“Are you a fucking jackass?” I asked Townes the other day. I think that may be the first time I’ve ever sworn at my nine-year-old. Certainly, without question, the first time I’ve ever done it with feeling. I went on to tell him that if he ever did it again, I’d spank him so hard he wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week (channeled my Dad pretty good on that one). I’ve also never spanked the kid.
Welcome to the other side of our life in Shanghai.
I have to say that on the whole, being here has been a lot harder than I expected it to be.
In 1993, I spent 6 weeks in a kind of training camp, preparing for my first trip to live overseas. I remember the coaches talking endless about culture shock – that it wasn’t just disorientation from living in a different culture with a different language and different rules. That it could manifest in a diverse myriad of ways, from depression to anxiety to anger to borderline psychosis, to irrational and at times reckless behaviors, to tears and gnashing of teeth, to outright despair. Uprooting your life will do that to you.
They were right, in 1993. That was one of the hardest years of my life. Somehow I thought this time would be different. I’m a veteran world traveler now, and after all, I’ve lived overseas before. We were moving to modern, bustling Shanghai, a far cry from the frigid, remote steppes of central Kazkahstan.
But we are five people, and living here is hard. And culture shock is in full bloom. It has returned with the kind of visceral immediacy that leads one to greet an old but half-forgotten feeling with thoroughly refreshed vigor: “Oh yes, you – I remember you, so clearly and so well now. How could I have forgotten what you feel like?”
Allison spends her days – all day, every day – wrangling 3 kids, hauling them over the streets and on the subways and through pressing crowds. A 10:00 doctor’s appointment and a 1:30 engineering class can turn into an exhausting ordeal, with everyone frazzled and snappish by dinnertime. There are no friends with whom to chat and share and decompress – only a stressed out, sometimes monosyllabic husband barely coping with his own crush of work and parental duties.
Naomi just missed her Vermont school’s annual 5-6 grade Shakespeare performance. Not only does she love her friends, and performing, and Shakespeare, but she doesn’t even have any school here at all to make up for it. She does all right but still resents her father sometimes, for taking her out of her life and into a different one, just for a job she doesn’t much understand or care about.
Townes – wow. A great, brilliant kid already averse to too much socializing, now given to a lot of moping and vicious mood swings. The cursing incident above was precipitated when he got irritated with his mother for something and left the apartment, and the apartment building, and cruised out into the neighborhood without letting us know where he was going, if/when he would be back, etc. Took me a while to find him. It was awsums.
And then there’s Eli, who’s mostly enjoying himself and having a good time at school but doesn’t have enough friends outside of school, and underneath it all, will sometimes ask when we are going to meet his China mommy and daddy? And if we go to visit the town in China that he came from, are we going to leave him there when we leave? Easy to forget sometimes that he’s still processing the permanency of his integration into our family.
Allison and I cling to the idea that in the long run, all of this will be good, and character building, and horizon expanding, and remembered with a degree of pride and fondness. Certainly that was my experience with Kazakhstan, in retrospect.
But I had forgotten, no matter how great Kazakhstan often was while I was there, just how hard and challenging and even devastating it was sometimes too. How I almost couldn’t hack it, and a month in, wanted desperately to quit and come home. I am remembering it now. I remember it very well.
And really we are fine, and all is well. But it’s the kind of fine where we’ve invited a raging tornado into our home and he lives over in the corner and is a real part of our family now. And sometimes he comes out and lays waste to the apartment and our psyches, and we kind of smile through clenched teeth, and send him back into the corner, and pick up the pieces – casting wary glances in his direction, watching him swirling and spinning and waiting patiently for his next opportunity. It’s a bit ominous, a bit unnerving, a bit more challenging than usual to retain a sense of peace and normalcy.
But to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, the pain now is a part of the joy then. And the joy then, of the pain now. We can’t look back on this and feel proud, and good, and laugh, if we are not tested. We do not know our limits unless we push ourselves to learn where those limits may be, and how far beyond them we can go, and what triumphs we can achieve when we try. These are the lessons we are trying to provide ourselves, and our children, and they are lessons that will not be learned easily.
Meanwhile, we will have as much fun as we possibly can. Eli will go to a birthday party today, Naomi will perform with her jazz band in a cool little club in the French Concession, we’ll head to the beautiful city of Hangzhou next weekend for a little break on West Lake. We’ll see about putting Naomi and Townes into a school next fall. We’ll keep learning Chinese and we’ll go see The Hunger Games in IMAX when it shows up here in a week.
As “limits” go we’ve set ourselves some not insurmountable ones. We’re not climbing Everest, we’re not crossing the Australian Outback, we’re not deep sea diving.
And hopefully, we’ll stop swearing at our kids – and they’ll stop giving us reason to.
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Our local shoppping center has a huge display commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster. Pictured here, they have unintentionally (I have to assume) and unironically included a full front-page parody page from The Onion about the event, alongside official news reports from the day from The New York Times and the Syracuse Herald. I love this.
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“Are you a fucking jackass?” I asked Townes the other day. I think that may be the first time I’ve ever sworn at my nine-year-old. Certainly, without question, the first time I’ve ever done it with feeling. I went on to tell him that if he ever did it again, I’d spank him so hard he wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week (channeled my Dad pretty good on that one). I’ve also never spanked the kid.
Welcome to the other side of our life in Shanghai.
I have to say that on the whole, being here has been a lot harder than I expected it to be.
In 1993, I spent 6 weeks in a kind of training camp, preparing for my first trip to live overseas. I remember the coaches talking endless about culture shock – that it wasn’t just disorientation from living in a different culture with a different language and different rules. That it could manifest in a diverse myriad of ways, from depression to anxiety to anger to borderline psychosis, to irrational and at times reckless behaviors, to tears and gnashing of teeth, to outright despair. Uprooting your life will do that to you.
They were right, in 1993. That was one of the hardest years of my life. Somehow I thought this time would be different. I’m a veteran world traveler now, and after all, I’ve lived overseas before. We were moving to modern, bustling Shanghai, a far cry from the frigid, remote steppes of central Kazkahstan.
But we are five people, and living here is hard. And culture shock is in full bloom. It has returned with the kind of visceral immediacy that leads one to greet an old but half-forgotten feeling with thoroughly refreshed vigor: “Oh yes, you – I remember you, so clearly and so well now. How could I have forgotten what you feel like?”
Allison spends her days – all day, every day – wrangling 3 kids, hauling them over the streets and on the subways and through pressing crowds. A 10:00 doctor’s appointment and a 1:30 engineering class can turn into an exhausting ordeal, with everyone frazzled and snappish by dinnertime. There are no friends with whom to chat and share and decompress – only a stressed out, sometimes monosyllabic husband barely coping with his own crush of work and parental duties.
Naomi just missed her Vermont school’s annual 5-6 grade Shakespeare performance. Not only does she love her friends, and performing, and Shakespeare, but she doesn’t even have any school here at all to make up for it. She does all right but still resents her father sometimes, for taking her out of her life and into a different one, just for a job she doesn’t much understand or care about.
Townes – wow. A great, brilliant kid already averse to too much socializing, now given to a lot of moping and vicious mood swings. The cursing incident above was precipitated when he got irritated with his mother for something and left the apartment, and the apartment building, and cruised out into the neighborhood without letting us know where he was going, if/when he would be back, etc. Took me a while to find him. It was awsums.
And then there’s Eli, who’s mostly enjoying himself and having a good time at school but doesn’t have enough friends outside of school, and underneath it all, will sometimes ask when we are going to meet his China mommy and daddy? And if we go to visit the town in China that he came from, are we going to leave him there when we leave? Easy to forget sometimes that he’s still processing the permanency of his integration into our family.
Allison and I cling to the idea that in the long run, all of this will be good, and character building, and horizon expanding, and remembered with a degree of pride and fondness. Certainly that was my experience with Kazakhstan, in retrospect.
But I had forgotten, no matter how great Kazakhstan often was while I was there, just how hard and challenging and even devastating it was sometimes too. How I almost couldn’t hack it, and a month in, wanted desperately to quit and come home. I am remembering it now. I remember it very well.
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| This one's for you, Buzz. Hard to judge the assets, but I thought the teeth at least would be in line with your preferences. |
And really we are fine, and all is well. But it’s the kind of fine where we’ve invited a raging tornado into our home and he lives over in the corner and is a real part of our family now. And sometimes he comes out and lays waste to the apartment and our psyches, and we kind of smile through clenched teeth, and send him back into the corner, and pick up the pieces – casting wary glances in his direction, watching him swirling and spinning and waiting patiently for his next opportunity. It’s a bit ominous, a bit unnerving, a bit more challenging than usual to retain a sense of peace and normalcy.
But to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, the pain now is a part of the joy then. And the joy then, of the pain now. We can’t look back on this and feel proud, and good, and laugh, if we are not tested. We do not know our limits unless we push ourselves to learn where those limits may be, and how far beyond them we can go, and what triumphs we can achieve when we try. These are the lessons we are trying to provide ourselves, and our children, and they are lessons that will not be learned easily.
Meanwhile, we will have as much fun as we possibly can. Eli will go to a birthday party today, Naomi will perform with her jazz band in a cool little club in the French Concession, we’ll head to the beautiful city of Hangzhou next weekend for a little break on West Lake. We’ll see about putting Naomi and Townes into a school next fall. We’ll keep learning Chinese and we’ll go see The Hunger Games in IMAX when it shows up here in a week.
As “limits” go we’ve set ourselves some not insurmountable ones. We’re not climbing Everest, we’re not crossing the Australian Outback, we’re not deep sea diving.
And hopefully, we’ll stop swearing at our kids – and they’ll stop giving us reason to.
No parent would imagine that your journey would be without such challenges, but important for you to share and important for all of us to hear. Most would not even *think* of attempting what you are doing! I can remember feeling nervous about going on an overnight camping trip when our 2 were little ones!!! Hugs to all.........
ReplyDeleteI think this is true of all adventures away from home, the initial excitement becomes uncertainty and homesickness, and sometimes fear. Usually when the time comes to leave, it comes with tears and regret because you have grown accustomed to a new place and aren't sure if you really want to leave.
ReplyDeleteIt is good that you have had an overseas experience before so you are able to recognize what is going on and can understand it and help the rest of the family with it.
We pray for you, for strength, for safety, and for peace. You are a strong family and will only get stronger in this new place. The kids will have great stories to tell their friends and the experience will broaden their outlook on their fellow man. It will be over before you know it!
We love you!
P.S Write a book already, would you, you are an awesome writer!