Beijing 2015 | Dumplings

This morning, the women made dumplings. Six in all, they filled the ample kitchen with its center island, talking and laughing -- my wife's voice somehow the loudest -- expert in their movements as they rolled flour for dough and cut the green Chinese vegetables with lethal-looking machetes. Chop-chop-chop-chop.

It was like looking back in time.

Lily sat on a window sill in the dining room, using a wooden mortar and pestle to grind down peeled cloves of garlic. In her form-fitting brown dress and house sandals, her black hair down around her shoulders, she looked like Pocahontas, working around the campfire.

These annual trips to Beijing are her return to her roots, and she relishes every moment. Usually we come in October. It's a trade-off: The weather is cooler then, the mosquitos gone, the milling crowds of foreign families vanished as kids return to school. The airfares are also cheaper. But I miss out on my own stateside autumn ritual. There have been several years when I missed the baseball playoffs and entire World Series. Unlike in South Korea, baseball has not caught on in China; the seventh game of a World Series matchup nowhere to be found on Chinese TV. Instead, there might be gymnastics, the Asian pro golf circuit, or women's volleyball.

But this year we came in August, to overlap with a month-long visit by my wife's younger sister and her daughter. I get a front row seat to watch three generations of my wife's clan here together. Since both Lily and Yuyu emigrated to the U.S., and married foreigners, their parents have been cheated of the multi-generational bond so critical to most Chinese families.

So my in-laws dote on their 8-year-old granddaughter, Kalea, a wisp of a girl with a beauty mark on her left cheek. She's inquisitive and independent and bathes in the attention,. Using the trip as a break from the authoritarian rule of their house in Orange County, she questions her mother's authority at most every turn in the absence of her more-disciplinarian father.

She clings to my wife, holds her hand in public, interrupts our conversations to run her own intimate girl talk concerning matters important to one her age: a new mosquito bite, demonstrating once again how she can trill her tongue or to point out that Uncle John has only taken one shower since he arrived. The bottoms of his feet are filthy. Yuck.

Kalea speaks Chinese at home with both parents. Her Ohio-born father has traveled frequently in Asia. While she can't fluently write Chinese characters, not yet, she can freely speak Mandarin with her grandparents, her uncle and his girlfriend.

She fits in here, unlike me.

Driving in the van, sitting in crowded restaurants or at the dinner table at home, she follows the fast-moving conversations and gets most of the jokes. And so this year, I decided to take her into my employ. One day as a group of us sat drinking coffee, I offered her a 100 yuan note, about $15, and offered her a side job while she was here.

She would be, I explained, my translator monkey.

She would make sure I kept up with the running dialogue about family gossip and the Chinese economy, ensuring that I, too, got all the jokes.

It seemed like a good arrangement. For the 20 years that I have been venturing to China, the language has proven a barrier impossible to scale; my own Great Wall. I am not good at learning foreign languages, and Chinese ranks with, say, Arabic or Norwegian, as one of the hardest to grasp. The four tones are musical notes that sour in my mouth. One misplaced tonal utterance can turn a simple phrase such as "I am hungry" into "I am a goose."

Misunderstandings abound. I have expressed what I have taken to be completely comprehensible phrases only to have listeners stare back stone-faced. Then my wife repeats what my ears hear as the exact same sentence, this time with the tones intact, and they all laugh, the tension broken. Then there is the required compliment about my skill at Chinese. I am like a dog that can talk, a marvel, a stupid pet trick.

In the 2000s, despite a few semesters of studying Mandarin at night school in San Francisco, there was little improvement. The written characters were impossible to keep straight, each a puzzle. I began to dream of complex characters, like buildings, crashing around me. I soon gave up, and began to concentrate on the spoken language.

The first time I came home from class and uttered a phrase, my wife put up her hand to stop me, as if I was sullying her gorgeous mother tongue, trying to play Brahms on a kazoo. "Your tones suck," she said.

And that was that.

And so for most trips, I sit there in silence. This court jester who likes to run with any pack during conversations, vying for the lead, to be the funniest or most outspoken, turns mute, reduced to watching passing traffic, spying sleeping cats on fire escapes, following the course of feral street dogs, making eye contact with pedestrians at stoplights.

When someone in the car tells a joke, I will turn to my wife after the laughter subsides.

"Ping, what did he say?"

In the first days of any trip, she will dutifully translate. Then I get a bit full of myself. I try to join in, asking questions or ribbing people. But she quickly tires of her role as language broker "It's not important," she'll finally say. Or I'll get an abbreviated Cliffs Notes version of a family interaction that's as complicated as a Shakespearean tragedy.

So I stew in my own silent world, thinking of the things I'd say if I could only join in -- the jokes I 'd tell. I'd be the life of the party, not the poor American husband who confoundingly (Is it laziness? Mental slowness?) can't speak Chinese, even after all these years!

But now my problems were over. I had my translator monkey.

She quickly accepted the deal. Suddenly, Kalea was on Easy Street. I was a sucker with bottomless pockets.

For me, I was back in the game.

Things quickly fell apart. At dinner that night, I asked her to translate a joke that made the entire table erupt into laughter. I turned to my translator.

"What's so funny?"

She hemmed and hawed. The conversation moved on, the moment lost.

I reached for another dumpling.

The next day, out again for coffee, I wanted to flirt with our waitress. Unlike in South Korea, where strangers ignore one another in public, the Chinese revel in public flirtation, especially with a foreigner who takes an interest. And since there were several women at the table, I wasn't a menacing male, but a joking uncle, eager to hear details of her social life: what music she liked, boyfriends, if any, movies she'd seen.

A few years ago, I'd memorized a little dialogue that I could use on waitresses, head-massage girls or young women we met.

"Xiao jie, ni hao," it began. "Hello, miss!"

Then I'd go on, a bit salaciously, that "You're very beautiful. But you are Chinese and I am American. You speak Mandarin and I speak English. I can't understand you and you can't understand me. But our eyes understand everything. My wife isn't here. Would you like to go up to my hotel room?"

It was the most comprehensive phrasing I'd learned to date. I nailed the tones. People could actually understand me.

"You're going to be sent to jail," my wife said.

The joke worked that year. People laughed. This year, I needed a new schtick.

I had my little translator.

"Kalea, when the waitress comes back, ask her if she has a boyfriend," I directed my little ward.

She crossed her arms on her chest.

"No way," she said. "You've already got a wife."

The waitress returned. She smiled at me.

That's when I fired my translator monkey. I reached for another dumpling and felt the silence return:

My own private China.