try to buy train tickets during Chinese Spring Festival (aka the greatest annual human migration in the world).
- Figure out what stuff is worth seeing- spend days and days looking at guidebooks and online to figure out what things you should see, try those things to discover the kids are bored silly (Forbidden City, Tiananmen square, etc), revise plans to try to find more kid-friendly activities, realize that “kid friendly” could mean that you are looking at pickled fetuses and corpses
- Food- (Despite all the problems above, food was by far our biggest challenge in the PRC) Keep enough food in your room so you can eat breakfast without needing to find a restaurant when you are jetlagged, figure out what things at 7-11 you are willing to eat, make sure your hotel is ALWAYS near a 7-11, make sure you stop sightseeing at least an hour before you want to eat so you have enough time to locate a restaurant, figure out how to order when you can’t read the menu, carry enough snacks for the kids in case there is no restaurant anywhere near where you are sightseeing, learn that the only food that is easily accessible to you is unappealing, get food poisoning at least once due to eating at a sketchy restaurant and/or street vendor, get screamed at in Chinese for not understanding the order/get a ticket/turn it in when your food comes system and you lost the ticket, spend hours walking around the trying to locate the restaurant you saw yesterday that looked good, try to order only to have the vendor turn their back on you because they don’t want to deal with trying to figure out what you want, get stuck at a sightseeing place where there are inexplicably no options to buy food, listen to the kids whine about how much they hate all the food, watch a kid who previously ate anything and everything refuse to eat anything but white rice, watch the other kid insist only on eating candy for five days.
All these things happened to us during the three weeks we were in China, despite our serious backpacking and traveling with kids experience (not to mention Chinese language skills!).
If we weren’t so damn independent (read: STUPID) and cheap, we would have hired a guide or done some touring with a group. Traveling on your own in China with kids is REALLY REALLY HARD. It was hard on us, our relationship (during that time…we are fine now), and especially the kids. They would have had a much better time if we were with a group that included other children they could play (and complain!) with.
-
Also, the idea of waking up in a nice, clean hotel where breakfast is provided, getting on a lovely bus (with no haggling or cigarette smoke) and going directly to a sight-seeing place, getting back on the bus to go to a pre-screened restaurant where a variety of totally edible lunch items are already waiting? Wow, I can’t even imagine how much less stress that would have been.
That being said, I am a backpacker at heart. I love stumbling around a slum we found accidentally and eating street vendor food that will likely give us all dysentery. I like interacting with normal people, even if they stare and make rude comments about us.
-
Despite all that unpleasantness (and it really, really was QUITE UNPLEASANT a lot of the time), I would do it on our own again because those unpleasant things make the best stories.
-
It really depends on what you want out of your trip.
-
As for finding a guide, I would try googling the crap out of “Location in China, Guide, english-speaking”. Then, cross reference everything you find with Trip Advisor. I found Trip Advisor to be extremely reliable for almost everything we looked up in China.
-
Good luck Anna! (And if Anna has more specific questions about China travel, shoot me an email and I will give you more detail privately).
After over four years driving through West Virginia to visit my friend in North Carolina, I finally found something worth stopping for there.
I stopped for at the Tamarack, which is a showcase of West Virginia handicrafts. I stopped because I had to pee, but I decided to grab dinner too. Who knew that the little cafeteria there was operated by the Greenbrier?
On the first swing through WV, I had Swiss steak, kale greens and the best okra I have ever had in my life. GREENS! At a restaurant beside a highway! The whole meal cost less than $10 and it was delicious. On the way back, I had amazing Cajun catfish, collard greens and fried green tomatoes. I have never had fried green tomatoes before, but oh my, they were phenomenal. Everything there was amazing.
Of course, the irony of all of this is the cause of my trip. I went down to testify in my friend’s custody hearing in which she requested court approval to move out of North Carolina. She got that permission, so it is unlikely I will be driving through WV very often.
Isn’t that just my luck?
|
|
