When my husband first announced we would be moving to China from one of the quietest, most charmingly provincial state capitals in Australia, I was ninety-five per cent horrified.
From a Californian bungalow with echoing floorboards and Tudor-glassed windows to a cement block in the sky? From streets with flat manicured lawns and the soft, echoing pop of tennis balls, to grimy, spit-laden, noise-polluted race tracks? From quietly sunny strolls with the pram to the local kindergarten to harried, gapingly seatbelt-vacant taxi rides that really put the beat into your heart?
How to forgo the very comfortable Known in favour of the scratchy Unknown? How could I let go of breakfasts of organic fruit, pouncey grained bread, gourmet muesli that snaps against the teeth and silky yogurt with essence of dried fig, in favour of... er... what do Chinese people eat for breakfast?
Let me re-paint this picture before I sound like a parochial, un-educated, Caucasian housewife, clueless snob.
I just didn't know.
I didn't know what Beijing would do to me. Nor the rest of China I've seen, for that matter. Nor the Chinese people, nor the history, nor the culture, nor the food...
I was a well-travelled Australian thirty-something woman when I got this ninety-five per cent horrifying News. I was relatively well-educated and well-read and well-versed on the world, having already lived in both Paris and London. I had an interest in geography, languages, travel and world history, and had spent the majority of my twenties on a Ban-the-Bomb/Amnesty International/Human Rights bandwagon, studded with a deep interest in psychology, philosophy (particularly Jung and Plato) and a great love of literature (both traditional and contemporary). I was liberal, open-minded, travel-hungry, ready for change, ever-primed for adventure, not a scaredy-cat, never shy of a challenge - all that.
So it surprised no one more than me to learn that the prospect of living in China made me ninety-five percent horrified.
It could have been the cushy, tennis-ball popping life I had been languishing in for that last eighteen months. It could have been the rush of humanitarian and human rights propaganda that came flooding from my twenties into my baby-fried brain, after a fifteen year sabbatical. It could have been the fact that China was probably towards the very end of a very long list of places I wanted to see in this lifetime. Not for any particular reason other than the fact that there were just so many other places I preferred to see first. And so I (quite literally) just didn't know anything about the place. I had not felt that 'pull' for China like I had so many other places around the globe. The Great Wall? Sure, why not. The 1703 summer retreat of Empress Dowager Cixi surrounded by the world's largest classical imperial gardens and eight outer minority monastic temples? Huh?
It could have also been the fact that my world was now completely and utterly not about me and/or my husband any more. It was purely and simply about the two little people we had deemed absolutely necessary in our lives. Our daughter was three, our son was just one when we received The News, and so our family was still heavily invested in the Huggies-Nuk-Advent-Baby-Bjorn-Peg-Perego world of sterilised infant fluff and padding - a world where everything is pastel and aesthetically beautiful and smells like lollies (according to magazines and the TV and some carefully-selective mother's groups).
Although I thrived on aesthetics (and still do), I was never part of a mother's group. Having wanted and struggled to have kids for so long, however, I had so bought into this artificially perfect world of, well... Babies. And toddlers. A world of sweet, carefully-packaged, harmonious perfection, tucked inside a pretty house with echoing floorboards, white fluffy rugs, hand-knitted toys and un-mineralised baby oil products. There were carefully structured days of best-for-baby routine, coupled with mincingly perfect (pedantic?) meals served in laughably expensive ceramic bunny dishes with silver baby cutlery, and daily educational processes from the pages of Child Psyche Encyclopaedia, all bundled up in paints, flashcards and fun.
Essentially, I was up to my eyeballs in the whole Goo Kit and Caboodle. Having this idyllic routine unplugged was a precarious position to be in for me. And having only given birth (what felt like minutes before) to our son, my hormones were still very much in that rampant 'mother tiger protects her cubs' while providing them with nothing but the Goo-Kit-and-Caboodle phase.
Before we received The News, I had always said to my husband (who moves a lot for his work) that I would live with him in a tin shed or a tent - anywhere on the face of the earth and even beyond that. And I really, truly meant that. Then the babies came along. And such grandiose and romantic ideas suddenly take a back seat when all that matters is how many brands of baby wipes one can successfully hunt down and compare for product effectiveness. With babies, life is no longer about challenges, it's about eliminating the challenges. Making everything routine. Easy. Focusing, honing, teaching, committing - not diversifying, risking, learning, free-wheeling.
Going to China with two small kids and leaving this gooey comfort zone was going to need more diversifying, risking, learning and free-wheeling than I had ever called upon before.
My life called. It was time to dive into the Unknown.
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