The Beautiful Country

Just back in Beijing after a three-week visit to the U.S., I can't help but catalog the variety of places and things I've done. In fact, I've been telling people it could almost be a "Best of America" tour, if such a thing is possible, and if one could actually pick a best out of so many treasures.

Let's start with the locations: lake and seaside Maine; Hudson Valley and Catskills of upstate New York; Washington, DC; Denver and the Rockies; and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Let's move on to the food: lobster and blueberry pancakes (hat tip Lori Bruno); sweet corn on the cob; risotto (Uncle Richie's finest); grilled peaches; Brooks barbecue in Oneonta; delicious latkes; Guapos guacamole; blueberry coffee cake (hat tip Carol Conlon); Maryland crab cakes; restaurant week meals at Jaleo (patatas brava and flan) and Siroc; Pete's clam pizza; Cafe Ole's sultan’s stew; Hudson valley cheese; macaroni and cheese and fried chicken at a wedding; pappardelle in Denver; spinach salad on the grounds of Denver's beautiful botanical gardens, scallops from the Outer Banks in Chapel Hill.

And the little ones: my cousin Maria's sweet Quinn and Declan; the Davis kiddos, all five darlings, all five perfect; Sufi, with his easy smiles and extroverted personality.

And the experiences: two bonfires (hat tip Tom Bruno and Josh O'Leary); one wedding (elegant and beautiful Tricia); swimming in one lake and one pool (hat tip Lori Bruno and Jennifer Taylor); one Rocky Mountain drive through a pelting hailstorm; one latke bake off; one afternoon of corn hole; jogs by the Hudson River, the Susquehanna river, the pine-scented hills of Chapel Hill; and to the Iwo Jima memorial in DC; a chance to toss a nickel on the grave of Buffalo Bill; a look inside the home of Thomas Cole; being in Washington on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington; putting a large decal tree on the wall of Daniel's apartment.

I've spent time on three college campuses: my own Oneonta, looking spiffy and landscaped; beautiful University of Denver, with its red rock buildings and curving sidewalks; and even more beautiful UNC, with its ancient trees and colonial brick buildings, southern charm at its best.

As always, I've been just overwhelmed with the generosity of friends and family who have picked me up from airports, put me up, fed me, and taken time to have a breakfast, coffee, lunch, drinks, or dinner with me.

I haven't had much time to write or study Chinese, and there's a new baby who just joined our Beijing "family," so I'm also looking forward to getting back to my life in China (and especially to wow Smudge with the 20 cans of cat food I've brought her. I'm sure she'll be grateful.), but this break has been everything a vacation should be: relaxing, fun, caloric, with plenty of time and laughs with people who mean so much to me.

Maine sunset

Lobsta time

Mom and Dan

Billy, Lori, Mike, Jane

Family on the dock.

All the Davis cuties.

Tricia was a beautiful bride.

Soaking up the sun in Denver.

Recovering from running in Chapel Hill.

Good Eggs, Bad Eggs

This is another installment of my Cooking Adventures in China series. It can also fall into the subset called I Didn't Poison My Guests.

To explain: I decided to have a kids-are-gone-so-keep-myself-distracted dinner party. And then, I decided that Beijing's hot and humid weather inspired me to do a party with summer foods: deviled eggs, guacamole and chips, salmon fillet, potato salad, ratatouille, and a peach tarte tatin for dessert. Inspired, as I said.

So the first thing I needed to do was boil some eggs for the deviled eggs and the potato salad. I did that and then Bob and I went out to buy the rest of the ingredients for the dinner party. It's a laborious process that involves a cab ride to the market at Sanyuanli because I'm a little uncertain about the fish at a local wet market, and then a stop at Jenny Lou's for things like whipping cream, a baguette, ice.

The first egg-related tactical error came about when, in an effort to prevent a mesh bags of eggs to be crushed, I put them in my purse. After we finished shopping, we hailed a cab because the weather was about 95, humid and dangerously polluted. I hopped into the car.

Crunch, went my purse.
I decided to wait until I got home to view the carnage.
As I exited the cab, I heard another crunch. Luckily, I had put the eggs inside a second plastic bag, so that the instant omelet was contained. Two eggs lost. It could have been worse.

Then we walked into our apartment.
"What is that SMELL?" I asked Bob accusingly. (31 years of marriage allows me to say these sorts of things accusingly with little or no evidence to support the accusing tone.)

"I don't smell anything," said Bob, who never smells anything.

In China, an unusual smell could come from all sorts of places: a pipe in the bathroom where the septic gases seem to back up every now and then, the neighbor's decision to fry up some rank fish, the air, the great unwashed in the unventilated elevators.

But this was a smell almost like.....rotten eggs. So many people compare bad smells to the smell of rotten eggs that I just didn't make the connection. (And yes, it's possible that I've dropped a few brain cells in my China sojourn.)

I proceeded to start preparing the deviled eggs. This was where it all got very interesting. As I peeled the eggs, I realized that some of the whites were more of a gray than white. Hmmmmm. And when I sliced the eggs, I discovered that in some, the yolk wasn't a round spot in the center of the egg, but more of an odd yellow squiggle at one end. Hmmmmm again.

Then my remaining brain cells kicked in and I remembered that not too long ago, there had been a rash of stories about fake eggs in the markets. Someone figured out that it was actually cheaper to use gelatin and who knows what to make fake eggs to save money. How this is possible is beyond my limited mental capacity. But you can look it up.

When I revealed my suspicions to Bob, he said, helpfully, "Maybe we shouldn't use these eggs for our dinner party." And then he sat down on the couch and said, "Let me know if you need me to do anything!"

I remembered I had the purse eggs, so I boiled up the ones that had survived the journey in the purse. These smelled like eggs, good eggs.

But before I could add the mayonnaise that we had just bought, I opened the jar. Mold. I think Bob was somewhat surprised to find himself marching back to Jenny Lou's to replace the mayo, since I rarely take him up on his offer of "help." But this time it came in handy. And it gave me a second opportunity not to poison my guests. Win-win.

I write this on the day after the dinner party, where I think I can safely assume I would have had news if I had caused any problems. And if you happen to be reading this and happen to have been one of those guests, um, hey.

I was too much in a state of shock and horror to photograph the bad eggs, but I do have evidence of the successful deviled eggs. Whether the first batch was fake or just rotten is still uncertain to me. Whether I'm brave enough to venture deviled eggs again in this country is also uncertain.

But I think I can safely say a good time was had by all.

My Fraudulent Life, Revealed

Dear readers, I am a fraud. I’ve been going on for quite some time now in this role, but I have to come clean.

Here’s my truth: I keep winning trophies at bowling. But my name is Debbie and I’m a mediocre bowler. My approach is a totally clumsy stride up to the line where I seem to consistently manage to add an odd twist to the ball just as it leaves my hands, sending my body into an odd contortion and sending the ball invariably off to the side or into the gutter. I stand there leaning like an idiot, hoping the force of my powerful thinking will help the ball get back on course.

And yet, the organizers of the International Friendship Bowling League insist on handing me these classy awards. I’m like that kid who shows up to the Saturday morning soccer games just because everybody does that on Saturdays and you sometimes get jelly donuts afterwards.

I don’t deserve these trophies. Look at them.

1.      HIGH GAME WITH HANDICAP, WOMEN’S CATEGORY, INT’L FRIENDSHIP BOWLING LEAGUE, AUTUMN 2012, BEIJING, PRC, DEB BRUNO

2.      HIGH SERIES SCRATCH, WOMEN’S CATEGORY, INT’L FRIENDSHIP BOWLING LEAGUE, SPRING 2013, BEIJING, CHINA, DEBBIE BRUNO

3.      3^RD PLACE, INT’L FRIENDSHIP BOWLING LEAGUE, SPRING 2013, BEIJING, CHINA, OAKWOOD DRAGONS

I’m not sure why Claes, our esteemed captain, gave me the third-place trophy to take home. It might be because he has a little kid at home who might impale himself on it. In any event, I have this shameful collection.

But the other day Bob, in his ever-helpful way, suggested a new use for the trophies. He observed that all expats in China really deserve trophies for putting up with the various difficulties and challenges we face on a daily basis. So I’ve decided to repurpose my trophies, awarding them back to myself for reasons I truly deserve this time.

1.      INTERNET ZEN: 636 days of Internet mafan, including a VPN that shuts out dozens of times a day, creating a Facebook “page not available” sign, a wireless system that cuts out 8 times a day, and the occasional inexplicable denial of the ability to search for, say, peach cobbler online.

2.      TUMMY TROUBLE: Bravery in the face of ice cubes with as much bacteria as toilet water, New Zealand milk that may have botulism, pigs floating in rivers, chickens connected to bird flu, grilled meat that may or may not be rat, exploding watermelons, and bean paste ice cream. Not to mention appetizers that arrive 20 minutes after an entrée, waiters that expect you to order food within 10 seconds of sitting, and “napkins” thinner than the thinnest tissue.

3.      TRANSPORTATION VALOR: Ability to cross the street as cars, bikes, dogs, people, buses, trucks come from every direction to impede your passing. Ability to hail a taxi and insist that the driver take you where you want to go, or within approximate walking distance. Ability to fight your way off a subway car as clueless Beijing-ren stand and stare at their iphones and ignore the fact that they’re completely blocking exit and entry. 

To Everything There Is a Season

Bob and I are about to enter into a new phase of our living-abroad adventure: a totally kid-free period. Now, there are couples out there who enjoy the empty nest and feel it allows them a whole lot more freedom. We, however, enjoyed having our kids around, Daniel for brief periods when he would pop up from tropical Guangzhou and complain about Beijing’s weather, and Joanna for the whole time we’ve been in Beijing, half living with us, and half with friends.

Joanna and I had our weekly manicures, our “Mad Men” nights, many dinners out, plus Thanksgiving, birthdays, Hanukkah, Passover, and just-because dinners. We shopped together, we admired Chinese babies, we swam in the pool at Seasons Park.

In any event, I’m excited about the next stages for Daniel in Denver and Joanna in Chapel Hill, happy that they’re able to do grad school with scholarships and not be saddled with horrible debt in two years. I know that they’ve got a perspective on the world from all their travels that few twentysomethings have, and that they’ll bring a larger understanding to their studies.

But I’m looking at the next period with a certain amount of trepidation. I’ve never lived abroad without having my kids around to share it.

And Joanna’s departure yesterday was not without a certain level of mafan – trouble. First, the weather. I told her that China clearly didn’t want her to leave, as lightning lit up the night sky, and the heavens opened up. We went out to dinner in the neighborhood, but had to run home in the rain. That was a rookie mistake on my part. As we rounded into Seasons Park, Bob helpfully suggested that I cut past the locked gate and run in through the open car gate so as not to wait in the rain.

I scooted around the gate and wham, slipped and fell in a muddy puddle, twisting my knee badly and slicing my index finger with something on my umbrella. Good thing I was wearing white jeans.

But this was not about me.

We decided to hire a driver since we figured the traffic and the cab situation would be tough in bad weather. So we called Patrick, who supplied a very affable bald guy who clearly loved to chat with foreigners.

And so our trip to the airport was a full-on China moment, with the driver expressing shock at Bob’s age – “Wooooah,” he said – and remembering he took Joanna for her GRE tests in Beijing.

When he asked what Joanna was going to study in the U.S., we made an attempt at saying something to do with health.

“Yisheng?” he asked. (“Doctor?”)

“Chabudou,” we answered. (“More or less.”) We figured that going into detail about a master’s degree in public health was beyond our Chinese abilities.

“WOOOOAH,” he said.

I believe we also covered topics like: Ambassador Gary Locke’s trip to Tibet, a comparison of Chinese and American journalists, the state of Rupert Murdoch’s marriage, the high cost of visiting America, and, of course, whether we had another child. Every statement was met with a “Woooah” from our driver, who chuckled and swerved as he drove us to the airport.

It was a fitting end to Joanna’s China experience, and it was the perfect distraction from sadness. And fitting, too, that we found out at the airport that her delayed flight would probably cause her to miss connections in Canada. Mafan.

There’s certainly one good reason for her to leave: she seems to be a committed runner, going out on days when the PM 2.5 is around 160, a state that would cause a major freakout in America. And when she returned our fancy American air cleaner to us, a cleaner for which she hadn’t changed the filter in two years, this is what we found.

On the left, the gray dust from two years of sucking in Beijing air. On the right, a new carbon filter.

 

Last dinner at Lost Heaven.

Fun at the Fabric Market

Most folks think of a 95-degree day as an opportunity to hang out at the pool, go to the beach, or stay cool inside an air-conditioned home.

As for us, we like to head across town to the Muxiyuan fabric market. It's a giant market, rows of covered arcades with hundreds of individual fabric stores, many of them filled with leopard prints, hot orange, and patterns that have never been found in nature. But you can also find beautiful raw silk, tweed, cotton, and brocade, gorgeous if you're willing to wander and to dig.

And Joanna waited until the very end of her two years in Asia to decide to have something made. So on a blazingly hot Sunday afternoon we set off to Muxiyuan, a place I discovered thanks to Rachel and her friend Kate, a veteran seamstress.

It's a very Chinese sort of place, with little bare-bottomed children wandering around, motorcycles roaring through, and every vendor unfailingly polite as we slid open their glass doors to poke our way through mountains of fabric. Some shops reeked of fish that the workers must have had for lunch, others were filled with smoke from cigarettes.

The last time I was at Muxiyuan, I found fabric for a bedspread and more for a blouse within the first 20 minutes. I'm decisive that way. Joanna needs time to ponder, so we circled around and back and looked at pretty prints, and finally bought a couple of meters of fabric to make two dresses for her and one for me. The cab rides there and back cost almost as much as what we paid for the fabric, but it was all part of the adventure.

On the way home, we got one of Beijing's classic taxi drivers, a cheery guy who had only a vague sense of where we were going but was clearly delighted to have a couple of foreigners in his cab. He started shooting questions at us. We understood roughly half.
Where we we from? (that's always the first question)
Meiguo!
Are you from Russia?
No, Meiguo, we answered.

Our Chinese was good, he announced. (That's always the second comment, no matter how bad your Chinese is.)

Then he asked us how long we had lived in Beijing, what we did for a living, was I married, did Joanna have a boyfriend, how old were we, and did I have a son?

Yes, I told him. I have a son and a daughter.
That drew a big thumbs up from our driver, who twisted around in his seat and gave me a big grin. Chinese people think that having one son and one daughter is about the best thing you can do on this earth, and congratulate me as if I've accomplished something impressive. I guess if you're facing a one-child policy, it is impressive to have two of any gender.

With every answer, he smiled. When he asked us something we didn't understand, he cracked up, every single time. It's hard to imagine why it's so consistently funny that a couple of Americans can't quite follow the rapid questions from a Beijing cab driver, but he found it endlessly amusing.

Joanna imagined the guy going home to his wife and telling her about the hysterical fare he had this afternoon. So funny!

The whole experience reinforced my idea of most Chinese as relatively cheerful people. They put up with a lot, standing in long lines to wait to get on a crowded bus, living in apartments with no air conditioning, eating street food that may or may not be contaminated, and never having much peace and quiet in a city of 20 million people.

Every time I encounter a child when I get on an elevator, I say hello, as much for the shy "ni hao" I get back from the babies as it is for the beaming look on the grandfather's or ayi's face as I clearly recognize the wonderfulness of this child.

The default here is a smile. The chance encounters are always pleasant. It's my silver lining in a place that can try the most patient among us. 

We've Got Seoul

We just got back from a long weekend in Seoul, which was a welcome respite. Seoul is a city with coffee shops on every corner, and even though it's surrounded by mountains, it doesn't suffer the pollution inversion Beijing faces. We were also lucky enough to stay in a lovely hotel with a great shower (you know you've been in China too long when you get excited that the shower is not situated over the toilet), a great gym (lap lanes in the pool, and treadmills where it isn't even possible to blare your individual TV screen), and coffee in the room. Coffee in the room.

When we could tear ourselves away from these delights, we did explore Seoul. The highlight was our daylong trip to the DMZ, a place Bill Clinton called the scariest place on earth. As we rode in our tour bus north out of Seoul, we started noticing barbed wire along the Hangang river, a waterway that connected north and South Korea. It started to feel more like a war zone, especially after we got our first sight of North Korea, where our guide told us the hills had been denuded of trees since the people used the wood for heat. It looked green and hilly, kind of like South Korea, although also spooky in some way that probably had more to do with our imaginations than anything.

The trip nearly ended on the bus for me. I had decided that Seoul's heat meant I should wear a skirt. I did see that the (unexplained) dress code for a visit to the DMZ listed no sandals or open-toed shoes (not wanting the North Koreans to see our decadent pedicures?), no miniskirts, and no faded jeans. I chastised Bob for his ratty, faded jeans. Meanwhile, when the South Korean soldier got on the bus to check our passports, he spied my knees peeking out and muttered something to our tour guide. I had broken two rules: I was wearing a sleeveless top (I forgot that rule) and my skirt was too short.

"You're too sexy for the North Koreans," Bob said.

"My skirt is NOT too short!" I said and stood up to show the guide the modest length of my skirt.

"Does it cover your knees?" she asked.

This is my Seoul look, pre-DMZ bag lady. There will be no pictures of that.

Right-hand side: South Korea. Left-hand side: North Korea.

Looking toward North Korea.

"Um, no," I said. But after she walked away I tugged the waistline down so that it sat lower on my hips. This was some sexy look: black and orange New Balance sneakers, a wrinkled white skirt that now looked more like a white garbage bag, and my sleeveless top covered up by Bob's windbreaker. Bag lady visits the DMZ. Or maybe I could call it Revenge for Gangnam Style. In any event, it passed muster with the humorless South Korean soldiers, who stood like statues facing the direction of the border with elbows slightly flexed and fists balled up. Bob dared me to dash over the concrete line separating north and south, which made me wonder just how much life insurance he could collect on me.

We were able to go into a building that straddled the line, and technically walk into North Korea, but the moment seemed anticlimactic after the Skirt Incident.

And that was that. The day before, we had another quasi-encounter with North Koreans on the flight from Beijing to Seoul. I noticed that the flight seemed to have an unusual number of short-haired young women wearing white blouses, and I kept mistaking them for flight attendants. But as we got off the flight, we noticed a line of security guards meeting us as we got off the plane, and then another mob of police at baggage claim. Suddenly I saw that all the young women had donned black blazers with some kind of pin. I couldn't get close enough to see what kind of pin. When we exited the baggage claim area, there was a giant scrum of cameras.

"Who is it?" I asked a security guy at a desk.

"North Koreans!" he said in an excited whisper. "Football!"

We found out it was the North Korean women's national soccer team.

Guards wait for the North Korean women's soccer team to file out to their bus.

I tried to imagine what it must have been like for them to arrive at Incheon airport, one of the most modern airports in the world, and drive past the giant phallic rocket model lit up in pink and purple in the summer night, and then to see (if only from their bus) a city that was wealthy, orderly, friendly, and quiet, the evenings disturbed only by fiesty rallies from Falung Gang protesters or demonstrations of Tai Kwan Do, and billboards with pictures of Chanel, movie stars, and Outback Steakhouse.

I'm a westerner living in Beijing, and I couldn't believe how excited I was to order Dunkin Donuts coffee. These girls probably didn't get a chance to try a green tea frappacino, but I like to think they were not that far away from that variety of capitalistic decadence either.

Genghis Khan-ing That Place

We didn't imagine that we'd be like Genghis Khan in Inner Mongolia, casting destruction and havoc everywhere. But we did hope to conquer, at least, the modern-day equivalent of looting and pillaging: descending on the town of Xiwuqi -- a couple of hours from the not-so-big town of Xilinhot -- for the Genghis Khan Grasslands Extreme Marathon.

Let's just say we came, we saw, we were conquered.

Xiwuqi is a town that feels as if it wants to grow into its ambition: six-lane roads, fountains with interesting sculptures everywhere, but not enough people to actually people it, it feels. And foreigners walking around the town get treated like celebrities. "Hello! HELLO!" all the children yell, and then their parents tap your shoulder and ask to take your picture. It's charming the first hundred times, and then you try not to make eye contact. The grasslands outside Xiwuqi are beautiful: rolling green, dotted with farms that have yurts and brick barns. The sky is vast and blue, and the air smells like it should smell. Joanna said it smells like Athens.

Before the race, all smiles.

But the race was not what we expected. I chose the 10K, which was actually an 11.5K. At one point I had a semi-conversation with a guy who told me he was Mongolian, and then said his name. It sounded like he was clearing his throat, so I asked him again. He did it again, and I realized that was his name, in Mongolian. But we were running pals for a while until I realized I was alone in the middle of grasslands with a total stranger who could kill me and bury me before the next runner came along. So that's why I walked.

Me and my Mongolian running buddy

I told myself that I would just run what I wanted to run and walk the rest, and was doing that for much of the race until I was passed by a person who, how can I say this, was not in shape. Times ten. And I thought, "Oh no, you don't," and ran the rest of the race. I don't know why people (Bob) get the idea I'm competitive. I was about #19 in a field of maybe 30. Definitely did well in my age category.

Bob was just as triumphant, meaning he finished his first half-marathon. Jamie and Alison, friends from Beijing, also made it through what they said was a very tough half-marathon.

Alison finishes!

Jamie finishes!

Bob finishes!

And then we waited for Joanna and Christian, our marathoners, first-time marathoners, to finish. We waited. Four hours passed. Five hours. Six hours. The blazing Inner Mongolian sun started beating down on us, and Bob and I started imagining injuries.

Seven hours later the two of them dragged past the finish line. The trail was not well marked and they got lost. I have never seen two people look that tired. I was exhausted just waiting for them in the hot sun and trying not to imagine terrible things that could have happened. (What actually did happen -- such as facing down a ground-pawing, snorting bull on their path -- didn't even enter my mind.)

But they finally triumphed. They probably ran another 10K at least, which makes them EXTREME marathoners, in my mind. And someday I'll figure out how Joanna can be my daughter and still go through something like that without any temper tantrums.

Anyway, we next dragged out to the Mongolian Khan Village, a cheesy collection of concrete huts shaped like yurts, for the festive banquet dinner. Bottom line: the beer was scarce and warm at that, and the centerpiece of the dinner was an entire roasted sheep, who was paraded through the room triumphantly before pieces of him were slapped on our tables, looking very fatty and as unhappy as he was when he realized his fate was to be killed, roasted, and then ignored by some very tired runners who would have preferred pizza. I stuck to the steamed bread. Sometimes no taste is better than certain tastes. And when the music started, the room started to empty out.

It turned out that Mother Nature had a better show in mind. As we were staring at the roasted sheep, the rain had been coming down, and now it stopped, leaving a spectacular sunset and a double rainbow. I think that's double happiness to the Chinese.

The Mongolian Four

Mongolian rainbow