Martin Adams
When he's not busy raising his son, Martin Adams is a freelance writer. During his three and a half years in Beijing, he has also been a warm weather kung fu practioner.
Heading South
It was the best of times. In this, his final missive, it pains this columnist to report that, after more than seven years in the Big Smog, he and his are moving on. Well, to be honest, I'm actuallyquite chuffed to be off: I have landed a job that promises to be fascinating down in Hong Kong, which will be a welcome change of scene and pace. Parenting-wise, being able to put Daniel into an English-language nursery and then school - common and relatively affordable as they are down there - will cure one of my greatest headaches as a laowai baba in Beijing: ensuring my little one absorbs English as well as Putonghua. Now it's up to his Chinese mum to make sure he keeps his Mandarin.
We Three Travelers
Kids see things that we don't. I'm not referring to the otherworldly - it's more this sort of thing: We are with our 3-year-old sitting outside The Den (I always think it's an underappreciated family venue), and my son Daniel says, "Daddy, look!" We look up, and there above our heads is a group of lord-knows-what-with-wings, presumed birds of prey, circling high above us. Most big people would never have noticed. And these rarefied if random powers of perception are just one reason why traveling with a little one is just, oh, so much fun.
Baba Laoshi
It was not - nay, is not my intention to force my child to be a swot. Indeed, living in East Asia is likely to confirm an in-built antipathy in any self-respecting Westerner to molding infants into high achievers from the word go. Pushing kids to get top marks at school, rather than laying the emphasis on encouraging them to find their own interests, may be natural given the intensity of competition for places at schools and universities. But so too, at least for many Westerners, is balking at the fad for turning your free-spirited toddlers into a virtuoso pianist and linguistic genius all before the age of 6 - and probably a short-sighted, stressed teenager in a decade's time. It's all just too Jane Austen.
A Time to Get Pregnant
When I studied Chinese formally for a year at Beijing Language and Culture University back in the halcyon, pre-fatherhood days of 2003-2004, I was one of three swotty types who sat at the front. We had the unfair advantage of having native Chinese speaker spouses (by the way, I always think the plural of "spouse" should be "spice", don't you?), and the dubious qualification of being "maturer" than the rest of the class. After we had done battle with the language for a while and discovered that the more Chinese characters we learned, the less we remembered. I recall a conversation in which a fellow square and I asked ourselves whether we would still have set out to climb the mountain that is Chinese if we had known what we were letting ourselves in for. "No," we concluded.
School Days
The month of May marks six months since we kicked our son Daniel out of the nest - albeit only as far as nursery school, I hasten to add. Monday to Friday, 8am 'til 5pm, he is officially outsourced to the Montessori nursery school in the wilds of Tiantongyuan where we live, outside the orbit of the Fifth Ring Road. Six months ago, I confess, it felt like we were cutting him loose. I really wasn't sure it was the right thing to do. Every child and parent must go through the traumatic first day of school experience at some stage, but at 2 and a half years old?
No Easy Answers
The fact that there is no parenting guidebook containing all the answers is a crying shame. One reason why that tome is a fantasy is because kids, in their wonderful if not frustrating way, simply refuse to read the script. Several episodes have reminded me of this recently, and they tend to involve: a) the expenditure of parental hopes and dreams, and b) the outlay of cash. Like Father, Like Son
As my columns have stacked up over nearly three years, I’ve wondered how long I can get away with obsessing about myself in print. Admittedly, the column is called “Beijing Baba,” so I have a fair amount of license to do so, and describe the pleasures (and the pains) of being a learner parent. Still, I’ve felt lingering guilt that the real central character has been left loitering offstage. After all, what is a baba without his erzi?
Re-entry Shocks
Thanks to the wonders of the webcam, I did not have to go without seeing my wife and son for the two months I spent working in the UK this summer. While part of me bemoaned the fact that “it’s not the same thing,” another side of me couldn’t help but feel a growing sense of dread at my terrible two-and-a-third-year-old on the computer screen before me. Never still, always noisy, often naughty, each week my son seemed to become more monstrous. He lacked a firm fatherly hand, his mother warned me. Or, I wondered, was he always like this? Perhaps I had just fallen out of the daddying rhythm.
Not Just Like Dad: Sharing Daniel with laolao and lao laolao
Those of you with long memories but short social schedules may remember that in past columns I have lavished praise on both my son’s ayi and Chinese granny. (To summarize: Nowhere inside or outside of Christendom was there an ayi like her; uninterfering mother-in laws like these don’t grow on trees.)
