In Part 4, our family of three widely diverse individuals leaves the mostly sheltered, mostly sedate university life and ventures out into the big, wide world. Well, bigger and wider. Were we read for it? Maybe the more important question is: Was the world ready for our strange tribe?
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In 2015, I retired from teaching and we three moved to the southern coastal city of Guangzhou (Pronounced as Go On Joe.) Why Guangzhou? Several factors influenced my choice. Guangzhou was a southern and coastal city. If I couldn’t live on the beach on Hainan Island, this was an acceptable compromise. Also, Guangzhou had a large international community which meant a wide diversity of restaurants, shopping, and services were available to foreigners in that friendly city. Third, it was my chance to start a new life, the life of a writer, with completely new patterns and friends. There was an additional very important consideration. One of our first steps upon arrival was to enroll CS in an international kindergarten. He was almost three years old and this was to be his first prolonged exposure to a bunch of strange new creatures – little kids! Acquiring social skills at the kindergarten was as important as the bilingual education he received there.
I was quite happy in Guangzhou. My wife, however, was far less pleased. I, the uprooted American, may have chosen to relocate 13 time zones away from my American hometown but this was the first time in her traditional Chinese girl life to be away from her family. She was never comfortable in Guangzhou and soon began voicing her discontent. I liked living in a place where you could see bare toes nine months a year; I was opposed to moving again, especially to any spot lacking that delightful feature. This time, a viable compromise was readily available. My wife’s older sister was urging us to move to the city of Chongqing, which was inland but far enough south to be acceptable to me. My wife’s older sister had left their northern hometown for a medical career in the army, which had settled her in Chongqing. Now, Sister offered my wife an alluring package: Move to Chongqing and she would help us find a suitable place to live, a good kindergarten for CS, and arrange a job for my wife – all while living close to family in Chongqing (Sister, her husband and adult son, plus husband’s extended family). Once again, Chinese water torture (tears at breakfast) eventually prevailed. Like Hemingway, I never left any place without regret but, after one year in Guangzhou, we moved to Chongqing and I gradually came to accept that lovely city as my new home.
In this new city, our strange tribe thrived. Our first apartment was chosen because of its close proximity to an international kindergarten as well as to a beaming auntie who loved this small nephew. Since the kindergarten was only “a good nine-iron shot” away, I could walk CS to his school each morning while Mama went to her new job. So what if he was one of the sparse handful of foreign kids at that kindergarten? He had already learned that, wherever he went and whomever he met, he would be different in appearance, heritage, and language skills. Accordingly, this little boy had learned to be flexible, to adapt to any group and quickly fit in; it didn’t have to be a perfect fit. Other parents delivered their kids to the kindergarten; I did too. But CS and I were the only ones singing the Beatles’ Nowhere Man and Yellow Submarine (from his favorite movie at the time) as we walked to the kindergarten.
Still wondering if we are a strange tribe? Well, let me offer Exhibit A. Shortly after we arrived in Chongqing, our family was invited to be on a local television show. This episode was about parenting. It compared different parenting styles between three local families with preschool-age children. There was the conventional nuclear family (father, mother, daughter), the single-parent family (mother, grandmother, daughter), and there was us (foreign father, much younger traditional Chinese mother, and X-hybrid, bicultural, biracial, bilingual son). In the course of the program, the television host asked a number of questions of each participant, including the kids. When the host got to CS, however, this four-year-old boy gently took the microphone out of her hand and continued the interview himself, as if this was perfectly normal – which it was, for him. This legacy of living stagefright-free continues. At the age of eight, in his first venture in public speaking and despite a frightful lisp from missing baby teeth, CS won the second prize for his age group in that year’s national China Daily English Speech contest.
As a member of a strange tribe, CS, by the age of six, had spent his first three years in a child-free campus environment, lived in three major metropolitan cities, and attended three different kindergartens. What’s strange about that? One predictable result was that, unlike his parents, Chester has no roots, no hometown. “Baba, Mama, Qiao Qiao. We are family.” His family was his roots, his hometown. For me, wherever I go, everything is judged against the standards I learned as a child in a small Midwestern American town. Mama is irrevocably a traditional Chinese girl (when convenient) comparing the world outside her window to her hometown in north-central China, as she had already proved by her discomfort in living without extended family nearby. (Even while living in Zhengzhou, she found reasons to go back to her hometown for frequent weekend visits.)
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Thus we end Part 4 of this saga. And, as Mark Twain reputedly said of the stories he dictated for his biography, “And the most amazing thing is that half of them are true.” In our case, this is a true and largely unexaggerated history of our brave little nuclear family. Tune in next week for our further adventures as young Mr. Chester ventures further out into the world. And, while you wait with bated breath, you can help fund this series by visiting my Buy Me A Coffee page and buy me some of that universal writing fluid, strong black coffee.