搬家记 Moving House

AI-generated translation.

I have been living in Shenzhen for more than two months now. Right now I’m sitting under the big banyan tree at Tsinghua University’s Shenzhen Graduate Campus. The birdsong makes me feel both happy and calm, and I want to set down what I’ve been feeling.

Why we headed south

The reason for moving was so that the children could have more time with their dad. Last year my husband’s work shifted heavily to Shenzhen, and he was constantly bouncing between Shenzhen and Beijing, exhausted. When he was on a business trip, he might be away two or three weeks in a row, and you could see our elder son growing a little distant from him. On top of that, I was about to take six months of maternity leave — why not, then, move the whole family south for a stretch and try it?

Picking up and crossing a province with kids and grandparents in tow isn’t easy, and I was anxious. I’ll have no friends in Shenzhen — what then? What about the kids’ education? Where will the grandparents get medical care? At the same time, the prospect of living in a different city excited me: I’d be near the Greater Bay Area and Cantonese culture, and what is life if not about experience? Oh, and I’d heard there are diving volunteers in Dapeng New District — how I’d love to get in the water!

For the past two months I’ve mostly stayed at home with the children; I haven’t yet really started my “out-in-society” life. So far, life after the move has gone better than I expected. The kids see their dad every day, and outdoor time has expanded considerably. Our elder son got into his “dream school” — quite unexpectedly — and after two or three weeks has adapted to kindergarten well. He declares that “when I turn seven, I want to go to the level-three class too.”

We live near University City, by the Dasha River and Xili Lake — beautiful, sparsely populated. For most of the day you can hear birdsong, something I never experienced in Beijing.

The public facilities at Shenzhen University City are open to outsiders, and the sports and cultural resources are unusually rich. After school, our son plays football on the big field; we often take him to the swimming pool too — top-tier facilities, hardly any people. I myself periodically go to the library to borrow books. AAAAH, Alice Munro’s stories are too good!

A family is a small team

We planned to make it to Shenzhen by Chinese New Year. Moving was tiring, especially while taking care of a newborn baby sister and dealing with our mischievous elder son.

My occupational reflex kicked in. I automatically slipped into PM mode and ran the move as a project. Even during my postpartum confinement I was planning out the project goals (get the family safely to Shenzhen for the New Year, lose no important items), what decisions needed making (which moving company, what to ship), what the critical milestones and dependencies were (settle Shenzhen affairs before my husband’s next business trip, ship the goods before the Spring Festival travel rush), what the risks were (grandparents or kids falling ill, the elder son disrupting things, a team with elderly and young members moving slowly and missing flights, Spring Festival logistics delays), whether resources were sufficient (do we need a packing service, do we need a babysitter brought in to help) and so on.

There was also the question of caring for my own emotions. Postpartum hormones already make moods volatile; with my husband on a business trip, I became the family’s main pillar, and the stress made it easy to flare into resentment. Once postpartum confinement ended I immediately took the baby back to Jinan for a stretch to recharge, banking up emotional energy for the move.

In the days of packing, the line Wen Jiabao wrote on a blackboard at Beichuan Middle School often flashed through my head: “Adversity strengthens the nation.” A family is itself a small team. Its members are not just my husband and me — Grandpa and Grandma are also key members. Everyone needs to coordinate tightly for so big a project to succeed.

Each person has their own characteristics. Finding each person their best fit on the team — where they create the most value and also feel good doing it — is a genuinely interesting human-resource problem. For example: Grandpa is impatient by nature and does things at a sprint; Grandma is gentle and does things in orderly fashion. For years Grandma has been complaining that Grandpa is sloppy — “he can’t even wash a bowl clean.” But for this move, with time tight and tasks heavy, his “fast, rough, vigorous” style turned out to be decisive. In four or five days we packed more than sixty boxes; Grandpa packed roughly fifty of them. And the kids weren’t pure dead weight either. We applied for an infant bassinet for our baby sister on the flight, which got the whole family seated in the spacious front row.

About grain and vegetables

Maternity leave scared me. I dreaded being cut off from society and swallowed by the trivia of domestic life. I longed for stretches of being-uninterrupted: to read a passage, take a hot shower, sit in tree-shadow under the sun, dance a clumsy dance, talk on the phone with a friend… These slivers of “time of my own” were like life-saving straws — I had to grasp them tight.

Although I was born into a large family, I was sent off to boarding school at age thirteen. My parents rarely involved me in household affairs, and I have a fairly self-centred personality, so before my thirties I had hardly experienced household drudgery. It was only after having children and going through two stretches of postpartum leave — being in close quarters with confinement nannies, my mother-in-law, my sisters — that I began to accumulate some real experience of domestic life.

The most immediate impression: household chores are never done. The vegetables are eaten today, but you’ll still need to buy more tomorrow. Dirty clothes washed today, more tomorrow. The kid’s toys spilled all over the floor — you tidy them up, and they’re scattered again straight away. On and on, infinite, like Sisyphus’s stone. I could feel how much these things drained me, and longed to return to the workplace. There’s pressure and drama at work, but compared with domestic life it actually feels sweet to me.

At a dinner one time I overheard several fathers chatting; their shared wish for their sons was: “find a Chaoshan daughter-in-law.” Chaoshan women are widely considered the embodiment of frugal household management. As Yang Yunsu writes in Reunion, Chaoshan cuisine keeps people coming back precisely because of the enormous toil of Chaoshan women. Tangerine peel has to be washed and sun-dried over and over; dried persimmons the same; medicinal herbs likewise. “Everything needs sunning, washing, slicing, carrying out and back, nine steamings and nine dryings. Nine steamings and nine dryings — how much of a woman’s whole life can be spent on nine steamings and nine dryings?”

I believe there really are people in the world who genuinely love housework, who enjoy life as a full-time mum (or dad). If that is their active choice, I have a thousandfold respect for them. But what I see far more often is the people whose right to choose has been taken away, who, bound by convention and for the sake of family, draw a chalk circle on the kitchen floor and live their whole lives inside it — a waste. Many of them are kind, generous, hard-working and intelligent women, like my own mother-in-law, who would surely have built bigger careers out in the world.

“Concern myself with grain and vegetables, face the sea with spring blossoming” — I haven’t reached that state yet.

Living as practice

Life itself is a practice. There is no one out there; there is only you.

While caring for our baby sister I joked that I was doing babysitting meditation. While breastfeeding, no scrolling on the phone, just attending fully to every suck of her little mouth. While wiping her bottom, I’d feel the sour smell of the poo, and focus on the change in her little bottom after each pass of the tissue. While settling her to sleep, I’d watch her drift into sleepy-eyed haziness under each gentle pat.

Taking care of our elder son is a harder practice, because the problems are all new. I’d get anxious about his crying when dropped at kindergarten, and frustrated by his irregular routine, his dawdling, his being late every day. I tried being strict and lecturing him, threatening him; tried adjusting his routine. Nothing worked. Gradually I gave up. Maybe he isn’t dawdling; maybe he’s just relating to the world at his own pace. I can’t make him follow the pace I expect, so I might as well just be there alongside him.

When I look at the students wandering through University City, I envy them: they can do what they like, unburdened, with a great deal of time to spend freely. Then I remember my own youth wasn’t actually that carefree either; I went around with my face in a knot too. Every stage of life has its own troubles. My life now is busy and chaotic, but the family is harmonious, the elders are still in good health, and we have a healthy boy and girl. To live in the present — what more could one ask?

About the future

Walking briskly in the sun, I often feel energy in my body and curiosity about the world; there’s so much I still want to learn, so many things I want to do. I want to learn to dance, paint in oils, learn Spanish, pick the cello back up, study philosophy, study the ocean… Walking past the big sports field, I saw a banner in the stands: “Aim to work in good health for the motherland for at least fifty years.” And I thought: if I can keep working in good health till seventy-five, and then live another twenty-something years devoted to my own interests — wouldn’t that be wonderful.