Fish Heads and Duck Skin

by Lindsey Salatka

  “Look away, Tina. We don’t need you fainting right now.” He glanced at the boy and then back at me. “Welp, I guess that eliminates using the five second rule.”

  “It suddenly makes sense!” I smacked my forehead. “No wonder the convenience stores don’t have diapers—this isn’t a diaper culture. Daniel, we only have six diapers left. What do we do?”

  “I don’t know, teach Lila to squat, I guess.”

  “That’s not remotely funny!”

  “Tina, they must have diapers here. There’s no way—”

  “But I’ve looked everywhere!”

  “They’ll have them in the grocery stores.”

  “But we haven’t found a grocery store! I don’t think that concept exists here either!” I stopped in my tracks and allowed the panic to seep in. “We need to go to the consulate.”

  “What? Why?”

  “To find out where to buy diapers. They’ll know if there are grocery stores here, right? They’re the consulate!”

  “The consulate’s where you go in an emergency—when your passport is stolen, or you need to extend your travel visa. They aren’t a concierge.”

  “That’s it!” I clapped my hands to my face. “You’re a genius!”

  “I am?”

  “Yes! Didn’t Richard say there’s a Ritz-Carlton near here? Let’s ask their concierge! They must speak English, right? Maybe their gift shop even sells diapers!”

  I could see Daniel was weighing whether this was a good idea, and then, unable to suggest a better solution, he shrugged. “I’ll find the Ritz in the guidebook.”

  “There it is—that tan building straight ahead,” Daniel said forty-five hot minutes later. I had refused to take another death-defying taxi ride, so we had walked the two miles in the hottest part of the day. Sweat stung and blurred my vision so I squinted to see where he was pointing.

  “Wow, it’s so out of place.” My breath caught in excitement. “Do you think they’ll have ice?”

  “If they don’t, the place right next door will.”

  I grabbed his arm. “Is it a mirage?”

  “Nope.” On the front of the two-story cinder block building adjacent to the Ritz, the green mermaid of Starbucks shone in her benevolent circle of love, beckoning us with her tail.

  I gave Daniel a side-hug. “I can’t remember ever feeling this happy.”

  Twenty people were waiting to order when we walked into Starbucks. We arranged ourselves in a huddle behind the last person in line. “What should we get, one of everything?” I hugged myself in glee. “Ouch!” I yelped as something dug into my kidney. I turned to see a woman with sharp elbows glaring at me. She then blazed past me, shouting her order at the barista. He nodded his head without looking at her. Daniel and I looked at each other as another man approached the counter from the other side and did the same thing.

  “Wait, this isn’t a line?” I said.

  “There’s no such thing as a line in China.” I heard this and turned around. There she stood, a smile in her eyes even as the corners of her mouth turned down in pity. “You must be new,” said my first friend in China.

  Kristy was tall and thin with light-brown hair cut in an adorable pixie around a pretty, postage-stamp face. She was half Japanese and had grown up in Alaska but moved to Shanghai six years earlier for a job teaching English. She’d subsequently met her husband, Andrew, who was British and taught “maths” at the British International School. Kristy and Andrew had a son named Jeremy who was the same age as Piper.

  “Where’s Jeremy now?” I asked, scanning the room for Piper’s potential playmate.

  “School,” she said. “But even if he wasn’t, I’d never bring him here. He’d rip this place to shreds and then drop a match on it.”

  “Oh,” I said, looking at Piper who was busy emptying the second napkin container.

  “He doesn’t love school, but his Mandarin is great.”

  “Do you speak Mandarin too?” I asked.

  “Out there I speak just enough to get by.” She pointed at the door. “In here, I’m fluent. What do you want? I’ll order for you.” She looked at her watch. “I have a few minutes, school’s almost out.”

  “Do you know where we can find a grocery store?” Daniel asked Kristy once we were outside.

  Kristy looked confused. “You mean, like the one directly below us?”

  “Seriously? There’s a grocery store below us?” Daniel said.

  “Do you know if they have diapers?” I blurted.

  “Yes, but they’re imported, so they might as well be dipped in gold. Your best bet is to have your next visitor bring a suitcase of them from home.”

  “We won’t have a lot of visitors,” I said.

  “Then you should ask your ayi to whistle train her.”

  “What is this whistle training?”

  “It’s Pavlovian potty training. You whistle in their ear every time they pee; pretty soon they pee whenever you whistle in their ear. Works like a charm, even on tiny babies. The Chinese have been whistle training since the beginning of time. Just ask your ayi—”

  “I don’t have an ayi.” I shook my head.

  Kristy regarded me with open-faced horror. “Oh sister, you live in Shanghai now—you must have an ayi if you want to survive. If you walk away with one kernel of wisdom, make it this.”

  I looked at Daniel. “But we’re on a budget.”

  “Who am I, Kristy Warbucks? Trust me, an ayi will save you more money than she’ll cost you. They bargain, pay the local price for everything, erase bribes, call in favors. This is their scene; they get how it operates. Where do you live?”

  “In a hotel right now but we’re moving into Century Club next week.”

  “The place with the ornamental playground?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That playground is always closed.”

  “What? No way! It wasn’t closed when we were there.”

  “Oh really? Were kids playing on it?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “That’s because it was closed.”

  I looked at Daniel. He shrugged. “We’ll talk to them,” he said.

  Kristy stopped and pointed at the escalator descending underground in front of the Ritz that I’d assumed was going to a parking garage. “That’s how you get to the grocery store. Remember, anytime you need groceries, look down. All grocery stores are underground.”

  14.

  Tina!

  I demand an update. It’s been three weeks and I haven’t heard boo from you. Are you alive? Are you well? Are your hands so greasy from stuffing wontons in your face that you can’t drag yourself across the carpet, drop yourself onto a stool, and bang out a brief message to me? I know you suck at communicating (!!!), but a reply will require thirty seconds of your time and allow me to rest peacefully knowing that you’re thriving in your new life on the opposite side of the planet.

  -Jennifer

  P.S. Your cat is an a-hole. I can’t believe you talked me into taking him. HE SUCKS. But I’ll probably forgive you once I know you’re alive. The reply button is typically in the upper left corner of your screen. Click it now or the beast pays …

  Jennifer,

  Wow—your timing. The internet serviceman just left our new apartment. Actually, servicemen. It took five hours and seven men to get it up and running. You would have thought they were launching the internet satellite from our gross little patio. I’m not convinced any of them had set up an internet connection before. No one seemed to be in charge. It was a real headscratcher, but hey, I can’t complain—I’m connected! At the speed of slugs crossing ice, but I’m working on being less irritated by that, or anything related to speed and efficiency. I came to China with several goals, one of which is to be less aggravated by events out of my control. I can already see that this intention will be tested many times a day. And that I may need to add sanity preservation to my list of aspirations.

  Before I begin my journey toward serenity, allow
me to quickly list a few of the irritations I’ve uncovered:

  1) Our new apartment has no oven. Somehow, we forgot to check for one on the walk-through, which, according to Daniel, was my fault, since I’ll be the one using it, and he was busy haggling. In my defense, I was more concerned about finding A/C, which thankfully does exist—it’s near the ceiling in a slim rectangular box in the corner of the living room and both bedrooms, and you need to situate yourself directly underneath it to feel cool. But not too close, because it drips. Back to the oven. Apparently, no one bakes here; all food is stir-fried. I can come around to this, but between you and me, I’m not sure how strongly I’ll identify with a culture that doesn’t appreciate chocolate chip cookies. Or banana bread. Or lasagna! Gulp. No wonder they’re so grumpy! Which brings me to,

  2) These people, their grouchiness, good grief. My anger issues? They don’t hold a candle, not the wick of a tea light, to the fury I witness here at almost every exchange. I’ve been here two weeks and have already seen three fist fights. Grown men rolling on the ground, scratching at each other! It stresses me out. Most of the time the people here are barely civil to me. Although, I’ll admit, when I’m with the kids, which is pretty much always, I get a much softer reception. This is because,

  3) My kids are celebrities here. I don’t jest. Any time we go to a public space, CROWDS of people emerge and surround them. They laugh, they point, they snap pictures, they tug at my clothes and ask me to take pictures, of them, hugging my kids. The first five times, this felt fun, even flattering—like someone else noticed that my kids were special. But let me tell you, the bloom isn’t just off the rose, it’s been chewed up and spit with gusto into the sewer. Piper now twists up her face and screams when locals so much as turn in her direction. And they don’t care! They touch her anyway! Forget subtleties, these people miss direct signals, every time. Speaking of direct signals, I’m not getting a lot of them on the TV because,

  4) All of our TV stations are in Mandarin. All eight channels. Wait—I exaggerated. There’s one channel that broadcasts news in English—it repeats the same six-minute segment for the entire day. Oh, how I yearn for news from home. I’d watch fifty-five minutes of commercials to get five minutes of English-speaking commentary about anything. I want to hear someone, anyone, outside of my own family, speaking English. My head hurts from all the foreign sounds flying around it. I’d probably be too tired to watch TV, except that,

  5) The playground at our complex is not meant for actual use as intended. The pool is always open, which is great, but,

  6) No one swims in it! The pool’s a virtual ghostland, all day long. Not one kid frolicking! Not until 4 p.m. anyway, and then holy smokes, it’s a mob scene. But 4 p.m. is the middle of nap time so we have yet to show up for the party. Maybe someday. It’s good to have goals.

  Here’s my list of good things about this place (It’s short, but I’m determined to make it longer):

  1) We’re alive and in one piece

  2) The girls and Daniel seem happy

  3) I made a friend. Yay! We’re having coffee tomorrow. Oh yeah:

  4) I found coffee!

  So there you have it. Your turn. What’s new on your side of the world?

  -Tina

  15.

  “I don’t know how a despicable creature like you, who might cause a grown woman to bleed from the ears, could be considered a pet to anyone, anywhere, at any time,” I snarled as I crept slowly toward the corner of the room. It was 3 a.m. We had been in our apartment for four nights, and Mr. Tinsey had escaped from his basket, again. This time he chirped while hanging like some kind of deranged circus cricket from a ceiling tile in the corner of the kids’ room, a location which dramatically amplified his already excruciating sound. When it jarred me awake, I honestly thought it was a smoke alarm. But our apartment didn’t have a smoke alarm, due to different or possibly non-existent building codes. It was just Tinsey’s damn song piercing the night again.

  Piper sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes. Lila continued to lie on her back in her crib, wailing.

  “I’m coming for you,” I said and picked up the desk chair. My words came out in a fierce yet desperate whisper, as if I were impersonating a B-actor in a horror movie. And like any good (or more likely, bad) horror movie, the time had come to slay the beast and roll the damn credits.

  “Tina, let me do it, I’m taller than you,” Daniel said, mid-yawn. He stood in the doorway in his boxers.

  I turned to look at him. “If you promise you’ll M-U-R-D-E-R-H-I-M, then I’ll let you do it. Otherwise, you can turn around and head right on back to bed.”

  “I will,” he said without hesitation.

  “You will what?” I cocked my head.

  “I’ll do what you just spelled.” He scratched his stomach.

  “You promise?”

  “Yes. I promise.” He held his arm out.

  “Fine,” I handed him the skinny chair.

  He propped it against the dingy gray curtains, then stepped on it and wobbled.

  “Oh for the love,” I said. “Let me do it.”

  “No, I’ve got it,” he said, grabbing the wall to steady himself.

  “Just, please be careful, Daniel. The last thing we need is for you to break your arm again while catching the damn cricket.”

  And that, right there, is what some people call famous last words.

  16.

  4 a.m., Renai Hospital

  “Even the hospital smells like pee,” I said in awe, my head on a swivel as I pushed the stroller into a poorly lit entry hall the size of a hotel ballroom but much filthier than any hotel ballroom I’d ever encountered. “Are you sure you don’t want to look for the expat hospital?”

  “I’m positive—it’s forty-five minutes away, and I have no idea how to tell a taxi driver to find it. We just need to take care of this as fast as possible,” Daniel said while wincing and shuffling next to me. The linoleum floor was maroon with brown flecks, although it’s possible the brown flecks were ancient clumps of mud. Or something else.

  “At least you killed the cricket,” I whispered in case the girls could hear me from their slumber. “I mean, not that I’m glad this happened, at all, but you know what I’m saying. Thank you.”

  He didn’t respond. About twenty rusty folding chairs sat near the center of the room where people had congregated to watch cartoons on a flat-screen TV balanced on a hodge-podge of side tables. There weren’t nearly enough chairs for the other hundred or so people who waited, perched against the walls, shifting their weight from one leg to the other, many of them wearing large visible bandages on their head or torso. A dozen people sat in wheelchairs also facing the TV; another dozen squatted against the wall in the far corner, smoking.

  From what I could tell, there were three reception areas. We headed toward the least crowded one.

  “Do you speak English?” I asked several people who all looked away uncomfortably. The last guy finally picked up a phone and yelled into it. A short, plump woman in blue scrubs hustled over. “Hello, how may I help you?” she said.

  “Hello! I’m so happy you can understand me. My husband broke his arm. He’s in a lot of pain, and we don’t know where to go.”

  “How you know it broken?” she asked.

  “Well, he’s broken it before, in the same spot, and he says it felt just like this, so—”

  “Go for x-ray.” She pointed to the farthest reception area. “You must first wait there.”

  “Uh,” I stammered.

  “Come, follow me.” She scurried in front of us, hollering as she pushed through the sea of people loitering around the desk. I attempted a futile manipulation of the double stroller behind her, through the masses of humanity, but ended up reversing out and circumnavigating the crowd.

  “First you get number!” our hostess cried once we found her, pointing to a stainless-steel pole with a mechanism at the top that dispersed pink paper numbers from a roll.

  I paused, confus
ed at first. “Oh! Like a deli!” I said, proud to have grasped the concept. I looked at Daniel for his approval. His eyes were closed, his face, pale. I pulled number 74 and looked at the screen above the desk—it said 47. “Wait—I think the numbers are reversed,” I said. Then the number changed to 48.

  The wait was eye-opening, although to be fair, nothing in Shanghai to that point hadn’t been eye-opening. For starters, the hospital setting didn’t preclude my kids from being celebrities. Neither did the fact that they were asleep. People crowded around us, reaching into the stroller to shake their feet.

  “Uh, please don’t touch. Sleeping.” I put my palms together and put them to my ear, tilting my head to rest on them. They ignored me, which made we wonder if either, 1) this wasn’t the universal sign for sleeping, or 2) they didn’t give a hoot that this was the universal sign for sleeping. They just wanted to touch my kids.

  For my job at home, I’d attended many a five-day conference where the sole focus was the minimization of hospital-related infections. The lengths we would go in the US to keep germs far from any orifice were astounding, but also, necessary. At this hospital, I marveled at the sheer number of patients waiting in the lobby who were either actively oozing blood, attached to an IV pole by a mountain of dirty, peeling steri-strips, or sneezing and/or coughing without covering their mouth or nose. Several people were engaged in all of the above. I’d noticed a remarkable amount of people walking around Shanghai wearing surgical face masks and had assumed it had been for protection against the air pollution, which was significant. However, I then realized they may have also been protecting themselves against disease and infection. I wondered where I could procure four of these face masks, and how I could coerce my children into wearing them.

  At 6:57 a.m., number 74 flashed onto the screen. My eyes burned as I ran toward the desk and yelled back at Daniel, “Hurry up!” Our English-speaking comrade must have been following our progress because she hustled up, too. She explained to the man at the desk, in what sounded like tremendous detail, Daniel’s situation. The man nodded with no words. He slowly pulled open the drawer in front of him and extracted an 8” x 6” book of triplicate forms. He inserted an ancient piece of cardboard between the first triplicate and the rest of the book. Then he filled every last millimeter of the top sheet with characters. He removed the blue copy, slowing at each point of perforation, and finally handed it to me.