Some Thoughts on Taking Lillia to China

(by Suzanne)

So here we are about halfway across the Pacific, and Lillia is, thank God, asleep. She was an unhappy camper after getting up at 4:30 to catch our first flight. Hopefully she’ll get enough sleep to not be miserable when we arrive in Beijing.

I am really hoping that Lillia will have fun in China. I know she’ll have a great time in Japan, because there will be lots of relatives there, plus Japan is the Land of Kawaii. But in China she’ll just have the two of us, and it’s a more challenging place to travel. She’s a pretty adaptable child, though. I don’t think she’ll have any trouble with the food, because I do a lot of Chinese and other Asian cooking at home. When she was a baby, she loved surprisingly spicy food. Then she turned two, and decided that she didn’t like food, period. After a year-long hunger strike, she started eating again, but never regained her love of chili. So we’ll have to be careful of what we order.

I’ve also tried to prepare her for the inevitable squat toilet. Fortunately, she seems more intrigued than disturbed by the idea of a new kind of potty. I just hope we don’t run into any really scary ones. We will be entirely in Eastern China, in relatively prosperous and heavily touristy areas, so maybe it won’t be a problem. When I was traveling in China back in the ‘80’s, scary toilets were pretty much the norm, especially in the hinterlands. I’ll never forget the first pit stop on the 4-day bus trip from Urumqi to Kashgar. After drinking a bowl of green tea, I asked where the toilet was, and was pointed out the back door. And out the back door was…a large rectangle of bare dirt being used as a toilet. Hmm. Well. When ya gotta go, ya gotta go. That was probably my most memorable Chinese toilet. Then again, there was that one in Chengdu with the live rat in it….

But I digress. I should probably wrap this up and get back to reviewing my Pimsleur tapes. Tom only knows a couple dozen Chinese words and phrases, and Lillia’s Kindergarten vocabulary will be of limited usefulness. (Though should we find ourselves in need of a little white rabbit, it’ll be her chance to shine.) Otherwise, I will be doing all the translating, God help me. I guess we’ll find out in a few hours how useful the Pimsleur Audio Course is. As fun and fascinating as I find Chinese to be, there were still a few lessons where I thought my head was going to explode.

Well, Lillia is waking up, so I really have to sign off.