When I asked Bing why she was so interested in the Weepster’s diagnosis, she explained that her sister-in-law’s three month old daughter was diagnosed with a missing  kidney at 38 weeks gestation.  With a lot of emotion in her voice, she went on to say that she is very angry and wants her sister-in-law, who lives in Canada, to sue the doctors for not identifying the problem earlier.  She then added, “…because at 38 weeks, it was too late – they would not kill the baby, so they made my sister-in-law give birth even though the baby had only one kidney.”   I was stunned.  In essence, she admitted to believing her niece, who has the same medical problem as my baby, should have been aborted.  I would have been insulted, but I’m positive Bing had no idea her words might hurt me.

Bing’s biggest concern seemed to be for her niece’s future ability to marry and “have a baby like a normal woman.”  It’s true that there are sometimes reproductive tract abnormalities associated with urinary tract abnormalities, but I’ve never given that possibility for Wee P much thought.  It just doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to me.  I wonder if the emphasis Bing places on a child’s future fertility is shared by most Chinese.

I had an interesting conversation a few weeks ago with my students about the one-child policy.  Most were in favor of the policy.  Those who were weren’t in favor surprised me with the reasons they gave for their opposition.  One student said, “What if I have one child, but he is not very clever?  I should be allowed to have a second child who will be better able to contribute to society.”  The rest of the students nodded in agreement.  I found it interesting that no student said the policy is a bad idea because it violates an individual’s rights.  Rather, those who were opposed cited the ways in which the policy hurts society.  Does Bing think her niece should have been aborted because the niece might fail to reproduce and thus fail to contribute to society?

I’m both baffled and intrigued.  I get that people from collectivist societies prioritize the good of the group over the individual, but is contributing to the collective really so narrowly defined here?  I find that hard to believe.

In any case, whether she’s reproductively challenged or not, I couldn’t be happier with my Wee P, who first graced us with her presence eight months ago today.  True, she wasn’t much to look at that first day, but even then, I had a hard time imagining a more perfect baby.  Happy eighth moon, Weepinator!

We’re finally in our apartment and can tell already that this place it going to feel like home really quickly. P loves her new bedroom and is having a fantastic time setting it up to her specifications. She’s currently in the living room watching Dora the Explorer in Mandarin. The kid is in heaven!

While I’m on the topic of P, this morning, she brought me a piece of paper and asked me to write her name on it. She then went into her room and came out a few minutes later to show me this:

Holy cow!

We decided to take a trip last night to a nearby shopping center to buy provisions for the house. While we were out, we wanted to treat P to a Western-style meal to thank her for being such a trooper through all the changes we’ve encountered. We were therefore thrilled when we saw a place called “Big Pizza” as soon as we got out of our taxi.

As usual, we got lots of attention in the restaurant, and most of this attention was directed at Wee P. At one point, I began to wonder if the servers were ever going to take our order, as they seemed to be too blinded by intense Wee P adoration to remember to do their jobs.

At one point, Wee P started to cry, so two of the servers rushed over and took off with her in the stroller. They pushed her all over the restaurant while I nervously followed behind. Wee P was clearly bewildered, but P thought the entire scene was the funniest thing she’d ever seen.

After dinner, we went shopping at Carrefour, which is a really nice, French supermarket/department store. In the middle of our shopping extravaganza, I realized I really needed to find a restroom. In my finest Marcel Marceau style, I approached several store clerks and tried to convey the state of my bladder to them. For the record, crossing one’s knees, bouncing slightly up and down while pretending to gnaw on one’s knuckles does not appear to be the universal gesture for “Where’s the toilet?” After unsuccessfully bouncing and gnawing for three very confused clerks, I finally took what I had learned from the Itsy Bitsy Spider and stood in front of a young male clerk, squatted, and used my hands to gesture liquid flowing down to my feet. This time, success! Apparently, success is occasionally accompanied by some degree of public humiliation, but that’s okay.

One of my favorite things about shopping in China is reading the English labels on products. Here’s some laundry detergent:

To save your eyesight, I’ll fill you in on the text.  The product claims it “eliminates the fungus,” is “mild-mannered,” and “increases colorfully,” all while “not injurying hand.”  I like this sound of that!

After paying  for our stuff, we were all on the verge of passing out from exhaustion, so we loaded up as quickly as possible and headed out in the snow to hail a taxi. We assumed incorrectly this would be an easy procedure. I waved to several drivers, who slowed down, gave us the once over, and then sped off. I finally got one driver to stop for us, and when I handed him the piece of paper with our address written on it, he took a look at it, shook his head, and just like his taxi driving brethren before him, he quickly drove away. At that point, I lost it. My babies were out in the cold, Chris and I were delirious from sleep deprivation, and I had no idea when we would ever make it home. I yelled at the taxi as it drove away the worst Chinese curse I knew (luckily in English) and told the driver what I’d like to see done to his 18 generations. I then continued to play the crazy foreigner and screamed my curse to each passing taxi with an added, “…all y’all’s 18 generations” just to throw in a little Arkansas flavor.

Eventually, a group of very nice people, who appeared to be university students, intervened, hailed a taxi, and somehow persuaded the driver to take us home. We still aren’t sure why so many drivers refused to give us a ride. We need to figure that out pronto.

Maybe this apartment is so quickly feeling like home to us because it provided such a sense of security to us when we finally walked through its door last night. Although we have very little understanding about how to navigate our world outside these walls, we’ve almost got the stuff within them figured out. Of course, we’ve yet to try operating the shower…

After P was in her pajamas and finally in bed, I asked her if she was upset with us for bringing her here and if she wanted to go home. After pondering my question for a few seconds, she replied, “No, I think I’wl just stay in our new home for a while. Maybe waiter we can go back to our udder home. I wike China a wot.” The combination of that response and her new found writing skills might just cause me to spontaneously burst into flames of pride.

According to Matthew Polly in  American Shaolin, the Chinese version of giving the finger involves pointing one’s pinkie finger at another person.  This gesture supposedly says, “You’re a small person,” and it packs an even greater punch if one simultaneously points one’s own thumb back at the self, which adds, “… and I’m a large person.”  How funny that Confucian notions of selfhood are evident  even in the Chinese version of giving the bird!

For the Confucian, there is no self outside of one’s relationships, so to expand the self (i.e., to become a large person), one must  constantly act in ways that enhance those relationships.  Thus, if I’m with my daughter, I can only expand myself (or even be a self) if I’m engaging with her in just the right way at that particular moment.  To be a small person is to fail to monitor and enhance relationships in this way.  As one’s relationships erode, so does the self.  If you think about it, the Chinese pinkie is a far less crude, but far more insulting  and culturally rich gesture  than our own version.  The message is essentially, “You’re not even a self.  You’re nothing.”  That beats “up yours” any day, I figure.

Today is my birthday.  I’m one year older, but to a Confucian, I’m a bit smaller than I was yesterday.  My mother called me early this morning for what I assumed would be my annual birthday greeting, but five minutes into the conversation, it was clear she had forgotten.  In such a situation, the good Confucian daughter would have 1) recognized the potential problem that existed for the mother-daughter relationship and 2) set out to allow her mother to “save face” by perhaps hinting about the birthday just enough for the mother to believe she had remembered it herself.  This wasn’t quite my approach.  I decided, for entertainment purposes, to milk my mother’s forgetting for all it was worth, so I plotted with a friend from high school, who still lives in my hometown, to casually mention my birthday at church this morning – just to see my mother’s reaction.

Deserving of the pinky?  I am.  Thoroughly entertained small person? Yep, that, too.

Tomorrow is Chinese New Year.  I think I’ll resolve to try to be a little less tiny in the year of the ox…

I just finished reading Matthew Polly’s book American Shaolin and, oh man, how I loved it! Polly took a leave of absence as an undergrad at Princeton to spend two years at the Shaolin Temple, the purported birthplace of both Zen Buddhism and kung fu, where he set out to transform himself into bad-ass while researching his senior thesis. The book is a memoir of Polly’s time at Shaolin.

I loved all the tidbits on Chinese culture I picked up from this book – especially those tidbits related to effective Chinese cursing. For example, I learned that a number of Chinese curses deal with eggs – to call someone a stupid egg is bad. To call someone a turtle egg is worse. Polly admits he doesn’t know why eggs are so disliked in China, so I asked a Taiwanese friend to explain. She said she thinks eggs represent to the Chinese things that are unfinished or unformed. Maybe calling a person an egg suggests he or she is crude? I’m still unclear about why turtle eggs are particularly offensive. I’d love any information anyone can provide here…

In any case, I think the difference in egg symbolism between the U.S. and China is noteworthy. I’ll be interested to know what my Chinese students think about the idea of an egg representing hope via the resurrection of God’s son. I’m considering staging an egg hunt on the Tsinghua campus in the spring, as I’ll likely have my work cut out for me in describing the finer points of American Easter rituals without some sort of hands-on experience.

I’m reminded of one of David Sedaris’ stories from his book, Me Talk Pretty One Day. In this story – Jesus Shaves – Sedaris describes a scene from his French language class in Paris. He and his classmates are trying to explain the idea of Easter (in very broken French) to a Moroccan student. Here’s an excerpt from the story printed in Esquire Magazine (slightly different from the book version).

The Poles led the charge to the best of their ability. “It is,” said one, “a party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus and . . . oh, shit.”

She faltered, and her fellow countryman came to her aid.

“He call his self Jesus, and then he be die one day on two . . . morsels of . . . lumber.”

The rest of the class jumped in, offering bits of information that would have given the pope an aneurysm.

“He die one day, and then he go above of my head to live with your father.”

“He weared the long hair, and after he died, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples.”

“He nice, the Jesus.”

“He make the good things, and on the Easter we be sad because somebody makes him dead today.”

Part of the problem had to do with grammar. Simple nouns such as cross and resurrection were beyond our grasp, let alone such complicated reflexive phrases as “To give of yourself your only begotten son.” Faced with the challenge of explaining the cornerstone of Christianity, we did what any self-respecting group of people might do. We talked about food instead.

“Easter is a party for to eat of the lamb,” the Italian nanny explained. “One, too, may eat of the chocolate.”

“And who brings the chocolate?” the teacher asked.

I knew the word, and so I raised my hand, saying, “The Rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate.”

My classmates reacted as though I’d attributed the delivery to the Antichrist. They were mortified.

“A rabbit?” The teacher, assuming I’d used the wrong word, positioned her index fingers on top of her head, wiggling them as though they were ears. “You mean one of these? A rabbit rabbit?”

“Well, sure,” I said. “He come in the night when one sleep on a bed. With a hand he have

The teacher sadly shook her head, as if this explained everything that was wrong with my country. “No, no,” she said. “Here in France the chocolate is brought by the big bell that flies in from Rome.”

I called for a time-out. “But how do the bell know where you live?”

“Well,” she said, “how does a rabbit?”

In addition to learning ways in which I might throw the egg word around to effectively insult the Chinese (don’t worry – I’ll try to avoid using these newfound skills), I also learned the most offensive of all Chinese curses.

During his first year at Shaolin, Polly was approached by one of his monk friends, who wanted Polly to give him a tutorial on American curse words. Polly didn’t feel quite right about the idea of educating a Buddhist monk on cursing, so he initially denied the monk’s request. The monk didn’t give up and appealed to Polly’s American patriotism by suggesting that because Chinese culture is so much deeper than American culture, Chinese curse words must be much worse than American curse words. Polly relented and after what amounted to a pissing contest, with Polly and the monk taking turns trying to one-up each other with increasingly profane curse words, Polly eventually threw out the worst word the English language had to offer – “motherf*cker.” After several attempts, the monk was able to at least approximate the correct pronunciation and eventually, with much effort on Polly’s part, he grasped the term’s general meaning. Finally, the monk replied, “That’s bad, really bad….But I don’t think it is as bad as this: ‘I f*cked your eighteen generations.’”  Polly, understanding the importance of respecting one’s ancestors in Chinese culture realized he had lost the contest. It wasn’t even close.

I was watching the televised coverage last week of the plane that safely landed in the Hudson River and I happened to catch an interview on Larry King with one of the passengers, Alberto Panero, a young medical student.  My ears perked up when Larry asked Panero to describe the thoughts he had as the plane was going down.  Here’s how Panero responded:

Well, at first I was trying to keep myself calm. You know, I was hoping that, you know, like I said, the right engine would get us home. And then again, you know, I started getting a bit scared that, you know, I was going to die, obviously.

And the main thing I thought was just — you know, I had some — I’d been having a lot of good things happen, you know, with my career. And I’m about to graduate medical school. And I just, you know, saw my parents and my family just in tears, telling the story about this nice young man who had everything ahead of him but, you know, tragically died.

I found Panero’s thoughts interesting.  As he considered the possibility of losing his life, his thoughts shifted immediately to his own personal goals and to the fact that he would never realize those goals. I was particularly struck by Panero’s lack of relationship-oriented thoughts.  Sure, he mentioned having had thoughts about his family, but those thoughts were again centered around his own personal goals – specifically, the sadness his family would feel that his goals would be left unrealized.

Why were the thoughts Panero believed might be his very last focused on his goals rather than his relationships?  To me, his thoughts typify the Western way of understanding the self as an independent, autonomous entity.  Of course, relationships are important, but they’re peripheral to the self.  This way of understanding the self is in contrast to the Eastern view of the self as a relational (interdependent) entity (i.e., there is no self outside one’s relationships).

I’m going to show the clip of that interview to my Chinese students (assuming Youtube isn’t blocked in China!) and I’ll be interested to hear their responses.  I’m curious to know if people from East Asia would have the similar end-of-life considerations.  My guess is that people with an interdependent self-construal would be more likely to consider their own, imminent death with thoughts about the state of their current relationships and considerations about whether or not those relationships are ending in a proper, harmonious state.

And speaking of death…I’ll end with a quote about dying – it’s terribly deep.

“I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather… Not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car.”

~ Will Shriner (American comedian)