This is a shout out to our friends B & A in St. Louis who sent us the most awesome care package last week (our first), full of whole grain goodness granola bars, organic chocolate, magazines galore (including Alabama Heritage, my old editorial stomping ground), and a festive Turkey centerpiece, among other treats. You guys are the best, so I dedicate this photo of the best billboard I've seen in a long time to you. Think of it as our deepest-felt thanks.
In return I got this nice e-mail from one of my students and I'd like to pass off the greeting to you all, since I think it really sums up the spirit of Thanksgiving:
"It's the life make us to know each other and I should be thankful to the life and to you as well. Thank you for all the happiness you have brought to me.
In this beatiful Thanksgiving day, I may not be aside with you, however, please do take the deepest wish from my heart to you. Happy everyday, and keep in touch. No more distance is longer than the distance between heart. Have fun everyday."
Couldn't have said it better myself. My tryptophan-induced dreams are of you this holiday season (yes, we have turkey in China...my students say it is poor-people food, though).
Peter is home in Idaho with his family, and I am feeling farther away from home than ever, so I needed at least this public space to mourn Mimi’s passing, remember her kindnesses, and wish her restful peace.
I would be one of three foreigners working for a company of literally thousands of Chinese employees in one big building full of tiny cubicles, like a giant ant colony of travel agents. The commute would be almost an hour and a half by bike and metro. At the end of my interview, I was so fired up about the job I wanted to stay in Shanghai for years and years just for the opportunity to really get to know China. (Oh yeah, free language classes at lunch, too.) But then I stopped to think: didn't I leave a really great job because I wanted more of an adventure than the adventure travel business could offer me? I had a job where I got to learn about the whole world with remarkable travel opportunities (South Georgia!). But working full-time is not for me. I don't know what I was thinking applying for another job when I work 12 hours a week and make enough money for both of us to live a really fun life in Shanghai. I like sleeping in and drinking coffee and listening to podcasts with Peter in the morning and going to the dumpling shop for lunch before we have to go to school. I like to have time to work on my book and write, which was put on hold the whole time I was working full-time.
What to do? I have to decide next week. I think I will offer up my skills part-time. I know I can't commute for three hours every day of the week. No dream job is worth that to me. I would be working with a Canadian journalist and a fellow American MFA (my first MFA I've met in the wild). The pay is really good and it would be an opportunity to work for a Chinese company and the learning experiences and quirks that would offer.
Any advice would be appreciated as I face this decision. In the meantime I have a pretty sweet baby-sitting gig watching Winston every now and then. Gina pays me in homemade granola, which is worth its weight in gold to me.
Perhaps it will help to tell you that Peter is Idaho right now and I am in Shanghai and it's raining. But that's not all of it. I felt this way in Seattle, too, so much so that once I drove to Mt. Rainier in the middle of the week and called in sick so I could just stay on the top of a mountain by myself for a few days and chill out. It was one of the best trips of my life. But there is no Mt. Rainier here. It is days and days to the closest place that could be considered wilderness. There is no way to escape except a mindshift into appreciating the urban jungle of a large Asian city.
There is a new store close to our house called Outdoor Store. They sell imported camping gear and the inside looks like a small-town Chinese version of REI. Shaved log banisters, some pine sprigs here and there, etc. They have all the name brands: Marmot, Arcteryx, North Face, SmartWool, Nalgene, etc. A windproof fleece there costs more than our rent, which is probably true in the U.S. too, but here nothing costs as much as a month's rent, nothing comes even close. A pair of SmartWool socks costs twice as much as an entire evening for both of us to go to dinner and the spa with a massage. Peter and I can't help but go in there and look around whenever we walk by. We touch everything. It feels like it should: warm, lightweight, waterproof, breathable, technical. Downstairs there are tents and sleeping bags and campstoves and carabineers. We wonder what they would charge us to spend a night in the display camp, use the warm down sleeping bags and cook breakfast over the not-backpacker-friendly charcoal stove and eat with the lightweight aluminum chopticks. Sometimes we think we might be able to sleep in that dark tent and pretend we're home.
I'm always planning my next vacation. I've got several lined right now, more than we can possibly accomplish if we want to come home in July and spend time in the Bitteroots or the Owyhees. Right now I'm hooked on Hokkaido, the northernmost (undisputed) part of Japan, where in winter, you can stay on a wooded peninsula jutting out into the sea enjoying thermal pools while looking out at the southernmost extent of the sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere. Stellar's Sea Eagles come down for the winter and small brown bears--distant cousins of our grizzlies--are hiding somewhere in dens.
Yesterday, I lay in bed watching a Planet Earth marathon while it poured what I'm pretty sure was acid rain outside. It was a kind of medicine, a therapy. Me and David Attenborough contemplating the world and its untouched places and that fine line between knowledge of the world and destruction of the world. It helped a little, but I still got out of bed and went to the computer to see how much it would cost to get to Hokkaido if I left tomorrow. Turns out I'd have to have Sir David's salary to get there, so I got on my bike and rode to the closest person selling roasted sweet potatoes and enjoyed the smallest, cheapest thing I could find that would make me happy in Shanghai.
Snack food: The food in China is good overall. It's greasy, but full of veggies and fruits--in season and local, so that's nothing to complain about. But we've been digging all the crazy snack foods. Crackers come in a staggering variety of flavors, and while we usually stick to simpler flavors like sesame and black pepper, we can't help but sample the chicken curry or mexican beef or italian meat pizza flavors. The Chinese also have a propensity for seeds and I'm hooked on cinnamon-flavored watermelon seeds and salty roasted lima beans.
Street food: This is a separate category from snack food. What I'm appreciating here is the accessibility of food. When you are hungry, there is always something fast and delicious nearby. I love the men who sell sweet potatoes that they roast over oil drums they wheel around the city. In the summer there was melon on a stick. Kebabs of all sorts are on every block along with a boazi shop, selling fluffy rice dough balls filled with pork, greens, root vegetables, or red bean paste. And there are convenience stores everywhere, so you can wash your street food down with bottled water, all manor of iced teas, milk tea, coffee milk, fizzy orange juice, or cola.
Old people: Chinese old people rock. A few of them are grumpy, but man are they healthy. The look twenty or thirty years younger than they are and are out and about doing everything. In the very Chinese neighborhood next to ours, the retired people sit in circles on these little tiny squatting stools and just talk or shuck beans or play cards. They stay social and active and live with their families, so it is so unlike a depressing nursing home. Nice work, China.
Babies: They are so cute sometimes it almost makes me cry. And they wear these awesome split-pants (no need for diapers--what a waste), and while it's gross when they pee in the middle of the bank line, they look really cute with their butts hanging out. But what I don't understand is why the Chinese bundle up their kids ridiculously in winter (like now even though it is almost 70 degrees, it's November, so there's a dress code), they have this crazy cold breeze right in their crotches. Also, the Chinese adore children. They are always giving candy or toys to Winston when we go out with him or play games with him or teach him Chinese. And while he sometimes can't deal with some of the old ladies who get in his face (he swats at them if they're not careful), he always seems to find himself an adopted grandfather whom he will adore for a few short minutes (makes me jealous).
Bikes: Man I love riding my bike in Shanghai. I love living in a bike society. Stupid Seattle with its spandex-clad white guys, riding to work like it was the freaking tour-de-france, had nothing on Shanghai. Everyone rides a bike everywhere. It is a vehicle; it is a tool; it is a part of life. There are big bike lanes everywhere, fenced off from the dangerous streets. People haul stuff on bikes; people take their babies on bikes; even the mailman rides a bike. And all the bikes are pimped out with racks and baskets and fenders. I love that it's not a status symbol; it's totally functional. It's not a statement (I hated when I told people I rode my bike to work in Seattle and they would say "good for you.") It's not excercise. It's life, and it will be hard to go back to driving a car when we move back to the states.
Laundry: It doesn't matter how small your apartment is or how poor you are, everyone in Shanghai has a washing machine. No laundry mats exist. You have this little washing machine in the bathroom and you hang everything out the window to dry. I never want a dryer again. Think of the energy being saved by not encouraging 18 million people that they need to dry their clothes electrically. Sure our clothes end up smelling like pollution, but we've come to expect nothing less.
Is that enough? These are the things I will miss about Shanghai when we're gone. In many ways, even though this is one of the biggest, most industrialized cities in the world, life is simpler here. We only go where our legs can take us. We only eat what we can afford to bring in from local farms. We can only wash a week's worth of clothes at a time, so our wardrobes are smaller. We can only say hello and goodbye and thank you and sometimes that's all the interaction we need to have. We smile a lot when we don't understand and the Chinese smile back. Our apartment guard calls us friend and a bottle of beer costs twenty-five cents. I guess there isn't much to complain about.
