Today I saved a life, but I don’t know if he will thank me much. I was in the grocery store and this guy flipped himself out of the tank onto the floor next to me. I alerted a worker who promptly scooped him up and put him back in the tank. He seemed to be giving me the evil eye from within those murky waters.
Just another day of grocery shopping in China.
We went to Nepal to visit with our dear friend, a young Nepali man (IL) who lived with us for almost a year in the USA ten years ago. He lived with us when he was 17. He is now 27, married, and has a beautiful 2 year old son. He came from a village about 100km outside Kathmandu, but a lifetime away. Betrawati is a sleepy, beautiful village where the friendships and family ties run deep over many generations. Before he came to the USA he had been to Kathmandu at least once, but never outside Nepal. He did not grow up with running water in his house, reliable electricity, indoor plumbing of any kind. They cooked (and still cook) on a wood fire built at the base of a earthen clay ‘stove’ and all slept together in the loft over the kitchen. The kitchen ceiling is black cinder from years of smoke and heat from cooking. The menu is dal baht (rice and lentil broth), milk tea, and yogurt made from the milk of the water buffalo who resides across the dirt road. She is milked every morning at 5:30am so there will be time to boil the milk and prepare the tea and start the yogurt for that day. No leftovers allowed, there is no refrigeration. Any scraps go back to feed the water buffalo.
Over the years the family was able to save money and built an extension on the house which has two rooms downstairs and four small rooms upstairs. Still no running water inside or reliable electricity. We slept upstairs in the addition on beds with thin futons and windows that looked out to the rice paddies that came right up to the back of the house. On either side were a collection of four or five houses all of which belonged to the extended family. Aunts, uncles, cousins all share the chores of daily life.
A typical day is to rise with the sun, have milk tea when it’s ready, do your chores, wash up, eat dal baht at around 9am and head to school for the 10am start. No busses, everyone walks. School is out at 4 and everyone walks home together. Children change quickly out of school uniforms into their play clothes, do homework, chores, and congregate on the front patio/dining room/laundry line to play games. Adults are finishing chores and the women are preparing dinner, dal baht. Then it is time to wash the dishes by the tap next to the out house. Into the darkness the children play. Then around 8:30 people head off to bed.
The land was very dry and surprisingly soft, and dusty. Since the roads were, for the most part, not paved, there was an huge amount of dust in the air.
Bathing, at least for the women, meant walking down to a cousins house in the morning where they have a tap that is about four feet off the ground and the water falls onto a slab of rock about 2×3 feet. The water is still cold from its journey down through the mountain stream. It only runs until 9am and then is diverted to the rice paddies, so get there early. It is about six feet off the road where people are walking to work and children are going to do chores or go to school.
I was at a total loss of how exactly to accomplish bathing in this set up with any kind of modesty. My wonderful host’s wife (PL) guided me like I was a giant, befuddled child. She told me: Bring your soap, shampoo, clean clothes, and a very small towel. Also bring your ‘washing gown’ which is something like a strapless beach coverup that ties around your chest to keep it secure. Once you have the gown on you shimmy out of your clothes and wash, wearing the gown.( It becomes very wet and clings in all the wrong places.) When you are done and rinsed you hop across a few rocks to the front porch of the adjacent house where you use the tiny towel to dry off and then shimmy into dry clothes while trying not to get them soaking wet from the bathing gown. (All this while trying not to notice the people walking by on the road.) PL was so kind and understanding and patient with me. And I knew it was this or face another few days of total griminess.
To get to school there are bridges made of steel cables with metal slats across the bottom. These bridge/walkways are wide enough to walk single file and are strung across a wide and powerful river which flows from a glacier up in the mountains. We were introduced to a favorite game -walk out to the middle of the river, hold tightly to the cable railing, and lean out over the edge as far as you dare and then just stare at the raging water rushing below you. You lose all sense of yourself as a person standing on a bridge and really do feel like you are flying. Our host, IL, told us they did this often as kids. I can totally see why, but as a parent it would scare me to death.
In this village the women still hike into the mountains to collect the grasses they need to feed the water buffalo. Everyone knows everyone. The warmth and deep sense of community far outweighed any lack of modern conveniences. My kids were enthralled and both vowed to come back to work in the school so that they could live among this wonderful family for more than just a few days.
I just returned from a week in Nepal. We travelled to several areas, all of which had their own unique character. This post just shows Kathmandu, the capitol of Nepal. Kathmandu was ancient, beautiful, filthy, chaotic, hot, dusty, delicious, poverty stricken, friendly, gracious, corrupt. It felt like the opening scenes in Disney’s ‘Aladdin’ movie had come to life, minus the Arabs and the cleaned up disneyesque part. I will write more, but for now I hope you enjoy the pictures.
If you wish to see a larger version of the pictures, just click on them.
This week has been window washing week at my apartment complex. I have seen lots of window washers dangling from ropes all over the city.
But this week gave me a chance to get a close up look at the bravery (and relative lack of safety precautions) of China’s window washers. Click on the pictures to get a better view.
I saw a poster at a local high end hotel which caters to expats. It was all in English and said that a British comedy troupe was coming to do their version of ‘Whose Line is it Anyway?’ I was really excited as my kids LOVE that show and my friends birthday is coming up. It sounded like a perfect night out.
The poster showed two ways to make reservations. First, you could email them. But I always feel that an email reservation request goes into this internet black hole and if it’s something I really want or need I want to be able to click ‘confirm’ and know I have it. The second choice was to call. I have become really good at asking people, in Chinese, if they speak English. So when the phone was answered by a very perky young woman in Chinese I was not deterred. I asked ‘Ni shuo yingwen ma?’ Right away she switched to English and asked how she could help me. I explained I needed to know if tickets were still available for the comedy show. The conversation went something like this:
me: Are there tickets available for the ‘whose line’ comedy show this saturday?
her: Which restaurant to you want to make reservations ?
me: I want to find out about tickets to the ‘whose line’ show.
her: Whose reservations?
me: There is a comedy show at the hotel this saturday, ‘whose line is it anyway’. I want to know if there are any tickets left.
her: Comedy show? Please hold while I get someone to help me………
cue hold muzak
her helper (HH): Yes, can I help you?
me: Yes I would like to know if there are tickets to the comedy show this saturday.
HH: How many rooms do you want to reserve?
me: I dont want any rooms, I want tickets to the show.
HH; What show?
me: (now getting frustrated) The comedy show, ‘whose line is it anyway’ . I want to reserve tickets to the comedy show.
HH: You want to make corporate reservations? You want a ballroom?
me: No, thank you. I will call back.
Who needs to go to a comedy show when my life is just one big Abbott and Costello routine? LOL
Heat and glass, apparently, do not mix!
These are the days I am especially glad that we do not live in Beijing where the air is thick with what the Chinese lovingly call ‘fog’. The fog in Beijing is thick and often yellowish and prevents you from seeing for more than a block at a time.
In Shanghai we do get actual fog, along with it’s cousins smog and haze. Usually these nasty days are no more than two in a row. But this week has been oppressive. It’s what my parents would have called soupy. The kind of days my mother would lovingly cut up fruit and put it on a plate with a scoop of cottage cheese and serve it for dinner, because only crazy people turn on a stove or oven in this weather.
Occasionally big, fat drops of rain hit my arms as I am walking and I think ‘ ahhh, at last the rain will come and clear this weather away’. But no. It lingers on and on. I have mentioned before that Mao, in his great wisdom, decided that anything below the Yangtze River didn’t get central heat. Now I have learned that they didn’t get air conditioning either! Truthfully this lack of power sucking machinery probably helps the air quality. But I think I may be making up for it with all the laundry I have to do since all four of us can soak through two shirts a day each. My saving grace has been that our apartment does have AC which I use liberally at night.
Last night, however, we were out until about 10:30. The kids were home without us and spent a quiet evening with pizza and a movie. The AC was on low. We came home and went to bed. This morning I opened the curtain to our living room sliding glass doors that go out to the balcony and found quite a shock. The doors are double paned and the outer pane of one of the doors was shattered! There was a definite point of origin, as if the door had been shot with a BB gun. Thank goodness it was safety glass so the pane was still in the door.
I went outside to feel if there was a hole at the origin point, but there wasn’t. All the patio furniture was exactly as I had left it and it wasn’t a windy night the night before. The kids adamantly denied being outside or doing anything that would cause the door to break.
I went to the management office to tell them about the door. I was really worried they would blame us and we would be footing the bill. They sent up a building ‘engineer’ and he took one look at it and told me not to worry, it was from the heat!!!!
My suspicion, and most unscientifically proven hypotheses, is that the seal between the panes is not great and moisture got in and expanded as the day got hotter and hotter, finally being too much for the glass and shattering it.
So when some people say ‘it’s so hot I could fry an egg on the sidewalk” I will say ‘it’s so hot it could shatter a patio door!’
The shattered porch door.
2010 Mavericks surfing competition.
Spring is a time for new beginnings, and for endings.
This year D turned 15 and has hit her full adolescent stride. Always independant, living in a city whcih gives her full access to a metro system, taxis, friends who live in far corners of the city, and an endless list of weird and wonderful things to do -she has taken it all by storm. If she were a surfer she would be up at the crest of a large wave, sunshine glinting off the water and her hair, admiring the beautiful view below her. Sometimes finding the balance between school and sports and social life is hard, but she faces that challenge head on.
S2 is 17, almost 18, and finishing high school. He has finished the college application process and chosen a school which I, but more importantly he, believes is a good match. He has also decided to take a gap year and stay in Shanghai with us so he can study Manderin for another year at a local university. Even with all of this decided he is still suffering from that most awful of adolescent traumas – senioritis mixed with angst. The angst is four fold. First is the feeling of leaving a school system that has consumed their entire lives. Each year brought a new grade and new classes but the sameness of the bus schedule, lunch with friends, after school activities, then home to do homework, was incredibly comforting. The second part stems from that deep seeded feeling that most, I think, teenagers have because they believe that the major they pick for college will determine the professional direction of their entire lives with no possibility of change. I am the model of change and reinvention for careers and have tried to point this out, but I am the mom – what do I know?? The third layer on top of all this angst is the sense of belonging or not belonging. He came to China just for his last year of high school, leaving all of his friends back in the north east. He didn’t think he would mind graduating from a different school, but as the days approach I think he does feel he is missing out on a bonding experience with those kids. (His totally amazing band leader from the USA has agreed to let S2 play in the school band at graduation. S2 is really excited about being part of the day). The last, and perhaps biggest hurdle, is the emotional house of mirrors he seems to live in due to Aspergers. He has a great deal of trouble self identifying emotions and the situations that bring them on. He is generally not comfortable with strong emotions of any kind. It is almost like he wants to crawl out of his skin when he feels very happy or sad. And afterwords he often cannot express or identify what made him happy, sad, angry etc. Usually kids like being happy and look back on the experiences of the day and make a mental note somewhere in their psyche that X = happy therefore repeat X and Y = sad therefore do not repeat Y. S2 has not mastered this concept, but he is working very hard to. In the mean time he rides his own surfing wave. On his ride he seems to ride many tall waves that come in quick succession. One moment he is at the crest enjoying the sunshine and the next he is in the trough feeling the chill of the shadow over him which comes from the next looming wave. He knows if he can climb back up to the top of the wave it will be warm and sunny, but it’s a hell of a lot of work to do that and he doesn’t always have the mental or physical energy to get there on his own. Sometimes he seems to have his surfboard clipped by the crashing wave, sending him tumbling headlong into the dark water and desperately trying to figure out which way is up before he runs out of air. Even with all of this he tries and tries again. I hope he knows how proud I am of him.
S1 is riding his surf board with grace and agility. He is becoming his own man. He has just finished his third year at college and will be starting an internship this summer to help him clarify what he wants to do when he graduates. He has a great girlfriend and they seem very supportive of each other. He still flounders on his board sometimes and then my instinct is to go running and save him, as any good lifeguard would do. This can be – ok, often is- a source of friction between us. For S1 I need to learn to lay back and wait to be called.
My husband and I are the lifeguards at this wild beach. We have our own long boards which we desperately paddle out into the rough waters to pull, push, prod – whatever it takes- in order to bring them into shore safely. But I am getting old for surfing. My body struggles to pop up to standing and find a sense of balance. I struggle with my own board and yet would give my life to save their lives. Most of the time they seem absolutely oblivious to the fact that there are other people (parents, teachers, family, friends) running to them, circling them with life rings and other safety nets. They may grab one and be towed safely to shore, but in words and attitude seem to believe they swam there themselves. But every once in a while they look up and around and not only see but acknowledge the other people around them. I am determined to stand vigil on this beach, watching the wild waves roll in and my beautiful children call ‘look mom, no hands!!’.
Happy Mother’s Day to all of you standing on your beach!
I have just finished having a string of wonderful guests and am looking forward to S1 and his girlfriend coming to visit soon. We will all celebrate S2′s high school graduation. Then I will fly back to the USA to spend some glorious weeks with family and friends. This will mark the halfway point of my sojourn in Shanghai. I can’t believe how quickly it has gone.
After a cold and dreary winter my best friend came to visit me! We have been planning it for so long (I think first discussions, over tea and cookies, happened before I even had plane tickets to come here in the first place!). Our time together was amazing.
Saying her flight here was delayed is an understatement. She took off from a major US east coast airport only to hear the captain announce, after some time in the air, that all but two bathrooms had failed and they had to return to the and would need to change planes. So after leaving home at 6:30am she finally took off at about 5:30pm for the 14 hour flight to Shanghai. Even after all that she was ready to go on every crazy adventure I had planned. On our first day out, among other things, we wandered through ‘old town’ which is partly truly old and partly built/rebuilt to look old. But none the less it is quite nice and busteling with a frenetic mix of tourist traps, local businesses, and the damp alleys leading to quiet by-ways taken by the Shanghainese and tourists who are lost or …..well, lost. But I have wandered these streets many times and have found the noodle man dependably parked on the corner. His three wheeled bike cart carries his entire livelihood. His propane cooker, all his prepped vegetables, noodles, sauce, giant beach umbrella, and tarp to block the wind. The menu choice involves spicy or not spicy. Other than that you get a generous portion of noodles stir fried with a mix of fresh vegetables. The dining room is two preschool sized tables with a few foot stools to serve as chairs. We ordered our noodles with a request of ‘a little spicy’ and were directed to sit. A few minutes later we had a delicious lunch under a tarp. Bellies full we headed to the ferry and enjoyed our sunny ride across the Huangpu River. On the other side we went up the Pearl Tower and took in the view of the city as the sun set and the city lit up. We had been walking all day and had seen many things. We were tired but our ticket in the Pearl included a museum tour on the ground floor. I had heard it was good and we wanted to get our moneys worth so we decided to take a look. We wandered the halls and looked at the displays. They were OK, but not especially wonderful and we were tired. We decided to find the way out. Alas, the museum was a one way hall that meandered in a most frustrating way. We were getting punchy and felt like we were trapped in Dante’s 9 circles of hell. The wax figures stared at us unblinkingly. The miniature dioramas started to seem ridiculous. We were giggling like school girls. Finally, stumbling out of the museum we took the metro home and collapsed. It was so wonderful to see the city through her eyes.
Her last night here another dear friend, who is also one of my husband’s co-workers, came to town. All four of us went out to dinner at a great restaurant called M on the Bund. The food was great, the view spectacular, and the company unbeatable. After dinner we strolled out on the Bund river walk and enjoyed the cool evening watching the ships float by. The week ended too quickly.
The next day my husband’s parents arrived. They had been touring China for 12 days and had seen Beijing, Xian, Wuhan, Changqing, the Three Gorges, the Yangzi River. They throughly enjoyed their tour but it was time for a rest and a quiet visit. Shifting gears I continued as tour guide. This time we took gentle walks through the local park, Century Park. We went out to the kids’ school and they had a chance to look around there. We went to a small water town that lies within the city limits called Qibao. The town holds a collection of small tourist sites but largely still remains a town where people live and work and go to school. This was a real treat since they had had the ‘tourist’ view of China. Qibao gave them a chance to see China outside of the regular tourist beat or expat bubble. Another highlight was taking them to one of my favorite spots, Lu Xun Park, about which I have written before.
Alas, another busy week came to an end. And here we are preparing for one son’s visit and another’s graduation. As the summer heat starts to roll in I can feel the pull back to the east coast of another continent. See you all soon!! 
The kiddie boat ride at Lu Xun park.
A handsome man from the neighborhood behind the park.
Getting There: Lu Xun park is located at 146 East Jiangwan Rd. (146 jiang wan Lu) near the Hongkou Stadium. Getting there is very easy by metro. Take line 8 to the Hongkou Stadium station and get out at exit 1. At the sidewalk turn left (so the stadium is on your left) and walk about 200 yards to the park entrance. There is no entrance fee.
The park was built in 1896 as a shooting field. In 1905 they added an amusement park area (kiddy rides). The famous Chinese writer, Lu Xun, was placed in a mausoleum on the park grounds and the park is now dedicated to him.
Cherry blossoms in the mid-day sun.
King of the mahjong table.
My Day:
The park is alive with families taking advantage of the shady spots, bounce castle, and small electric boat rides. The older generation prefers the tables set up for mahjong or card games. Park benches often become host to intense debates. Just a stroll along the shady lanes of the park is a great way to spend the day, too.
In between are open areas where accordion players entertain, opera singers practice. Line dancers get their groove on only yards from the traditionally dressed folk dancers. Another turn down a different path finds the calligraphy masters practicing on the pavement with buckets of water and long brushes. They will explain the history of each character to any interested onlooker. Today was a sunny sunday and the cherry blossoms are in full bloom. The park was hopping.
The folk dancers at Lu Xun.
This little girl wanted to dance too 
The cherry blossoms were beautiful.
The line dancers getting their groove on.
Everyone in my family had agreed that on such a beautiful day we should go for a walk in the park. On arriving we were greeted with the onslaught of sights, sounds, smells and sheer mass of people, that China is so well known for – and so often leads my son into sensory overload. I just wanted to have a walk in the park, so to speak. My ‘good mom’ self seemed to have been left behind at first and I had this fantasy of a perfectly relaxing day that didn’t involve negotiating with teenagers or dealing with emotional crisis. Unfortunately that is exactly what parenting is about. I felt frustrated by his sullenness.
To give you an idea of his mood let me tell you a little of his running commentary on the park. On walking in and seeing the small electric boats floating on the lake among the plastic fish he said “oh look, how nice that they let the children drive the nuclear subs among the water mines…how lovely.” This was said with a completely deadpan face and tone of voice. I think he meant to be cynical, but when I really looked at the boat and plastic fish his description was right on the mark. So I started to laugh and tell him it was a good joke. But he didn’t mean it as a joke, he meant it as a deep, thoughtful commentary on society. So he really didn’t appreciate me finding humor in his comment. Ahhhh, deep breaths……..and move on to another area of the park where, hopefully, we can find more common ground.
At home my kids complain that they are not learning practical things in their Chinese class. I suggested that a day like this would be the perfect opportunity to practice and get to know some locals. S2 had a sour expression on his face and just stared at the ground as we walked along. I was getting snippy and this didn’t help the situation. Finally he said to me ‘I just feel overloaded, please just let me walk along.’ I took another deep breath. I felt very guilty about my snippiness and appologized. Once we had reached this truce the tension level dropped and we walked along and peacefully enjoyed the scenery.
No mahjong table? No problem, a bench works just fine!
This bud has a couple of days before it blooms.
Along the path we found a man hand painting fans. He decorated one side with scenes from the park and wrote poems on the other side. They were marked with his ‘chop’ which is a Chinese person’s official signature. He saved the two end panels of the fan and inscribed them for the purchaser. D fell in love with one that had red cherry blossoms on it. The artist wrote her Chinese name on the back and wrote the date and place so she would always remember where she got the beautiful fan.
A game of cards in the spring sunshine at Lu Xun.
The artist at work at Lu
The furthest edges (left and right) are where the artist enscribed D's name and the date and place where they met.
Zhu Lao Shi practicing calligraphy before the crowd descended.
The cherry blossoms on D's fan.
Turning a bend we came upon one of the calligraphy teachers writing on the road. I stopped to take some pictures and he asked me where we were from. From there the conversation blossomed and we started to attract a crowd. I introduced my kids and explained that S2 was planning on going to a local college next year to further his studies in Chinese language and calligraphy. The teacher, it turns out, is an award winning calligrapher and teacher at the college S2 is planning on attending. He and S2 traded phone numbers. It was very exciting and the crowd really started to grow. Even I felt crowded in. Lao Gong (LG for short and meaning husband) was off to one side and started to collect his own set of groupies. All of this became too much for S2. He was very polite and excused himself to go and sit on a stone wall. I was proud of him. D and I continued to chat with the teacher and the others for about 10 minutes. Finally I felt we had reached the limit of my Chinese and it was time to move on in the park. I also wanted to find S2 and make sure he was ok. When I extracted myself from the crowd I found S2 sitting on the stone wall chatting with a young Chinese man who wanted to practice his English. S2 said a polite farewell and we moved on before the crowd could follow us. S2 actually seemed cheered up. He said his favorite part of the conversation with his new friend was that the man told him he is ‘a sailor….he sells things’ LOL.
I am somewhere in the middle of this crowd explaining why we came to live in Shanghai.
Grandfather taking his granddaughter for a spring walk in the park.
After a day of sunshine we left through the back of the park. This leads into a series of small streets and little alleys. One of my favorite dumpling stands is back here. The walk to get the dumplings provides an eyeful too. There is a barber who has set up shop in two parking spaces.
School children getting an after school snack on the way home in the afternoon.
Today he was giving a customer a close shave while a fellow barber cut another customers hair.
Women work together in supper preparation tasks. The laundry flys like colorful flags from the power lines. The street food vendors and vegetable carts line the roads. This is the China I have grown to truly love.
getting a close shave at the outdoor barber.
Our dumplings were fresh and hot and wonderfully juicy. After a long day out they hit the spot. The chef kept coming out to watch us eat, making sure we knew the finer points of soup dumplings. We assured him they were very delicious!
At the end of the day we exited the subway (metro) station near our apartment and were greeted with a lovely row of white cherry blossom trees catching the afternoon sun.
fishing in the small lake at Lu Xun park.
These girls were playing with some water next to the vegetable cart.
This handsome man kindly agreed to have his picture taken.
Blogging has brought me a whole new array of friends whom I really enjoy communicating with. Some are also bloggers and some are readers perusing the ‘net. I have met gardeners, parents, photographers, writers, adventurers….We live in an amazing world with so many creative and kind people.
Recently I made a new friend through such a strange set of circumstances that I feel I must share it with you. It’s a story of less than six degrees of separation across two continents that still boggles my mind.
The time line is not completely straight so bare with me.
Just before leaving for China I visited a new and wonderful yarn shop in a nearby town in the Hudson Valley. As a member of Ravelry, an online community of knitters, crocheters and other fiber artists, I went to the web site and ‘Liked’ the yarn store. Ravelry is very similar to Facebook where you can set up a profile with a picture and some basic information about yourself. So when I ‘liked’ the store my info showed up on their page in a similar way to friends list on FB. That was it and I basically forgot I had done it until a little over a month ago.
That was when the comment arrived on my blog. Jeanette wrote and said she had found my blog because of my ‘like’ on ravelry and the fact that my profile included a Chinese flag. Jeanette had also ‘liked’ the store and followed my information to my blog because, as she told me in her comment and following emails, she and her husband were coming to Shanghai to visit. She wanted to get some idea of what to expect.
Being a friendly sort of person I asked what was bringing them here. She replied that her husband, Jim, was lecturing at a local school. The school she mentioned was the one my children attended but there are two campuses about an hour and a half apart in the city. So I asked which campus he would be coming to. She told me he would be at both. I told her my kids go to that school and wondered what her husband would be lecturing about.
We had moved from the ‘comments’ section of my blog to private email at this point and either she used her own email in the beginning and switched to using her husband’s account, or she used his all along and I was just a dunce and didn’t notice. But anyway, about four or five emails in to our conversation I noticed the name on his email account and realized that her husband had been pen pals with S2 when S2 was in 5th grade. S2′s school had a wonderful program where the kids could pick people who lived in the community and had jobs that the kids aspired to. S2 and Jeanette’s husband Jim wrote several times and met at the grand finale of the project at a special breakfast that the school held for the kids and their pen pals. The postcards and other letters that S2 received were and are treasured items. So much so that one of the post cards had come with us to Shanghai!
The historic Bund as seen from the Pudong side of the river.
I am much better at remembering faces than names and I wondered if I had ever met Jeanette around town. I decided to employ the web in the way that seems to be increasingly popular – stalking people. Not really stalking, just casual following really 
I googled Jim’s name because I knew there would be pictures of him and I hoped to find something from an article with a caption of ‘here is Jim and his lovely wife Jeanette’ so I could run through my brain’s file folders of faces and check to see if we had crossed paths before. I did find some pictures and was trying to decide if we had met before when I was distracted by a list of Youtube videos that Jim had posted. One was called ‘first calf at the fair’. Our county has one of the biggest agricultural fairs in New York State and it is on our list of things we must do every August. I was intrigued by the video and clicked. It is a sweet little movie showing a variety of vignettes from around the fair. One of the clips is of the main intersection, just below the 4H barns and heading toward the midway. This path is always crowded and is lined with every conceivable kind of food booth. I was watching and feeling wistfully nostalgic about my beloved fair when my eyes grew wide with amazement. Coming up the path, toward the camera were my husband and S2! I couldn’t believe it. This was the day before we left for China. I knew exactly the time and date because we had booked our tickets in order to fit in one last fair day before we moved. I am sure Jim did not recognize my son since a 10 year old and a seventeen year old look quite a bit different. And Jim never met my husband. So the choice of clip was just by chance, or karmic sight of hand.
mama and her piglets at the fair, 2011
I
the giant sand barn under construction at the fair.
I wrote to Jeanette and confessed my stalkerish ways and told her about the crazy coincidence of Jim being S2′s pen pal and then S2 and my husband being in Jim’s video. She was very gracious and didn’t think I was stalkerish at all. ”Jim puts those videos up for everyone to look at!” She told me. She also told me that Jim only did the pen pal program for four years so S2 is one of four kids in the whole world who could have this special connection.
After all these coincidences we decided we had to meet when I they came to Shanghai.
So the time has come, and almost gone, for them to be here. Their schedule was very hectic and we only got to meet up one night but it was really nice. They brought the clear Hudson Valley air with them (it had been cold and rainy every day -all winter- until they arrived) and we had a lovely stroll along the Huangpu river where Jim stopped to paint the view of the historic buildings across the way. The air was cool enough to warrant a hat and light gloves but you could smell the warm earth and knew spring was coming. We all went out for a dinner of traditional Shanghainese soup dumplings known as xiao long bao. Jim and Jeanette, both extremely talented artists, shared their travelogue sketch books with us and S2 got to show Jim some digital pictures of some of the artwork he has done here in Shanghai. They talked technique a little and then we settled into a warm and wonderful dinner with lots of friendly conversation.
Jim painting by the Huangpu River.
So who is this mystery man that has crisscrossed through our lives? His name is James Gurney, artist, author of Dinotopia and the great blog GurneyJourney. We are very happy to call Jim and Jeanette friends and look forward to seeing them in the Hudson Valley or back in Shanghai
I will be forever grateful to Jeanette who reached out and made that first comment on my blog which brought us all together again many years and many thousands of miles away!
PS. my regular readers will know that I work hard not to reveal personal information about people in the blog without their express permission. I did check with Jim and Jeanette and they both agreed to have their true names used here.
