I had e-mailed Everett earlier in the week and we planned a time to talk. I didn’t have a phone in my apartment, so I used my computer to call his office—while Cole slept on the bed in the same room. It was morning on the East Coast, evening in Thailand.
“Thank you so much for talking to me this morning.” I told him about my ambitious plan, learning three languages in three different countries, and asked him about the best way to learn.
He explained, “Language is not a mathematical system and it can’t be completely taught in books. My view is that people are born with the need to communicate. We don’t learn languages as well unless we need them. We must depend on them for our survival.”
Everett literally put himself in a life-or-death situation when he moved his wife and small children to a hut in the Amazon. When his wife came down with dysentery, she almost died before they were able to travel upriver several hours to get medical care. Poisonous snakes and plants were everywhere; without learning the necessary language, Everett and his family might not have made it at all. This reinforced what I’d been thinking about our project; we had to put ourselves in a place where we’d be forced to use the language just to get by. Only then would we really learn well.
We talked more about his experiences, and he touched a bit on how he learned the Pirahã language. He said that living in the Pirahã culture was incredibly necessary for learning the Pirahã language. “I think that one reason that adults have a harder time learning a language is that they have already acquired one culture and they want to live within that culture while they learn the other language.”
I interjected. “Like, living your regular American life while studying Rosetta Stone Japanese in your spare time? But not going to Japan?”
“Exactly. And that’s not going to work. When children learn their first language, they learn the language and the culture together, so if you don’t replicate that, you are going to have less success.”
Everett’s children also learned the Pirahã language as well as Portuguese. Their family fell into habits with language, using Portuguese while in the Brazilian towns, Pirahã with the tribespeople, and English when they ate lunch together. Sometimes they’d forget to use English until someone said a certain word and then they’d all naturally switch back to English again.
I processed this, then asked, “So do you think you have to let the culture change you?”
“If you learn another culture, it changes you. I mean, it’ll start with trivial things like words for new concepts that you didn’t have before. I don’t think that you start off wanting to change, you start off wanting to learn, and the learning itself changes you,” Everett explained. It made sense to me.
These days, Everett’s children are grown and raising their own families. His intention was never specifically to raise bilingual kids—it just happened as part of his research and career choices. I asked him how the kids did when they returned to the United States. He said it was actually pretty challenging.
“We had a very traumatic experience for them in 1984—they had only been back to the States a few times in the last seven years, and we came up to Cambridge, Massachusetts. They started school and the U.S. culture was the foreign culture to them, and they learned from that, I think they grew strength from that. But it was hard, initially, for them.”
I thanked him for his time. I looked at my sleeping boy, his bare legs stretched out and his arms raised over his head, taking up as much of the bed as possible, a sleepy conquistador of mattress real estate, and let Dr. Everett’s last words settle over me. It was hard. For them. Whatever happened next, I had to be very careful. I didn’t even know how to protect Cole, but as we packed up our bags and I took down my whiteboards, I kept watching my son. Children were their own instruction manuals, I decided. If I listened and watched carefully, he would tell me what he needed. He’d let me know if it was too much, too fast, or too hard. I hoped that would be enough.
Four
I watched the cityscape through my misty window, searching for some clue about our new home. Cole slept on my chest, his face nestled below my collarbone, warm and soft. Drew sat next to me, cradling our backpack like a second child, our third suitcase wedged awkwardly between us. I leaned my forehead against the cool window, absorbed the details of each skyscraper, the hue of the glass, the shapes of the high-rises, the empty spaces between them, wondering if it looked more Chinese here, if there was some fundamental Chinese quality to this city, any particular sensibility that I could identify. So far, nothing I could pick up on—just large glass-and-steel buildings, silver cubes towering in clusters, dotted with cranes and the skeletons of new construction along the way.
I turned to watch Drew experience the new city for the first time. He looked out the window with keen interest, silently absorbing the result of my latest plan, giving away nothing.
We passed the Bird’s Nest, an eighty-thousand-seat arena that was created for the 2008 Olympics. The interior lights of the stadium illuminated each band of steel, radiating colored light that mirrored prettily on its large reflecting pool. The scale and beauty of the architecture was impressive, a monument to what Beijing could be, but as of yet was not. I could tell the city was huge, with unmitigated urban sprawl—a “megacity” they called it. From the back of a taxicab it just looked like an hour of traffic between densely packed skyscrapers, gray and solemn.
The daylight had started to fade, but the millions of individually lit homes illuminated the sky. A thick haze had settled on the horizon, diffusing the light into a yellow glow. It was our first encounter with the infamous pollution: a thick, slightly brown blanket of smog that covered the city.
We were in Beijing.
Our friends had thrown us a good-bye party at the only Mexican restaurant in Chiang Mai with decent margaritas, and Cole crawled around under the table while we ate, the sound of motorbikes zooming by not diminishing the enjoyment of some decent guac. At the end of the night, I teared up a little when we were saying our good-byes. Drew and I had lived away from our families since college, but somehow leaving behind the small community we had cobbled together in Thailand stung more than missing our relatives back home.
Over the months of planning, as the word slowly got out to our extended network, I had been flooded with stories about China, which ranged wildly from “It’s the worst” to “It’s the best” with plenty of “meh” in between. One friend who’d visited had broken down after four days, emotionally exhausted from the attention her ample bosom garnered her—an elderly Chinese woman even reached out and cupped her breasts, unable to resist the novelty, mortifying my friend. Another friend, a corporate road warrior who lived in Singapore, raved about Beijing’s food and shopping. Friends who lived in Shanghai and Kunming told me of the challenges of Chinese culture. As we drove through the city for the first time, I tried to hold back judgment. I knew it would take time to get a sense of the place.
Drew’s parents were reluctantly happy for us. Yet I could sense his mother’s unease when she asked, “Are you ever going to come home to the States, or is this forever?”
No, not forever, Drew assured her. We encouraged them to get passports, and we’d fly them out to see us. His mother discouraged the pipe dream, responding in one e-mail exchange, “I have no desire to see any country anywhere in the world.” There’s a Vermont stubborn streak in that sentence, one that Drew had inherited. His parents were retired, living in rural North Carolina, and while they didn’t expect us to live near them, or even on the same coast, our habit of leaving the country seemed to be pushing it a bit too far.
I took some comfort from our friends Alison and Shawn, who had spent many weeks and months in Beijing as they waited to adopt each of their two children. They told us, “You will love Beijing. We miss it even now.”
At the Beijing airport, I had given the taxi driver a slip of paper with our hotel address written in Chinese charac
ters painstakingly copied from the hotel’s website. An hour later, the driver stopped in front of a building with an intricately designed golden façade and a red-tiled roof. It wasn’t until the driver took off that I truly felt the enormity of what we had done.
We moved to Beijing without any Mandarin—to learn the language, yes, but we had immediate needs to attend to and no language with which to do so: checking into our hotel, finding and purchasing food, and trying to find an apartment. Yes, there was a travel bubble, a network of websites, hotels, tour guides, and expat relocation companies, all ready and willing to usher us into an expat version of Beijing, where life was lived in English, for nothing more than a fee. But I had other plans. I wanted to discover Beijing myself, to learn the language as we went, to experience the city and culture in a way that wasn’t filtered through the travel industrial complex.
It was the end of December, and our breaths billowed out in white clouds. Red and yellow neon signs with Chinese characters crowded the sides of each building, and barren trees lined the street. The city was quiet. Drew and I stood with our nearly two-year-old, plus three suitcases and a backpack, alone on Donghuamen street in the Wangfujing neighborhood of Beijing—just us and a line of red lanterns strung down the street, swaying in the cold night air.
Drew and I looked at each other and laughed.
• • •
LET’S SEE WHAT I’VE GOTTEN US INTO, I thought to myself as I bundled up Cole the next day. We’d successfully checked into our hotel the night before with the help of some miming. Afterward, I’d given Cole a bath and put him to bed while Drew went out to get dinner. He came back with instant ramen buckets the size of movie theater popcorn and with a slew of seasoning packets that included pickled vegetables. We ate our enormous ramen, flipped through the TV channels, and went to bed. We still hadn’t seen the city in daylight.
We set out with Cole in a comically large winter jacket (all we could find in Thailand, where winter weather gear wasn’t needed or stocked) and we wrapped him and the entire stroller in a travel blanket that also doubled as a pillow if you folded it right. We were only a few blocks from the front entrance of the Forbidden City, so we headed there first, noting the empty streets except for the three-wheeled electronic rickshaws only manned by their drivers, the windows fogged up from his or her breath. We passed shops with beautiful gift boxes of teas and candies; souvenir stands selling panda bear hats for kids; hawkers with half-frozen, out-of-season strawberries; and convenience shops selling everything from bottled water to skin-whitening cream.
It was New Year’s Eve day, so when we reached the Forbidden City it was completely devoid of other Westerners. A few intrepid local families milled around. I prepared myself for my first test: I had to order tickets in Mandarin. I couldn’t help but think of Marco Polo, who worked so hard to get to China. All I had to do was buy a ticket. I had practiced a little before we came, using online lessons to memorize a few phrases. I walked up to the ticket office and said, “Èr” for two, and held up two fingers. A long beat passed, I could feel my cheeks warming up, flushed with embarrassment, and then the ticket seller responded in perfect English, “Do you want a map?”
“Yes, please,” I said, sliding my Chinese yuan across the counter.
The majesty of the Forbidden City was impressive from afar. Up close the rows of chairs in the main plaza were covered in a thin layer of soot, the red paint on the grand center building was chipped in places, and the endless steps and handrails were dusty and gray. Cole kept kicking off his shoes. A Chinese woman came over and pulled down the hem of his pants leg, which had crept up to expose an inch of his ankle. I said, “Xie xie!” (thank you), and she said something in Mandarin. I tilted my head and bobbed it a few different ways, trying to convey Great idea, I’m not sure, and We’ll try that! all in one movement. She nodded and walked away.
I passed. It was a tiny victory, but I took it. I had interacted with someone in Mandarin and held up my end, even if that just meant saying “thanks.”
We holed up in the little café inside the Forbidden City and I cleaned up the soot Cole had gotten all over his hands while Drew ordered us some drinks. My face was frozen from the wind, but I was happy, sipping my steaming cup of tea with my family, in China, in the Forbidden City. I pressed the details into my memory like the imprint of a flower in a closed book, mental notes to save everything: the large ancient stones in the garden, the buzz of Mandarin, the heat coming from the kitchen, and the cramped little tables with families bundled up in full winter coats around us. Even the little kids were drinking tea. Eventually, Cole wriggled off my lap and bolted for the door, laughing the whole way—he was making his escape. His toddler threshold for sitting still had been reached.
As we walked out of the rear entrance of the palace, the air seemed worse, and a fog moved in thick and gray with flakes of what looked like ash. It reminded me of the book The Road by Cormac McCarthy. If there was anything more postapocalyptic than ash slowly falling from a gray sky, I couldn’t think of it. I had just given up on trying to get Cole back into the stroller, pulling him up on my hip, when a hush fell over the city and the streets emptied around us.
“Mama,” Cole cried, and arched his back, the warning sign of a dangerously jet-lagged and sleepy boy who could easily skew into tantrum territory.
“Drew, we have to get him home,” I said, wrapping Cole’s stroller blanket around him as he wriggled on my hip. “He’s done.”
“Okay.”
Outside the palace, there was a line of taxicabs parked with their engines running on a day when almost no one was looking for a ride. Drew had a business card from the hotel with our address on it and a small map on the back showing its location in relation to the Forbidden Palace. It was only a few blocks. This should be very straightforward.
Drew knocked on the window of the first one and handed him the card. The driver shook his head, said something in Mandarin, then handed back the card and rolled up his window. What?
Drew tried the next one. No.
“It’s really close!” Drew protested, but the driver coolly rolled up his window and stared straight ahead.
Oh, come on! I thought. The weight of Cole was making my hip and lower back ache, and he had started to whimper a little. We moved down the line of cabs.
At the last cab, Drew tried his best Mandarin. He said the name of the hotel slowly and pointed down the street, miming, “Not far, not far, just down this street” and with Cole about a moment away from a meltdown, the driver looked at my husband and tilted his head, then flicked his hand at us like he was flicking away a bug.
So we walked. It wasn’t far, but Cole was done with life. He started to wail. I was singing songs to him, jog-walking down the street, bouncing him with every step. I zipped him up into my coat, saying, “shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh,” but now people were coming out from the hutong courtyard homes, coming to the street to see this crying baby. One woman even stopped me to try to calm my child for me. She put her face inches from his (and mine) and cooed at him. He was not amused. Before long a small crowd formed around us. I said, “Xie xie,” over and over, impatient to get through the crowd, and finally started just forcing my way past everyone, Drew following behind with the empty stroller. Meanwhile the day kept darkening as more and more smog rolled in.
Finally we burst into the hotel room. Cole stopped crying and fell asleep immediately. The cold melted off me, but I couldn’t shake a sense of foreboding.
I looked up the pollution levels on the U.S. Embassy website. The hourly reading was at 300—extremely hazardous (to put that into perspective, Los Angeles on its worst days is a 30). We shouldn’t have even been outside.
I felt a scratchy tickle at the back of my throat, the telltale sign of oncoming sickness. This couldn’t be good.
Five
The sun woke me as it streamed in through the glass, which had become covered in condens
ation from our nighttime breathing. I gently eased myself out of bed to make tea. I had quickly discovered that tea in China was not just superlatively good, it was also varied: from ultralight white teas to refined jasmine green teas to the strong oolong and black teas, with endless variations that I never would have thought possible, rows and rows of it in the markets and grocery stores. For a coffee drinker like me, it was a revelation. One day I drank a translucent tea that tasted almost like blueberries. Another day, I created my own chamomile–green tea blend with fresh dried flowers and leaves I chose at the market. I couldn’t read the labels, and even my dictionary was useless because it didn’t let me look up Chinese characters, so I’d buy tea at random, surprised each time I brewed a new batch, wondering what I would be drinking next. It became my little ritual to sit in the quiet of that single room and to warm my hands with my hot mug, with my husband and child still sleeping, and prepare myself for the day.
I was still trying to find us an apartment, sorting through the different neighborhoods to get a handle on a city the size of the state of Connecticut. The lay of the land was simple enough. The Forbidden City marked the center of town, and everything radiated out from there. Highways ran in rings around the downtown area, slicing out broad cross sections that contained hundreds of microcommunities, places with names like Chongwenmen, Dongsi, Dongzhimennei, Dongzhimenwai, Fangzhuang, Lido, Lishui Qiao, Nanluoguxiang, Shanyuanqiao, Shangdi, and Xizhimen. The names blurred together for me as I read through online apartment listings—Was it Fuchengmen or Fuxingmen that we didn’t like, I’d wonder, flipping through my notes, trying to remember what areas we had visited and which ones we had eliminated from our search.
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