We have safely arrived in Beijing, and are in the gorgeous State Guest Hotel, and have already had dinner with the Gaungdong group---lots of baby girls, some of them crying, all of them lovely! ... By the way, within hours of being here, Beijing had easily stolen from Kowloon the title of Asia's most haunting, breathtaking city. This is the place you want to come to, to see a reality shifted by many many dimensions away from the reality of North Atlantic western culture.
Beijing is pure 1950's, Maoist block architectures mingling with the Inner City/Forbidden City style historic Chinese structures, and featuring sights that are alien, ancient, otherworldly. Hard to capture how foreign and fantastical this city feels, so different from anything we've seen so far. The heart of China beats here, and it is rural as well as urban ...
One example: we took the new superhighway leading from the airport into the city, one of two such highways (the other is only about thirty meters to one side, and will be completed by 2008 and the Olympics). Kath noticed that all the cars crowding the highway are new cars---because so much of China's population is new to driving. While I noticed that wild sheep were grazing between the sparse trees on the strip of land between the two superhighways leading through the city.
Have never seen sheep grazing along the 401's passage through the heart of T.O., nor have I seen ancient walled Imperial Gates (ancient water gates, our guide explained) nor Imperial houses backdropped by bleak Stalinist structures draped with feeble attempts at Western advertizing, nor 'outdoor gymnasiums' of workout equipment, mechanical stairmasters and ellipse machines being used by old men in Communist winter-drabery and other dressed-for-snowstorm passersby who step onto the machines in their parkas and boots, do ten reps, then continue on past painted wooden shopfronts so old and elaborately designed they look like priceless medieval heritage buildings ...
China's heart is a clash of histories and styles and a promise of the future that seems not to have arrived yet. Beijing is the most improbably different place I have ever seen; if it did not exist, it would take a China Mievillean act of imagination to conjure it into being ...
Ciao from the State Guest Hotel!
Thursday, February 1, 2007
A Day of Rest in K-L, Then a Return to Singapore
It is 5:30 am in the morning of Saturday Feb 3rd here in Singapore, and the four of us are preparing to head for the airport, and our flight to Beijing ... A first-time entry into the PRC mainland for both Kath and I. Next post should be from northern China, as our hotel there is supposed to have net access. Hopefully we'll have an easy flight, and update you from the State Guest Hotel after we've met up with Yulin and the Canadian gang who've just returned with their babies from Guandong!
Ciao for now.
Ciao for now.
Cameron Highlands, and Kuala Lumpur
Highlights of our return journey from Ipoh to K-L: Uncle Sam took us up into the mountains, winding up and up to the fantastic high pass farms and villages and hotels of the Cameron Highlands, where many Malaysians go on holiday, to escape the heat of the low lands; being cooler in the Highlands, European fruits are grown here. But at various elevations, other harder to come by, jungle vegetables and fruits, including strange varieties of bananas, which were delicious.
We lunched at a Cameron Highlands Tea farm, which grows orange pekoe (bought some here for mom and dad) and offered us scones, cookies and as Marcus put it, 'tea and sympathy' on our long drive back ...
Best part of the drive came as we wound north through the vast Malaysian jungles, the new mountain road offering fantastic views of lush tropical valleys and passes. Then Uncle Sam spotted some aboriginal blow-pipe hunters climbing down out of the trees and crossing the road. These aboriginals collect jungle fruits and sell them at road side huts made from bamboo stalks and leaves ... But they survive by hunting and gathering, using blowdarts to shoot monkeys, and eat the meat.
Sam called to the young pipe-hunter returning to his hut, and the boy---he seemed only 17 or 18 to me---came out and talked to us, or rather to Sam and Lucilla, who were familiar with his dialect (they grew up in the foothills of these mountains, and know several dialects). The boy demo'd his pipe for us, putting two darts into the side of a tree some forty feet away; the darts hit the same spot so precisely they formed a V, sticking out of the tree (something I've seen Costner's Robin Hood do with arrows in a movie, but that was special effects; this was a boy who lives without electricity or running water, surviving by his hunting-gathering skills in the jungle and feeding his family of two, maybe three children who we saw by the hut).
Pic Six: an older aboriginal wandered in, wanted to try on my sun glasses, then hammed it up for me.
Pic Seven: K-L from the end of Unlce Sam and Aunt Belinda's mountainside street (it was a foggy afternoon).
Final Pics: Petronas Towers.
Malaysia's Deep Past and Far-Flung Future
Highlights:
Seeing aboriginal hunter-gatherers in the Cameron Highlands ... Then visiting the far-out futuristic Islamic architectures of downtown K-L, the Petronas Towers. Malaysia is a land that is colourful, vibrant, changing, still mired in its rich past, reaching out for a future that's still a hazy dream for most of the country's population.
Upon our return to K-L, we enjoyed the best meal we've had so far in Asia, at Uncle Sam's terrific restaurant, Bangsar Village Seafood. Aunt Belinda and Uncle Sam were terrific hosts, as was their son Amos ... Uncle Sam spoke so proudly of Amos during our there-and-back trip to Ipoh, it's clear that Sam and Belinda are the very best of parents. And Amos is a young man to be proud of indeed---if the future of South East Asia is in the hands of Amos and his friends, that future is as blindingly bright as Petronas's visionary structures seem to promise.
Ciao
Seeing aboriginal hunter-gatherers in the Cameron Highlands ... Then visiting the far-out futuristic Islamic architectures of downtown K-L, the Petronas Towers. Malaysia is a land that is colourful, vibrant, changing, still mired in its rich past, reaching out for a future that's still a hazy dream for most of the country's population.
Upon our return to K-L, we enjoyed the best meal we've had so far in Asia, at Uncle Sam's terrific restaurant, Bangsar Village Seafood. Aunt Belinda and Uncle Sam were terrific hosts, as was their son Amos ... Uncle Sam spoke so proudly of Amos during our there-and-back trip to Ipoh, it's clear that Sam and Belinda are the very best of parents. And Amos is a young man to be proud of indeed---if the future of South East Asia is in the hands of Amos and his friends, that future is as blindingly bright as Petronas's visionary structures seem to promise.
Ciao
More Malaysia Pics
UPDATE: Here's pics from our second day in Malaysia, the trip to Ipoh, and the morning of our return to K-L.
First pic, shrine to Lucilla's ancestors in Choong Pak's living room.
Two: veranda-shaded front entrance to Choong Pak/Chun's home in Ipoh.
Three: Hanging antler-orchids growing in the veranda garden outside Chun/Choong Pak's front door.
Four: Cave crypt-temple where Lucilla's father's ashes are interred; temple is at the foot of the cliff-sided escarpment that borders one edge of Ipoh.
Five: Entrance to the central Buddhist cave of the crypt-temple.
Six: Some of the shrines within the cave.
Seven: the rear of the cave opens into an entirely cliff-enclosed sacred hollow, where another temple soars above us.
Eight: strangely, one of the central features of this sacred hollow is an enormous tortoise pond, where hundreds of the creatures chow down; some are several feet in length.
Nine: a corner of the multi-floored maze of the crypt itself; the interred include small photos of loved ones, as well as location numbers.
Ten: Uncle Sam and I beside one of the little Buddhas outside the temple.
Updating from Beijing, knowing we'll be so busy from this point in our expedition onward, so brief best-of pics and highlight descriptions from here on (so less reading for those of you following our journey :)) With so much paperwork and group coordination coming in the next couple of weeks (not to mention diaper changing :) there will be little time for blogging.
As it is, the only time I've had for blogging has been given to me by my insomnia ... I get up hours before the others, go over our pictures, choose the best and most comprehensive, look over the scribbled notes I've made in different homes, hotels, on buses, in the backs of cars, etc, try to organize thoughts and impressions from my jetlagged sleep-deprived fog and get them down in a vaguely coherent sequence, and then post an update just as the others emerge for breakfast.
The rest of our time is spent traveling, visiting, sightseeing and dining (a major affair, when many attendees and many dishes are involved!) ... Bringing out a laptop to describe what's going on is inappropriate much of the time and impossible most of the time (it's packed away in a suitcase in the trunk of the vehicle we're traveling in).
Ciao for now ...
The rest of our time is spent traveling, visiting, sightseeing and dining (a major affair, when many attendees and many dishes are involved!) ... Bringing out a laptop to describe what's going on is inappropriate much of the time and impossible most of the time (it's packed away in a suitcase in the trunk of the vehicle we're traveling in).
Ciao for now ...
What I'm Looking Forward To Most
The morning after our arrival in Kuala Lumpur, we set out in Uncle Sam's comfortable roadster for an important overnight trip to the family's home city of Ipoh. Lucilla and Sam, the youngest members of their generation of the Ho family, have a particular purpose in mind: they want to arrange additional care for their oldest brother, Choong Pak. Choong Pak's been blind since his early fifties. Now in his eighties, he is bed-ridden and in very poor health. Choong Pak is unable to look after himself but naturally wants to remain in his own house; there he at least knows his surroundings by touch, even though he can no longer move about the house without assistance.
Choong Pak already has the most honourable sort of assistance: a daughter who's dedicated her life to looking after him. Kath's diminutive cousin Chun, sister to cousin Lin in Singapore, lives with Choong Pak, and does her best to nurse her father, attending to his daily needs. A fall several years back left Choong Pak with a broken hip, and with the fear of further injury that keeps him confined to his bed in a room in an older house in a quiet and sweltering neighbourhood of Ipoh (a city that, upon our arrival, appears to me to be badly eroded by Malaysia's oh-so-humid hard-on-the-architecture climate).
But Choong Pak has inherited the stubborn determination of his mother, and doesn't want to move to a home where he can be given care by a team of nurses. Who would want to leave their own home? … Lucilla's Mama named her four sons after parts of the Cedar tree. Choong Pak means 'leaves of Cedar' and so is the eldest (the tree's top, if you will). Choong Chee means 'Cedar branches' and so is the middle son. Choong Kan, Lucilla's other brother in Kuala Lumpur (who is away on a visit to Taiwan---we won't get to meet him on this trip) was named 'Cedar roots'. And the youngest son, Kath's affable uncle Sam, our host and dauntless mountain-road expedition driver, is Choong Lam, which means the whole Cedar bush altogether.
Our two-day trip by car to Ipoh and back is central to our visit to the South East Asian side of Kath's family; Marcus and Lucilla's primary motive in planning a just-before-Maeve travel arc out of China and up the Malay peninsula is to tackle Choong Pak's stubbornness and to help Chun help her father as his situation worsens. I am reminded of the dedication of my own aunt and uncle Dolores and Paddy, who lived with my maternal grandparents in Dublin when they grew old, and looked after them in their last years, assisted by their siblings in every way possible … The bonds of brother and sister to their parents, and to each other, is the universal that binds Malaysia's 'world away from Waterloo' recognizable in its essence.
The visit to Choong Pak's home is bittersweet and revealing. Kath and Marcus and I wait in the front room, or step out to wander the covered veranda outside the front door that serves as both carport and shaded garden for each home I can see on this blisteringly sun-beaten street. (A stroll to the end of the street quickly convinces me that I'd best stay out of the heat, under the veranda's relative cool). While Sam and Lucilla visit with Choong Pak in his bedroom, do their best to convince their oldest brother to accept the services of a maid---Chun alone cannot carry her father to the shower to wash him every day, and has to rely on friends to come each day to aid her---Kath and I peer in wonder at the intricate handicrafts crowding the shelves and cabinets of the front room, and at the welter of well-tended plants in a the dazzling outdoor garden.
Chun's life strikes me as both sad and lonely. But she has made an art of it, turning her isolation in Ipoh into a Daoist meditation in devotion: to her needlework and origami-like paper constructs, to her rich and riotous garden, a visual splendour in the shade of the carport; and ultimately to her father. As Lucilla's voice rises insistently in the back bedroom---she will brook no refusal from her Cedar's top brother---Chun shyly bestows Kath and I with gifts she has made for Maeve and for Robyn: beautiful handknitted dolls.
Finally, Lucilla's will wins out over Choong Pak's (no surprise there---I'm married to her daughter, I know how strong Fong women can be). Then Kath and I briefly meet Choong Pak, and squeeze his hand, and watch him cling in shyness to his pocket radio, the one treasure he holds to as a lifeline to the vast outer world he lost when he lost his vision.
Later that night, retreating to the Ritz Garden, the best hotel in this bedraggled overgrown cliff-enclosed valley city of Ipoh, Kath and I bow out of a dinner with one of Lucilla's childhood family friends, as we are both feeling burnt out by travel. We're in dire need of some downtime. Well, at least I am … Sleep has been very hard to come by for me since leaving Waterloo. (The night before, at our wonderful K-L family reunion dinner, young Hui asked me when we'd left home; I told him the 21st. "Oh, just six days ago?" I had to pinch myself. Surely it's been six weeks!)
Our trip to Ipoh represents the apogee of this South East Asian side-arc out of China. Tomorrow we begin the return journey, back down to Kuala Lumpur, then back down to Singapore, then back into China to meet our mystery daughter. Maeve feels all the more mysterious to me here in Ipoh because she feels farther away than she did when we were back home, preparing her bedroom, folding her clothes into her drawers and putting up her room's decorations. My head is fuzzy from a week's lack of sleep. I'm disoriented, O.D.ing on travel at this point. We've been uprooting ourselves so often that there seems nowhere to stand, get my bearings.
But here in Ipoh, as Kath slips easily into sleep, I gaze up at the ceiling, trying to relax and recapture my dad-to-be anticipation … I know what's coming, just over a week away. It's a gift just for me. A priceless witnessing that accompanies meeting our mystery-baby. I've been relishing the thought of this gift for the past few months, ever since Kath and I decided how best to handle the crucial first week with our first child. Maeve will be upset, that's a given. And we've been told it's easier for her to focus on bonding with one of us during the first few days, rather than with both of us.
So my role, at first, is one I look forward to, and feel grateful for. I'll get to take video of Maeve meeting Kath. I'll get to have the front row seat on a transformation that'll take only days, really, then continue for a lifetime. I'll get to tape a baby girl being taken up in the gentle arms of a strange woman; and I'll watch this baby assess Kathleen; and I'll witness this baby gradually decide she is secure with her. I'll get to witness, over several days, Maeve's dawning realization that she has been placed in the arms of someone who's kind, and reliable, and beautiful, and soothing, attentive to every need, quick to respond to any cry, oh-so-strong and safe.
I'll get to watch our baby Maeve begin to appreciate the amazing woman she's been handed over to, a woman I love and admire more than words can articulate. I'll get to see our baby slowly fall in love with her mother---and this witnessing, I am more and more certain, is the greatest privilege of my life. It's the gift that being fortunate enough to fall in love with Kath has bestowed on me, undeservedly.
Forget witnessing the moon landing when I was nine. Next week I get to see little Cai Ling change by degrees from an adopted mystery into our daughter.
That is what I look forward to most.
Is it any wonder I cannot sleep?
Choong Pak already has the most honourable sort of assistance: a daughter who's dedicated her life to looking after him. Kath's diminutive cousin Chun, sister to cousin Lin in Singapore, lives with Choong Pak, and does her best to nurse her father, attending to his daily needs. A fall several years back left Choong Pak with a broken hip, and with the fear of further injury that keeps him confined to his bed in a room in an older house in a quiet and sweltering neighbourhood of Ipoh (a city that, upon our arrival, appears to me to be badly eroded by Malaysia's oh-so-humid hard-on-the-architecture climate).
But Choong Pak has inherited the stubborn determination of his mother, and doesn't want to move to a home where he can be given care by a team of nurses. Who would want to leave their own home? … Lucilla's Mama named her four sons after parts of the Cedar tree. Choong Pak means 'leaves of Cedar' and so is the eldest (the tree's top, if you will). Choong Chee means 'Cedar branches' and so is the middle son. Choong Kan, Lucilla's other brother in Kuala Lumpur (who is away on a visit to Taiwan---we won't get to meet him on this trip) was named 'Cedar roots'. And the youngest son, Kath's affable uncle Sam, our host and dauntless mountain-road expedition driver, is Choong Lam, which means the whole Cedar bush altogether.
Our two-day trip by car to Ipoh and back is central to our visit to the South East Asian side of Kath's family; Marcus and Lucilla's primary motive in planning a just-before-Maeve travel arc out of China and up the Malay peninsula is to tackle Choong Pak's stubbornness and to help Chun help her father as his situation worsens. I am reminded of the dedication of my own aunt and uncle Dolores and Paddy, who lived with my maternal grandparents in Dublin when they grew old, and looked after them in their last years, assisted by their siblings in every way possible … The bonds of brother and sister to their parents, and to each other, is the universal that binds Malaysia's 'world away from Waterloo' recognizable in its essence.
The visit to Choong Pak's home is bittersweet and revealing. Kath and Marcus and I wait in the front room, or step out to wander the covered veranda outside the front door that serves as both carport and shaded garden for each home I can see on this blisteringly sun-beaten street. (A stroll to the end of the street quickly convinces me that I'd best stay out of the heat, under the veranda's relative cool). While Sam and Lucilla visit with Choong Pak in his bedroom, do their best to convince their oldest brother to accept the services of a maid---Chun alone cannot carry her father to the shower to wash him every day, and has to rely on friends to come each day to aid her---Kath and I peer in wonder at the intricate handicrafts crowding the shelves and cabinets of the front room, and at the welter of well-tended plants in a the dazzling outdoor garden.
Chun's life strikes me as both sad and lonely. But she has made an art of it, turning her isolation in Ipoh into a Daoist meditation in devotion: to her needlework and origami-like paper constructs, to her rich and riotous garden, a visual splendour in the shade of the carport; and ultimately to her father. As Lucilla's voice rises insistently in the back bedroom---she will brook no refusal from her Cedar's top brother---Chun shyly bestows Kath and I with gifts she has made for Maeve and for Robyn: beautiful handknitted dolls.
Finally, Lucilla's will wins out over Choong Pak's (no surprise there---I'm married to her daughter, I know how strong Fong women can be). Then Kath and I briefly meet Choong Pak, and squeeze his hand, and watch him cling in shyness to his pocket radio, the one treasure he holds to as a lifeline to the vast outer world he lost when he lost his vision.
Later that night, retreating to the Ritz Garden, the best hotel in this bedraggled overgrown cliff-enclosed valley city of Ipoh, Kath and I bow out of a dinner with one of Lucilla's childhood family friends, as we are both feeling burnt out by travel. We're in dire need of some downtime. Well, at least I am … Sleep has been very hard to come by for me since leaving Waterloo. (The night before, at our wonderful K-L family reunion dinner, young Hui asked me when we'd left home; I told him the 21st. "Oh, just six days ago?" I had to pinch myself. Surely it's been six weeks!)
Our trip to Ipoh represents the apogee of this South East Asian side-arc out of China. Tomorrow we begin the return journey, back down to Kuala Lumpur, then back down to Singapore, then back into China to meet our mystery daughter. Maeve feels all the more mysterious to me here in Ipoh because she feels farther away than she did when we were back home, preparing her bedroom, folding her clothes into her drawers and putting up her room's decorations. My head is fuzzy from a week's lack of sleep. I'm disoriented, O.D.ing on travel at this point. We've been uprooting ourselves so often that there seems nowhere to stand, get my bearings.
But here in Ipoh, as Kath slips easily into sleep, I gaze up at the ceiling, trying to relax and recapture my dad-to-be anticipation … I know what's coming, just over a week away. It's a gift just for me. A priceless witnessing that accompanies meeting our mystery-baby. I've been relishing the thought of this gift for the past few months, ever since Kath and I decided how best to handle the crucial first week with our first child. Maeve will be upset, that's a given. And we've been told it's easier for her to focus on bonding with one of us during the first few days, rather than with both of us.
So my role, at first, is one I look forward to, and feel grateful for. I'll get to take video of Maeve meeting Kath. I'll get to have the front row seat on a transformation that'll take only days, really, then continue for a lifetime. I'll get to tape a baby girl being taken up in the gentle arms of a strange woman; and I'll watch this baby assess Kathleen; and I'll witness this baby gradually decide she is secure with her. I'll get to witness, over several days, Maeve's dawning realization that she has been placed in the arms of someone who's kind, and reliable, and beautiful, and soothing, attentive to every need, quick to respond to any cry, oh-so-strong and safe.
I'll get to watch our baby Maeve begin to appreciate the amazing woman she's been handed over to, a woman I love and admire more than words can articulate. I'll get to see our baby slowly fall in love with her mother---and this witnessing, I am more and more certain, is the greatest privilege of my life. It's the gift that being fortunate enough to fall in love with Kath has bestowed on me, undeservedly.
Forget witnessing the moon landing when I was nine. Next week I get to see little Cai Ling change by degrees from an adopted mystery into our daughter.
That is what I look forward to most.
Is it any wonder I cannot sleep?