Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [6]
“I’m thinking China,” I said to Sylvia one evening. Why not, I thought. True, we had small kids. Normally, one would buy another house, settle down, do normal-type family things, give the kids stability. We had tried that. And we had found it wanting. Perhaps it was the meth dealers next door. That wasn’t part of the American dream. Perhaps it was the Sisyphean task of trying to keep a lawn green in 105-degree heat. It is the unwritten rule of suburban life: The grass must be green, even if you live in a desert. Perhaps it was all the massive SUVs driving to Target and Wal-Mart with the little yellow ribbon decal. I don’t know. Whatever it was, I did not want to raise a family like this. And so I was amenable to some out-of-the-box thinking. China was the future. That’s what everyone said. It would be a few years until the mess in the housing market sorted itself out, allowing us to prudently plant the flag in some other town far removed from the box-store burbs. So why not take the kids to China and live there for a while? It could be done. It would undoubtedly be interesting. It would be good for the kids. Probably.
“I’m thinking Monterey,” Sylvia replied. This was her out-of-the-box retort. We were unable to afford to buy a home in coastal California, so we would rent there. We couldn’t buy anywhere, but we could rent everywhere. And Sylvia was from the central coast of California. So it would be a homecoming of sorts.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m thinking big cities, a country in transition, history in the making.”
“I’m thinking beaches, clean air, perfect weather. Besides, you don’t speak Chinese,” she noted.
“Not yet.”
Sylvia gave me a dubious look. “I’m all for making some changes,” she said, “but China?”
Why not China? One out of every five people on this planet lived there. We should get to know them better, I argued. And we’d spent years living on the far peripheries of the world—Kiribati, Vanuatu, Sacramento. It seemed reasonable to want to spend some time in the very center. And from what I’d read and heard, that center was moving to China. It seemed important to try to understand this place. Besides, I like a little dissonance in my life. And the prospect of shifting one’s gaze from the smallest countries in the world to its largest was supremely discordant.
But there were little people in our lives now. On the one hand, it would be good for them to learn Mandarin and to experience another culture. That would be good parenting. On the other hand, impulsively moving to the other side of the planet and setting the children down in a city that was reportedly swirling with clouds of pollution would not be good. That would be bad parenting. It’s complex, this parenting thing. And so we decided that I would set forth on a scouting mission to China. While Sylvia perused the rental listings in Monterey, I was off to the bookstore. It was time to learn Chinese.
2
I want to be very clear about this. I am not blaming anyone. No one is at fault. I am even willing to consider the possibility that it wasn’t done on purpose. But, as I delved into Chinese for Dummies, I couldn’t help but conclude that the Chinese language is the Great Wall of languages, a clever linguistic barrier erected to keep outsiders out. What, frankly, is wrong with Esperanto? Or alphabets? What is so deficient about an alphabet that uses a judicious twenty-six letters? We can make lots of words with those twenty-six letters, big words even. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of linguistic