Don't Look Down.

Author's note: Do not read this post if you have delicate composition, are prone to barfing and/or pregnant. For all three above reasons, the Sheppard family should probably not read this post. Don't say I didn't warn you.


Ice-ball fights are definitely NOT as fun in Beijing. They should be; they're rare.

Northern China is desert so it doesn't rain or snow much. The watercolor paintings you see of China's verdant hills, bamboo forests, otherworldly limestone formations and panda bears is not Beijing. Beijing is large and flat, dusty and smoggy; it is a massive swatch of brownish-red, cracked earth. Trees are sparse and pandas can only be found at the zoo.

The snowfall last month was light, maybe 1/2 an inch, enough for any young child to consider a winter wonderland. The kids were thrilled to play outside after school. They blissfully ignored their ice-soaked nylon tennis shoes, sopping wet jeans and jack-hammering teeth. Their boots and snow gear, carefully purchased and packed, did not arrive in the air shipment as intended.

The boys plan du jour was to ice up Park Avenue's "silver-bullet," a two-story metal slide, the super-fast kind of slide that insurance companies banned long ago in the US. We also iced up the slide's landing. Eli ran and surfed down the ice slide on his shoes, going so fast he caught air. When he hit the runway he either tumbled out of control or whooshed along until he hit the giant trampoline ramparts. Finn, who is generally more cautious than his brother, launched butt down, catching air and crash landing all the same. We were in stitches, ignoring the gasps and screams some other Park Avenue residents. The crazy Sheppard family at it again.

The day's snow play was fun until I got to thinking. It was so much fun until I looked down. I know better than to look down. I know I know better than to look down.

It was dusk but I could tell the slush I was scooping and smearing on the slide was death-gray, it was nothing but a thin coating of ice chips that were perhaps blasted out of the sky by the Chinese Government's rain-making efforts, a mere flocking of the detritus of the Beijing Streets.

I was scooping up the detritus of the Beijing streets and smearing it onto the slide, my children's hands, jackets and pants were already grotesque casualties. I was trying to tamp down this nauseating thought when a slush ball slapped me in the back of the neck and began its cold trickle down. My thoughts turned to scorching bath water, fortified by vinegar and creating a bonfire out of our clothing. Those clothes can never be worn again.

I'm not a germ-a-phobe, really I'm not. On a good day, this is what I think of germ-a-phobes: "Good luck with that!" I sincerely feel bad for people who devote so much time to an intractable problem. Besides, don't our bodies need exposure to germs in order to fight them? During one of my frequent dark moments I might think: "Thanks, morons, for creating these super mega germs and poisoning our water supply with your all your anti-bacterial soap non-sense and anti-biotic addiction.


On Poop

That said, the Beijing streets are capital N-A-S-T-Y. Shit and piss and loogies and barf are everywhere. Dog shit, kid shit, worker-man shit (check a construction site--no porta-potties!). None of the shanties in the hutongs behind us have plumbing! All the street vendors use the the tree enclosures of Park Avenue as their bathrooms as Ruby and I discovered one day while walking. It's a miracle to come home without feces patterned to the souls of your shoes!

And y'all probably have heard about the crack pants. It is customary for children to roll commando with giant splits in the crotch of their pants. Just squat, poop and go. Don't worry about picking up the poo, no scoop laws here for dogs, kids or adults! Now I think disposable diapers are an assault on Mother Nature, but cap that crack with cotton, yo!


On Phlegm

If you are one of the 20 million Beijingers over the age of 30, you could win a loogey-hawking contest. The Chinese have a nasty habit of spitting. Spitting is actually too gentle a word. Horking better captures the sound and sentiment of the sport. The country's soundtrack should be honking horns, burps and gargling phlegm exorcisms. The soundtrack loops everywhere: sidewalks, offices, even restaurants.

The government worked overtime to punish violators during the SARS outbreak and before the Olympics. Only the middle and upper-class educated youth got the message. Migrant workers of all ages, men, even the sweet-looking little old ladies will frequently send a viscous throat cocktail your way. Nothing more non sequiter than watching two little old ladies, gracefully dressed, walking arm in arm down the boulevard, talking in singsong voices. One stops, snorts, heaves and gargles and issues a flying, gelatinous slug. It is shocking.

While disgusting and a major health-hazard, spitting is considered an inalienable right, a necessity for personal well-being. It's nasty logic: when smoke and pollution and phlegm are trapped in the shenti (body), expel them. If you happen to be smoking a cigarette and need to clear your pipes, no problem! Just double barrel shoot the crap out your nose! I've been in taxis where the driver managed to smoke, drive and shoot a nose loogey out of a narrow crack in the window, all while navigating Beijing traffic! If you are sitting in the back seat of a Beijing taxi, always keep your window closed!

My American neighbor recently went to a doctor fearing that the lump in her throat was a swollen thyroid or a cancerous pollup. It was just an emulsion of Beijing. The doctor's remedy: hawk more loogeys!!

On Vomit

Sometimes we play "Count the Barf Splats." One day I counted 10 separate "sidewalk texturing incidents" just on my 30-minute walk to school. Every time Finn and Eli see a barf splat, which to say is often, they make dramatic hurling noises and contort their bodies like they are disgorging the contents of their own stomachs. The Chinese people seem to get a kick out of this.

I wondered why the vomiting epidemic. Food poisoning? Well, we have eaten all manner of street food and have yet to barf, sensitive stomachs and all. Debauchery? No clubs or bars in this part of town, though the texture count does rise on Mondays. Population density? Perhaps, but in other big cities I have never seen so much vomit.

Then, walking home from school one day, I got my answer. I was passing by a bank and the guard in front was snarffling and suctioning and hoarking and gargling. From his mouth issued a sickly frog-like glob that landed with a splat a few feet in front of me. After more heaving and gargling, the guard determined that there was still too much bad chi in his body so he began punching his gut until his lunch spewed out and landed a few feet behind me, gracing the bank's entrance. Where spitting doesn't work, barfing does the trick!

Curiously, the guard resumed his normal erect stance, trying to look important even though nobody robs banks in Beijing. He didn't ask for sick leave, nor was he sent home by the manager, and he made no attempt to clean the mess, leaving customers to step on or over it. It reminded me my first trip to Beijing in August. Somebody puked right in front of a street vendor's food cart. This I would call negative advertising. Not so in Beijing. The vendor left his cart, didn't bother to roll it even a few feet to right or left and the morning's paid no mind, stepping on the pile to purchase their Beijing Omlettes.

But There Must Be Street Cleaners?

Beijing is city of 28 million people, the majority of who ascribe to the "better out than in" philosophy of health care, a city where it rarely rains to flush all the detritus into the drains.

On the main boulevards and in prominent tourist areas, you see the Waste Management crews in their neon-orange suits, with their little carts and bamboo brooms. Bamboo brooms are great for sweeping the fallen leaves of the very sickly looking trees; they are worthless for feces removal. The dry stick brooms just spear the poop and rake it around until the sidewalks are swirled with brown, making it impossible to NOT step on poo.

Outside the main boulevards and tourist areas, where YOU the foreigner, should see no reason to go, there is no waste management. Perhaps you now know why we call the alley behind our apartment "Stinky Alley."

Anyway, if you plan to visit us in Beijing, do yourself a favor: Don't look down.

Taxing

I pitched a fit. A full-public, feet stamping, shouting, swearing fit on the crowded streets of Beijing. I tried to keep my cool, I did. I thought of my happy place, holding the gently-undulating giant moon snail on the low-tide shores of Vashon Island; hiking through the cloud forest in the Peruvian Andes, pressing my fingers into the soft mosses; slipping behind my camera lens to document the extraordinarily ordinary.

I squeezed my eyes shut and thought of all my countless blessings: Eli and Finn, Austin, my health, my dear friends, my curiosity, my warm but crumbling Park Avenue apartment, my Chinese cleaver, Cafe Besalu, coffee, my pole. The five -week accumulation of frustration proved to be too much. It reared up out of my gut and boiled over. Too much fire in the body, the Chinese would diagnose. Too much fire. My Chinese sign is a rabbit, soft and velvety and cute. I should have born in the year of the dragon.

I just wanted to get home, a simple desire, really. The guilt of being gone all weekend at a photography workshop was gnawing away at my psyche, plus there were jiao zi (home made dumplings) waiting. I would catch a taxi home which was a straight shot east from the school. It was Sunday night, cabs should abound. There are 140,000 official cabs operating within Beijing's first 3 ring roads at any given hour. Make that 500,000 if you count the price-gouging and illegal hei che (hey chuh) black taxis. Yet I watched as 4 empty cabs rolled past. Then another. Then another. My Chinese competition hailed them successfully with their subtle "pat-the-dog" hand motion.

I nudged my way deeper into the traffic stream. I inserted myself deeper into the suggested traffic lane, cars, bikes, rolling toasters, scooters whizzing around me blaring horns. The arctic winds blowing off the Mongolian Steppe kicked up and blasted through my too-thin jacket. I looked down at my gloveless hands and thought of the cracked red earth of Northern China. If I had wanted this kind of cold, I would have moved to Chicago. At least in Chicago I could say "please do not add those Sichuan peppercorns that make my tongue conflagrate and my children cry to the pile of mystery meat." However, in this cold, even the Sichuan peppercorn tempts me.

My lips and cheeks pull taught in a frozen face lift. My dog-patting morphed into a more frantic dog-beating. A good thirty minutes later the traffic backed up enough to force a taxi to idle within pouncing range. I opened the door and inserted myself into the front seat. Just get in and tell the driver to go, people have advised.

"Go," I said.

Taxi driver eyed me with contempt, heaved a great sigh and drove. We were moving at a good clip when I showed him my address, written in Chinese characters. He slams on the brakes.

"I don't know it," he barks in Chinese.

I retort in my halting, four-word maximum sentence Chinese: "South Gate Chaoyang Park. Go!" I say.

"I don't know it," he lies again.

Bull shit. Chaoyang Park is the largest park in Asia. It's a giant tract of trees with plazas celebrating workers and rusted roller-coasters and chain-whipping martial arts students and colorful brides and a a 30-foot statue of Shaquille O'Neal and vendors hawking inflatible turds. Chaoyang Park covers half the fucking city. It is the diamond of "Civilized Chaoyang." There are 4 gates in Chaoyang Park. They are on the main roads. Everybody knows the Park, everyone knows that gates. Even I know the gates. Don't blame my pronunciation. I sound like a Beijinger when it comes to my address. Plus, I got my Chinese cell-phone all up in his grill with my address.

I repeat: "South Park Gate."

He points to the door and waves his hand. "Get out."

I shake my head no, because there is no word for "no" in Chinese. The Chinese don't shake their heads, but I cannot think what else to say.

"Get out," he says again.

I shake my head harder. He begins pushing me out the door. I am staging my next verbal comeback but the only Mandarin that comes to me is "My dormitory does not have air conditioning." Ten lessons into my Survival Chinese class and I am clearly not surviving. I cannot tell time, order food, or give directions to a taxi driver. I can tell Taxi Bastard and anyone else who is willing to listen that I am a clever international exchange student from Switzerland and my dormitory is not far from the library, only I'm not an exchange student, I'm not Swiss and I don't live in a dormitory.

I think how I've tried and tried to persuade teacher Zhang to help me blunder through more practical phrases like: "Ayi, can you please pick up my children at 4:00 from the bus stop in the event I have fallen in an uncovered manhole or have been hit by a bus?" Or, "Door man, how I can get the electricity back on in my apartment?" Or even: "Taxi driver," assuming I can hail one, "please rush me to the hospital, I've been hit with shrapnel blasting out of construction sites."

I think how my pleas to Teacher Zhang beget total bewilderment. Why would I not want to know phrases like "It's my secret?" Or "Paolo is very fat," that are printed in the text. I suspect she is a loyal, Hero of the People, unwavering in her charted course of teaching from the world's worst Beginning Practical Chinese textbook. I don't blame her. She does what boss man tells her and boss man knows what foreigners need to successfully navigate China.

The blaring horns resume and the wind blows back my eyelids and I'm pretty sure ice crystals are coating my irises. I lost my verbal kung-fu battle with Jack Ass Taxi and I'm wedged between lanes again, trying to hail a cab. Mission Taxi Redux is fruitless so I abort and dodge traffic to the nearest subway station.

The nearest subway station dumps me a good 40 minutes quick walk from my house. I decide to take a bus, only I do not know what bus to take. The schedule postings are all in Chinese characters but Chaoyang Park South Street is 10-lanes wide and arrow straight so I figured I could take any bus and get closer to home.

I wait and begin to see the beauty of having a full-time driver. The idea was to spend my money on travel not drivers. The price tag for cars in Beijing is steep. (You get a driver, you buy or lease the car that comes with him). You now gotta win a lottery; Government is trying to stem the tsunami of Chinese vehicular progress. Streets can't handle more congestion; air is already worse than in a coal mine. As I stand at the bus stop I wonder what the gawking Chinese are thinking. Why would this white girl even consider taking the "people's transport"? Lotteries can be won with power and money. They assume I have both.

Another ten minutes pass before a bus stops. It's this double decker structure that looks to have emerged straight from the Big Tent. It's the clown bus in a circus act; I have never seen so many people squashed into one space. It reminds me of a recent school bus accident in the Hunan Province where 64 kids were crammed into a nine-seater van. Van collided with a truck and in the twisted metal lay China's future, tragically juliened.

I still need to get home so I opt to get on, only there is no room. People push and shove and some little lady is smacking me hard with her bag. I can't breath and I can't get on or out so I start to scream. The people stop pushing long enough to stare at the crazy foreigner screaming the selfsame swear words they learned in their pirated Hollywood movies. For one moment in this GPS quadrant, ever-pulsing Beijing halts. The silence is broken by a police man that laughs heartily at me. I elbow my way back through the crowd, shouting more expletives, and walk all the way home.

AYI chihuahua!

It's, like, 8:35 in the morning and I am pacing the apartment, waiting the immanent arrival of Ayi. My feet squeak across the floor. Squeak, Squeak, Squeak. Is it because my floors are so damn clean or is it the fake wood laminate that makes that sound? My floors at home don't squeak. They are real wood. They are usually covered in dirt tracked in by curious and tactile boys.

My phone screams at me; I have an urgent message. It's Robert, our former driver, the one who thinks I speak with sharp tongue and who thinks I'm a nut job. "Ayi will be late, she is on her way. Traffic is bad. This will not happen again. I told her she must ride her bike in and be there on time! My apologies."

I relax and listen to the steady drip of my upstairs neighbors shower. Thump, thump, thump it goes on the concrete. It seems my neighbors are always showering. The drip never stops. One time the drip turned into a steady stream that came through the cement and dry wall and leaked coldness into our bathtub. I envision our neighbor's tub crashing through our ceiling and squashing the kids. Blood and cement and steel and porcelain everywhere.

I call Lucy. Whenever I have a problem with the apartment, I call Lucy. Our dishwasher does not work, so in comes Lucy her high heels clicking. Click Click Click. I remember thinking: "Uh, you gonna fix my dishwasher in THOSE shoes?" Turns out that Lucy's only job is to announce her colleague is coming to fix my dishwasher. Two minutes later, the colleague enters and chain smokes his way into my kitchen. Lucy leaves. Colleague doesn't know jack about dishwashers. He comes back 4 more times and finally calls Colleague Number 2 for assistance. Colleagues 1 and 2 chain smoke and discuss the price of leeks and Feraris. They peek under the lid of my fry pan and see a whole chicken--feet and toenails and beak and comb and gobbler and melting eyeballs and all--and wonder aloud if this is what Meiguo rens (Americans) eat, but they do not fix my dishwasher. I want to tell them that it probably has something to do with fact that the water hoses have been affixed to the appliance with stuffed newspaper and that perhaps a better suited connection might allow water to flow through, but I can't say "Why don't you use a water pipe that actually fits this dishwasher" in Mandarin.

Two days later the dishwasher was gone, leaving a gaping hole in my cupboards. Then magically it reappeared. It was the same dishwasher and it sucked up water just fine, but then it sprayed all the dirty water into my cabinets and onto the floor. I gave up on trying to fix the dishwasher. I can wash our dishes by hand, but I know full well that we will probably lose our deposit for "breaking the dishwasher." It might be worth it just to not have to listen to the chain-smoking colleagues in my apartment everyday.

A loud explosion rattles me back to the present where I can still hear the dripping. I muffle the sound by cranking up the Lupe Fiasco. This is war. You drip, I hip hop. The bathroom ceiling access hatch is still open, revealing the source of the leak: aluminum foil covering the drain pipes. Seriously, I could not make up this shit if I tried. It can't possibly cost much to cap them with PVC caps. There are a million shops that sell nothing but PVC pipes and caps in the hutong behind the Park Avenue complex. But this is China.

I am glad Ayi is late. I don't want an Ayi. Austin insisted. It sounds romantic and all, to have someone clean your house and cook your food, but it's really just fucking awkward. I can put my own groceries away, thank you very much, and wash my own clothes, and sweep my own floors. Or not. Besides, Ayi Ge Yu Rong does not speak a lick of English.

I resume pacing and then I sit, trying to look natural, on the world's most ornate and overstuffed couch. It's froof times 10. It's like Snufalupagus crashing into a Victorian claw-footed tub. Snuffy's long eyelashes the fringe on the umpteen pillows. I had to remove half the pillows to even be able to sit. If only I could stuff half this plush into the rock-hard mattresses. The Chinese will sleep on anything. I once saw a guy use a brick for a pillow. He was taking his siesta on a concrete curb, his head propped on a brick. I on the other hand wake up constantly with my hips, elbows and joints tingling and throbbing from prolonged pressure on the hard mattress. Austin does not have a problem, he flips and flops and kicks and punches all night long. He never sleeps in one place long enough to make his limbs fall asleep.

The doorbell rings. I startle. I summon all Mandarin skills (I can say hi) and smooth my frizzle-dry hair and open the door. "Ni Hao! I say, trying to sound cheerful and confident like I have done this before. "Ni Hao," Ge says with a smile. We stand looking at each other. Great, now that's over. I've exhausted my Mandarin. Now what?

500 is when the Canary Dies

The first morning in Beijing was glorious. From 28F we could see clear to through the CCTV tower, know colloquially as Big Underpants, straight to the Forbidden City. Looking West, the horizon was rimmed by Donkey Saddle Mountain Range. It was sunny and warm like a fine California day. It was not to last.

Three days in I opened the curtains and: brown. It was like Seattle gray, thick and pervasive, only brown. So brown I could not see the adjacent apartment tower. My lungs hurt. Finn was complaining that his nose hurt. Eli dug out a blackish booger we call smooggers (smog + booger = smoogers) and paraded it in front of my face. Holy dragon warrior, that hovering brown cloud that is clinging to my widows is mostly fog, right?

I logged on to the US Embassy to check the hourly AQI, the Air Quality Indicator. The AQI measures dangerous particulate contents, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and ground ozone. Most foreigners have an AQI ap on their phone. Checking the AQI can be dangerous, like owning a scale and checking your weight. It can become obsessive. I resolve to not obsess.

AQI measures air quality on a scale of 0-500. Zero would be a vacuum, 10 would be Austin's farts, 60 is Los Angeles on a decent day. 200 is unhealthy. 300 is hazardous. At 5:00 am on October 18th, the Beijing AQI was 447, constituting an emergency, though nobody was taking emergency measures.

Can the AQI surpass 500? Yes. Has it passed 500? Yes. What happens at 500: the canary dies. Even coal miners have masks. But what exactly do these numbers mean? I need context, so I asked everyone I know who speaks English: the boys' teachers, expats, Austin's co-workers, "What exactly does an AQI of 447 mean?" Is it equivilent to smoking cigarettes, equal to taking a pull off a tailpipe? Equal to sitting in front of a campfire and singing Kumbiyah? Do I REALLY have to keep my boys indoors? Lungs can regenerate after two years, you know.

Only Kyle could give me a satisfactory perspective. Kyle is a naval attache living in Beijing with his family. He actually hooked up one of his cigarettes to the AQI machine. It registered 67. Kyle figures he is actually cleaning the Beijing air by smoking it through his filter. Yikes! 447 is bad. It's scary bad. The boys are climbing the walls. Fortunately our Park Ave ceilings are nice and high.

So next time you see an EPA employee, give them a hug. For all my ultra-conservative friends, come, I invite you to experience life without the clean air act. It's *cough, wheeze* awesome. If you can't make it, don't worry this toxic cloud is coming your way soon enough.

Summing up The Sheppards First Week in Beijing

Dragon

"He calls you ribbon, but her name is dragon!!!!!!" Said Robert with a grin spanning his earlobes. He of course was referring to me as dragon. Robert was our driver before Mr. Wang. Robert drove us to the Great Wall on our trial trip in August. Robert is jovial and has an excellent command of English. Robert thinks I'm brash, perhaps crazy and that I am a terrible house-keeper.

He first admonished me on that Wall trip. Honestly, I said nothing during the first hour of our ride to The Wall other than a polite greeting. I was exhausted after a week of school and apartment hunting and preferred to stare out the Nissan Sentra's window at the passing countryside. I could spend all day looking out windows if the territory is unfamiliar. China qualifies as unfamiliar. I never even been anywhere in Asia until now.

The landscape between Beijing and Xianshui (pronounced Shee -on- shway) was rather boring: flat, pinkish caked earth, pocked by many thousands of poplar and eucalyptus trees planted in rows to bulwark the Northern Capital from the sandy winds that blast it every Spring spanned for miles. The scenery changed to more beautiful walnut groves and fruit orchards and quaint villages with wandering chickens, donkey-drawn carts and the tiniest of tiny Mao-era elderly as we approached the foothills of the Donkey Saddle Mountain Range. The road is shared by all manner of transport, foot, cart, car and truck alike.

The traffic getting out of Beijing was an awful mess. It took us more than an hour to get to the first toll road. At one point the cars started to move and Austin cheered our imminent progress. Within minutes, however, we were clumped together again and resumed idling. All I said was, "So much for the traffic clearing." It was an innocent comment, muttered without the faintest trace of sarcasm, but Robert wheeled his head around and delighted: "Ahhhhhhhhh, she speaks with sharp tongue!!!! She perhaps wears the pants, no? Hahahahahahah" Oh, Robert. Oh, China, you ain't seen or heard nothing from me yet.


Trading the Tourist Visa in for the Resident Visa.

The Sheppards are here in Beijing. Half of China seems to know this and every last one of them seems to be in our employ. We'll call them handlers. I heard that term today over coffee with a lovely, more seasoned expat. Handlers, I like that; it's fitting. First came the airport handler, you know the guy you always see in the navy suit behind the security checkpoint with the sign reading "Sheppard Austin." That dude.

Airport handler was tall, like many Beijingers (the Asians are short stereotype does not apply to the Northerners) and walked a million miles an hour. His sole purpose was to walk in front of us quickly. He said nothing and led us to baggage claim and straight to customs quarantine, both places we could have easily found ourselves. Well, I guess we can say that quarantine found us. Yap Master Ruby couldn't stop barking for five minutes and it cost her 30 days in the doggie slammer. Now we have to employ another village to feed and check in on Ruby.

Airport handler vanished into thin air and two more handlers came skipping into his place and stuffed our whole family, two cars seats, plus 14 giant duffle bags into a a brand-new Honda Odyssey minivan that isn't because it is way smaller than my Odyssey. It was a tight squeeze, so tight that Handlers 2 and 3 got to stay behind and continue the hard work of chain-smoking in a polluted city.


That left us with Mr. Wang our driver who ferried us to home sweet Park Avenue. We stayed up long enough to unpack all the Legos and find some clean pajamas and make the beds. Lisa, our, um, apartment broker (???) was kind enough to hire another handler--that makes 4-- to get us some sheets, pillows and duvets to cover the rock-hard mattresses. I think it was around 10 pm that we Sheppards were journeying through the land of nod.

The boys woke up at 2:30 a.m. This made us good and tired for the 9:00 am arrival of our broker Lisa and another dude whose purpose again was unclear to do an apartment walk through and sign the lease. It's worthy to mention that since the walk through, where we noted only minor damage, this whole damn apartment is falling apart: dishwasher's busted, drawer handles are falling off, the ceiling is leaking, the windows don't open, stay open or shut, the bathroom reeks like a port-a-potty and one of the posts of our four-poster bed toppled over. These are first-world problems, as my dear friend Jill says, and we are thrilled with our location, the space and our view and will continue to be so with the walls crumbling around us.

The following two days were lovely, clear days with mild weather and sunny skies that we got to spend in the car or inside sundry government offices. We first had to get a bank account and register with the police. All foreigners have to register with the local police within 24 hours of arrival. To this end, apparated handler Sean, who is an American with and enviable command of Mandarin. Sean used his Guanxi (pronounced Gwan She and meaning "pull") to get us VIP status within the ICBC Bank. VIP status let us bypass the line and fill out less paperwork--14 forms instead of 2,348,006!

VIP status or no, it still took half the business day to open an account. The paperwork is in Mandarin with a few poorly-translated English words for guidance. We kept having to fill out the same form over and over, the first time because I did not put my middle name in the space. The form did not ask for my middle name, only my first and last. But the VIP teller wanted my middle name so he tore up the form and made me start fresh. Then, I stupidly did not check the box marked with only a "U." I don't know what checking "U" meant: perhaps "U Suck" or "Undone" or "U go home" or "U give me all your money and U don't get back"? Instead of just letting me check the mysterious "U" box, he tore up the form and made me start all over. I was so careful, so totally fastidiously careful to write my middle name and check the "U" box, but then I wrote in my address where the form said address and this was totally, clearly, absolutely NOT the right thing to do, for the teller snatched it again in a huff and shredded it and called his manager who started gesticulating wildly and yelling and then handed me a new form. This continued with a few more shreddings until the teller, exasperated that a VIP could be so utterly retarded, circled the only two line items I need concern my sorry bourgiouse ass with.

So this is how you open a bank account in China

1) Go to bank
2) Use Guanxi to get VIP status
3) Fill out form as follows:

First Name: Lesley Duncan Sheppard Last Name:

Address:

U (Insert Check Mark)


After the pleasurable banking experience, we drove to the Police Station. Only the police station moved and there was no indication as to where, like, say a cheery sign: "Your Local Police Station has moved to XYZ street. We Execute to Bring You Inconvenience!" The people in the crowded street--and when I say crowded, I don't mean Seattle crowded, or even LA crowded, I mean China crowded--that was lined with scores of shops selling nothing but vinyl windows and PVC pipes had strong opinions regarding where the police station might have moved. I noticed everybody gave a long-winded response and all pointed in different directions. I asked Sean if any of the people actually knew the station's new location, and he said "of course not." "Well, then, why do they respond with an answer they know is false?" I asked. "To save face." More on that face business later.

The best part of Mission Police Station was that Mr. Wang our driver had to back all the way down the street because it was physically impossible to turn around. Mr. Wang is bad ass, he managed to squeeze through a tangle of buses, cars, carts, bicycles, three-wheelers, rolling toasters, adults and children without scratching the Odyssey or sending anyone to the hospital. I think I might call him Mr. Mario Andretti Wang henceforth.

We did register, several hours and several police stations later. The residents in Park Avenue had to go to a specific police station, we were informed. We also got cell phones after going to 4 stores. Apparently you cannot possibly purchase a phone, a sim card and a plan in one place.


These first few days lived and learned a very important rule of life in China: You can only accomplish 2 things in any given day. Everything takes 5 times as long as it does in the States. You can go to a market and cook dinner; you can go to work and go home, you can volunteer and your kids' school and pay the water bill. Go to Mandarin class, pick up kids from the bus. The 2 task rule is why everyone lives with grandparents and great grandparents and divides up the labor. If you don't have a village, you buy one, and the Sheppards already have a village on retainer.

Carrefour
I deserved a Western shopping experience. We just spent 18 hours on an Air China plane with Chinese-only movie options and two kids, one of whom refused to sleep. I deserved a Western shopping experience. We just spent 3 days trying to make ourselves legal and reachable that included 3 trips to police stations--foreigners have to register with the police within 24 hours of arrival--and 4 failed attempts to get phones.

I deserved a Western shopping experience. I had already elbowed my way through enough crowds and crossed the 20-lane ring roads with my kids. I don't yet speak a lick of Mandarin and I had groceries and small appliances to buy: humidifiers because everyone has, like, 4 of them, and it's so dry here the Tom's toothpaste turns rock hard when the cap is left off, and it's always left off; an iron, because Austin does not believe in the wrinkle-free convenience of lycra and polyester additives or the rumpled look; and a hairdryer because I cannot go out in below-freezing temperatures with wet hair.

I decided to go to Carrefour. Carrefour is French-owned company. The French can make fire hydrants look like works of art. Carrefour will be pleasant, I concluded.

Mr. Wang drove us to Carrefour in our rented Honday Odyssey-That-Isn't. Amazon pays for Mr. Wang. Mr. Wang sighs a lot and does not speak English. I don't think Mr. Wang likes us. Mr. Wang drives and waits, drives and waits, drives and waits. That's his job.

Carrefour looked promising until we rounded the high-walled entrance. There it was. There was that wiggling, vectoring mass that is China again. Hundreds of people all going different directions. The shopping carts stood parked in an inclined lot made of a dirt rock slurry. How do you drag a cart up and out of a rocky beach when it's part of a rusted, sticky serpentine of 500 other carts? I reluctantly let go of the kids' hands to separate one cart from the train of conjoined carts. I clutched and pulled and kicked and sweated and swore and pulled and kicked some more until finally I spot a lone cart left by and shopper some hundred paces away and I make a run for it because half of China wants that same damn cart. My legs are longer so the cart is mine and I secure it by hugging it while steam is pouring from my nostrils to let other shoppers know to step off. I scream at Eli and Finn to keep up and hold on tight to the cart because, dear God, what on earth will I do if I lose them in this Carrefour crowd?

The entrance to Carrefour is at the end of a long, steep ramp. I'm trying to push the cart up this slippery ramp with one hand while I hold fast to Finn, my perpetually curious wanderer, keep an eye on Eli and control the blown-out wheels that are all pivoting in different directions. I am sliding backward and my cart bangs into the wall. I am sweating and I don't usually sweat. I pick up a protesting Finn and throw him into the cart and regain tenuous control using two hands. Along the ramp are product reps shouting at me and trying to stuff items into my cart. The Tide lady tosses a three-pack of detergent into my cart and I hand it back. She pushes it back towards me, insisting. I want to tell her I hate Tide. I want to tell her Tide smells like fast-food workers. I want to tell her that I'm not racist or classist, but it smells like my days working at Ricos and that the perfume doesn't come out until I wash it 5 times with my own detergent. But I can't speak a word and just press on until I can get to a place to jettison the Tide without her seeing.

Finally, I reach the top of the ramp and cough and blink as the two-million watts of flourescent lamps and the familiar, toxic smell of pvc-coated China overwhelmes my senses. Carrefour is huge and unabashedly cluttered like a Super Walmart after a 6 magnitude earthquake, however the aisles are Trader Joe's narrow. To make navigation still more challenging is the constant restocking taking place. In America, grocery stores are re-stocked between 1-3 in the morning. You get the best free moving boxes at 3:00 a.m. In China, restocking happens during business hours, in front of you, and the employees don't give a rat's ass if they are in the way. You run into a restock pile, you have to back down the 400-meter aisle (no room to turn) with your shrapnel-pile-of-a-cart squeaking, jerking and seizing up and you don't complain because this is du jour in China.

This ain't no Western shopping experience, I can tell you that. Oh, holy dragon dung, my eyes and nose and throat are burning but at least I see the puffs of mist issuing forth from the humidifier section. I feel like my husband in the bread aisle: so many options and a huge range of prices and I just want a machine, any machine, so long as it moistens the air so my hands don't crack and Finn's nose doesn't bleed and my toothpaste does not petrify. And then here comes the humidifier reps, two of them, sounding like pirates with their heavy "arrrrh" Beijing accent. I am very happy for their help, though I can't understand a word and I end up with a cracked-egg shaped machine that makes me happy just looking at it and a flourescent-green frog whose steam streams from the slits in its eyes.

I grab a blow-drier and an iron and I don't even look at the prices because I have to make my way down to the grocery store on Level 1 and the kids are getting restless and I'm now starting to worry that they won't take my ICBC China debit card because most places in China accept cash only. We have to slip and slide down to Level 1; we need cereal badly. Eli's nirvana is a world made of cereal; he's the kid who cries sometimes when I make pancakes and bacon because he wants cereal. He will not entertain noodles with vegetables or pumpkin soup or rice or buckwheat congee for breakfast. The healthier cereals at Park Avenue's fancy April Gourmet cost between $6 and $9 for a box holding 2-3 bowls worth. I don't care if I live on Park Avenue, I will not pay $6 for a morning's worth of cereal. Not in China. Not anywhere.

We travel up and down and up and down aisle after endless aisle and I'm starting to feel sick to my stomach and we are parched and we can't find the cereal because there is no cereal outside the foreign food section that offers the same $9 boxes of Cheerios, so we head towards the checkout line, ten million carts long, and I am even more worried I can't pay and people are staring at my tottering cart, jammed with appliances and brooms and buckets and mops and more Halloween shit, and that bourgeois guilt starts creeping in my gut as I notice that everyone else has two or three-items in their cart and I think Great Holy Dragon dung, you people have endured all this for two potatoes and a sponge?

Then I remember that it's mostly Chinese who live at posh Park Avenue and it's only Chinese who live in the pent houses two floors above. I'm am still feeling painfully privileged but slightly vindicated when the checker barks out something in Mandarin that I can only assume means I can't have the cracked-egg humidifier that makes me giggle. A manager is called over to bark the same message, only louder, and crisply walks away with my egg and I don't understand why I can't have it and I feel instantly sad as I timidly hand over my ICBC debit card that required filling out 1 form about 7 times and, fortunately, the reader accepts it. I have to navigate through the machine's Mandarin prompts and I can only hope that they are asking me to okay the amount and for my password.

I pay and wheel the cart back down the death ramp where a barely five-foot tall woman accosts me with a fist full of crumpled receipts in hand. She's talking to me but it sounds like she's yelling. Does she want my receipt? If so, why? Is this some scam? She is not wearing a Carrefour uniform, this must be a scam. Or a diversion to steal my frog humidifier. Don't touch my frog! The yang in me says she's like the Costco door checkers, looking to see that the contents of your basket match the receipt. I decide to ignore the security checkpoint/possible thief, to take my chances and keep skidding to the rocky beach hill that I now understand must be a runaway cart ramp. Suddenly I feel everyone is eyeing my cart a little too eagerly. I start to get nervous, but there is Mr. Wang. Thank God.