Deja Vu

Greetings from Beijing! We arrived safely and without major incident en route, although as the title of my blog predicted it was something of a Griswoldian journey. We departed New Haven at 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, August 5, and arrived in Beijing 40 hours later. Our itinerary could only have been less efficient if we had stopped at Yellow Jacket en route! But the kids saved the major meltdowns until we were on Chinese soil, so I’d call the trip a success.

I’ve been experiencing déjà vu as many aspects of touchdown conjur up Fulbright Welcome Week 2003. Some of the parallels include

• Extended, seemingly futile negotiations with baggage-office staff at PEK as a bus carrying the rest of our large group waited … and waited… and waited for us
• Being cloistered in a swanky western hotel for the first couple of days, not having even to handle a RMB note or speak a word of Mandarin
• Hanging out with Sukey Bernard (Who? Keep reading!)
• Traveling with a big gang of academics who I don’t know well (or at all) and wondering which of them will become good friends during our China adventure

Of course, there are some differences this time around. Like, for example, we’re staying at the J.W. Marriott instead of the Hilton. Boy, it is just an entirely different experience here – the pool is on the second floor instead of the sixth!!! And, of course, there is the small matter of the two little monsters/darlings we have in tow.

What can I say about Elsa and William that they will not hold against me years from now? Hmmm… well, they are both sleeping right now and look perfectly angelic. But during their waking hours they are both extremely, um, exuberant. This is true at home, too, but they are really not taking any breaks from being hyper and loud. Actually, William is not that hyper, he is just loud. And extremely attached to his mommy. William’s two primary activities when he is not in my arms: clinging to mommy’s legs or shouting at the top of his lungs to be held by mommy. Elsa is defiant, demanding and just plain LOUD. Did I mention loud? Oh yeah, spazzy too. But she has endured a grueling journey here and is running on fumes – so far, the only thing she has eaten has been the cereal we brought with us, a few bites of fruit from the hospitality suite, and a few pieces of room-service penne. So I remain hopeful that once she acclimates – hopefully by tomorrow(?!) – she’ll settle down a bit.

Three things have saved me from going completely bonkers with Elsa. The first is the presence of another family on our trip with two lovely little girls, one a year older and one a year younger than Elsa. Playmates! Yay! The second is the astonishing (to Jonathan and me) reaction of our traveling companions to Elsa. Several of them apparently find her adorable and entertaining. Somehow they haven’t noticed the antics that have preceded her (involuntary, premature) departure from several public meals. So on the trip over we actually got several small breaks from Miss Loony-Tune while she visited with various new friends on the plane. Finally, we have help in Beijing from our friend Sukey, who in 2003 was the amazingly poised and sweet 15-year-old daughter of our fellow Fulbrighters in Shanghai, Jane Hunter and Joel Bernard. Today Sukey is heading into her junior year at Wesleyan and is in Beijing for the summer before spending fall semester here. We adored her in Shanghai and are thrilled to have her with us this week – she is GREAT with the kids and, super bonus, speaks Mandarin! YAY!!

So I actually have a few initial observations about Beijing and China that go beyond what a pain in the ass it is to have my kids here with me, although having barely left the hotel I don’t have much to report yet. My impression so far is basically plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. China, as anyone who has not been living in a cave knows, is insanely dynamic, always changing at a mad pace. There have been lots of changes in Beijing since I was last here in October, 2003, and even at Pudong Airport in Shanghai , where we enjoyed one of our avoidable stopovers). Pudong, for example, has two new terminals. Plus ca change. The international arrivals terminal, interestingly, is not air conditioned. Plus c’est la meme chose! It somehow seems soooo Chinese to me that they have a very sleek, modern, huge airport, which is largely motivated by the desire to create a certain image (you know, of sleekness and modernity) for the rest of the world. Yet international travelers deplaning at Pudong in, say, August cannot get through immigration without starting to “glow.” Nothing says 21ST CENTURY WORLD POWER like a steamy airport terminal, right?

Beijing has expanded outward since we were here in ’03. I think they had just finished building the Fourth Ring Road then; now the city has been built out to Sixth Ring Road. I wonder how many rings there will be in 2013! There is also a new terminal at PEK, and as intended it does indeed look like a dragon! Very cool. It is also IMMENSE – the largest airport in the world, I’m told. But as in Shanghai there is a hint of the developing world in that many flights do not terminate at the terminal per se. We parked on the tarmac and descended old-fashioned stairs, then stood around waiting for busses to transport us to the terminal. It was 91 degrees, 90% humidity and 200% smog. To be honest, it did seem an appropriate capper for our multi-leg journey to end on air-stairs. It was sort of like the golden age of travel, except we didn’t stop to refuel in Newfoundland.

As happened when we arrived at PEK for Fulbright orientation in 2003, one piece of our checked baggage failed to show up. Then it was my giant suitcase with all of my clothes for the semester; this time it was just our beat-up old stroller. Chasing the stroller down gave me an experience that truly illustrated the highs and lows of being in China.

First, the low… after all of our group had collected their bags and our stroller was the only thing missing, I went to see if it was with the oversized bags. A baggage-office staff person took my claim tags to try to track down the stroller, but I could not tell what was going on – was it on the ground, coming in from the tarmac, or was it lost, or what? Nor could I tell what she was actually doing to find the stroller, since it kind of looked like nothing. After about 5 minutes Jonathan came looking for me and was determined to abandon the stroller, which would have been fine because we REALLY wanted to get going to the hotel, as did the 24 people we were traveling with, and we knew we would probably get a brand-new stroller courtesy of either Yale or China Airlines. But at that point the girl with my claim tags had disappeared behind an official door, and since we had seen airport staff actually checking the tags as passengers left the baggage area I didn’t think we would be able to get our (HUGE) cart outside. So I left Jonathan in the office and I went out to get our greeter, hoping someone from the hospitality company would come back with me and either get our stroller or get our claim check back. And if you’re thinking, “But I’ve read all about the big campaign to teach English to hospitality workers in Beijing! Couldn’t you just tell the baggage staff to get your tags and let you go?” Um, no. I could not. It is possible that the combined English vocabulary of the four girls in the baggage office was smaller than my Mandarin vocabulary. And that is NOT a way to brag about my Mandarin!

I’m not knocking the baggage girls for their lack of English skills. What was frustrating about the experience was that for most of the time I and then Jonathan were waiting, nobody was doing anything except for ooh-ing and ah-ing at our adorable baby. (Our adorable little girl was already on the curb with one of her new jie-jies from the Yale delegation.) The girl who had our baggage tags mostly stood around looking worried, except of course when she went into the next room. When I finally got back to Jonathan with a baggage manager (who also spoke ZERO English but had been sort-of briefed by our guide), at least 20 minutes had passed since the last bag had been pulled off the carousel and we still had no stroller. We couldn’t communicate that we just wanted to cut bait, so I had to smile warmly and take my claim check out of the girl’s hand, which is probably incredibly rude in China, and said “Wamen qu zai hotel! Xie xie nimen!” (“We’re going to hotel! Thank you all!”) And no, the Mandarin word for “hotel” is not “hotel.” I just couldn’t remember how to say hotel. Everyone clearly thought we were nutty as Jonathan, William and I bolted out of there and hurried to rendez-vous with the other Yalies, who were of course very eager to get the hell out of the airport and into the hotel. (And who were also, by the way, super kind and gracious about the delay over a crappy old stroller!)

But then something sooo nice happened, something that would, I think, never happen at an American airport. We had exited the baggage area (with no one inspecting our claim check, by the way) and were about to get on the elevator to the parking garage when the original baggage girl came running up to us with, you guessed it, our stroller! She was sweaty and out of breath and obviously delighted to have reunited us with our precious lost luggage. It was NOT a short distance that she had covered. I did my best to express my appreciation and to convey that she had gone well beyond what anyone would have expected. “Hen hao! Xie xie ni! Ni shi wonderful!” Smile, hug, etc.

Of course, now I’m irked that I’m not going to get a new stroller from the Yale Executive Education Center! So thanks for nothin’, xiaojie!! Ha ha ha.

The ride into town was unusually quick. Usually all the roads in Beijing are totally congested, but for the Olympics there are restrictions for pollution control that take more than half the cars off the streets every day. Also, instead of a diamond lane they currently have a five-rings lane. Each highway has a lane painted with the Olympic rings (it looks cool, I’ll try to get a photo) which can only be used by vehicles with special Olympic credentials, which all of our vehicles have. We saw police cars at every exit (and the exits are closely spaced, so there was a lot of bacon on the highway), presumably enforcing the traffic restrictions. One of the Yale families spends a lot of time here (and even has an apartment in Beijing), and they were especially struck by the increased number of police on the highway. The absence of traffic is eerie. It’s not like Beijing is a ghost town by any means, but anyone who has been here before would notice right away how few cars there are.

OK, so I must conclude these ramblings without editing them because my coach is about to turn into a pumpkin. That is to say, the little angels are stirring from their nap. (Nap! Yay! Maybe we’ll all have a happy afternoon!!) Next time I will write about our first Olympic event (women’s handball, gooooooooooo Angola!) and impressions of the Olympic venues.

Oh yeah, we saw David Schwimmer at the airport in Beijing! Celebrity sighting #1!