What Martin Luther King Jr. Means to Me

Last week in Beijing, I was asked to be on a panel with a group of Americans to speak about Martin Luther King Jr. and the recent Black Lives Matter protests. I sat down to write something. I usually prefer to speak without reading, but this time I knew I had to prepare something and read it word for word. I worried I would otherwise get too emotional. When I got to the stage and sat before a hundred plus people, I thought I’d be able to get through it without losing it — halfway through I choked up. Thankfully I wasn’t the only one in the room who reacted that way. Here is what I said:

I was cooking when I heard about George Floyd’s death. It was a routine day during coronavirus. We were living in the Virginia suburbs, on evacuation orders and we were hoping to go back to Beijing soon. After working on some of my personal projects that morning, I’d spent several hours homeschooling the kids and was just settling into my kitchen routines with NPR news blaring from my phone. And I have to admit that my reaction was not one of complete outrage as it should have been. It was more like a weary, “Oh this is happening again.”

A little background on me: my parents immigrated from Taiwan to the United States. I was born in Chicago and grew up in a homogeneous conservative community in Southern California. My mother and I were one of the first non-white families to move into a white community when I was young, and the neighbors planted a stink bomb in our yard as a greeting. That was when I was three. Growing up as a Chinese-American, I’ve been subjected to racist comments. I’ve been made to feel uncomfortable, to feel like I don’t belong.

But at the same time, I come from a family that, like many families, has had its own racial biases. When I decided to go to New York City for college, to a university right near Harlem, one of my family members’ reactions was “But there are so many black people there.” A couple of years later, when I was fully immersed in this college, I told my parents that I wanted to become an African-American studies major. “We worry that you won’t find a good job with that kind of degree,” replied my parents. I chose “urban” studies instead. I love my family very much and I don’t consider them to be racist, but the reason why I mention these stories is because we must not bury the biases we have grown up with, the things a friend, a family member, or we have said or done.  

 I myself am guilty of doing or feeling things that are racially insensitive. While driving through certain parts of Philadelphia as a young journalist, I remember feeling nervous and locking my car doors. I am sure I have committed many infractions like that in my life, sometimes without even realizing them. The other day at a supermarket in Beijing, I mistook an African-American woman for another who’d I recently met. I don’t know if it was because of her race that the mistake happened, but I certainly felt like that may have been the case. I hope she was thinking this about me: What. A. Dumbass. But if you ever look at me and think I’m Chinese rather than American, I will do my best to give you the benefit of the doubt.

When I heard about George Floyd’s death, I thought about someone I’d met through my foreign service life. Vincent. I’d met him while studying Spanish at the Foreign Service Institute near Washington D.C. in 2014. He was an African-American from the Bay Area. Like me, he was the spouse of a diplomat. I have to say I wasn’t sure about Vincent in the beginning. After all, I’m from Southern California. He is from Northern California and he’s also an Oakland Raiders fan. But the two of us spent hours together Monday through Friday for several months — just the two of us and one Spanish teacher going over verb tenses and Spanish vocabulary. We learned the words to Enrique Iglesias’ Bailando and suffered through episodes of a Spanish-language soap opera that was specifically made for Spanish learners called Destinos. He shared his collection of Romeo Santos bachata music. We bonded. So one day, when he came in looking crushed I was immediately struck. He was usually pretty easy going and relaxed and all of the sudden I’d seen this other side of him. The news was reporting on the news of Eric Garner’s death, a result of an illegal police chokehold. His alleged crime? Selling cigarettes. His death had shaken Vincent to his core. I had heard the news too, but it didn’t affect me the same way. For days, Vincent came into class with those words weighing on him: “I can’t breathe.” 

Vincent was a man almost as large as Eric Garner. The hurt and pain that he was experiencing left an imprint on me. This pain that Vincent felt, that I feel, that so many of us are continuing to feel was best expressed by Doc Rivers, the American basketball coach. In a recent press conference after the death of George Floyd, he said, “We (blacks) were the ones denied living in certain communities. We’ve been hung. We’ve been shot. And all you keep hearing about is the fear (of blacks) … It’s amazing to me. Why we keep loving this country and this country has not loved us back.”  

So back to my reaction to George Floyd’s death: it is one no longer of weary jadedness. It is outrage. And Thank God so many other people felt that way. Thank God it got people out everywhere to protest. From Washington D.C. to the small town in New England where my in-laws live.  I wish I could say that energized by my outrage, I valiantly joined the protests. In another life, yes, but … contracting the coronavirus, possibly passing it to my mother who was staying with us, and my children’s safety were all things that keep me from going.  

But during a lull in the protests, one weekday afternoon in June, I drove straight into D.C. with my six-year-old son. We put on our masks. We parked on the street not far from the White House and walked to Black Lives Matter plaza. We felt the energy of what had transpired and we saw the signs denouncing all the hate that had been occurring. I also hoped that even though my son is only six years old, that he will remember from that day the message that Martin Luther King, Jr. espoused: you must stand up and fight against the intolerance that you will continue to witness, be a part of, and be subjected to, in your lifetime.

How We Got the Pup

On a drive through to Beijing countryside to the Great Wall, we stopped for eggs and honey. We somehow ended up leaving the farm stand with a puppy in our backseat.

For the last year or so, my daughter has been pestering my husband and me for a dog. I felt for her. As a kid, I’d always wanted a dog but no amount of pleading with my immigrant parents would let them see that there was any benefit to having such an animal in our house. For many immigrants like my parents, things are measured in usefulness and utility and a dog fit into neither category. My parents were always busy with work; we had no household help; and a dog would get in the way of more important things. Like homework.

So after my daughter continued to pester me for a dog for weeks, I made a deal with her — if she made her bed every day, for an entire year, she could have a dog. She made her bed dutifully, most days. Her brother started making his bed. There were several moves over the course of this last year — from China, we went on an extended vacation to the States over the winter holidays and ended up staying there for the first six months of the pandemic. The kids shared a bed in the various temporary homes in which we stayed in the States, which made it easier for them to complete the chore. And  just as the year mark on this deal hit, we came back to China.

So not long after we returned to China, we found ourselves driving through the Beijing countryside one weekend. We’d forgotten to stop at the farm stand where we usually paused, and instead we stopped at another stand just before a mountain pass. My husband kept the car running while I hopped out to buy some organic eggs and honey. A gregarious middle-aged farmer offered me a taste of the honey that he harvested across the road. My husband looked on impatiently from the car as I conversed with the farmer. After I’d purchased a jar of honey and some eggs, I encountered the puppy, bouncing around in front of the stand, play fighting with a kitten.

“That’s a cute puppy,” I said to the farmer.

“Do you want it?” he asked. “Because if you don’t, I might have to get rid of it.” He ran his finger across his neck, making an imaginary slit.

My husband heard that from the car. He got out. He went to the stand, picked up the puppy, held it up above his head and looked it squarely in the eyes. The puppy, a peppery brown short furred male with floppy triangles for ears, looked back calmly.

The thing was, even during the entire bed-making year, I never thought I would actually get the kids a dog. My mother knew I wasn’t serious and she’d warned me — she’d told me early on, if you make a promise to the kids and you don’t keep it, they won’t trust you anymore. It wasn’t that she wanted me to carry through with the promise; she just wanted me to stop making the promise. Realizing that she was right, I put a clause in the deal with my daughter that if she failed to make her bed on a given day, that the year would start all the way over. I figured that would get us to college.

But when a farmer tells you he’s going to have to kill a puppy, after you’ve promised your daughter a dog, after a year of bed making, after many months of enduring hardships during COVID-19, it’s fate knocking.

We asked the farmer how much he wanted for the dog. “Nothing,” he said, crossing his arms. “It’s yours.” He explained that there were puppy mills in the area, and that the females of such litters were snapped up for breeding purposes. The males, like unwanted daughters of the countryside, were cast aside. Someone had dropped off several puppies, all male, with this farmer, and he simply didn’t have the wherewithal to take care of three.

So that’s how we got our pup, who we’re still in the process of naming …

My Supermom

I’ve written a bit about my mother, who moved in with us during the COVID-19 pandemic and lived with us until my husband, kids, and I recently returned to Beijing. My mother was a lifesaver. When she stayed with us from February until July, she helped me with the tasks that have fallen on the shoulders of most mothers, working or not, during this terrible pandemic.

In the mornings, she gave my kids three hours of Mandarin, science, and theater, and art class. (Above, she’s seen acting out a play that she had my kids write, in Chinese.) In the afternoons, I took over to teach the kids English and math. She helped keep the house — a giant 4,000 square foot two-story colonial with a basement — spotlessly clean. And in the late afternoons, I would start cooking. (You might be wondering what my husband was doing. Yes, he had a job, but don’t get me started. I’ll save it for another post. Suffice to say my mother helped keep our marriage from descending into a deep and dark place.)

My mother is many things, but she’s not much of a cook. She had a career, as a scientist, entrepreneur, software engineer, and Six Sigma black belt. That didn’t allow her to spend much time in the kitchen. When I turned to cooking as a career, in my late twenties, it surprised my parents. It wasn’t what immigrant parents who moved to the United States to pursue their Ph.D.’s expected from their children.

While we were in the States until July, I cooked every day but somehow it wasn’t until I returned to Beijing that I thought about making a delicious steamed fish that my mother cooked often when I was a kid. While we were in our 14-day quarantine back in China, I was re-organizing all the cabinets and came across a bottle of Lee Kum Kee Seasoned Soy Sauce for Seafood. My mother had left it the last time I visited, and the couple of times she cooked for our family, she made the fish with this magic sauce and a couple of other things — but I didn’t exactly know what they were. I still never had made it for myself, after all of these years.

So I called her and got the recipe, not realizing it was quite so easy. A dash of soy sauce, a dash of sesame oil, and if you want to be fancy, a little mirin, just to coat the fish. Then sprinkle it with some shreds of scallions (or leek), cover it all up, and zap it in the microwave. It’s that simple.

It took under ten minutes to put together, from start to finish. And of course, as I ate, I thought of my mom and how many years ago, she’d probably come home from a long day of work and put this dish together for my brother and me. (My father was usually at work until after dinner.)

Heating something in a microwave isn’t really considered cooking, but sometimes, zapping something in the microwave is all you should do after a long day of work, especially if the result is a deliciously tender and flavorful as this.

Freedom ... In a Time of Coronavirus

And then we were free. Well, as free as one can be in a country like China.

We’d endured a 42-long hour journey to our home in Beijing, three COVID-19 tests, and 14 days of strict quarantine in our house. We got a message just before noon on a Friday telling us we could leave our house. You’d think we would’ve bounded out of the house, jumping up and down, but we weren’t quite ready. The kids were playing on the iPad, and I was still in the midst of purging unneeded belongings from every closet, drawer, and cupboard of our house. 

Soon I’d miss this quarantine and all the self-isolation that came before it in the States. Not every part of it, but I’d look back at the time fondly, despite the stress and the isolation. My husband and I had been in the very fortunate position of not having to leave our house for work. It had re-energized me as a cook. It had forced us to simplify; I’d enjoyed not having to think about social engagements and the anxiety associated with them.  And our family had survived, and even gotten closer, given the number of hours we’d spent together. A friend in Beijing who’d taken the same flight and was also just let out of her quarantine, sent a message that expressed my sentiments: “Do I have to leave my cocoon?” 

Also, before leaving the house, all four of us had to find our masks and shoes, brush our hair, and look somewhat presentable to the outside world. 

Finally, the kids and my husband crossed the threshold of our front door, with me trailing behind. We walked through our complex of houses and townhouses and through a gate that led to a canal. Before we’d left, construction workers had fenced off access to it, as the area had been slated to be “beautified” by urban planners. Now the construction walls had been removed, and a nice foot and bike path lined either side of the waterway. We noticed just as many people were wearing masks as not. We walked along it to a nearby mall, which was lively and crowded with shoppers and office workers heading to lunch. 

Steel gates and crowd control barriers with retractable tape funneled us to a security guard, who asked us for our “health kit” app. It took a moment to dig out our phones and fumble with our apps before our phones lit up with our “green” status; when we presented it, the guy waved us through without looking at it. We noticed a camera that seemed to have facial recognition software and was pointed at our faces. We were stopped at two other checkpoints like these that afternoon. COVID-19 was definitely helping China build the brave new world that it wanted. 

One of the many health checkpoints in China.

We got the kids passion fruit bubble tea from a new place called Koi and poked around. While a few restaurants had closed for good, the more established ones seemed busier than ever before, with tons of diners inside seemingly dining without a care. After discussing the myriad of lunch options we had, we settled on dim sum, one of our favorite weekend routines, at a nearby hotel. We were relieved to find the large tables in the restaurant as spaced out as they’d been before the pandemic. Steamer baskets filled with shrimp har gao, char siu buns, and pork shao mai came out, followed by plates of cheong fun rice rolls, sesame balls with lotus paste, grilled savory turnip cakes. The parade of dim sum came out for another hour. It was the first restaurant meal I’d had since March 14. I ate so much that I had to go straight home for a nap. 

That throwing of caution to the wind played out over the next few days, as we had more social interactions. People offered to shake my hand. We reunited with friends with hugs. It was especially sweet to see our children starting to play again with neighborhood kids. Some kids had grown so much and had interesting shaggy hairstyles that I didn’t recognize them. My kids seemed a little awkward and shy at first, for it must have felt strange to interact again with others after such a long exile, but quickly they abandoned their shyness and played without a care in the world.

As beautiful as these moments were, they also came with mixed emotions. After pleasure came fear — was I putting myself and the kids at risk of getting COVID-19? And then sadness: for it just brought to mind all the things we couldn’t do comfortably in our own country, halfway around the world.  

This is What Real Quarantine Feels Like

In the last couple of posts, I wrote about our crazy 42-hour journey from Alexandria, Virginia to our home in Beijing, where my family and I had been living before the pandemic began. But even though we’ve returned home, the challenge isn’t over — we’re required by law to quarantine for 14 days and take another COVID-19 test before we’re let outside. And this is real quarantine: no stepping outside our door, no going into the backyard. For the first day or two, a guard stood outside of our house before he relaxed and trusted that we wouldn’t leave. We can open our front door to accept deliveries and put out our trash, which I’m told someone incinerates. 

We’re on day 13 right now. And with every hour, as we get closer to the end, it only seems to get harder. Very tempting are the basil plants right outside our front door — I’ve wanted to go out and pick a few leaves from time to time, but even that might count as breaking our quarantine.

The first week was actually kind of nice. We’ve been away for almost eight months, so it felt great just to be home. Our kids rejoiced with endless Legos, board games, and books. They played with their pets, a cute guinea pig named Glance and a rabbit the size of a small dog. (Then, depressingly, they returned to their tablets and Kindle.) My husband retreated to the armchair that he loves to read in. I was happy to have my writing desk back and a fully-equipped kitchen with all my gadgets. 

But I didn’t miss much of my stuff, aside from our Jura espresso maker in the kitchen and a few dresses with pockets. Actually, having a cluttered house stressed me out. In the States, we lived for eight months with just the stuff in our suitcases (and a Target purchase here and there). And now back in China, we had so much stuff, coming out of every drawer. I set about de-cluttering and made a huge pile of toys, clothes, shoes, and random knick-knacks to give away.

I haven’t cooked much. I’d cooked nearly every day in the States since mid March, when restaurants were ordered to close in D.C. We never became comfortable with takeout in the States. Perhaps we were too careful, but with coronavirus everywhere, it just wasn’t a chance we wanted to take, especially knowing that had we tested positive for COVID-19, we’d blow our chances of getting back to China. 

But now that we’re in China — which fumbled its COVID-19 response early on but has managed to control the coronavirus for now — we’ve been indulging with the help of Chinese delivery apps. Delivery men on scooters will bring pretty much anything to our door within half an hour. (And yes, it only seems to be men. So far, I haven’t noticed a female delivery person.) You can get Skittles delivered from a nearby 7-11 or a fancy 10-course banquet meal from Beijing’s most expensive restaurants. We’ve opted for the dishes we missed when we were in the States: Peking duck, served with mandarin pancakes and a sweet-savory dipping sauce from Da Dong (which famously opened and closed in New York City last year; the Beijing locations are still among the best duck restaurants in the capital); Sichuan stir-fries like kungpao chicken from a local hole-in-the-wall, and soup dumplings from the venerable Din Tai Fung. Not quite as famous but just as good is Black Sesame Kitchen, which one night delivered bottles of wine, red-braised pork, and five-flavor eggplant. For dessert, my kids have ordered Taiwanese shaved ice and flower tofu from Meet Fresh (more on that in a future post!), ice cream from our local corner store, and pastries from our favorite baker. Bubble tea helped with the jet lag. And yes, I’ve been indulging in sweets too. Thank goodness we also had an exercise bike delivered before we arrived!

Preparing for our entry into the outside world, I downloaded an app onto my phone called my “health kit,” which shows your COVID-19 status and a list of places you’ve been recently. We’ll need to show our health kit occasionally when we’re out and about, and Chinese authorities use the information in the event of an outbreak (and to control people’s movements). The app, using a centralized database linked to your phone and your ID, rates you one of three colors. If your phone lights up green, you’re able to move about freely in China. Mine came up yellow, noting that I’d been in Beijing, Tianjin (where our flight had landed), and (in red letters) 美国 - the United States, which leads the world in the highest number of cases. If your screen lights up in red, you’re in trouble: you’ve got coronavirus. 

In the States, I didn’t ever feel this sense of confinement. I now understand why house arrest is a form of criminal punishment. To be inside, withering away without sunlight or the privilege of breathing fresh air (even if it might be polluted Beijing air) is to endure hardship.

In the States, we talked about being under “lockdown” but we always had the freedom to leave our front door and drive, walk, or run anywhere we wanted. I went out almost every day during our self-isolation, to do errands, pick up groceries, take the kids on bike rides, and to work out for my sanity. I wore a mask in crowded spaces and indoors but certainly no one made me wear one. The benefit we have in the States is freedom — lots of it. In the absence of any federal guidance and restrictions, that freedom has also given COVID-19 the ability to spread. 

People don't have the same freedom in China. Aside from the health kit apps and the 14-day quarantines that anyone entering the country has to undergo, anyone who tests positive for coronavirus is sent to a hospital for observation, regardless of the symptoms or lack of them. 

This morning, I looked up the statistics on coronavirus in China. Yes, critics are suspicious about how accurate the statistics are, but regardless of what the numbers are exactly, how they report their statistics shows how differently China is dealing with COVID-19. Baidu, the Chinese version of Google, displays a chart: one that lists the current situation and another that give the total number of cases and deaths since the pandemic began. Under the current situation, the chart lists a total of how many people are currently being treated, with a breakdown of how many are asymptomatic, how many are suspected cases, and how many people are in intensive care. Note the chart does not say “this is the total number of cases that exists in China” — no one for certain can say how many cases there are in any country. The key is that China is actively containing every confirmed case. After all, what’s the use of counting cases if you’re not going to do anything about them?

That means in China, people who test positive — some of them children — are separated from their families and taken from their homes, as my friend Peter Hessler mentions in a recent New Yorker article. Yes, that sounds harsh, but in this case — and perhaps only in this case — a crackdown of this nature makes sense. Everyone else in an infected person’s household stays safe and when infected people recover, they return home. And it has allowed life to return to normal for the rest of the population. People have returned to work, while restaurants and other establishments are operating without the constant fear of infection among employees and guests. Schools are slated to open in September. 

It’s possible that another outbreak might occur and we could go back into another quarantine or lockdown in China. But it’s also nice to have a real possibility that our lives will return to some kind of normalcy, for hopefully long stretches. It’s also nice that I’ll be able to go out without worrying about encountering mask-less people who might very well have COVID-19. 

For now, looking out my window and watching a few early morning joggers go by, it seems like the price of China’s harsh coronavirus containment plan is worth it.  But we’ll get to see for ourselves in the coming months. 

A Trans-Pacific Journey Home in the Midst of COVID-19 (Part 2 of 2)

So there I stood, detained near the door of a chartered Boeing 747 that looked fit for cargo. Meanwhile, my husband and children took their seats on the aircraft destined for China. I wondered if I’d be on the plane too. Or would we be separated?

Before the pandemic, we’d lived in Beijing. We’d been on vacation in the States when the coronavirus pandemic had begun in China and had cancelled our plans to return home. Now half a year later, as we were finally on our way back to Beijing, it seemed like my life was about to be upended again. 

The attendant who’d detained me continued to take everyone’s temperature and waved through all but two others, who also happened to be mothers. They looked as helpless and worried as I did. I rifled through a carry-on and took out a clipboard that the kids used for drawing. I fanned myself. I found a can of cold apple juice I’d saved for the kids. I held it to my forehead. I opened it and downed the drink in a few giant gulps.

And yes, I’d thought about that issue. When I’d started planning for the journey days before, I’d made a vow to myself that I’d try to drink as little as possible. The media stories about aerosolized droplets spinning out of flushed toilets had traumatized me. (I’d even contemplated putting on an adult diaper, like that jilted astronaut on a rampage to wound her lover and his mistress.) But as is always true on airplane journeys, I’d already had to go to the bathroom a bunch of times, even though I’d tried to minimize my liquids.

So at this point, I didn’t care how many times I’d have to go to the bathroom. I just wanted to be on the plane when it took off. After the attendant waved everyone through, he turned to the three of us. He took readings of the other two and waved them through. He inserted the thermometer in my ear. Then the other. He then said something to a person next to him who was taking down the readings. Then, thankfully, he waved me through.

I had no idea what my temperature was, and whether it would be too high when we landed in China, where there would be another temperature check, along with a COVID-19 test.

As I settled into my seat, I fretted about my possible temperature. My husband shrugged it off. “So you were a little hot.” He was being rather nonchalant, I thought, especially given the prospect that he could have been on his own — possibly for months — with two young children.

Before we took off, someone in charge made some announcements. It was important for us to remain in our seats as much as possible. We should only get up if we needed to go to the bathroom. And once we landed, we had to remain seated, for the Chinese contact tracers to do their jobs. “And if anyone tests positive in China, you’ll be brought back to this plane and placed in here,” he pointed to the pressured medical cabin with the biohazard sign on it. Before the flight took off, he disappeared into the room and shut the door behind him.

The flight to Guam had been long but comfortable, but this flight was the opposite: only five hours but dreadful. The seats had about an inch of leg room and made United economy seem luxurious. We were fed cold sandwiches, potato chips, and bottles of water. The whirr of the plane’s engines was deafening. And my mental state didn’t make things any better.

With no entertainment screens on the back of the seats, my son fell asleep and my daughter read on her Kindle. I looked at my phone, on airplane mode. It told me it was 4:34 Thursday July 30 but I had no idea if that was am or pm or what time zone it was referring to or how much time had elapsed on the flight. Even though we were only supposed to be in the air for five hours, it felt like somehow time had warped and lengthened as we crossed the international date line into the next day.

Finally, the windowless plane seemed to dip and descend. With an abrupt thud, we landed. Even as we came to a full stop and the engines went quiet, we continued to sit. The back door opened. About a half dozen people wearing white suits and plastic face shields bounded down the aisles, looking like invading space aliens. One of them went row to row, asking, “Is anyone experiencing COVID-19 symptoms? Is anyone feeling unwell?” Other inspectors examined forms we’d filled out before landing. After the white-uniformed Stormtrooper-like figures took the necessary documentation they needed and conferred, they allowed us to disembark.

In the terminal, we approached the hurdle that I’d been dreading the entire flight to Guam: the inspection area where our temperatures would be taken. I slowed as we walked through the hallway with a bunch of sensors. I waited for an alarm to go off. But all that happened was a white-clad worker waved us along, smiling under his or her face shield, and indicating that we could continue. I could breath again.

But not for long – the next nerve-wracking challenge was just ahead: our second COVID-19 test. We were directed to an area with tables and desk lamps that reminded me of a nail salon. We sat down across from another inspector who interviewed us one by one. In the last 14 days, had we gone to a restaurant? A movie theater? Had we been to a social gathering? Had we eaten wildlife? After he checked off a row of no’s, he gave each of us the form to sign. My children carefully printed their names, taking the matter as seriously as the health worker who’d questioned us. 

The worker directed us to a testing booth, where one swab went up one nostril and another swab went down my throat. It took just a few minutes and my children didn’t look scathed in the least. But the nose swabbing produced a minor reaction in my tear ducts, and I emerged like a wounded, sobbing mess.

You’d think after all these hoops and hurdles we would finally feel relieved but then came the toughest part: the wait. Our test results would come back in “four to twelve hours,” we were told. (At this point, more than 30 hours had elapsed since our journey had begun.) And if we were positive, the plane’s pressurized biohazard cabin was waiting for us, to take us back to the United States.  

The authorities had cordoned off a section of the waiting area at departures for us. It wasn’t quite the “lounge” we’d hoped for, though there were instant noodles and unlimited Sprite and Coca-Cola. It was bright and sunny and about four in the afternoon when we settled in. Like on the airplane, we were assigned seats and told not only to remain seated as much as possible, but to “face forward” to limit our exposure to others.

Our kids had pushed well beyond their second wind and played with the iPad until the batteries ran out. My daughter went back to reading her Kindle, while my son watched a movie on my computer. At some point, my daughter put her head down and fell asleep. I dozed off and when I woke up, it was dark. I made instant noodles for the kids and instant coffee for my husband and myself. Six hours had gone by.

Then there was some stirring among the passengers. And an announcement: we were all negative! Everyone cheered. I sat down for a moment to reflect. For the last six months, our lives, like everyone else’s in the world, had been upended. But COVID-19 had caught us while we were on vacation. We’d stayed in the States, wiping our brow that we’d narrowly escaped the threat of an epidemic, only for our lives to be upended again when COVID-19 descended upon the rest of the world. We started and stopped new schools and routines and moved several times along the way. With all the uncertainty that the coronavirus had brought, we’d been unsure if we’d ever return to our home and the lives we’d built in China. With our lives suspended, we’d grasped for every silver lining. And now, finally, we were going home.

We boarded one of a long line of buses flanked by police cars with flashing sirens. The motorcade went about 30 miles an hour on the highway, as if we were in slow motion, like the last half year of our life. We arrived in front of the complex of our house around three in the morning. We were allowed to walk to our homes while attendants carried our bags. Our quiet cul-de-sac, lined with single-family houses, green shrubs, and Chinese lanterns seemed at once familiar but foreign. I was grateful for those moments of fresh air, even if it might have been polluted Beijing air.

And then before us was our home. The houses on our street were modeled off of southern California tract homes plunked down in the middle of modern, downtown Beijing. We’d lived there for two and a half years before the pandemic struck, and it was the only home my younger child really remembered. As we entered the house, we re-familiarized ourselves with every room. Counters seemed shorter that I remembered, the ceiling seemed higher, and the house seemed smaller and more cluttered. We showered. We ate, unsure of whether this counted as breakfast or dinner or what.

As I tucked in the kids and finally flopped into bed, at close to five o’clock in the morning, the sun started to rise. It was a fitting, topsy-turvy end to our long journey.

A Trans-Pacific Journey Home in the Midst of COVID-19 (Part 1 of 2)

The skies looked threatening when we left our temporary home in Virginia for the airport. My in-laws drove us in their minivan, loaded to the brim with sixteen pieces of luggage and four of us squished in the backseats. The forecast had predicted thunderstorms that evening but thankfully it was still dry when we arrived at Dulles. 

We’d already had a tearful good-bye with my in-laws back in June, when we’d thought we’d be leaving earlier in the summer and had driven up to Massachusetts to see them. This time, I was too tired to shed many tears, too anxious that something would go wrong on our journey and that this wouldn’t actually be goodbye. So this time, we exchanged quick hugs — even though it was likely we wouldn’t see them for a long time — and focused on the journey ahead.

As we walked into the brightly-lit airy terminal, I reminded myself that it was close to a miracle that we were able to get on a flight bound for China at all. Not only are international flights to China severely limited, but the country has banned foreigners from entering ever since COVID-19 became a global pandemic. (And yes, the irony is not lost on me that the pandemic began in China.) 

We’d been granted rare permission to return to Beijing. My family and I had passed a COVID-19 test that was administered a few days before. A privately-chartered United plane would take us and about a hundred other passengers to San Francisco, then Guam. There, we’d transfer to another plane. Because China has banned international flights from the capital of Beijing, the plane would land in Tianjin, a port city about a hundred miles away. In the airport, we’d take another COVID-19 test and wait for an unknown amount of time for the results. If they were negative, we’d be allowed to board a shuttle bus to return to home, to quarantine for 14 days. If we passed a third COVID-19 test at the quarantine’s end, we’d finally be permitted into the outside world — one that we hoped would have schools for our kids and regular work schedules for my husband and me. Like everyone else in these times, all we wanted was normalcy. The idea that it might be within our reach made the stakes of the journey even greater. 

Given that we’d been sheltering mostly in a suburban house near Washington D.C. for the last few months, it was a shock to enter a terminal filled with people. When we’d gone to get a COVID-19 test a few days before, I’d nearly had a panic attack because two other people had shared an elevator with us; now we were about to board a metal tube with more than a hundred others. 

But aside from the masks that everyone was wearing, the airport check-in area seemed just like pre-pandemic times. The United employees were actually friendlier than before; they exchanged relaxed banter and laughs, which set me at ease. Going through security was a little more nerve-wracking with long lines and security personnel wearing plastic face shields, which were strange novelties to my kids. 

And yet, again, there was reassurance: the floors glimmered from all the bleach and sanitizing. We were one of the few (and possibly only) flights leaving at this time of night; our departure was schedule for one o’clock in the morning. We did our best to get through security as quickly as possible and head to the gate, noticing that all the advertisements that usually decorate airport hallways had disappeared, replaced with billboards soliciting ads. 

Boarding the flight, we were careful to socially distance from others, though what was the point given that we were going to be in enclosed spaces with the same people for the next forty-plus hours? A flight attendant greeted us with hand sanitizing wipes as we stepped from the covered walkway into the plane. We found our seats halfway toward the back of the plane; my daughter and I had four seats in the center row, as did my husband and son, who sat behind us. 

Maybe because flying had been so much a part of our lives before the pandemic, I was surprised to find that it was strangely reassuring to be on a plane, even if it was a small confined space. It felt … normal. (Maybe that’s also how people feel going to restaurants these days; it’s an illusion as we’re lulled into our pre-pandemic lifestyle.) But my feelings were pretty moot for the first leg of the flight, to San Francisco, because I was exhausted and fell asleep as we soon as we took off and only awoke as the plane descended. (My daughter did as well.) We’d landed in San Francisco, and the flight crew wished us well before they got off the plane and another crew boarded. I felt for the flight attendants; it must be a terrible, stressful job in these times but yet they’d remained composed and professional throughout the flight.

The flight to Guam was long but comfortable; the screens affixed to the chairs kept my kids entertained. I dozed for a while before starting a book, my friend Barbara Demick’s new Eat the Buddha, about Tibetans in China. Reading about the journeys of Tibetans into exodus put our trip into perspective, and Barbara is an amazing storyteller. (She’ll be making an appearance in the new BSK book club that I’m starting; sign up for my newsletter on my home page if you’d like details.) The airplane food was better than I expected. I gobbled up an omelette stuffed with cheese and some unidentifiable vegetable; the second meal was butter chicken with rice, which was equally delicious. They were the first dishes I’d eaten that I hadn’t cooked myself in weeks. Maybe that’s why they tasted so good. 

In Guam, we were greeted by rather unfriendly police who tried to usher us as quickly as possible through the terminal. I would’ve felt the same way; who wanted mainland Americans spreading COVID-19 to their small island? Before we boarded the awaiting aircraft, a specially-outfitted Boeing 747 with a compression chamber for medical emergencies, someone made a few announcements. Because this wasn’t a typical commercial airplane, all of our carry-ons would have to be labelled with our names and stowed toward the back of the plane. And we would have our temperatures checked as we boarded. 

We were led onto a very hot tarmac and before us was an enormous windowless airplane. As the sun’s rays beat down on us, I could feel myself breaking into a sweat as I hauled my roll-aboard suitcase up a long flight of stairs. Thankfully, our kids were old enough to walk up the stairs by themselves. As we were lined up getting on the plane, I thought that to anyone who didn’t know better, we must have looked like a long line of refugees — ones that were escaping the United States!

The inside of the plane was cavernous, and it felt like we’d boarded an aircraft that had once lifted the military out of Vietnam. The plane’s furnishings seemed to have been ripped out of retired planes; there was a set of airplane bathrooms that stood tall like port-a-potties in the unfinished space. A narrow row of seats took up part of the back of the plane, while filling up the plane’s center was a wider row of seats with Russian lettering on the tray tables. Labels hastily taped to each chair indicated the seat assignments. In front of the seats was a mysterious area that was curtained off and next to it, the sealed-off medical chamber with a biohazard sign on it. 

As I took this all in, an attendant leaned towards me and stuck a thermometer in my ear. He looked at the reading, frowned, and stuck the thermometer in my other ear.

“Sorry,” he said. “You’re a little hot. Stay here.”

He took my husband’s temperature and then the kids’, and waved them along. As they climbed into their seats, I remained near the door of the plane, wondering if I would be locked into the compression chamber, detained in Guam, or even worse, sent back to the United States — by myself … (to be continued in my next post on Friday) 

Before the Journey, I Had to Pack ... and Cook

Dishes from my second-to-last cooking class …

I was too busy in our last few days in Alexandria, VA to shed many tears. We’d only been given about a week of notice before we were leaving, and I not only had to pack up everything we’d accumulated in the last six months but I also felt the obligation to cook everything that remained in the fridges — there was one in the kitchen and one in the basement, both filled to the brim with food. I had ingredients for at least eight days worth of meals, and we only six nights left. I spent a good amount of my last week in the kitchen, teaching two final cooking classes, and then setting forth to cook everything. Partly of course it was because we needed to eat, but beyond that, I just felt some strange obligation to actually cook it all, even if we couldn’t eat it all.

My son, waiting for his pizza he’s made from scratch.

The sourdough discard scallion pancakes were the best version of these pancakes I've made: light and airy.

Among the dishes I made: pad thai, dan dan noodles, bok choy, burritos, pizza from scratch, sushi rolls and Japanese egg omlettes, scallion pancakes with sourdough discard, two last loaves of sourdough. There were also a lasagna bolognese and dumplings that I’d made a while ago and frozen — I defrosted them and served those to my family, too. And stuff my aunt had given me: Chinese fish balls, rice noodles, red beans. And then the things that would ultimately go to waste, cooking projects that would never come to fruition and made me sad thinking about them: an enormous half of a daikon and frozen chicken that I planned to make into chicken noodle soup, pork belly and fermented black beans that I’d wanted to use in twice-cooked pork. Thankfully some of my guests in my cooking classes offered to take some of my pantry ingredients off my hands - I hope they’ve found their way in the postal service to your home.

Sadder than having to abandon cooking projects was parting with my mom. My mother packed up her things and left a few days before we left — it was easier that way, especially because my in-laws were driving down to help see us off. We kept the good-bye as short as possible; she was going to stay at my aunt’s in Maryland, and when my aunt came to pick her up, I don’t even think the kids were there to give hugs or wave good-bye — there was the excuse that we’d drive to my aunt’s to see them before we left (which didn’t happen) but that’s kind of how we do things in Chinese families. Closure really isn’t necessary. And anyway, she said, she’s always only a video call away. I cried and my mother looked at me awkwardly; I knew that she’d probably cry sometime, but just not in my presence.

Ingredients and books, packed and sent away before we left …

I had carefully packed some cooked food for our journey — peanut-sesame noodles, leftover sushi, beef jerky, prosciutto — but when it came to leave, I was so overwhelmed with the volume of stuff we had to take to the airport already that I just gave it all to my mother-in-law. We would survive on bagels, granola bars, and airplane food for our journey. Along with all the other contents of our fridge, my in-laws would have enough to eat for a week, possibly longer. It was enough food that they cancelled their meal kit delivery service for the following week.

This was going to be our airplane food, but I gave it to my in-laws for their journey back to their home.

Before we left for the airport, I had a few moments in the kitchen by myself. It had served me well. It was where I’d started my online classes, back in May, which felt like a lifetime ago. There were some flaws to it. A huge crack ran through the center of the tiled floor. The sink was positioned right in the center of everything, which made it difficult for more than one person to work in the kitchen at a time, even though it was a large, airy space with a beautiful range, two ovens and a skylight ceilinged hallway with plenty of storage space and back counters. It was where I’d gotten my mojo back as a cook in the last few months, and every day between four to six o’clock in the afternoon, I was reliably in there, listening to podcasts and feeling productive, making something good for my family to eat during this terrible pandemic.

After I finally cleaned out the kitchen, packed our bags (which consisted of six checked bags, our skis, eight carry-ons, and two booster seats) we finally loaded up my in-laws’ minivan for the long journey. When we set off for the airport around 9pm on Tuesday, the skies looked threatening, an impending storm turning the sky a strange orange hue …