Some of the Asian ingredients I need to give away before next week … Let me know if you’re interested …
Earlier this week, I learned that my family and I might be heading back to Beijing, where we’d been living before the pandemic began. We’re scheduled tentatively for a flight next week, which doesn’t give me much time to pack and get a COVID-19 test. I have a cooking class today and Sunday. I also have to give away my leftover Asian ingredients and dry out my sourdough starter so I can slip it somewhere deep into my bags.
I sort of can’t believe we’re going. After all, we’re flying in the middle of a pandemic. My husband’s employer gave us two other dates that came and went. And U.S.-China relations have never been worse. Just this morning, I woke up to the news that China is shutting down the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, where I lived for two years. This is in retaliation for the closing of the Chinese consulate in Houston earlier this week.
My family and I have been in the States for almost eight months. We’d decided to pull our children out of their Beijing school in mid December to take a carefree six-week vacation in the States, with no inkling that we’d still be here in summer. The ski clothes we packed are a little too hot to wear in D.C.’s July humidity.
Our departure is bittersweet. We’re looking forward to getting back to our house in Beijing and hopefully what will be normal routines with school for our children, work for my husband, and Black Sesame Kitchen and lots of recipe testing for me. And yet the last half year in the States — even with the pandemic raging — has also felt like home and given us the chance to reconnect with friends and family. The online cooking classes have helped me connect with Black Sesame Kitchen guests and a virtual community of home cooks around the world.
The hardest part of leaving the United States will be parting with my mother, who’s been staying with us since the pandemic began. After we relocated to Washington D.C. in February, she flew out to be with us temporarily to help the kids transition into a new school. When the school shut down in March, she took a lead role as the educator in our family. We could not have managed the last half year OK without her. (I don’t know how parents on their own are doing it.) It’s been the longest I’ve lived with my mother since I left home for high school, and I wish I could treat our departure the way I did back then, with the excitement of a new chapter of my life beginning. But I can’t. I’m not going off to college this time and I don’t wish to leave my mother behind. What’s even harder is the fact that we have no idea when we’ll see each other next. Maybe it will have to be after a vaccine is available and distributed widely and after China opens up again to the rest of world.
China at the moment is like the most difficult, red-roped nightclub to get into in the world. There are only a few flights going in and out of the country every week, and most of them are bringing Chinese back to China. All foreigners are banned from traveling to China, unless, like us, they’ve been granted special permission. We have dozens and dozens of expatriate friends who are waiting for that permission.
Life in China is supposedly going on as usual, with schools aiming to fully reopen in September, restaurants accepting reservations (including Black Sesame Kitchen), and even movie theaters and swimming pools in the midst of throwing open their doors. Does China have the virus as in control as they say it does? Will we make it back to Beijing? Will Black Sesame Kitchen be able to continue to stay open?
Last night, as I shared my worries with my mother, a Chinese idiom came to her mind. “The boat will straighten itself out when it gets into the harbor,” she said. Our boat is actually a chartered plane that is stopping in San Francisco, Guam, and the port city of Tianjin before we arrive in Beijing; let’s hope that we have a smooth landing.
My mom, Chinese and Tai Chi teacher extraordinaire, with my kids.