It’s
good to be home again. Certain
routines only happen when you’re home. You can try to meditate, and exercise
and eat right and spend sensibly when you’re on the road but it isn’t
consistent. Bits always fall
off. Exhausted last
night. Delayed flight finally
arrived, get home five minutes before another conf call. Go up stairs to say good night to the
kids but they’re already off to sleep.
But this morning, I was up early and off on a fresh start.
My little one seems to still be a little jet lagged like me
a week after we got back. I heard
her video game bleeping off in the distance when I was trying to
concentrate. Later when I came out
I asked her to wrap it all up in five and she did. She wanted to show me the books she’d gotten out of the
library at her new school. “I got
six!” “Cool. What did you get?”
She had six books on cooking deserts, with titles like
“Really Cool Ice Cream Cakes.”
Mastering my urge to say anything negative, I sat down with her to have
a look. Like any parent, I’m
sensitive to having her gobble up eat endless sweets, even if she goes through
the trouble of reading a recipe and making them. The night before she’d made cupcakes for all her new
classmates. Not a bad tactic for
establishing some points as the new kid.
Later when we were in the and I moved the drivers seat back from where
my wife keeps the seat to something that would accommodate me, I crunched the
basket that she had all the cupcakes neatly lined up in and this almost got me
assassinated.
It was drizzling outside. In dry, dusty Beijing, this is categorically a good
thing. Wipers flapping, I noticed
that my wife had Amy Winehouse’ 2002 album, “Frank” in the car CD player and
turned it up. Everyone is in our
squad is an Amy fan and there aren’t many musicians I can say that about. We used to have her on all the
time a few years back and somehow it felt almost nostalgic to hear her, and I
thought of the first few times I’d heard this disc, in one instance, oddly,
driving around the eastern shores of South Korea with a friend.
We arrived at the school. I do not have the driving routine down. I waved the guards going through but
then one gave me the screw-face. I
pointed to our newly affixed sticker in the window, which I’d mistakenly
positioned behind the top layer of tint so that it is difficult to see from the
outside. He unscrewed his face and
let us pass. Inside there is a
logical little queue one proceeds along until you reach the point where you
drop off your child. No one is
beeping. No one is harried. People stop and allow kids to cross the
road. Oddly carefree, everyone is
suddenly 不厌其烦[1]. Normal,
you might well imagine, but I can almost guarantee that none of these drivers
would behave this way, outside of these school walls.
I have written many times about the chaotic drop off
situation, a mere 500 yards across the way, at the Chinese school my kids used
to attend. The staff there are
professional, the school is well funded, the parents all seem to drive
remarkably expensive cars, but no one has any patience for anyone else and
drives in and out of the long straight path down, selfishly. How can this be?
You drive through a gate and are forced to slow down to a
crawl. There is a feeling perhaps,
passing through that the old rules don’t apply anymore. Impatient, chaotic, selfishness will
somehow not be tolerated and with all the pylons pinning you in and guards
standing about, there is a narrowness of possibility for, say, doing whatever
the hell you want. Having said all
this, I know that it is only a matter of time before I dash back home one day to
say that the beautiful, regulated ideal, was only a myth, when someone cuts me
off and draws forth from my bowls loud invective my daughter’s will want to
query me on: “why did you yell
‘your mother’s ass, bitch’ to my classmate’s father, dad?”
Driving off, “Stronger Than Me” was on and I turned it up
and tried, I noticed, to listen to the lyrics more closely than usual. And one doesn’t get far before
something like “Poor Amy” crosses one’s mind. At the corner of An Hua Jie and Tian Bei Lu I paused to let
an old man on a bike continue in front of me. He paused as well and looked at me like I needed my head
examined: “Why are you, a car,
giving way to me, a bike?” The
residue of my patient, polite, plodding at the school was still coating my
judgment.
[1]
bùyànqífán: not to mind taking all
the trouble (idiom) / to take great pains / to be very patient
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