Beijing 2018 | Going Home

It's early morning on our departure day and Mama, as usual, is in her kitchen-laboratory, preparing breakfast. She’s always up first, usually by 6:30 a.m., before first light, to enjoy the soft stillness of her aloneness.

Today, though, I’m up with her, sitting at the dinner table, drinking instant coffee. I’m trying to adjust my body clock so I am not wracked by jet-lag when I finally arrive back in San Francisco, many ocean miles and many hours from now.

My wife will be up soon, and, together, we will act like today is any other day, and not the final hours of preparation before heading off to the airport for our 5:30 p.m. flight.

The Chinese are known for their stoicism, but my mother-in-law has been known to break down in tears when her two daughters — my wife and her younger sister — walk out the door, leaving both her and Beijing yet again, for America.

My wife usually keeps her emotions in check. If she cries, I know I’ve committed something inexcusable. But she’s never been a mother, never watched her grown children leave her repeatedly for a place far away.

“When people get old,” my wife says, “they get very sentimental.”

Yesterday morning, we ventured out on some last-minute errands, to buy Chinese snacks whose quality my wife cannot match at home. We walked stiffly in the dry, bitterly-cold, single-degree temperatures, toward a small outdoor food stand my mother-in-law knows about.

We bought 20 pounds of sunflower seeds that my wife and I eat like chipmunks, and a few pounds of chestnuts that will all be packed away, filling the space of all the chocolate my wife lugged over from the U.S.

Mama led us like a guide, scouting the fastest route, as she marched us through hidden neighborhood parking lots and along less-crowded back streets, while her daughter, ever the family critic, complained that our chosen way was actually longer.

When we arrived at the tiny stall, my wife advised me to stay back so the seller didn’t see my foreign face and decide to raise prices. On the way home, I carried 10 pounds of seeds while my wife pulled the rest in a little red shopping cart her mother uses for errands like this.

“How much of this do I get?” I suddenly turned to ask her.

“Whatever you want,” came the reply. “You’re a VIP.”

Gee, thanks dear.

I walked ahead of the women, hurrying against the cold, passing laborers dressed like eastern Eskimos, men who stared at me with rapt curiosity, each of them smiling broadly when I greeted them.

A block from home, while crossing a broad street, my mother-in-law was nearly run over by one of those zig-zagging delivery scooters that lurk behind you, assassin-quiet.

“Hey!” I yelled at the driver who, to his credit, stopped to apologize.

A bystander leaned against a motorcycle, watching the near disaster.

I looked at him.

“That’s my mother!” I said.

He gave me a thumbs-up.

The other day, I asked Mama why she didn’t have any old, black-and-white photos of her kids when they were growing up. She said that many had gotten thrown out when they renovated their apartment years ago.

So, I assumed the family didn’t keep any pictures at all, that maybe the Chinese weren’t as sentimental as Americans.

One afternoon, when my wife and I arrived home after a day out in the city, we found several hundred color photographs that my father-in-law had pulled out of some closet to organize.

There were shots of my in-laws as a newlywed couple and photos of their children as teenagers and as budding adults. Everyone looked so thin and young and happy

There were photos after all!

The pictures were neatly arranged in stacks on my father-in-law’s work desk, that sits beneath a large picture window that looked out into a busy alley thoroughfare. I asked my father-in-law’s permission to look through them, and he told my wife and I to take whatever shots we wanted that included us.

My wife says her father is getting rid of things, shedding belongings, scaling down his life, as he readies for death. But I don’t like that thought. I’d like to think he just wants us to have them as keepsakes.

For more than an hour, I sifted through photographs of my wife and family taken in the years before I met her. She’s a changeling, always with different hairstyles, clothes and various gazes into the camera.

Finally, I found the prize.

It was a photograph of my wife and her sister taken in a park in Beijing. She has her arms crossed, gazing directly at the camera, her silken, black shoulder-length hair longer than she wears it now; her waist tiny, as it is today.

I first saw the photo in a matchmaker’s restaurant in Burbank years ago, before I even met my wife in person.

But I knew right then that she was the one.

For lunch, we went out for one of China’s famous culinary inventions: hot pot. The place was called Treasure Garden, a name that’s just so Chinese, and it was huge, covering an entire block.

While trying to hail a taxi to the restaurant, a passing cabbie took one look at me and buzzed past. My wife said it was it was because he was afraid that he couldn’t communicate with me.

The very next cab pulled over and I jumped into the front seat.

As I usually do on my penultimate day here, I felt more confident in my Mandarin and took the initiative in conversations.

I turned to the driver.

“Are you afraid of me?”

“Why should I be afraid of you?” he said.

My wife began to explain the communication issue but I cut in.

“Maybe because my nose is too big,” I said, “and my face is too ugly.”

He laughed.

“Like Donald Trump,” I said.

He chortled at the mention of the name.

My mother-in-law said, “When George Bush senior died, China felt like it lost an old friend. They don’t feel that way with Donald Trump.

Here in a Communist, one political-party nation, we all tended to agree.

“I don’t like Donald Trump,” I told the driver. “I don’t like him at all.”

In the afternoon, we went for tea at Li Yan’s apartment nearby.

I wanted to meet her three cats.

Yan was an elementary school classmate of my wife’s and we had all traveled together in central China the week before, when Yan filled us in on our failing marriage. Her husband, Zhao, was out at work, so it was safe to visit, because I don’t know what I would have said to him, considering the terrible things I know he’d told Yan.

During the trip, I’d shown Yan pictures of my home office and backyard swimming pool, just outside Las Vegas.

They were luxurious compared to most Chinese living standards, and I immediately regretted it.

When Yan invited us over, she said she lived a humble life and, as all hostesses warn, that her place was a mess.

We entered her apartment building through a dark passageway and walked up five flights of unlighted stairs. Yan said it was a particularly difficult climb when she carried groceries, but that she was in good shape as a result.

Her flat was more of a tenement, really, a small single room that she shared with her cats and her husband — way too small of a place for any marital discord.

The shared kitchen, showers, and toilets were in rooms down the hall. But Yan made do. Her older sister and her husband lived a few doors down. And she had her cats. And her books.

As she served us tea, she said that her husband would be angry if he knew I was there: ashamed for a foreigner to see how they lived. My wife and I both wanted to reassure her somehow. Hers was a clean and well-lighted place, I said, adding that U.S. tastes were moving toward smaller living spaces, much smaller than what she lived in.

My wife looked out the window at a skyline of nearby buildings and said that Americans would pay a million dollars for such a view. Yen pointed to a tree branch outside. During the summer months, when she left the windows open, she woke up to the sound of bird song.

Yan knits scarves and gave one to my wife. It was a touching gesture from a woman who had so little, to another who had so much.

When we left, we all hugged, leaving Yan to her bitter marriage and the small space in which she leads her life.

The childhood friendship had survived decades, an entire ocean and a socio-economic chasm, emerging not only intact, but thriving.

My wife is giving her mother some last-minute feng shui tips for her living room; placing a plant here, turning on a light there.

In my mind, it’s a bonding ritual.

That’s what these trips to Beijing are all about, to keep the home fires burning, the emotional ties tied.

Beijing changes so much with every visit. My wife and her friends return after a year’s absence and have to first learn the new slang words. They look for streets that aren’t there anymore, and see buildings that seem to have risen out of thin air.

Beijing: prest-o, change-o.

But my in-laws remain the same, except for one thing — they’re getting older. With my mother and father now gone, I know how important these last years are.

A year is a long time. And I worry deep down that the next time we come, they may not be here.

So, I store away images. Like the moment my wife’s mother said her hairdresser told her she looked like former South Korean President Park Guen-hye, and how she laughed — that sweet little laugh! — when I said Park was now a jailed criminal.

And I think of our final night here, when my father-in-law insisted on taking us out for a last dinner. He’s usually disengaged when it comes to food, but on this night, he played master of ceremonies, slowing poring over the menu, carefully choosing each dish, using torn-up bits of napkins to mark the pages.

It was a gesture of love, pure and simple.

And so we depart, my wife and I. My Beijing days are over, the sweet journey to the place where she is from.