Ni Hao

It's October, and me and Masala Papa are still waiting for news of Masala Baby. Meanwhile, I'm taking Chinese so I can at least say something important, like where's the bathroom, when we're over there. I'm tripping all over the pronunciation. If Japanese sounds singsongy and happy, Chinese sounds choppy and like you're mad at the entire world. Japan imported more than 3,000 Chinese characters into their writing system eons ago, which, for me, comes in handy when I'm trying to decipher the meaning of words in Chinese. The Chinese characters that spell the word telephone, for instance, are the same as those used to write the word in Japanese. The pronunciations sorta sound the same, too--dian'hua in Chinese, den'wa in Japanese. But not every word follows this rule, and some are vastly different. The Chinese characters that spell the word husband in Chinese mean teacher in Japanese. Patriarchy lives!

Today's word of the day, just because I love saying it:
gong-gong-chi-che (pronounced gong-gong-chee-chuh) = public bus.

Love and Hate

I hate gas-guzzling SUVs, houses with strings of Christmas lights dangling from their roofs in the middle of summer, people who talk on their cell while driving with a baby in the backseat. I hate cashiers who don't say thank you, CD cases that you can't open, and potholes.
I love the five-second rule, peanut butter, maps of any kind, Elvis before he got fat, the smell of dead leaves in autumn, lilacs and hyacinths. I love fresh snow, laundry dried on a clothesline and diagramming sentences. More to come.

Shiny Happy Family

So I was flipping through an old copy of Weekend magazine, one of the new contestants in the dethrone-Real-Simple sweepstakes. One feature was about a family and their vacation home, complete with photos of their fabulously furnished rooms, nary a dust bunny in sight, and shots of their cute daughter, who was, wait a sec, is she Chinese? At which point I flipped back for another look at the parents, and yep, they're white. A biracial family in a story that's not about international adoption, not about raising a kid who's a different color than you, that doesn't even bother to note that they're white and their kid isn't? I was stunned--and hopeful. Maybe the day is finally coming when the media starts treating multiracial families like normal everyday people and not some freakish subset that only warrants coverage because of their multiracialism. Is that word?

Lost Girls II

A new report in the Lancet say that more than 10 million baby girls have gone missing in the past decade in India. It's the first credible report I've read about this. Ultrasounds are to blame: More pregnant women are learning the sex of their baby (even though it's illegal for docs to reveal the gender) and when they find out it's a girl, they're having abortions. Just like in China, boys are prized and girls are just dowry money-suckers to be married off and forgotten. China's patriarchal society has long been criticized by outsiders, but India's has skirted public attention. Maybe this report will draw more notice to it.

Lost Girls

So Masala Papa and I watched a National Geographic special on China's lost girls over the weekend. It was like a 45-minute guided tour of what our two-week trip will be like when we go to China later this year. I feel somewhat disconnected from the whole thing, imagining ourselves on the bus en route to the hotel/city office/orphanage to pick up our child, in the room being called to come fetch him/her from the arms of a smiling caregiver, etc. This is going to be us in a few months? Hard to believe. Masala Papa shed a few tears; so did I. During the show, a nine year old girl adopted from China talked about how she felt about being adopted. She said her other friends had been born to mothers, but she had 'just been born.' It made me sad, thinking about that missing piece in her life. She'll probably never know how she was born, or where, or to whom.

meet masala family

I'm not a mama yet. I guess I should state that upfront. This year, if the stars align, masala papa and i will adopt masala baby from china. Masala is basically a blend of various spices -- a heap of ground cumin, garlic, cardamon pods, cinnamon sticks, a couple cloves, a dash of this and that and you've about done it. I kind of see my family that way: mix one white with an indian guy, stir in a super-duper doggie, then add a cute-as-a-button chinese baby and ouila! you've got a masala family.