Beijing Tai Tai

by Tania McCartney

Me, I have no right to say that. I was born in Tasmania and I vaguely remember smooshing together some slush on the bonnet of our VW halfway up Mount Wellington. It melted and slid off soon after, and that was the extent of my snow experience as a child. When we moved to New South Wales, I spent the rest of my childhood swimming in the warm Pacific Ocean with a chocolate-brown tan. Not much snow in my childhood, no no. Sandcastles yes, snowmen no. And on that note, why don’t we build sandpeople at the beach and snowcastles in the snow?

  But I digress.

  Xiansheng was upstairs for the beginning part of our family’s first snowman, so he’s probably only got himself to blame, being that he was unavailable to direct us with the architectural planning. As the kids were also new to this and I don’t like bending down too far, we decided to build our snowman on a table at the front of our building. We pushed aside the chairs and began plonking handfuls of slush on top (after about fifteen minutes of gleeful ball-throwing).

  Very soon we had a wee man about 40 centimetres tall with a cute belly and a nicely rounded head studded with two silver jiao coins for eyes and some little stones for a mouth. We even carefully wedged two short sticks into the body for arms. Cute, cute, cute.

  Then Xiansheng came down and shattered our snowy illusion.

  ‘You call that a snowman? That’s not a snowman! Ha ha ha ha ho ho ho!’ he said into our bright-eyed faces, and then promptly flung himself onto the snow-covered lawn nearby and began some serious snow-gathering. Great walloping scoops he made—armfuls of the stuff scraped across the withering wet grass until a large, incongruous pile of mucky slush began to form beneath the bare trees. We all stood watching. Riley sneezed. Ella groaned. Finally, we screwed up our noses, patted the head of our wee snowman and went inside.

  ‘Don’t worry!’ Xiansheng called after us, ‘I’ll have it sorted! I’ll give you a real snowman!’

  He didn’t last long. Ten minutes later he came through the door grumbling about a pathetic snowfall and went to take a hot shower so he could scrub his cold knees, while we three snowman experts sniggered into our cocoa.

  Bring on the next flurry!

  The Tooth Fairy Cruises Beijing

  Do you believe?

  When we left Australia, I was sure to send off change-of-address notes to the VIPs in my children’s life—Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. I had carefully explained to Ella that these characters don’t really visit China and that we would need to let them know our change of address.

  Ella, wide-eyed, made sure I didn’t forget.

  So, when she lost her first baby tooth ( sob!), the first thing she said to me was: ‘Are you sure you gave the Tooth Fairy our change of address?’ I reassured her. We prepped the tooth for the Fairy and Ella snuggled in to her first gap-toothed night.

  The Tooth Fairy did come; she’s an organised fairy, after all. She even left a shimmer of glitter all over the floor and on the nightstand. And not only that—she left a 100 kuai ($18) note! Ella was ecstatic. I assured her that this 100 kuai thing would be a one-off ... first teeth always make the Tooth Fairy extra generous, and Ella had to promise me she wouldn’t tell any of her friends about this ridiculous sum (don’t want to cause problems with my parent friends or anything).

  But money aside, I have to tell you something. Something really disturbing, actually. I have to tell you that some people think this Tooth Fairy hoo-ha is a crock. Can you believe this? And, horror of horrors, some people will even lump the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus in this crock category!

  I know you are clutching at your chest right now. It’s shocking for me, too. And yes, along with regular fairies in the garden, leprechauns and elves, the illustrious Tooth Fairy is also maligned (most unfairly) in this way.

  Imagine. Imagine not having faith in the magic of this world. Imagine presuming that you could possibly know, with 100 per cent certainty, that every tree doesn’t contain a resident fairy. It’s too frightening to me, this presumption, and frightening for children the world over. And frightening for anyone who holds faith in their heart.

  If you, God forbid, happen to come across non-believers in this lifetime, remind them of a little girl who wrote to a newspaper editor when her friends told her there was no Santa Claus. The letter is called Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Google it. Print it out and give it to anyone who doesn’t believe.

  At a 100 kuai a tooth, Ella is a true believer.

  Bu Yao!

  Extending our kids’ Mandarin

  ‘Ask Ayi!’ is a regular refrain in our house. It’s so nice to have someone else to send the kids to (other than Dad), yet every time I tell my kids to ‘go ask Ayi’, they whine about being unable to speak Mandarin. Suspicions peak, therefore, when I frequently catch them quite suddenly adopting the linguistic capacity to ask for strawberries, Oreos and mango ice cream. Hmm.

  After a couple of years of daily language lessons at school, I did, however, expect my kids to be able to communicate better in Mandarin. They have an okay vocabulary for their age (colours, days of the week, fruit, extended relatives), their pronunciation is infallible, but their general sentence structure leaves a lot to be desired. Is it just them or is it the way they are taught?

  Chinese is typically taught by rote here, even at international schools, with set sentence structure learned by memory. Although this may be effective for learning Chinese characters, I’m not so sure it’s effective for absorbing a language kids hear only 5 per cent of their day or less. As it stands, their most oft-used phrase is the simple ‘Bu yao!’—don’t want.

  Nothing, of course, beats the mother-tongue method, internationally tried and true. I’ll never forget meeting an expat mother who, for their family’s first six months in Beijing, took her kids out of their international school early every day so they could mix with regular Chinese kids. I would never have been brave enough to do this, and I look upon this woman’s decision with enormous, regret-encrusted envy, as both her children are now fluent.

  Bit too late for wishing but I suppose there’s still time to help the kids’ language exposure deepen. Riley constantly asks me, ‘How you speak _____ in Chinese?’ and I indulge him when I know, but oftentimes I don’t.

  Maybe I should give Cute Chinese Chick with the Ming Dynasty haircut a call. How you speak ‘giggle’ in Chinese?

  When I Was a Kid...

  Educationally, our kids have got it good

  I am frequently dazed by the international school education our children are receiving here in Beijing. Just when I think they’ve got it good, I realise they’ve got it even better.

  Every time my kids come home from the British School spouting another brain-augmenting day, I can’t help but repeat that same phrase over and over in my mind: ‘When I was a kid...’ (also tempting to follow it with the classic ‘...had to walk 10 miles in the snow with no shoes and a bag full of books on my back’).

  When I was a kid, we didn’t have access to interactive whiteboards or a bottomless internet that could flood any project with detailed information at the push of a button. No no. We had to wade through 24 hefty encyclopaedias (for those too young to remember, encyclopaedias are information-packed books) and if the info couldn’t be found there, we’d have to— gasp!—make a trip to the local library.

  When I was a kid, we didn’t make short films using plasticine figurines and digital blue screen technology (in grade three!). We didn’t create entire planets in our classroom and spend a week designing and reporting on the flora, fauna and social infrastructure of Planet Zim Zum. We didn’t hold weekly assemblies demonstrating how Egyptian mummies had their brains pulled out through their noses. We didn’t have access to 100 bongos and an African drumming display that sends chills up your spine or whacky scientists who make volcanoes out of bicarb soda. We didn’t read at a grade-two level when we were only four years old. It just didn’t happen.

  Could it be that I am a little jealous?

  Yes. Yes I am. I want to play, too. I wan
t to pull brains out through noses and make short films with blue screen technology! Alas, it all seems too late for me. I will never have the early exposure to the world our kids are having here. The cultural saturation. The language skills. The mind-stretching challenges. These things are restructuring the very composition of our children’s brains. It’s prepping them for life in unparalleled ways—ways they’re unlikely to achieve at home.

  Our children will not receive this kind of education in Australia. While our education system is impressive and our teachers are marvellous, government schools suffer typical lack-of-fund-itis, endemic to most countries of the world, I suppose. Unless we want to pay for a school that costs more than a small island (ain’t gonna happen), our kids will attend a public school when they go home—with one teacher, a class size double those in Beijing, a quarter of the resources, and no teacher’s aide, oh no.

  It worries me. Will my kids’ brains languish if they aren’t exposed to the level of intellectual stimulation they’ve experienced in Beijing? Will we be compromising their very future? Have we set them on an educational trajectory that will forever remain unparalleled?

  Until we go home and find out, I’ll be delighting in every British School drop-off, and so will my children. Lucky ducks.

  Crowning Glory

  Western hair/Chinese hair—not same thing!

  The difference between Chinese hair and Caucasian hair is vast. Coarse versus fine, shiny versus arid, straight versus loopy, thick versus sparse, liquid versus fluffy. A generalisation maybe, but this is the ultimate difference between what a hairdresser will find growing on the head of a Beijing native and that found on the head of a several-generations-Caucasian – Australian, especially one who has fairy floss for hair. Like me.

  It actually took me months to muster the courage to walk into my first Beijing salon, mainly because I feared they would completely fluff my fine, arid fluff. What struck me when I first went into the salon, however, was not the hairdressing itself. It was the staring. The being inspected, assessed and blatantly gawped at like a Parisian haute couture shop assistant, only without the hoity attitude, just childlike curiosity.

  They look at your hands and the rings on your hands. They look at your nails, your watch, your clothes, shoes, bag, skin, hair and finally your face, which they will stare at as though caught in a hypnotic swirl. Persons with low self-esteem, paranoia or agoraphobia enter at own risk.

  To dodge the stares, I usually read, which I’m convinced is considered the height of rudeness because I have never seen Beijingren do this. Ever. They just sit there, patiently, for hours and hours—even under the perming machine—staring. Amazing. Who’s got time to do that?

  I also buck the system when it comes to the handbag handover. It’s not paranoia, I just want it with me—it contains my phone, my magazine, my vital bottle of water; it stays with me. Each time, nonetheless, I am asked for it and each time I politely refuse. But God forbid if I place it on the floor. ‘No! Tai zang le! Too dirty!’ they will cry and my bag will be offered its own chair, like a pet. I’m sure they would shampoo it if they could.

  Speaking of shampooing, there is nothing like a Chinese head-washing. Nothing. They’re onto something, these people. There’s none of this sitting upright and twisting your neck into yoga contortions before wedging it into a headache-inducing basin, no no. You get to lie down, yes, you do. And you have a hot towel for the back of your neck and your head rests on something soft but firm in the basin, so there’s no strain at all. Why didn’t the West think of this?

  Then comes the water, then the deliciously fragrant shampoo ... then the fingertips. Oh Lord. The hair-washing mistress begins by pressing into scalp pressure points that make you release little whispers of delight. She then launches into strong, sweeping, skin-shifting tingles all over your head and down your neck, where the sides will be compressed and kneaded along with the slippery aid of conditioner. I challenge any goosebump to lay flat during this experience.

  She will then use her nails to vigorously scratch the scalp, then pull hair by the roots, sending blood rushing to the skin, and the grand finale will be an earlobe massage that really belongs in a parlour of things far less savoury, for its tendency to curl toes and flush faces pink.

  I love a Chinese head-washing so much, I’m even over the ‘staring’ thing. Every eyelash, every freckle, every stray dot of mascara, every open pore is under intense scrutiny. When under the fingertips of my master head-masseuse, my face—upside down to their point of view—must surely resemble the Swiss Alps—white and angular, all mountains and valleys, peaks of cheeks and troughs of deep-set eyes, high ridges of nose bridges and temple plains, with my Roman schnoz rising clear and proud like the Matterhorn.

  But I let it all go for this singularly otherworldly experience. When the washing and kneading is done, my neck and ears are lovingly dried and then my head is wrapped, Smurf-like, in a tight towel with my ears sticking out like those of a four-year-old boy. I’m then kindly escorted, in a semi-delirious state, to a waiting chair and if my stylist is not ready, I’m given a hand, arm or shoulder massage.

  On top of all this (if you can believe there could possibly be more), a Chinese blow-dry is truly something to behold. My regular doyen is such a perfectionist, he’s been known to finalise my blow-dry with a ten-minute fine-tooth-combing—coaxing, quite literally, each strand into place. By the time he’s done, I look like my hair has been cast in a blonde mould, a Polly Pocket plastic dome. I absolutely forbid him to hairspray, lest it never move again.

  Then, when I finally stand and flick my head, that plastic dome separates like the strands on a fringed lampshade and falls into a flickable sheath that weighs onto my shoulders softly, like silk tassels. Sleek, shiny, frizz-free, gorgeous hair on a head that is usually inhabited by a brillo pad.

  That’s right, nothing beats a Chinese blow-dry, especially when it costs around three dollars from first rinse to head-flick. When I return to Australia, I honestly don’t know what I’ll do with my frizzy mop. I guess I’ll be able to get a job as a toilet brush.

  Good hair. It’s a Chinese thing.

  The Rabbit Finds Beijing

  Easter in the capital

  Santa Claus has it all pegged out. He has his high-tech, computerised Naughty or Nice list churning out statistics on an hourly basis, slotting kids worldwide into categories that ultimately determine their ranking on the big-gift/small-gift/lump-of-coal scale.

  The Easter Bunny isn’t that sophisticated.

  I don’t know much about the elusive Mr Rabbit, but I imagine he is a simple fellow, living in a sunny dale somewhere near the Lake District in England, secreted under a hill of lime-green grass and pink daisies. I imagine he wakes each morning, pops on his denim overalls, perches bifocals on his twitching nose and sets his worker bunnies to smelting great slabs of chocolate in the labyrinth of his underground empire.

  Afterwards, he more than likely has a cup of tea and a piece of carrot cake then hops off over the dales for an afternoon lollop in the sunshine.

  Come Easter Sunday, I imagine Mr Rabbit puts on his jet-powered, super-sonic, land-bounding hopping shoes, then slings his never-ending choc-egg supply onto his back and bounds off on his egg-delivering route. You see, Easter-egg-hungry kids are everywhere nowadays. Even Beijing.

  I must admit, Ella in particular was worried whether the Easter Bunny would make it to Beijing. She expressed this concern more than a few times, as did the kids of some neighbours. So, my Halloween-buddy neighbour and I decided we needed to help Mr Rabbit find our kids and make things chocolate-coated and pastel for them.

  It took a lot of liaising with the Bunny. There were heavy discussions about the logistics of importing his eggs, as good ones are either scarce or horrendously expensive in the Chinese capital. But we did it. We got the goods and organised an egg hunt and games for the kids in our building. We dotted the bushes downstairs with pastel ribbon, hid straw bunnies in the grass and perched foil-wr
apped choc eggs in surreptitious places, where only kiddliwinks dare to tread. We had 50 kids trailing baskets through the grass, scurrying and peeping with delight.

  The great Bunny didn’t let us down.

  Like all Western festivals, it was a surreal experience celebrating Easter in Beijing. The only outward clue Easter had arrived was the mass selection of chicks, bunnies and hand-painted eggs at Liangma flower market. What a bonanza. It seems that every Western festival comes up trumps in the sales departments of China (surprise, surprise).

  In the meantime, Ella and Riley have not only dipped themselves in melted chocolate, they have also experienced a renewed faith in the Easter Bunny and in the knowledge that celebrating an important festival like Easter is something you bring with you no matter where you live in the world.

  Fu huo jie kuai le! Happy Easter!

  Baubles and Bling

  Tai Tai bedecked

  When my sister Jie Jie first came to visit us in Beijing, I took her to buy baubles and she promptly laid down and had conniptions on the floor. Then she stood up and fossicked and left the store with her body weight in bling.

  Let me explain.

  When we first arrived in the capital, I wasn’t interested in baubles; I had never really been into them. Handbags and shoes? Yes. Baubles and bling? No. I had my engagement ring and wedding band, some Swarovski crystal earrings and a few heirloom pieces, and that was always enough for me.

  Things rapidly changed, however, especially after an hour or two at Ling Ling—a local jeweller who has cornered the higher-class bauble market here in Beijing, making friends with many an expat and offering a vast collection of bling from 10 kuai novelty bracelets to rare Tahitian pearls worth thousands of dollars.