The next few days wane in the September breeze, warm gusts that blow out the last of summer humidity and foreshadow autumn. We visit the Temple of Heaven, take in a kung fu show, and find American-style pancakes at a trendy café, where the kids begin their schoolwork for the year with spiral notebooks and math problems. We take the metro to Tiananmen Square and watch children fly kites with their grandparents, then bottleneck in line with the other tourists across the street to squeeze through the entrance to the Forbidden City. Tate moans and holds her stomach, asks to leave, swears she will be sick. Concrete blares light from the sun with no shadow for respite; throngs of pushing bodies are everywhere. We swim upstream through the crowd, pass the gauntlet of locals selling folded fans and windup toys on upturned cardboard boxes outside. There is no trash can, and I have forgotten to add a plastic bag to my day pack, a travel habit I cultivated when we lived in Turkey and I was pregnant. Ten feet from us, in the dirt next to the sidewalk, a little boy defecates on a piece of cardboard held by his grandmother.
Still no shade, still people pushing forward and backward.
We hold hands, the five of us, and speed walk to the metro station. Tate keeps quiet, seals her lips shut as sweat bubbles on her forehead. We enter the train, hold on to the rails, and she vomits violently on the floor as the doors close. A sympathetic woman hands me tissues to mop up the mess, and Tate holds out her offending damp shirt from touching her skin, says cheerfully she feels better already. I apologize in English to the people around us. Our metro stop arrives, and we exit the train, wind through our neighborhood sidewalks full of men and women in power suits, then up to our apartment.
The smells of the city, the train, Tate’s retching have attached to us. We run our second load of laundry.
Seven days in Beijing and we feel our brain fog finally lift. Our spines stiffen, and the moisture returns to our eyes. Our bodies accept that we have switched sides of the planet. I give my past self, the one that wrote me my much-needed note, a mental high five. I made it through Beijing. Onward.
It’s the start of the second week of our journey, and it already feels like we’ve been gone for months. We fly to Xi’an, seven hundred miles southwest of Beijing, the country’s ancient capital, and check in to a guesthouse near friends through Kyle’s work, Americans who moved from Portland several months ago. This new apartment feels like a palace compared to our Beijing studio, with three bedrooms and a separate kitchen, and there is grass outside the building where the kids can play with other children both native and foreign. They head downstairs while Kyle and I put sheets on the mattresses; then he scrambles eggs in the kitchen, the air wafting a familiar smell of home. I smile and sigh in relief at this smattering of homeyness, then head outside to watch the kids.
The blacktop and patches of grass where the children play are surrounded by identical concrete apartment buildings, a village square in this city of five million people. I join a towheaded mother who is watching the game of tag and introduce myself. Her name is Ashley, she hails from North Carolina, she has four boys, and she reads my blog. They have lived in China for several years now, for her husband’s work, and it is a thrill for them when they meet other English speakers. Her boys excitedly shout game rules in both English and Mandarin, gather our kids and their neighbors like mother hens. The children play until dinnertime; Ashley and I swap stories about expatriate parenting and homeschooling and good green bean recipes, and we could be anywhere in the world having this experience, but we are in the ancient city of Xi’an in central China.
We will take the bus in this city, mostly, and our friends explain which bus number goes which direction. On the day we visit the Muslim Quarter in the city center, we board a sweaty bus and show the driver our destination written in Mandarin script. Curious eyes bore through our bodies and faces, shamelessly scrutinize our hair, the shape of our hips, our children wearing only shirts and shorts because it is still hot even though it is technically autumn. An old woman stands next to me and yells at me in Mandarin, pointing to the kids’ bare legs and shaking her head. She chastises me the entire ride downtown, pointing her finger at my face. The bus driver pulls over to a stop and tells us to get off the bus; we have arrived at our destination. We instead walk five more blocks, passing three more bus stops before entering the archaic city wall that marks the entrance to the quarter.
This is the original city center, perhaps the center of the entire world at the height of the Silk Road. It is here where the trade routes began, where merchants vagabonded westward, through Persia and Jerusalem, possibly passing a living, breathing Jesus on their way to Constantinople and Venice. Xi’an was once the most vibrant cosmopolitan city in the East, and now it is home to one of the world’s oldest mosques. It is also the ideal place to buy art, which is my souvenir of choice, both for future use and because it packs easily in a tube strapped to my pack.
We walk through the covered bazaar, pass booths of wooden frogs, jade necklaces, and political posters of Mao, and stop at a table where a man is selling his oil paintings for a few dollars each. I buy three, scenes of children playing in the snow in front of village pagodas, and roll them into our plastic architect’s tube. We walk by a stall where a woman is selling scrolls, tall and thin cuts of silk papered with designs of flowers and trees, and Tate asks for one for her room. For the sake of our bags and budget, we have told the kids they may have one souvenir per continent.
“Are you sure you want this to be your souvenir for Asia?” I ask her.
“Can she write my name on it in Chinese?” Tate asks.
We ask the woman in slow English, and the woman smiles and nods, asks, “What is your name?”
“Tatum,” she replies.
“I am sorry . . . I do not understand,” the woman says. (We have inadvertently saddled our daughter with a name that confuses more people than we suspected, something I swore I’d never do due to my own personal experience.)
“Tatum,” my daughter says again, slowly. “T-A-T-U-M.”
The woman pauses, repeats the letters, picks up her pencil, and scribbles on the side of her newspaper. “What do you think?” she asks. “The letters sound similar to your name. You say it Te tai mu.”
“Does that mean anything?” I ask.
She thinks for a moment. “In a way, it means ‘Caregiver of peace.’”
“I like that,” Tate says.