I know generally how our place will look because of the Internet listing, but it is still disorienting to see it in person. There are two double beds, a couch with an extra blanket, a bathroom, a kitchenette, a washer, and a clothes dryer all sandwiched in a room the size of my Oregon kitchen. Robert tells us he is a native of Beijing and is happy to give us ideas of what to do and see during our week there. Our only two official goals in Beijing are to show the kids the Great Wall and to begin the process of jet lag recovery, and we know the latter is best accomplished with sunshine and fresh air.
He scribbles a list of suggestions in Kyle’s notebook, most of which we already know: the Temple of Heaven, Tiananmen Square, a kung fu show. On the left he writes them in English; in the middle he writes in pinyin Chinese, a bastardized Mandarin employing the Roman alphabet, which helps native English speakers pronounce the language. On the right, he writes rapid-fire in Chinese characters, which we can show taxi drivers.
“Is there a place to buy food nearby?” I ask. There is, he says, and he draws a map on another journal page that points the way to a mall with a food court and supermarket down the road. He recommends the twenty-four-hour diner on the ground floor of our apartment building, tells us to try their sesame rolls. Then the only person we know in Beijing bids us well and leaves.
For the first time since we left my parents’ house in Austin two days earlier for breakfast tacos before our flight, the five of us are on our own. I feel like a squirrelly teenager away at college for the first time: apparently, I am a grown-up in charge here.
Hunger outweighs any desire to shower away the airplane funk and collapse into bed. So we leave our backpacks piled on the couch and follow Robert’s map out the building, turn right, and begin our week-long investigation of our neighborhood nestled in Beijing proper. This is a business district, gray office buildings sandwiched together and studded with shops on their first floors; there is a wide concrete pavilion along the road that serves as the evening hangout spot and children’s playground. A yellow-gray haze of smog rests on the tops of buildings, pauses to catch its breath or ours, thick and lifeless. Most of the small shops are now closed for the evening, but we find the mall with the food court. We choose a restaurant where the waitstaff appears friendly enough, and we order with our fingers from the menu. We slurp eye-wateringly spicy soup and bowls of perfectly round white rice scoops. The kids whisper requests for cups of water, and Kyle signals for someone from the staring throng of waitresses. “Shui?” he asks with a smile. The woman nods, hurries to the kitchen, then returns with a tray of piping hot water in handleless teacups. We forgot to add the ping bing to the shui to indicate cold and bottled. Steaming hot water—this the default, and we will forget it routinely for the next three weeks.
We are in China.
Novelist Anthony Doerr says that jet lag is “a dryness in the eyes, a loose wire in the spine.” Two days ago we sat in Austin traffic on the way to the airport. Now we are navigating crowded, pallid Beijing streets, loose-wired spines, death grips on the boys’ hands, and wondering aloud to no one in particular if street-stall grapes are safe to eat. I take melatonin capsules and strap on my eye mask at night, force my body to sleep after first forcing it to stay awake four hours longer than it wants. At three in the morning, I hear a sound in the corner of quiet rustling and the rapid shifting of paper scraps, like a mouse. I pull up my eye mask, and Finn is rummaging through the near-empty refrigerator, looking for an afternoon snack. I call him back to his pallet on the floor, where he prefers to sleep tonight instead of the couch. He is soon talking in his sleep: “Wait wait!”
Jet lag is punishment to a body already in culture shock, forcing you to sacrifice desire for the necessary: you may want to find solace from reading a novel in bed, but you’ll regret that decision later at three in the afternoon, when your body taunts your poor choice with shaky legs and heavy eyelids while standing on a crowded metro, strangers’ armpits too near your nose. The earliest European explorers endured months on a ship with seasickness and a vitamin C deficiency in order to touch Asian soil. Jet lag is our modern-day scurvy.
I question our sanity by our third day here. I’m enamored of the earth’s diversity of climates and cultures, and I want a drink of all of it. But China is a struggle for me, with its Communist worldview a battering ram against my overzealous democratic autonomy. I knew this about China before we landed here, so a few weeks before we left I journaled a note to my future self, as a hammer to break the glass in case of an emergency (the emergency being, of course, questioning our sanity and considering a trip to a coffee shop to grab some Wi-Fi and book a return flight home):
You’re in China, which is hard. But you can do hard things. You won’t be here long. This month is the foundation for the year. Lean in to the struggles; give thanks for the easy times. Hard doesn’t mean wrong. You’re on the right path.
I need this note. Instead of an emergency hammer, it is a life preserver. It keeps me away from the coffee shop’s Wi-Fi, and tonight we find Italian food for dinner instead. The kids watch cartoons on the restaurant’s television, and Kyle and I have a miniature date. I’m grateful for the wisdom of my past self.
We walk back to our apartment, bellies full, and sleeping four-year-old Finn loses a flip-flop in the Beijing night as Kyle carries him in his arms. He’s down to three shoes for the year until we buy him another pair. That did not take long.
We will only be in the capital city for a week, only to acclimate to the time change, to adjust to this side of the planet. It feels heavier here, the majority of the world’s population tilting the earth’s axis to the east, and I can feel the wobble in our collective rotation.
Today, in the supermarket produce section, abundant piles of pink dragon fruit sit in baskets next to apples and red lettuce. In the afternoon, schoolchildren in blue skirts and red neckerchiefs run to the store nearest our little neighborhood and leave with cellophane-wrapped snacks and cotton candy–colored drinks. Blonde women in line at the supermarket speak Russian, as does the woman in a power suit next to me on the metro. Several miles away, officials are planning their bid for another Olympic Games.
“Mom, whenever I blow my nose, it’s all black,” Reed remarks.
“My eyes itch here,” says Tate. We’re leaving a park for the evening and heading back to the apartment, and the gray sky is only slightly yellower than the concrete skyline.