Thoughts from the train...

(written last week)

I’m on a “fast train” traveling from Shanghai to Beijing right now.  It’s a Thursday afternoon and the sky outside the windows is grey— I don’t know if it’s because of the rain or the pollution today.  Either way, I’m feeling more than a bit humbled.  Perhaps it’s because I’m traveling at 300 km/h – about 185mph – or maybe it’s because of the book I’m currently reading.  Pearl S. Buck’s “The Good Earth” was written 80 years ago and I’ve read it once before, but it still inspires humility and a greater sense of perspective.

(above) Train stewardesses after our arrival.  I think they look so classy in their matching outfits!

On days like today, I’m awestruck by my own life.  Like the main character in the novel, I’m tempted to praise the gods – any gods – for my own good fortune.  I’m 31 years old and I am living my life’s dream.  I work overseas in a satisfying career, I am able to provide for my family, and most importantly, we are all generally healthy (and expecting another little life!).  It’s the kind of fortune I rarely dare to acknowledge since I have a real fear that it will all, somehow, vanish.  On good days, like this one, I even begin to let go of the lifelong terror that I’m just playing a role, like a kid trying on a costume but knowing it’s all make believe at the end of the day.  When did I become an adult?  I’m still not sure I am one, but today it feels lovely and real.

I won’t see much in Beijing this weekend.  I’m traveling as one of two adult chaperones with 11 high school students to a Model United Nations conference at our sister school.  Their campus is on the outskirts of the city and so is the hotel I’ll be staying in.  The conference will begin this evening and will last until Sunday afternoon, at which time we’ll take another train back home, going 820 miles in only 5 hours. 

As we speed out of Shanghai, through miles of industrial buildings, then a shallow lake sprinkled with endless fish farms, and through bustling Nanjing on our way north, I’m not terribly concerned about not getting to see Beijing’s sights on this trip.  It’s cold up there this time of year and more grey and polluted than Shanghai (or so I’m told).  

(above) The "view" from my hotel room.  Note: the horizon disappears due to the obscene smog, not because of the distance.  There's cranes there-- you just can't see them!

Pete and Reese aren’t with me and so I wouldn’t manage to enjoy Beijing completely anyway.  That’s always the case for Pete too.  He goes on epic and adventurous bike rides exploring our new city, but always returns wishing he could have had us to share it with.  In any case, he takes the better pictures and she provides so much of the fun (and the frustration) that it wouldn’t be the same.  Maybe later this spring...?  It'll be warmer then, and cleaner air too (hopefully).

This train trip, though, that’s another story.  I love riding on trains.  I always have, though I’ve probably only been on about 20 in my life, discounting the metro/subway/underground.  Prior to my junior year in college, I did an epic 5-week trip with my sister and some of our friends beginning in London, going through France and Italy, and ending in Spain.  Then, like now, I just gaze out the windows at all the things passing before me.  Like my friend, Gloria, would say, “it’s magical.”  I fall into a trance as the trees pass by and we race through tunnels.   

Earlier there were sharp hills in the distance, unlike any I had seen before.  They reminded me some moments of the rises outside of Izmir, but these were more… foreign, different. In some places there are roads, while in others the straight lines are the boundaries of rice fields and other unknown-to-me crops.  People have done so much with the land – and to it – that it’s hard to grasp… you almost need it to pass in such haste because it’s too much to take in if it comes slowly and you can reflect upon it genuinely.

This is exponentially true in China.  Whereas in Europe, one is struck by the history, here in China you are almost attacked by the future.  With Pete, the year before we were married, we marveled at the old villages and the ancient houses between Munich and Prague.  You felt like you were falling back in time and it was romantic – or, at least, we were.  Here, I quickly lose count of the cranes giving rise to hundreds of high-rise apartment buildings, all of which are identical and boring, but which can’t be built fast enough to keep up with the demand.  There are bridges and cities, all rising out of nowhere.  I wonder when it will ever be enough… in this country that can’t seem to stop growing, producing, and making things for the rest of the planet.  I get lost in my thoughts.

I decide to go back to my book.  It’s a work of fiction, about China in fact, but it takes place in the late 19^th century and early 20^th, when none of this “progress” could possibly have been imagined.  The book’s characters tackle their transforming lives; the pace of technology and change there and then, like here and now, is very palpable.  There is so much to look at and experience, and it’s quite overwhelming at times, living here, a part of this but also very much separate from it. 

I just looked out the window: to my left was a strawberry-red setting sun, colored most likely, by the particles in the air.  If you didn’t know how gross it was, it’d be beautiful.  To my right, a nearly-full rising white moon. It’s almost too good a metaphor for the duality I feel in my life these days.  It’s like they were planted there, from out of “The Truman Show.”  By the time I finish this paragraph, both have disappeared behind the clouds or the smog, mysteriously, and again I feel giddy with my life but also left with too many questions.  Grateful, but a bit frightened too.

Nearly every other passenger in this first-class car is Chinese.  Like me typing on this Apple laptop, most of them have various pieces of electronics with them.  Some are napping while others drink home-brewed green tea from their ever-present thermoses.  They refill them constantly from the hot water provided at the front of every car.  I’m so much like everyone I’m sitting with, and yet I still feel like a spectator.  I go back to my book, once more, and I realize that like with my reading, my presence in this seat is one of an outsider looking in on China.  Perhaps now, after six months in this fascinating, tremendous new country, I can get past my humility (or my fears?), be the adult I think I am, and engage with someone about the cranes and the trains, the sites and the sounds of the Beijing I’m missing this weekend… real though it is, I need more reality I think.

Chinese New Year

For our first Lunar New Year holiday in China, we decided to have a staycation.  It was the smart thing to do: it would have been prohibitively expensive to try to take a train or fly anywhere and it was too cold to do much of anything on vacation anyway.  


Here, a photo journal of our 10 days at home, together, and playing....

 

Dinner at the school-sponsored Chinese New Year event.  More dishes than you can count, one after the other, and only half of which are recognizable!

 

At the Shanghai Aquarium with Reese.  She never tires of this place.  With the penguins, alligators, jellyfish, and sharks with noses like saws, neither do I.  One thing that gets me, though, is the climbing structure, shaped like an iceberg, and the sign next to it that reads, "no climbing!"  Seriously???

 

A couple nice days in between, when the cold air warmed, and the kids played...

 

(above) Before bedtime, tickles with Daddy.   In the morning, below, finger painting.

 

(above) At the Shanghai Science & Tech Museum, in the kids' room, there is a great space where Reese loves to get lost in the mirrors.  Then, learning about the science behind cartoons with Dad.  (below)

 

 

(above) The stalls in the courtyard of the mall where, during the holidays, one can buy all sorts of dried fruits and herbs, smoked meats, clothes, nuts, and much more!  (below)  Reese admiring and in awe of the fireworks overhead.  I can't for the life of me manage to post the video, but I'll try adding it to Facebook.

 

Home for the holidays

(sorry for the 2 month delay...)

In December, we were lucky enough to be able to go home for the holidays.  Those words roll off my tongue (“home for the holidays”) more out of habit than from purpose.  I realized often that, for Reese, Shanghai was and is as much her home as Washington state is for Pete and I. I couldn’t help but wonder how much it might have confused her when we said this in our preparations for the trip.  She’s lived out of the US for much longer now than she ever lived there, so what on Earth did Mama mean when she said we were taking a big plane to go home for the holidays?  I wonder…

The trip, like every one we take back to the States, was both lovely and bittersweet.  We were there for just shy of three weeks, but it’s never enough time.   Inevitably, the jet-lag, the random flu or the exhaustion of pregnancy, and the travel shaves time off the vacation so that we really only had 2 weeks.  Of course, I ought to slap myself for being so selfish – not everyone gets to fly around the world for the holidays or be with their loved ones – and yet I always want more!

(above) You can't beat the love, or the drinks, in the Lidzbarski household.  Here, my Dad is being greeted by my cousins.  We were positively showered with kisses (so much so that there was no time for the camera!

We spent quality time with my parents, my brother, and my cousins.  Within minutes of arriving in my parents’ house, the one I spent ten years growing up in, we excitedly announced our pregnancy despite having been awake for too many hours and knowing rest was necessary.  Instead, in contrast to all we know about how to shake jet-lag, we talked for 2 hours and ate a grand meal at midnight… bites of deluxe ham and sausage from my aunt’s Polish deli, leftovers like you can only have at your Mom’s house, and random desserts you didn’t even know you were craving. 

In Walla Walla, we were treated to more meals at family and friend’s houses.  At one point, we were made a delicious baked (fresh, local) Northwest salmon dinner.  Pete and I ate greedily, happily never mentioning that we’d had the same meal the previous two nights in a row.  It was such a luxury— we were just grateful to have the taste in our mouths again!  We went once for taco truck, and Pete ate at the Green (I never made it, I was sick that night).  We drank at Public House 124, giddy with the memory of the place and smiling from ear to ear because we felt like we were locals still.

The weather wasn’t great, and we didn’t get to go walk around Bennington Lake, like I’d hoped.  Instead we spent more time indoors, with the people we love… just never enough time.  A play-date with toddlers here, a board game with family there, some casual TV watching with friends (pretending we do this all the time and it’s perfectly natural to be at your house on a random Tuesday night).  It was sooo good.

(above) At the Farmhouse, which Leanna has decorated beautifully... with Wyatt, Leanna, and Mom...

After having no real decorated home for Christmas, no magnificent trees, and no Santa Claus in 2011 and 2012, Reese was gifted with two Christmases this year!  In both Renton and Walla Walla, she was spoiled by grandparents and aunts, with horses, dolls, and clothes.  The kid had more presents than she could open and the love that obviously poured out from everyone for this little blonde girl that everyone missed was so genuine, it made my heart heavy to think of leaving once more.

(above) I can't begin to do this photo justice with a mere caption.  We have a series of about 20 of these, from the moment when she opened the gift, through to stripping off her clothes in front of 15 people then and there, to the spins she did and sheer JOY she got from this $4 thrift store find.

It’s a fascinating thing: going home for the holidays.  We are unconditionally loved and spoiled.  And yet, I always feel guilty and sullen afterward.  No one ever actually criticizes us for going overseas.  Less and less often, people ask “when are you coming home for good?”  They know now that we don’t know the answer.  Despite this, I inevitably leave every time feeling guilty and questioning our life and our choices.  No one does this to me; I do it to myself.  But, oddly, when we got back to our apartment in Shanghai, I felt both foreign and immediately at home.  Perhaps “home for the holidays” is no longer a city or a four-walled structure for our little Yenbarski family.  Maybe it’s the excitement of the back-and-forth and knowing that we are loved despite (and because?) we are on this adventure.