In less than a
week, it’ll be almost two years since we returned to the States. A lot has happened in that time: lost teeth, piano lessons, graduations from
preschool and fifth grade, karate, piano recitals, some pretty major home
renovations. At times it’s easy to
forget that there ever was a Hong Kong year, we’re so buried in the
heres-and-nows of Virginia.
Which means at times it’s easy to think that none of it mattered, that
we shouldn’t even have bothered.
But still . . .
Here’s a short
list of what, two years on, remains from that year:
1) There
are, of course, the objects: the
Hong Kong flags hanging in the kids’ rooms, the tin wind-up toys Jamie got for
his birthday when we were in Vietnam.
There’s the red salad bowl made of finely-grained wood, the fancy
brushed steel flashdrive I received as a party favor at one of the conferences
I attended. I still have my nice
suit from the tailor down in Central, and Ellen has two or three skirts and a
few shirts from Hoi An. Over our
mantel is a fancy porcelain carving of gold fish swimming around a lotus plant,
and opposite it hang a pair of paintings from Hanoi and Xi’an,
respectively. We also have a neatly
embroidered baby carrier over one bookshelf, not too far from a trio of fantastical
paintings from Bali showing brightly colored dancing beasts and magical
women.
I’m pleased to
note that my beautiful, six-million dollar hand sewn rug from Beijing is still
beautiful, and worth every damn penny, thank you very much. This bears mention, because just after
I bought it I was one of the guys on the trip—a Canadian whose family had just
joined for the day—was teasing me about spending so much money.
“What you should
do,” he said, “is buy a stop watch.
Then when you get home you can time yourself whenever you stop and look
at the rug. That way you’ll know
how much all of this cost you per minute.”
Jerk.
For what it’s
worth, not a day goes by—okay, not a week
goes by . . . okay, not a month goes
by where I don’t pause, look at that rug, and say, “Dang. That’s purty.”
As all of this
probably makes clear, we bought a lot of souvenirs when we were in Asia. Enough to decorate the entire house,
actually, so that, stepping into our living room before actually meeting us,
you’d assume “Hanstedt” was some sort of weird name from an obscure ethnic
group in China.
Seriously, we’ve
pretty much decided we can never live abroad again simply because we don’t have
any rooms left to decorate. That,
or we’ll just have to buy a second house next time we return to the
States.
That said, the
objects we actually notice—the ones that make us pause for just a millisecond,
our hearts suddenly warmer than they were before—aren’t necessarily the
expensive ones, or even the big ones:
there’s the silk embroidery of a lotus flower on the wall by the front
door, for instance, almost an afterthought when we were in a small shop in
Vietnam, but now something that I’ll pause and . . . just look at for maybe half a minute every other day or so. Or the small wooden plates next to the
cookbooks, thrown in with the aforementioned salad bowl and a half-dozen other
things we got in a shop near our hotel. They’re beautiful—one green, one red, one natural wood
color, the grain showing in all of them—and they catch my eye almost every day
when I walk into the kitchen.
Or when Lucy
comes down in the morning for breakfast, and she’s wearing her blue and white
sport uniform from the international school. Mornings where that happens, both Ellen and I will pause,
watching her make her way to the table.
Sometimes we’ll look at each other and grin, sometimes we won’t, just
watching her, both of us smiling, the little red Norwegian flag flashing on her
shorts—and we’ll know it was all real.
2) Then there are the
memories.
Some of them are
prompted: the first Christmas we
were home, for instance, we made photo albums for each of the kids. For Will and Lucy, this meant culling
their nearly 5,000 pictures (each) down to 400 or so that we put in separate
albums, customizing each one to reflect the experiences of the child, what they
valued, what they’d want to remember.
For Jamie this meant picking at random from Ellen’s thousands of pics,
trying to choose images that would somehow capture key moments for a little guy
who was barely half-way through his third year when we returned.
We gave the
albums to them on Christmas eve, halfway through the present opening. For twenty minutes everything
stopped. All three heads were
bowed, all three pairs of hands were flipping the pages, flipping, flipping,
scanning from side to side, taking it all in.
“Look! Will! Remember?” and then Lucy would point to picture of the bird
market and tell a story.
“Hey, look! Remember?” and then Will would hold the
book up so we could all see a picture of the kitten we found in a park in
Shanghai.
“Look! Remember?” Jamie would then holler, and
hold up a picture of a—what was that?
A cat turd? A dead bird? Hard to tell. Not really even sure that he knows . . .
But a lot of the
memories are unprompted. We’ll be
sitting at the table eating dinner, and out of the blue Lucy will say, “Remember
the time Jamie shook his fist at a monk?”
And we’ll burst out laughing.
Then Will will say, “Remember when he ate his dinner so fast that he
threw up?” And we’ll laugh
again. Then Ellen or I will say,
“Remember how Eldon use to love playing with Jamie, how he would come over and
shake his fists at him and Jamie would shake his back and the two of them would
keep doing it until they burst out laughing?” And we’ll laugh again, even louder. And it will go on like that for ten
minutes maybe twenty, sometimes half an hour: “Remember?’
“Remember?” “Remember?”
3) And then there’s something else,
something that’s harder to explain:
I see it when
Will and Lucy come home from school, and I find them in Will’s bedroom, their
heads together, lost in some game they’ve made up, involving marbles, beads, or
three kinds of glue and miniature Leggos.
And I see it
sometimes on Saturday mornings, when Jamie is fussing about some thing or
another and later I’ll notice that he’s turned quiet, and discover him in his
room, being read to by his older brother.
And I see it on
nights when Ellen is gone or out with her friends, and instead of cuddling with
all of the kids separately, I’ll stretch out on the big bed in our room and the
four of us will lay there, telling stories about the day, about school, about
burping and farting, and our friend Lilianna who talks in funny voices.
And I’ll see it
sometimes when we go on a trip, a short trip to Charlottesville, maybe, and
I’ll give them a heads-up when it’s five minutes until departure, then we’ll
all climb in the car, no fussing, no complaining, just a sense of, “This is who
we are. This is what we do.”
I’m not sure how
to describe it, really. But it’s
very real. It’s like a river
that’s cleared, all the dirt and debris settling to the bottom, firming down into
sediment that will be solid for years to come, leaving everything above clean
and pure. It’s as though we’re
utterly content with ourselves, with who we are as a family. And with our place in the world.
That’s what it’s
like. That’s what remains.
