The Talk. Or Not.

It’s Wednesday, which means Lucy has her afterschool activity, hand drums, or hand grenades or some such nonsense.  Wednesdays also mean Will takes the bus home by himself, freeing Ellen up so that Jamie can take a decent nap and the two of them only have to make the trip into Tai Po once. 

When he arrives on campus, Will takes the elevator up to the top floor of my building and strolls to my office.  I can hear him coming the whole way down the hall, the 15 or 16 key-chains he has collected jangling as he walks.  It’s a wonderful sound, signaling, most weeks, the end of my Wednesday workday, or at the very least an excuse for packing up my lap-top and heading up to the flat, where I give Will a snack before settling on the couch to handle a few more e-mails.

Today, though, is special.  Today, I get to have The Talk, with Will.

Yes, that talk, the one about the birds, the bees, and Britney Spears’ absent underpants.  It appears some of the kids at school have discovered at least the latter, and have spent what little time they’re not on the internet looking at pictures they shouldn’t look at explaining to their classmates the intricate details of these works of art.  According to Ellen, who can draw information out of eldest much better than I can, these same boys also delight in waiting until the teacher leaves the room, then shouting at the tops of their lungs all the rude words they know and several they’ve made up.

In short, we did not choose to have The Talk with Will at this particular point in his short life; the decision was thrust upon us.  Either explain things to him now, the proper way, or take the risk he’ll form the life-long impression that sex is something involving hip-boots, short whips, and men with names like “Donkey Kong.” 

It’s not that I’m afraid of The Talk.  This is me, after all, Man o’ Crap, a guy so full of it that he can talk about anything, anywhere, at anytime, convincing absolutely no one but himself, but enjoying the experience immensely nonetheless.

No, I’m fine with having the The Talk.  I’m just not fine having it with my son.

I am Norwegian, after all.  And Midwestern.  And Lutheran.   Sure, we—the collective we, mind you—have sex.  Occasionally.   But we don’t talk about it, though I’m not sure if this is because we’re embarrassed, or just so brainwashed by our parents on the virtues of modesty that we fear bragging. 

I don’t, for instance, have any memory of my own father having The Talk with me.  It’s entirely possible that he handled it the same way he did revealing the truth about Santa Claus, by simply saying, “You get this stuff, right?”  Maybe, with the sex talk as with the Santa talk, I nodded vigorously, even though, in both cases, I had no idea what he meant.  Which perhaps explains why I now have three kids and still spend Christmas Eve rigging cameras trying to get a snapshot of that fat bastard (Santa—not my dad). 

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I always assumed Will would learn about sex the same way I did:  by looking at Scott Holgscrum’s dad’s Playboy magazines.  Of course, given that both Scott and his brother Todd regularly ate Milkbone dog biscuits as a part of their afternoon snack and spent most of their twenties playing Bunk Buddy Bingo at the state penitentiary, maybe talking to Will straight up is a better idea.

 

So it’s Wednesday, and I’m sitting in my office sending crank e-mails to one of the deans about that speck of dark skin at his temple that I can only assume is melanoma, when I hear the jingle-jangle of Will’s backpack coming down the hall. 

“Hey,” I say, when he comes in.  Even I can hear the crack in my voice.  “How was school?”

“Good,” he says.  “David threw up during recess.  It was really gross.  And kind of funny.”

I’m not sure where to go with that.  So I pack up my laptop, grab my water bottle, and lock up.  We stroll down the hall, my son and I, talking about little things.  He’s explaining something to me about cuttlefish, and I’m saying “Uh-huh,” and “Really?” all the while wondering how I’m going to start the conversation.  My original plan was to appeal to Will’s scientific nature by very literally discussing the birds and the bees, slipping in, only toward the end—“Oh, and that’s how people do it too, only the man has a penis and the woman has a vagina, and for God’s sake, wear a condom or it’ll shrivel up and drop off!” 

Now, though, this seems like a stupid plan.  I find myself listening to him chatter on—we’re off cuttlefish, and onto, somehow, air pressure—and thinking what a handsome boy he is, his cheekbones high, his mouth small, his eyes slightly sunken like his uncle and his grandmother, clearly more Satrom than Hanstedt, and more Campbell than Satrom.  Really, Ellen should be the one having this talk with him.  The two of them are much more alike, on the same mellow wavelength.  Whereas I used to worry that Will was too shy, that he would suffer at the hands of kids his own age, Ellen knew better, knew—as a former wallflower herself—that he would be fine.  Will tells his mother things that he never seems to mention to me, stuff about his classmates and his dreams and things he’s wondering about, like how God is light enough to be supported by a cloud, and how do scientists know what color dinosaurs were? 

Thinking of this, I remember something Ellen mentioned to me, and interrupt my son’s stream of consciousness (he’s now onto turbo jet engines and Einstein’s conceptions of the fourth dimension):  “Hey Will?”

He looks up at me.

“Mommy told me something about Mark and George not being nice to you.  Is that true?”

For an instant, his eyes drop.  “Well,” he says, drawing the word out.  “Kind of.  A little bit.  Maybe.”

The first clue, actually, came two weeks ago when we learned that Thomas, one of Will’s classmates, had transferred suddenly to another school.  When we asked why, Will had said some of the other kids weren’t nice to him.  Three days later, a note came home from the teacher talking about how some of the kids were starting to play “excluding” games:  it’s Monday, so let’s all pretend Bobby is a loser and keep him out; now it’s Tuesday, so let’s ignore Wai Lam; Thursday, it’s Kyle’s turn.  I remember these sorts of encounters when I was in sixth grade (and college, and grad school, and at my first job).  I just hadn’t remembered them starting so early. 

“What did they do?”

“Hey look!” Will says.  He bends down and picked up a long, dried out pod.  Peeling back the top husk, he reveals a row of dark black seeds. 

“Huh,” I said, because, after all, it was a seed pod, and there’s not really much else to say.  “So what did they do?”

“I bet these would still grow, don’t you?”

I lean in, look at the seeds.  “I dunno.  They look pretty dead to me.”

We walk a bit further.  The sun is shining and the air feels dry for once.  We’d spent most of February running a dehumidfier, trying to keep mold from blooming on the walls of the flat.  I know I should be happy about the change in weather, but honestly, it’s so bright out there I have to squint. 

And I’m beginning to feel the pressure, too:  Ellen’s been bugging me about The Talk for three weeks now, and I can never seem to find just the right moment.  Now, we’re only two-hundred yards from our apartment building, and The Talk is not the sort of thing I want to do sitting down and face to face and having to look him in the eye.  Definitely more of a side-by-side thing:  two dudes, strolling along, shooting the shit about menstrual cycles and stuff. 

And of course, somehow, I’ve gotten sidetracked on this conversation about bullying and all that it entails—little things, like, say, my son not being invited to a birthday party, or not being driven to a Columbine-style killing spree. 

 “Does this happen a lot?” I say. 

Will is still peering into the pod.  “What?”

“This,” I pause, trying to figure out how to put it.  “This stuff with Mark and George?”

“You know what?” Will says.  We’re at the backside of campus, strolling along the bottom of a sheer rock cliff. 

“What?”

“Seeds are pretty incredible.”

For a second there, I think maybe he’s leap-frogged right over me and we’re onto The Talk before I even know it.  Were I smart, of course, I would capitalize on the moment, explaining that testicles aren’t just for getting stuck in zippers, but between the sun, the wobbly conversation and my own fears about somehow turning my boy into one of those men who think the clitoris is a kind of Italian car, I’m in the position to capitalize on anything. 

So I stumble on. 

“When I was a kid, my friends Scott Holgscrum and Mark Vandenborough used to do stuff like this all the time.  I remember once—“

“Because, you know,” Will says, gesturing at the wall of rock beside us.  “Grass can grow in something like this.  It barely needs any soil at all.  If the seed can land there, and it gets enough water, grass will grow.”

“Will,” I say, “this is important, I really want to—“

But he’s examining the stones now, picking at one with his finger, his elbow in close to his body, his eyes fixed on his hands.  Something about his posture, about this gesture, pulled in close to his body, as though protecting himself—something about this triggers a memory for me.  Suddenly, I’m back maybe five years, the first time we’re in Washington DC and decide to go to the Natural History Museum.  For weeks, Will, then four, had been talking about going to see the dinosaurs, rattling on and on about Tyrannosaurus Rexes and Triceratopses and a bunch of names I don’t even know how to mispronounce. 

By the time we got to the museum on Saturday, though, it’s time for Lucy’s nap, so she and Ellen head back while Will and I go into the museum.  After spending a few minutes admiring the huge mammoth in the front hall, we stroll into the room where the dinosaurs are kept—or their bones at least.  The room is immense, of course, so I wasn’t surprised when Will stuck close to the walls, examining the terrariums they’d set up to show what the undergrowth and bug-life looked like during the neoplywhatever era.  Eventually, though, I got bored with this stuff and figured he was too.

“Come on,” I said, taking his hand.  “Let’s go see the dinosaur bones.”

But he pulled me to a side room.  “What’s in here?”

It was a long hall with some sort of fancy display concerning neoplywhateverean sea life.  “Giant sharks,” I said, surveying the scene.  “Pretty cool.  But come one:  the dinosaurs are in here.”

But he’d spotted a TV screen on the other side of the room.  Running over, he planted himself in front of it, eyes fixed on the flashing images:  a tiny bug, being eaten by a fish, which in turn is eaten by a bigger fish, which is then swallowed by a dinosaur shark or something and on and on and until the tiny bugs all die, and then the little fish and the big fish and the dinosaur shark all shrivel up and croak. 

“Huh,” I said, watching it.  And then watching it again.  And again.  Will stood, staring, as though he’d never seen TV before.

“Really?” I said, when the same, 60-second video came on again.  “You really want to watch this again?”

He just nodded.  I stayed for one or two more rotations, then wandered off, looking at the rest of the display, the fake starfish, the silhouette of a giant shark on the wall, the weird, snaily looking things that seemed to be wearing space helmets.  When I came back, Will was still staring at the TV:  same story, floating bug, fish, bigger fish, monster shark-ish thingy-bob.  Blah blah blah.  The food chain can be boring, especially when you’re at the top of it. 

“Come on,” I said, “we can watch TV at home.”

But he wouldn’t budge.  He just stood there, feet anchored to the ground, one hand up, picking at the metal frame around the TV, his arm in close to his body, as though to keep it warm.

I wandered the other way, ducked my head into the dinosaur room.  There was the triceratops, big enough to hold a mini-van between its ribs, a T-Rex with it’s head well above the second-floor balcony, something else I couldn’t name with plates along its spine.

I hustled back to Will.  “Come on,” I said.  “You gotta see these dinosaurs.”

“I’m watching this,” he said.  It had to be the thirtieth time he’d seen it. 

I will admit I started to get a little irritated.  “Geez, Will,” I said.  “We came all this way.  The dinosaurs are right there.  You gotta come see them:  they’re huge.”

 

I’d like to tell you that it was at that point that I figured it out, that the moment I said “huge,” I knew, as any good father would, why Will wasn’t going to budge from that TV screen.  But that wouldn’t be true. 

In reality, I nagged at him a bit more, might actually have chastised him a little.  I might even—though I don’t honestly remember—have finally dragged him out of the museum in a little bit of a huff—though, honestly, writing about this right now, I don’t remember that happening either. 

What I do know is that by the time we got out into the fresh air, I knew what was going on.  I knew that he’d been scared and that he’d done the only thing he could to protect himself:  planted his feet and held his ground like the determined (I won’t say stubborn) little guy who was his mother’s son. 

And I know I bought popcorn before we got on the train.  And that we sat and ate it, and talked about—well—any damn thing but dinosaurs. 

 

This second time, fortunately, I’m not so stupid—and a good thing, too, because you can’t get popcorn to save your life in Tai Po. 

Seeing him standing there, picking at that small fleck of dirt on the stone face beside the sidewalk, I know there’s no way in hell I’m going to get him to talk about what’s going on with Mark and George at school.  Every time I bring it up, he’ll just start talking about seeds again, or blowfish, or aerodynamics and solar winds.

And I’m guessing The Talk won’t happen either.  And maybe it never will, at least not with me.  Maybe I’m just not the right person—like I said, while Ellen get thoughts about God and the intricate details of Will’s school day, I mainly get phrases that begin with, “Hey Dad, did you know that . . .” followed by obscure information about how ducks float.

Which is fine, I guess.  I like hearing about nuclear reactors, or why wind happens, or how sharks never sleep.  Really I do.

At the same time, I understand that what’s happening here is just the beginning:  Will will turn ten this year, will go back to Virginia, will start fourth grade, will begin to form the friendships he’ll keep for years.  Two years after that he’ll go to the middle school, and then there will be girls and cliques and stuff that’ll make those idiots George and Mark seem like a stroll on a daisy farm. 

My own Dad, who’s neither fat nor a bastard, always talked about how when I was thirteen I could get out of a car faster than any boy alive.  “We’d get to church,” he’d say, “and no matter how fast I was, you’d be out first and ten feet in front of me.  And you’d stay there, ten feet away, walking in front of me, like we had nothing to do with each other.”

And I know that’s coming too.  Maybe especially with this boy, who’s more Satrom than Hanstedt, and more Campbell than Hanstedt, and more his own person, already, than I ever was. 

So call me a bad father; call me short-sighted and superficial; call me a selfish old man who’s gambling with his son’s future happiness (not to mention the shriveling up and dropping off of—well, you know); call me all those things.  I don’t care.

Because for now at least, he’s still my Will and he’s still talking to me, even if it is just about grass seed.  And pathetic as it sounds, I’ll take what I can get.

So now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go call Scott Holgscrum’s dad.  

Colonialism in a Nutshell

Wednesday: 

It’s January, and I’ve just accepted an offer to serve as a consultant to the General Education program at my host institution.  These duties are in addition to my Fulbright work, so it means I have to go to the human resources office and sign a new contract. 

Everything goes perfectly fine:  I’m told of my additional wages, the length of my contract, and of the fact that, should I need to leave before my 30 June end-date, my pay will be pro-rated. 

Then the HR guy asks to clarify something:  “The date of your Fulbright began on 25 August.”

I nod.  That sounds about right. 

He nods.  “So the end date is 25 June?”

Yes.  It’s a 10-month grant.

He smiles kindly.  “Your housing, it is paid for with your grant.  It should expire on the 25^th.  But we will not worry about this.”

I hadn’t even realized that I’d been holding my breath, that the pressure had been rising in my chest until he said those last few words and all the air came rushing out.  20 years ago, when I’d returned to England after a year’s absence, I’d been denied a debit card by NatWest, because I’d left the country with an overdraft, this despite that the last thing I did before leaving was make a large deposit wiping out all but a paltry 13 pence:  about a quarter, in US terms.  Might as well have been 13,000 pounds.  This was England, after all, where rules are rules. 

And Hong Kong, of course, learned its math from England.  In my few months in here, I’d learned that rules were rules in HK as well—even when there’s ample evidence that they should be ignored (see “Is BEA the Spawn of the Devil,” if you think I’m exxagerating). 

So to be given such a gift—5 days of occupancy beyond the terms of my original contract!—was a pleasant shock.

But then the HRO man frowned, taken by a sudden thought:  “Will your family be staying with you?”

No, I told him.  Of course not:  I planned on making them sleep in the parking lot for the last week of our stay in Hong Kong.

Okay, I didn’t actually say that, but I thought it—I mean, of course my family was going to be with me, right? 

When I told HRO man as much, his frown deepened.  After that, I have to admit, I’m not entirely sure what he said, but I’m pretty sure it was something along the lines of, “We will have to look into this.”

 

Thursday:

It’s a week later, an ugly, dark, cold-to-the-bone January week.  It’s mid-afternoon, and an e-mail from Ellen shows up on my office computer:

Could you get in touch with Gilbert Wong and ask if he can have one of the cleaning ladies open the recycling bins on the 6^th floor?  Jamie and I were putting in newspapers and when my back was turned he dropped something that made a loud clunk!  I don’t know what it was, but I know it wasn’t paper and I’m worried it was someone’s keys or a camera or something.

I should take care of this right away, of course, but I don’t.  For one, I’ve got a presidential forum I have to present at the next week, and I need to finish my powerpoint.  For two, I get nervous every time I have to call Gilbert:  he’s the head of the Estate Office, the guy in charge, but whenever I call the help-line to have something repaired in the flat, he answers the phone himself.  This freaks me out.  Doesn’t he have a secretary?  An assistant?  Even an answering machine—there’s nothing worse than interrupting a guy who’s got 13 buildings and 120 employees to manage, just because you need a new light bulb. 

So I don’t call.  Instead, I put my head down and get back to work, hoping that either:  a)  Ellen will figure out what Jamie tossed into the bin and discover it doesn’t matter; or b) she’ll just forget about it, allowing both me and Gilbert Wong to go back to our jobs.

 

Wishful thinking.  This is Ellen, after all, she of the attention-to-details mein.

I get back to the flat at five.  The sun doesn’t set for another hour or so, but already the sky is a dark and heavy gray.  And it’s begun to drizzle. 

“Did you call Gilbert?” she says first thing when I walk in the door. 

“Ummm . . . “ I say. 

She hands me her cell.  “Call him.”

“It was probably nothing,” I say.  “Probably just a bottle or something.  Even if it was a toy, it was probably just some piece of junk.”

“Call him,” she said.

The annoying thing about having been married to someone for 17 years is that they can tell when you’re being lazy.  I took the phone.

Gilbert picks up.  Of course.

“Hi Gilbert,” I say.  “This is Paul Hanstedt.  In 601.  We were wondering if you could tell us who might have the key for the recycling bins.”

“Excuse me? 

“The recycling bins,” I say again. 

He repeats the phrase, in English. 

“On the eighth floor,” I say. 

“Ah yes,” Gilbert says.  “The eighth floor.” 

“We think our son might have dropped something into one of them.  And we were wondering if someone could come by with the key so that we can get it out.”

“Of the recycling bin,” Gilbert says. 

“Yes.”  Glancing at my watch, I realize it’s now almost 5:15, a quarter of an hour from the end of the business day.  “I’m really sorry to bother you about this,” I say. 

“I’ll be right there.”

“No!” I say.  “You don’t have to come!  Isn’t there someone else?”

But he’s already hung up. 

I turn to Ellen. 

“What did he say?”

“He’s coming.”

She turns as pale as I must look.  If there’s a shade of whiter than white that two Scandinavian-Americans can be in the middle of winter, that’s the color of our skin on this particular January evening. 

 

Five minutes later, there’s a knock on the door.  It’s Gilbert, of course, in a windbreaker and tie, smiling and friendly behind his glasses and graying temples.

“Hello, Professor,” he says.  This only makes it worse.  In a place where “professor” is a contested term, reserved only for those with 20 books and a speed-dial to Oprah, Gilbert always addresses me this way.  Meanwhile, I feel fairly safe in assuming that he wasn’t one of the lucky few of his graduating class from high school that was able to get a university degree (another system inherited from England).  Consequently, and I suppose ironically, he’s been doomed to spend his life tending to the needs of spoiled academics who don’t know how to fix a leaky toilet or change the lightbulb in their kitchen vent.  This despite the fact that, not having made the 18% cut, it’s still entirely possible that he graduated higher in his class than I did in mine. 

“Hi, Gilbert.”  I step into the cold and wet passageway and lead him up the stairs to the eighth floor, then down the hall.   The whole way, Gilbert strolls beside me, stroking his chin thoughtfully, saying to himself, over and over again, “Recycling bins, recycling bins.”  I don’t understand what’s going on, of course, until we round the corner by the elevators and he looks up, sees the bins, and exclaims:  “Ah!  Recycling bins!”

Fair enough.  I don’t, after all, speak Cantonese, and if I did, my assumption would be that I’d be a good forty years into fluency before someone told me guangdongwa for “recycling.”

“Yes,” I say, spreading my hands broadly.  “Recycling bins.”

Gilbert steps forward.  The bins lids are locked with a complicated bolting system that requires a funky key similar to an allen wrench.  After testing each lid with a small jiggle, Gilbert shakes his head. 

“I do not have the key for these.”

“No problem,” I say.  “Seriously, it’s probably nothing—just a cheap toy, or a toilet paper roll or something.  Let’s just forget about it.”

But he’s already got his iPhone out, is punching in a number. 

“Really,” I say.  “It’s almost five-thirty.  We should—“

But now he’s talking in rapid Cantonese—Cantonese is always rapid—gesturing at the bins, pausing, listening, speaking again, gesturing again.  There’s another pause, during which I’m certain I can hear the person on the other end of the line cursing silently to himself. 

“Honestly,” I begin, but Gilbert has hung up.

“He be here shortly.”  I can only hope whoever “he” is, he is not big and mean and preparing to go home to a young, beautiful wife baking salmon soufflé in nothing but a negligee, making him all the angrier about having to dig a rubber octopus out of a glorified garbage can for a bald fat gweilo.

It’s worse, actually.  “He” is a youngish man in his late twenties with neatly trimmed hair and a custom-made suit.  He glances at me once or twice as Gilbert explains the situation.  I apologize profusely.  Once Gilbert has finished, the fashion model pulls out a string of keys, selects one, and opens the paper bin, where Ellen says she and Jamie were working when something went clunk in the night. 

At this point, I admit, I’m rude:  I push GQ and Gilbert out of the way, refusing to let anyone else perform this part of the job.  Bending in, I see that the bin is 9/10ths empty.  At the bottom lay one or two typewritten pages, several cereal boxes, and a stack of the South China Morning Post.  I don’t see anything that shouldn’t be in there, clunk-wise or other.

Standing on my tiptoes, I try to lengthen my reach so that I can move the cereal boxes, perhaps discover a waylaid diamond engagement ring or Rolex watch that would make this fiasco worthwhile hidden beneath everything.  My fingers, though, stop a good six inches short of the f the pile. 

“Here,” says Gilbert, and he and the handsome young man edge me to one side. 

“No,” I say.  But yet again, it’s too late:  the two of them are lowering the bin to its side.  Here again, I try to get in the way, try to be the one to get his hands dirty, but in the end it’s all three of us down on our knees, on the wet pavement, pulling scraps of paper from the bottom of the barrel.

Nothing evidences itself in our initial go through.  So we begin to sift, lifting each newspaper, each cereal box, each discarded fax and bundle of wet tissue, giving it all a shake to see it anything falls out.

Nothing does. 

“I’m sorry,” I say. 

“No problem,” says Gilbert.  GQ says nothing.  It’s now 5:40, ten minutes past quitting time, on a cold and soggy January afternoon cum evening.  Paper is strewn across the damp concrete.  Our fingers are wet, our nails chipped from scraping the hard ground as we lift and sift. 

“I’m sorry,” I say again.  I could say it twenty more times, and I don’t think it would make me feel any better.  “Why don’t you let me put this stuff back in?  You two can go.  I’ll just shut the lid when I’m done.”

“It’s okay,” Gilbert says. 

“No,” I say.  “Seriously.”  I start to get back on my knees, hoping to position myself so that I can block them as I shift the now soggy piles of mulch back into the bin. 

“No,” Gilbert says by way of reply, and he and GQ somehow spread their elbows, bracing their back toward me so I can’t enter. 

“Let me,” I say.   My forehead is hot.

“No,” says Gilbert. “No.  It’s okay,” he says. 

“Please,” I say.  And:  “I’m sorry.”

But it’s no use.  They keep shoveling, lifting the piles back into the barrel, the wet, soggy masses of newsprint and notebook paper and unpaid bills and snotty tissue rags.  I stand, watching, feeling my face burn, my insides turn with shame as these two men, one older than me, one more nicely dressed than me—both of them wiser and kinder—clean up my mess.       

Yangshuo

Back in college, I had a friend named Andy who was a guitar genius: we’d be sitting in the practice room at St. Aidan’s College in Durham, taking a break from rehearsal, and he’d rip off some killer lick that made every one sit up.

“Play that again!” we’d say, picturing our first gold record, our first fuzzy-sweatered groupies.

Andy would give us a look half-amused, half dazed: “I can’t,” he’d say. “I don’t know what I did!”

After he graduate from university, Andy moved to London and went into advertising. His major triumph was an award-winning Virgin Air advertisement in which the grim reaper comes to collect a man sitting on a bench. Everything goes just as planned: a stone gargoyle breaks loose from the building just above the man and begins to plummet straight toward his head. The grim reaper looks pleased.

And then the man’s life begins to flash before his eyes: we see him as a child, as a teenager, on his wedding day. We see his vacation in Bali, his holiday in Barbados, his trip to Spain. Flash, flash, flash, scene after scene after scene.

Next thing you know, the grim reaper is looking at his watch.

More scenes flash: skiing in the Alps, white-water rafting in Utah, hunting big game in New Jersey, etc., etc., etc.,

Now the grim reaper is eating a pizza.

And still more scenes, flash flash flash: a cruise in Alaska, parasailing in the Bahamas . . .

Then the punch-line from Virgin Air: Life is short. Do lots of stuff.

This ad is perfect for Yangshuo, China.

I have to admit, we went to Yangshuo over the Chinese New Year only because the tickets for our first three choices—Bali, Borneo, and Thailand—were so overpriced we would have had to body parts to go—not that we didn’t consider it.

At first glance, Yangshuo was something of disappointment. Sure, there was that karst topography, those crazy, fairyland mountains you see in paintings of China, rising suddenly into the air. But I’d already seen karst in Ha Long Bay—and they’d been surrounded by deep blue waters while I was floating on a junk and sipping Vietnamese coffee, three things that are difficult to compete with. Especially in the middle of winter, in China, when everything looks dead and dusty.

It didn’t help that we woke up our first full day there to find the sky dull with clouds, temperatures somewhere in the range of autumn in Antarctica. We were staying at a small resort about ten minutes outside of town and alongside the Dragon River, a place that had been recommended to us by friends. One of the ETAs had also gone there, and told me, just before we left, that her favorite memories of the place were wandering through the rice paddies in the morning mist.

Since we had plenty of mist, we decided this plan was as good as any. So after breakfast we tossed some snacks in a backpack and headed out the door.

Within minutes, Will and Lucy had disappeared.

I don’t know how else to describe it: we walked out the door, crossed a small bridge, came to some rice paddies, and—Poof! They were gone. It was almost like they’d spent most of the last year living in a huge metropolitan area where concrete and walking at an adult pace were the norm.

Ellen and I followed as best we could with Jamie, scrambling through vine-strewn thickets and what Ellen said was a briar patch but what I identified as a giant Venus man-trap. I wanted to offer Jamie up as a sacrifice to appease the thorn gods, but Ellen insisted that this was illegal, and that if we tried to leave mainland China with one less child than we arrived with, there would be problems.

Eventually we made it through, and eventually Will and Lucy appeared again, their foreheads greased with gray mud and their faces glowing.

“It was great—“ Lucy said.

“There was this pit—“ Will went on.

“And we jumped over it—“

“Using our sticks!

“And there was this one place—“

“Lucy was scared.”

“No I wasn’t! There was this one place—“

And on and on.

We spent most of the morning out there wandering through the dry rice beds, sitting on a little bridge over a small brook. A boat was moored along the river, and a woman inside was baking small round cakes and selling them to the rafters crossing the weir. I bought one, figuring if I was going to get Mao Tse-Tung’s revenge, I might as well get it for something involving potatoes and green onions and ham cooked in butter. They were so good, Ellen made me go back and get another one.

Eventually we grabbed a taxi into Yangshuo itself. We didn’t know what to expect, other than that “West St. “ was mentioned in almost very tourist guide we’d read. Soon enough we found out why: it was a pedestrian walkway lined for more than a half-mile with crafts shops and souvenir shops and fancy restaurants. It was tourist heaven.

But here’s the thing. The tourists?

They were Chinese.

Sure, we saw the odd white folk, pasty skin glowing through the throngs of people. But for the most part we were surrounded by real Chinese people having a real Chinese holiday at a real Chinese tourist destination. Which was nice, quite a change from Vietnam were we felt like all of Hanoi was set up for white folk looking for creative ways to spend their money.

Okay, maybe I’m overstating it just a little: there was plenty in Yangshuo that served white folks. At the China Café, for instance, you can dine on an amazing tofu and mushroom claypot—the tofu nicely braised, the mushrooms and vegetables soaked in a savory broth so hot it’ll burn your tongue even ten minutes after it was brought to your table. And when you’re done, if you still have room, you can order apple crumble.

How cool is that?

The next day we repeated our routine: up in time for a breakfast of banana pancakes with chocolate (I’m not making this up), pack the bag full of snacks, and into the wood.

Again, Lucy and Will disappeared. Again, Ellen and I did battle with flesh-eating plants, again I tried to explain to my wife that offering up Jamie was both economical and practical, ensuring more suitcase space for souvenirs on the return trip. Finally, though, we made it through the thorn-patch, emerging into an open area that was—again, no kidding—filled with flowers.

Were I a better writer, I’d be able to tell you exactly what kind of flowers these were. I’d know the latin names, the family to which they belonged, their medicinal uses, and the greek goddess after whom they were named. I could also describe them in a way, other than to say, “Gosh, they were pretty,” where you could picture them in your head, and, in doing so, experience a slightening of tension in your chest, a departure from, at least momentarily, the daily stresses of life in the modern world.

Unfortunately, though, I’m a hack who, at this particular moment, is still so distracted by the phrase “banana pancakes with chocolate” that he can’t even remember what color the flowers were, much less engage in an extensive Google search to give you a bunch of information that only your inner dork really needs to know.

Suffice to say: Gosh, they were pretty.

And there were a lot of them—say, half a basketball court’s worth. And they were purple and white and yellow (mmmm, bananas).

“Wow,” I said, when I first found them.

Ellen came up behind me, wiping the blood off Jamie’s face and arms. “What?” she said, then looked up. “Oh wow.”

I used to want to be a rock star. I just want you to know that. I used to have long blond hair and wear boots and big shirts and scream into a microphone and pretend I was Bono with a Midwestern accent. I wrote pretentious lyrics and got blisters on my fingers trying to learn the chords to “All Along the Watch Tower.” I avoided hard drugs and too much liquor, but only because I’m a control freak and can’t stand it when the walls breath and my cat starts talking to me—but even so, I wanted to be a rock star. I had aspirations. And they were big aspirations. I was not a man to be satisfied with small, simple things—small simple things that, really, if we’re honest with ourselves, can also be classified as “stupid” and “boring.”

All of which is important for you to know because, standing there, that second morning in Yangshuo, the mountains rising up around me, the sun on that small field of flowers, Ellen and Jamie beside me, the bestial screams of Will and Lucy echoing in the distance—standing there, two things happened that made me feel like I was eight, and it was Christmas, and someone somewhere was making cookies with frosting that I would get to eat all by myself.

First, I heard a buzz.

Second, I saw rats.

It took me a minute to figure out what the buzzing sound was. But then, of course, it was obvious: bees. Going from flower, to flower, to flower. I don’t know what the best part was: that they were there in February, invisible until you took the time to really look for them, or that it was so quiet I could hear them.

But there they were, and like the flowers, they were very pretty. And like the flowers, as I watched them, I experienced a slightening of tension in my chest, a departure from, at least momentarily, the daily stresses of life in the modern world, blah, blah, blah.

Then there were the rats. I was positive they were rats, weaving darkly between the stems of the flowers, flashing gray-black as they passed in and out of sight. I even turned to Ellen and said, “Look: rats.”

She tugged a strand of hair from her face, leaned forward. “Where?”

I pointed, waiting for another flash of dark. Finally it came. She frowned, then looked at me, frowning.

Okay, so they were butterflies: big, dark, blue butterflies. That were flying above the flowers. But they were flying very fast. And quick. Really quick. Flash! Just like that! Looking for all the world like little rats, racing between the stems of the flowers. Rats with wings. And antennae. And pretty little patterns on their backs.

Eventually Will and Lucy showed up. They were streaked in mud again, their foreheads scratched and sweaty. Both of them were buck-naked from the waist on up.

“Where are your shirts?” I said.

Will and Lucy looked at each other, then at me. Will frowned, then said, “What?”

“Your shirts,” I said. I tugged at my own. “Remember? The thing you wear so that you have something to wipe your nose on?”

They looked at each other again, longer this time, as though considering. I noticed for the first time, that they were both carrying different sticks today, longer, and thinner looking, much straighter. From where I was standing, the tips almost looked as though they’d been sharpened into points.

After a moment, Lucy give a little shake of her head. Will nodded slightly, then the two of them looked at me again. “We’re hungry,” Lucy said.

We spent the rest of the morning lounging about by the small stream again. Afterwards there was an incident involving two Poptarts, three children, and a six-year-old with that sort of attitude that leads to stories in the National Enquirer about kids who are locked in the attic with nothing to eat but small spiders, emerging 17 years later with luminescent skin and an uncanny ability to sense movement behind their heads. As a result, Lucy was forced to abandon her spear and she and I headed back to the hotel room. There I spent half-an-hour reading Martin Booth’s brilliant book, Gweilo, and Lucy spent half-an-hour breathing loudly through her nose.

After lunch, we caught a taxi upstream and floated down on 20-foot long bamboo rafts guided by muscular Chinese men with long poles and chapped hands. (That sentence sounded much less kinky when it was in my head).

Anyhow, the rafts were only four feet wide, just enough to hold a park bench that they’d strapped to the bamboo with a couple lengths of bungee. The rafts barely floated above the water, so everyone wore bright orange plastic grocery bags strapped over their shoes to keep from getting soaked.

Lucy and I were paired together, for weight reasons, and though she’d stopped the heavy breathing, it was easy to tell we were still a little annoyed with each other. Eventually, though, we came to one of the many weirs that stretched from one bank to the other.

“How’re we going to get across?” Lucy said.

I shook my head. “Don’t know.”

And then the raft in front of us, holding Will, Ellen, and Jamie, was guided toward a small narrows where the wall was lower than in other places. The man with the pole leaned low, lifting the front of the raft over the weir, and then WHOOSH! down they went.

“Daddy--!” Lucy said.

“I know!” I said, and then we were going over too, the front of the raft stretching, stretching, 5, 10, 15 feet into the air in front of us, until a point was reached, momentum changed, and the raft dipped radically, straight toward the water, and plunged forward.

And I do mean plunged: when the front tip of the raft hit the water, it went straight in, and under, and the entire craft was essentially submerged for a good four or five seconds. After that, almost instantly we were afloat again. But even so, on a cold February afternoon in Yangshuo, this is a crazy ride for a little girl and an old man, and we took great pleasure in screaming, every time we went over a weir, like, respectively, a six-year-old and a four-year-old.

Four or five moments like this, and we were friends again. I even asked our raftsman to guide the vessel over to the spot on the bank where I’d made Lucy abandon her spear earlier that day. He did so, reluctantly. I think he thought she needed to pee, and he looked a little startled when she reemerged carrying a six foot spear, replete with a few small, bloody feathers on the tip.

Between these moments of screaming bliss, the journey is nothing short of a Gainsborough wet-dream: a broad, lazy river, plumes of bamboo, wide-horned water buffalo chewing winter grass, row upon row of wind-smoothed mountains rising into the afternoon sky.

That evening was spent back in town, watching a lightshow choreographed by Zhang Yimou, director of Raise the Red Lantern and the genius behind the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. Set in a natural amphitheater along the river, the show uses the mountains off in the distance as a backdrop, lighting them with huge spotlights so that you can see them even though they’re miles away. Zhang also uses every inch of the harbor, extending and retracting floating platforms back and forth so that his dancers and actors seem to appear out of nowhere, floating on black ice. I’d say it was brilliant, but that would be like saying Michelangelo’s David is a big naked guy. Zhang is a genius clearly not of this world.

The next morning we returned to the rice paddies, the children disappeared, Ellen and I debated offering James to the thorn gods. The weather was warmer, now, slightly balmy, even, and the rounded mountains rising out of the flat plains looked familiar and green, somehow more hospitable.

We arrived at the little bridge, relatively unscathed. Will and Lucy were nowhere in sight. Settling in, we opened some granola bars, took about 38,000 cutesy shots of Jamie playing in the water, read a little. By 10:00 I was starting to get a little worried. By 10:15 I suggested maybe I should go look for them.

“They’ll be fine,” Ellen said. I noticed she'd warmed to the idea of clearing luggage space since we'd bought a load of tablecloths and wall-hangings as souvenirs the night before.

At 10:30 I was just tightening the laces on my shoes, when Will and Lucy emerged from the brush, hunched over, naked but for a pair of loincloths, their faces and arms and chests caked with mud and something darker, more ominous, that I couldn’t make out from a distance.

“Where the hell—“ I said, and then stopped. Dangling from the handle end of Will’s spear was a necklace of human ears.

“What the--?” I began, and then stopped again. While Will wouldn’t meet my gaze, his eyes glancing back and forth over the surrounding thickets of bamboo, Lucy was watching me carefully, head down, eyebrows pinched. She wasn't glaring, really, but I could see her fingers tightening around the grip of her spear.

“Never mind,” I said.

There’s more I could tell you about the trip. I could tell you about hiking up Moon Mountain. I could tell you about how, from the huge, crescent shaped hole in the hilltop, carved by millions and millions of years of wind and rain, you can look around for miles on either side and see wave after wave of mountainous peaks.

I could tell you about how, on the hike up the mountain, one of our number (who shall remain nameless, due to her tender years and—well--other tender parts) needed to pee so badly that she squatted in the woods. Unable to get our attention to bring her a wipe, she grabbed the nearest leaf and cleaned herself up—not realizing that the leaf was covered with tiny, little prickers.

I could tell you how I let Ellen take care of cleaning that one up, not because of gender roles, or even gender delicacy, but because I couldn’t stop giggling.

In short, we were able to Do lots of stuff in Yangshuo, hopefully holding his deadliness the reaper at bay for at least a few moments longer as we remember these things when our time finally comes.

After all the images have flashed by, though, and the reel-to-reel is beginning to flicker as the film winds down, I’m pretty sure that as the grim reaper checks his Blackberry and takes the time to floss his teeth, all my memories will culminate in this one particular moment:

It’s the last full day of our stay, and we’re hiking a back-route to Moon Mountain. We’re on dirt paths, cutting through palm groves and patches of garden where you can still smell the charcoal fumes from when they burnt out the ground cover at the end of the growing season.

We’re not entirely sure where we are—the instructions we’d received from the hotel said something about a fork, and we hadn’t found any such thing—but eventually we stumble into a small village. There’s a basketball court there, and small red hens running around pecking grain from the tarmac. On the flat stone wall outside one house, someone has laid out a head of lettuce, one leaf at a time, each glistening with water, from gate to gate.

We move on through the village, passing mud-brick houses washed with yellow paint. There’s a small shop on our left, with a girl in a pink raincoat and black boots chatting on a rhinestone covered cell phone; behind her, a group of men play cards on a plastic table.

Will and Lucy are ahead of us. They’re running. Past the mustard-colored houses, past the girl with the raincoat, past a pair of roosters eyeing each other near a water pump. The path we’re following is cobblestone, and as old as God, the rocks uneven and slippery even when dry.

Our instructions tell us to take a left between two watering holes. We’re not sure what that means. Were the pumps watering holes? Are those big cisterns? But eventually we come to a bend in the road that passes between two large, muddy, hollows and we think, Ah, yes, this is it. So we turn left and continue on.

And Will and Lucy are still ahead of us, sticks in hand, striding confidently through this place that is as foreign as anyplace they’ll ever be, conspiring together, plotting out forts and surprise attacks on chickens and parents and their little brother. It might be they don’t even see the watering holes, the mud-brick buildings, the low gray sky, the water buffalos in the barns, those crazy peaked mountains bursting out of the earth all around us. It might be they’re so locked in their heads, in whatever game it is they’re imagining, that they see none of this.

But I do. And Ellen does too. And what we see as well is our family, deep in rural China, wandering through a village in the middle of nowhere. What we see are our children, kids raised in Virginia and watched like hawks by their parents and their day-caregivers and their pre-school teachers, watched so carefully they never learned to ride bikes until they were 8 and 5—we see our kids, moving beneath that sky, past those ragged palms, toward those glorious mountains—we see our kids running along, hair tousled, clothes dusty, heads full of adventure, the whole damn world open before them.

A Night at the Opera

 The saying goes that everyone needs to see Chinese Opera once in their lives.

And only once.

Because apparently that once will be enough to last their entire lives. 

It’s perhaps important to point out that the person who told me this was herself Chinese, that this isn’t merely a western reaction to a type of music that my rural Virginia friends would refer to as “caterwaulin’”—a high Scots phrase referring to cats that, well—waul.   

It’s also perhaps important to point out that the term “caterwaulin’,” which I’ve never actually heard anyone in the state of Virginia use, could also be applied to Western opera, anything written by Madonna in the last 20 years, Britney Spears since her first marriage, and Snoop Doggy Dog in his entire life. 

Having thus offended most of Asia, a large part of Europe, and every Madonna, Britney, and Snoop fan out there (in short, no one), allow me to say that, having spent our first six-and-a-half-months in Hong Kong defining “culture” largely as “things you can eat,” our time for going to the Opera had finally come.

Steeling ourselves for the experience, we spent an hour in our room putting on our nicest clothes and slamming vodka martinis.  We’d planned on leaving at five, but for some reason got a late start (Ellen couldn’t find her keys; I couldn’t find my face).  As a result, we spent the whole stroll down the hill, the shuttle-ride to the station, and the train ride down to East Tsim Sha Tsui debating whether we should go straight to the opera or try to squeeze in dinner first. 

I was all for getting some food.  There was this little German place we’d been meaning to try for a long time, and my postmodern, too-clever-by-half sensibilities loved the idea of sampling 17 kinds of meat ending in “wurst” before watching a bunch of heavily made up folks in platform shoes and silk robes wobble around warbling about the morning frost on lotus flowers.

Ellen, though, had other ideas:  “We leave after the first act,” she said, “and go get more martinis.”

“You mean supper,” I said. 

“Whatever.”

I liked this idea, actually.  Unfortunately, for once in our lives our walk down the hill, the bus, and the train were in perfect sync, so that we ended up traveling the 17 miles down to East TST in roughly six minutes.  Grudgingly, we strolled to the German restaurant, ordered several variations of dead pig, and settled in for a long night.

The opera we’d chosen was called The Story of the Jade Hairpin.  It’s an old story about a boy, Pan Bizheng, who fails his university exams twice, and, forlorn, decides the best way to drown his misery is to move into his aunt’s Buddhist nunnery. 

Works for me. 

Meanwhile, the nunnery has received a new novice, an official’s daughter who has had to flee her war-torn region.  Bereft of family and all hope, Chen Jiaolian is about to kill herself when she’s rescued and taken to the temple.  There, she’s renamed Miaochang, and despite having some really fancy clothes and no real inclination toward becoming a nun, takes the vow.  Pan and Miaochang meet, of course, and fall in love, leading to a tale of “forbidden love, forced separation, and eventual reunion.”  If all of this sounds just a little bit like “When Harry Met Sally,” then that’s because it is only involving a nunnery, lots of Chinese people, and no orgasm scene in a restaurant. 

The particular version we saw was a new take on this old story, and composed in the kun style, at six-hundred-years old the grandfather of Chinese opera.

And, according to one of our neighbors at the theater, the most refined form of opera out there.  “Cantonese opera is good,” he told us during intermission.  “Peking Opera is the best.  But kun opera?  Shanghai opera?”  And here he held his hand in the air over his head, horizontal to the ground, showing a level unattainable by any of the others. 

That aside, the great thing about Chinese opera after half-a-year of living in China is that it reminds you that you’re in a foreign country.  It’s just that foreign.  Really.

Not that that’s bad.  On the contrary, Ellen and I were both delighted by the whole experience.  The music was powerful and moving, the costumes were gorgeous, and the writing was, for the most part, poetic and beautiful.

But seriously?  When we first moved to Virginia, we were shocked how the local accent could turn a single-syllable word—say, “sand”—into a multi-syllabic, multi-tonal phrase:  sa-an-duh.  This made for an exciting contrast the usual four-flat tires on a muddy road Wisconsin-speak:  “Y’all are goin’ to the be-each?  Funny.  I can-tuh sta-an-duh the sa-an-duh.”    

Well I’m here to tell you that Virginians got nothing (nuthin’) on those kun folk who regularly hold single words seven or eight beats, taking them through four or five tones.  Imagine a single sound:  gow.  Now take that sound and stretch it out for five seconds:  gooooowwwwwwwwwwwww.  Now take that stretched-out sound and put it on a roller coaster:  begin low, then go high, then to medium, then to high again, where you hold it until you can’t breath anymore. 

And we’re talking the spoken part of the opera, here; this is the dialogue.  You can imagine what the singing part sounded like.

Everything else in the play is just as stylized:  people don’t walk, they walk.  For women, this means mincing steps while holding the upper body steady, so that if a woman’s legs are covered by a gown she seems to actually float on a silken cloud.

For the men, walking means elongated steps at the end of sometimes byzantine leg movements:  imagine Python’s “Walk this way,” meets Tai Chi.   Making this all the more magnificent is the fact that male actors wear five-inch platform soles, elevating them precariously as they half waddle, half-stork stroll in rapid pursuit of the fleeing damsel or in flight from the angry prioress.

The arm gestures are just as elongated as the words, and twice as dramatic as the walking.  That the sleeves of the actors are probably triple the length of their arms makes their motions all the more fluid.  Indeed, as a whole, the costumes are everything you’d find in a child’s fairy dream of the orient:  long silken robes, flashing jewels, delicate fans, and elaborate head-pieces designed to show off the flowing black hair of the women, especially Miaochang, who, if she ever got her tresses tangled with her cuffs would need the jaws of life to extricate herself. 

Now if it sounds like I’m making fun of all of this, I would point out that only a culturally illiterate cretin would mock an art form that has been designated by UNESCO as a “Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.”

Fortunately, for you, of course, I come from a place where “culture” is defined as drinking beer from a glass and where the words “oral” and “masterpiece” are used together only when reviewing films deemed inappropriate for persons under the age of 18. 

That said, the overall effect of all of this is wonderfully elegant and sublimely elaborate.   The musculature and bodily control to perform kun is extraordinary.

With all the fancy costumes and the fancy walking and the fancy talking, it’s probably not too surprising that the story-line itself wasn’t a real cliff-hanger.  Check that:  I’ve seen Teletubbies episodes with more drama.

Part of this, I’m sure, resulted from the limitations of the translations.  Because the play itself was in Shanghainese, there were large screens above and on either side of the stage translating the lyrics and dialogue into both Chinese characters and English.  Though for the most part this worked just fine (even if the Budweiser ads got a little distracting), every once in a while we had the sense that we were missing something. 

Take, for instance, the scene where Pan and Miaochang came upon each other in the woods late at night.  This is early in their courtship, and neither is certain of the others’ feelings.   You can imagine the chemistry:  she’s sixteen, gorgeous, decked out in silken robes and glowing jewels that highlight her ebony hair and high cheekbones.  He’s a party boy, twice flunking his exams, living in a nunnery, now alone in the woods with this gorgeous young thing. 

They banter back and forth.  He tries to get her to sing him a song on her zither, a long, stringed instrument with a wooden joy stick.  She refuses, saying it wouldn’t be appropriate, threatening to narc to his aunt on him if he doesn’t leave her alone.  The tension builds.  He leans forward over the table where she’s seated; she leans back, but only a little.  Her hands are bare, resting on the music box.  His inch closer.  Then the subtitles flash the following dialogue: 

P:  Your fingers are like silken bows glowing in the moonlight.

M: Naughty boy!   I will tell your aunt.

P:  Have you seen the floss?

M:  Excuse me?

P:  The floss—I can’t find it anywhere.

M:  I haven’t seen it.   Did you look in the drawer with the toothpaste?

P:  It’s not there.  And I’ve got this sesame seed stuck between my teeth—it’s aching like the warm red sun on a rain-parched plateau.

M:  It should be in the drawer.  I haven’t touched it.

P:   Crap.

At another point, Miaochang is alone in her chamber, writing a poem about Pan.  Struggling to describe him, she chooses a single, long word that she twists and turns over itself for six minutes as she narrates her scribbling.  The teleprompter, meanwhile, gives us the word “Romantic,”

Romantic.  Really?  The guy’s wearing a floor to shoulder silk robe in baby blue, using a falsetto voice, and  trying to touch your zither—and “romantic” is the best you can come up with? 

 

In the end, I’ll have to admit, I dozed a little during the third scene, and got annoyed at the way my knees kept banging the head of the guy in front of me—though not half as annoyed as he was, I’m sure.  Ellen, meanwhile, confessed that she struggled to keep her head erect during the last two scenes, which made me feel a little better. 

Talking about it in the taxi on the way home, though, we were both happy that we’d gone.  I even confessed that I’d like to do it again sometime, albeit preferably in a theater where there was more legroom.

“Really?” said Ellen.

I nodded.  “And I want one of those silks robes, too.  And some of them fancy sleeves they were waving all over the place.” 

She looked at me, her face stippled by the lights of the passing cars.  I reached over and took her hand.

“Your eyes,” I said, “are like lotus flowers laced by the morning frost.”

She smiled gently, almost beatifically.  “I love you,” she said, “really I do.  And you’re the father of my children.  But if you ever say anything like that to me again, I’m going to have to kill you.” 

Then she patted my hand and released my fingers.  I grinned, leaning back in the seat.  Outside, Kowloon whizzed by, the double-decker busses, the red and green taxis, the tall buildings, lighted windows rising 80 floors.  It’d been a nice night, all things considered.  The German food, the opera, just getting out of the house without the kids for once.  We were in a magnificent city in Asia, experiencing a new culture, a new life, a new world.  So I wouldn’t ever be a famous kun actor.  Big deal.  Who cared?

Unless . . .

Could it be?

Maybe . . . maybe I just needed try harder? 

I reached again for Ellen’s hand.