Big in China Read online

  Clusters of bikers congregated in front wearing leather vests showing gang colors, their long beards spilling down over bulging bellies. Harold and I parked his cherry red VW bug around the corner and sat talking.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I had no idea this was a biker bar. We can go home. I won’t be mad.”

  “No,” he said. “It will be fun. I haven’t been to a place like this in years.”

  We walked up the steps—Harold in his khaki shorts pulled halfway up his gut, black socks leading to loafers. He strolled right through the packed crowd of beefy bikers and bought two Buds before we found a spot at a table. As I relaxed about the crowd, I grew nervous in an entirely different way—I was going to be in way over my head with the great Buick City Blues Band.

  But Trag was a gracious, terrific bandleader, pulling me into the music and never showing me up—traits I would try to mimic with my own band years later. I played the entire set, and over the next three years I headed for Otisville any time we were in Michigan on a Sunday night. My in-laws thought it was crazy to drive down a dark two-lane highway for a hundred miles to hang out until 2:00 a.m. in a rickety roadhouse where fights occasionally erupted. But Becky never complained because she understood how much I loved those jams.

  Finding a place like that in Beijing seemed unlikely, but I kept hoping to stumble onto a great musical partner. During my first week, I heard the sound of guitars drifting out of a second-floor window of the compound clubhouse. I left my family, following the faint sound of a solid folk rock groove up the curving central stairway and down a hallway. Inside a large room I found four Western guys rocking out in front of rows of empty folding chairs. When I asked a woman standing in the back when the show was, she shot me a confused look. “They’re rehearsing for this morning’s worship service.” I briefly pondered whether they’d let a Jewish guy into their contemporary Christian rock band before moving on.

  When our sea shipment arrived, I quickly found my Vox amp and trusty Fender Stratocaster. I plugged the amp into an adapter and popped it into the wall. The red light glowed warmly as I hit a single E chord, which rang for a split second before the light faded and the amp powered off with an ugly sizzle. I had made a classic rookie mistake, using an adapter when I needed a transformer to step my American 110-volt amp up to the Chinese 220. I slid the silenced amp over by my desk, where it would gather dust for a year.

  A few months later, I heard about a downtown club featuring Sunday night jam sessions led by Chicago blues musicians on monthlong residencies. I put new strings on my Strat, only to learn that the club was on the verge of folding and the music was done. I didn’t touch my guitar for months.

  One night I was sitting in the Orchard, my favorite local restaurant, sipping a beer and listening to a jazz band. The music was mediocre but the setting was superb. The Orchard was a refuge, sitting on a lake surrounded by a thousand apple and pear trees, with a luxuriant, serene garden in the back.

  The owners, Lisa Minder and Ertao Wu, were an American/Chinese couple, and the place, which they designed and built themselves, reflected their diverse backgrounds. The food was Western, and the eclectic, understated design mixed European, American, and Chinese furniture under exposed beams made of reclaimed timber.

  I told Lisa, a native of Wheeling, West Virginia, that it was nice to hear live music so close to home. “Eh, I’m sick of jazz,” she replied. “Don’t you play guitar? How about hosting an acoustic open mic night?”

  She had a vision of expats pulling mandolins and banjos out of their closets. I told her I’d love to do it if I found a partner, but I wasn’t comfortable performing solo.

  Shortly after, I had a single fun jam session with a friend of a friend. I asked if he’d like to host that open mic with me, but he only wanted to perform at the Orchard with his own group. I booked it for him, joining at the end of the night for three songs.

  Afterward, Lisa told me how much she enjoyed the music, especially my singing, a compliment all the more satisfying for being so surprising.

  “I’d still like you to host an open mic,” she said.

  I had a gig. I just needed a band.

  Chapter 8

  Into the Great Wide Open

  There are countless motivations for traveling, but most people abandon “throwing yourself into the deep end to see if you can swim” after they have kids. It just feels too risky to set off on aimless wanderings into parts unknown with children in tow.

  Yet kids, too, can tap into something deep within themselves when forced to stretch beyond their comfort zones, which we began realizing as soon as we took our first trip into China’s vast, beautiful, and underdeveloped interior. These journeys were far more adventurous than anything we would have attempted at home.

  China had three weeklong holidays when virtually the entire country shuts down: the first week of October, the first week of May, and Chinese New Year, which varies with the lunar calendar. These breaks are prime times to go exploring, but because 1.3 billion other people have the same idea, many expats prefer to stay put or leave the country, lighting out for Thailand, Malaysia, or other Asian ports of call. We ignored this line of thinking, visiting the southern towns of Guilin and Yangshuo for our first October holiday, just six weeks after we arrived in China.

  We knew little about the places, except that a friend said they were beautiful and guidebooks showed wondrous limestone hilltops covered in dense green foliage rising above the picturesque Li River. In Guilin, we floated down the river, saw cormorant fishermen operating in the ancient way, visited caves packed with Chinese tourists, and watched Anna’s photo being taken dozens of times.

  Our guide “Judy” took us for two dinners at the Asia Pacific restaurant, because, she said, it was the cleanest, most air-conditioned place in town. We were mostly focused on the veritable petting zoo in the front, where diners could choose their meal, selecting from dozens of aquatic tanks of critters, as well as wood cages filled with pheasants and large muskrat-like rodents. A separate nook contained several large glass terrariums filled with stacks of writhing snakes, which made Becky’s skin crawl and sent her rushing back to the table to drink tea while the kids and I looked over the animals and watched other guests select a fowl and haggle over the price. I tried to rush my children away before the bird could be killed, but they understood exactly what was about to happen and wanted to witness it. It didn’t seem to hurt their appetite at all as we sat down for scallion pancakes, sautéed chicken, and succulent boiled river shrimp.

  We passed dozens of roadside noodle stands, which Judy told me were “Guilin rice noodles, the traditional local food.” Surprised that I wanted to try these, she took us to a nice little restaurant where I slurped down a bowl that cost about 16 cents. Eli and Anna also loved the fresh noodles, adding the peanuts and cilantro just as Becky and I did, but skipping the hot sauce. Jacob ate granola bars and sorted Pokémon cards in the van.

  But the real discovery took place on the bumpy dirt roads outside Yangshuo, a few hours south of Guilin. “Peggy,” the local guide we had hired, spoke in a nonstop patter of Chinglish, with us catching maybe 20 percent. She marched us up to a bike rental place and asked for a kid’s seat. The young lady running the stand smiled, nodded, and pulled out a wicker basket, which she strapped to the back of a tandem bike with some wire. There was no way to close the front, but she waved away our concern, motioning for us to put Anna in, then taking a sheet and tying a knot in front of our daughter.

  Anna would be fine, as long as she consented to stay there. If she fussed at all, this jury-rigged contraption would not work. She was on the back of a tandem piloted by Becky and Jacob, because Eli, at five, was strapped into a similar chair behind me, his knees hitting me in the back; he was too big for the seat, but too small to pedal any of their bikes.

  We set out like this across a beautiful, otherworldly landscape. Deep in the country, we stop
ped for lunch at a tiny restaurant with a small English translation menu. We ordered “fresh local chicken,” and I believed the menu’s words because several birds ran wild through the garden behind our picnic table. Jacob munched on white rice and French fries. When the chicken came out, it was a whole bird chopped up and piled on a plate, with the feet on top. Eli pushed them aside and dug into a delicious ginger-infused meal. We capped it off with ice cream bars, which we came to regard as an essential food group on these outings, since making sure our kids didn’t melt down from hunger became more important than worrying about their diets.

  Eli was taken aback by his first meeting with squat toilets. We were deep in the countryside and Peggy asked some local people if we could use their facilities. I took Eli into the toilet. He looked at the hole in the ground and asked me where “their other toilet” was. “This is it,” I said.

  “No, seriously,” he insisted. “The real one. To use for number two.”

  “Seriously, this is it,” I said. “They use it for everything.”

  He was awed, but Anna was unaffected. She had been on the edge of toilet training, and we realized she was all the way there when she did not resort to diapers on this trip. This required Becky and I to each become adept at stripping Anna down and holding her up in the air over a toilet hole without looking down; doing so might have buckled our knees.

  When the May holiday rolled around, we were ready for another China adventure, but wanted to steer far enough off the beaten path to avoid huge crowds. On a WSJ colleague’s recommendation, we chose the south-central province of Guizhou, a remote, river-filled place dotted with ethnic minority villages set on high mountains.

  It was not an obvious destination. As China’s poorest province, with a per capita income of $614, Guizhou lacked many amenities a vacationing family might seek—swimming pools, tourist sites like caves, even established hiking or biking trails of the sort we enjoyed in Yangshuo. Few people we knew had been there. The expat-oriented travel agent first tried to correct me, then laughed out loud when I insisted on buying air tickets to the capital of Guiyang.

  We spent one night there, having our first taste of local food, which was different from any other Chinese cuisine I had tasted, its extreme spiciness balanced by sour, pickled vegetables, cilantro, and other fresh herbs. The revelatory food was consistently excellent throughout the province, even at dumpy restaurants in tiny towns. We became regulars at several Beijing Guizhou restaurants for the rest of our stay in China.

  “We say if it doesn’t have chilies, it’s not food,” said our guide Huang Duan (“Call me Howard”). As a lifelong hot food devotee, I felt like I had found my tribe, but in most respects, it felt as if we were at the end of the world.

  A growing pack of curious onlookers followed us from our hotel to the restaurant in Guiyang, and the entire waitstaff crowded around two-and-a-half-year-old Anna, wanting to hold her, kiss her, and pose for pictures with her. This ritual would be repeated over and over during our visit; Gandalf the White wizard could not have received more amazed stares had he appeared on the streets of Guizhou.

  “Many of these people have never seen anyone who looks like Anna, except in pictures,” Huang Duan explained. “They think she looks like an angel.”

  The next day we drove three hours to the mountain outpost of Kaili, a much smaller, poorer, and dirtier city, which is the capital of the “Miao and Dong (minority groups) Autonomous Prefecture.” China has fifty-five recognized minority groups, officially making up about 9 percent of the population. The Miao are known as Hmong in Laos and other parts of Asia and have a sizable population in the United States.

  We bumped over rutted roads in this rough coal-mining region, taking in scenes of slag and ash heaps and bustling mines. I wondered what we had gotten ourselves into, but then we drove through deep green mountains, with even the steepest slopes covered in terraced rice paddies. Men plowed the muddy fields behind water buffalo. Women chopped tall grass with handheld scythes, loading it into large wire baskets balanced on either end of a long wooden pole carried across their shoulders.

  It was fascinating and beautiful, but as the day wore on, the kids wilted in the rising heat as we bounced from one village to another. By the time we climbed into the van for the bumpy, sweaty ride back from a ramshackle village where we bought batik purses and jackets, we were worn out, the kids were restless, and I wondered if we could keep up this pace for three more days. Chinese tour guides seemed to think that they were not doing their job if they did not rush you to as many places as possible each day. We were passing through remarkable countryside, but not really stopping to explore it, sticking instead to a steady litany of villages, which were fascinating but beginning to run together, especially for the kids.

  Our anxiety deepened during dinner at a stuffy, un–air-conditioned restaurant. Huang Duan ordered our food, then ran out to get us cold beer and soda when the waitress said they did not have any. As Becky and I pulled delicious, slow-cooked ribs out of a bamboo steamer filled with moist, flavorful rice, Jacob let out a yelp. “I hate this food!” he screamed.

  Eli flopped onto the old linoleum floor, where Anna joined him, much to the horror of the young waitress hovering by the door to our private room holding a pot of tea. Our children were falling apart, and it was clear that we couldn’t maintain this pace for three more days.

  The next morning, the kids ate the Trix cereal we traveled with while Rebecca and I conferred with Huang Duan over a breakfast of dumplings and spicy noodles. We told him to slash a third of each day’s activities and allow time for the kids to ramble through some of the beautiful fields we were zipping by. We were forcing flexibility on our children, but we had to be a bit realistic.

  We visited a large Miao village, where we joined Chinese tourists watching a traditional flute and dance show, the women clad in colorful hand-embroidered dresses. As usual, Anna’s appearance drew as much attention as the little girls clad in traditional silver hats and necklaces. We bought the kids wooden swords that would get a workout over the next few days. Later we drove farther into the boonies and were the lone visitors in a remote Miao outpost, where we viewed traditional homes housing pigs, chickens, and water buffalo on the first stone floor and several generations on the top two wooden floors.

  Packs of beautiful, dirty-faced kids followed us everywhere—minorities are not bound by the one-child policy—so I started filling my pockets with lollipops and gum at tiny village shops, which were usually just glass-fronted counters stocked with simple provisions like water, cigarettes, instant noodles, batteries, and candy. Jacob and Eli loved handing out the sweets. One five-year-old boy appeared with a four-inch bug on a string leash. Our kids thought that this mantis-like creature was the coolest pet they had ever seen.

  The next day we told our guide to drop us off so we could hike across rice paddies and through two villages, which were off the tourist path. They were just places where people lived. As we neared a bridge that would take us back to our van, I stopped at one of those little stores to buy water and cookies for the kids. A group of village women, clad in traditional blue smocks and white head coverings, were eating lunch in a back room. One called out, “Chi fan!” “Chi fan!” (Eat, eat!), and waved me in. When I entered, she handed me a bowl of congee (rice porridge) and gently pushed me onto a small wooden stool. The congee tasted like glue. Looking at a sea of smiling, expectant faces, I smiled and said, “Hao chi!” (Tastes good!)

  They pulled up another chair and handed Rebecca a bowl. Soon bowls of cooked food came our way, including some spicy mystery meat, which lent the congee a strong, vibrant taste. The kids watched the whole scene with amused smiles, while eating their “Ocop” faux Oreos—we now considered packaged cookies, reliably available anywhere, another essential food group.

  We lunched at a local barbecue joint hard by the banks of the churning Bala River, underneath cloud-shrouded, deep green pea
ks. It was part of my plan to give the kids more freedom; the day before we had passed the place and I envisioned stone skipping and fisherman watching on its large, pebbly river beach, which would be a big improvement over forcing them to sit at a table in a gritty roadside restaurant. Our guide did not want to take us there and remained uneasy when we insisted. Becky and I laughed about how uptight he was, but the source of his discomfort soon became clear: even by rural China standards, the sanitary conditions were spotty.

  You walked into a dirty little greeting area, chose some meat or fish, and then were given a private grill to cook your own food by the riverside. The whole area was muddy—no surprise since there had been a light mist or heavy rain throughout our visit. As we tentatively walked around the outdoor dining area waiting for our food, our kids started playing with a gaggle of children.

  Their playmates were fellow diners as well as Miaos from a neighboring village, including one boy zipping around on a homemade scooter, which was basically just two planks of wood with rickety wheels attached. He gave each of our kids a turn. Throughout this trip Jacob and Eli made friends with fun-loving Chinese boys, getting into hardcore games of tag, karate, and Game Boy playing. There are an awful lot of wild boys in the world, and it became obvious that they can spot one another and connect without saying a word.

  Anna picked up a small fish a villager had caught and swung it around by its tail, much to the delight of the other guests eating nearby, all of them tourists from a city about eight hours away. They handed us little cups of beer and insisted we sample their fresh-grilled meat and fish.