The five of us are eager to leave the city, if only for the day. We need a literal breather.
There is a large Chinese edifice—complete with an urban leg-end about visibility from space—so well-known that it’s used as the national landmark for the entire country. Tourist trap it is, but it’s a solid excuse to escape the sallow city pollution, with its dull, stinging scent of metal and exhaust, and to engage with trees. Before we left for China, we asked the kids what they most wanted to see in our first week. All three independently said the Great Wall. Midway through our week, we hire a van and driver for the day, per Robert’s suggestion, and watch as the window’s view morphs from high-rises and hordes of businessmen in gray suits to dirt and grass. While the driver weaves through city traffic and then suburban villages, we listen to an audiobook about the wall, about Qin Shi Huangdi, the emperor who commissioned the construction, and about Mongols and ancient dynastic leaders with god complexes and paranoia. Our driver does not speak English, and he smiles and nods at us through the rearview mirror.
The Great Wall is an intimidating barrier of stone and fortitude, a staggering example of what humankind (and a steady dose of slave labor) can accomplish without modern technology. It is our springboard into history, how ruthless dictatorship and a reasonable fear of barbaric invasion leads to an impressive architectural marvel of stone and size. We climb up and down stairs that roll with the hills; it’s a stroll down a cobblestone sidewalk twenty-five feet above ground, and I hold the backs of shirts as my children lean out watch holes to check our height. We take First Day of School photos, even though it’s not technically the first day of school. Our blonde children pose for other photos with Asian tourists. We then queue for a toboggan ride down the hill, the most enjoyable method of egress for children leaving the wall and returning to the parking lot. The man governing the slide warns the Westerners in line, “No yeeeehaaaaaw! Be quiet. No America here.”
Finn sits in front of me on a plastic toboggan with wheels and a brake handle, and we glide away from the line of tourists in what could be a pleasure ride on a winding aluminum path through the forest, were it not for the timid woman on the slide in front of us, hand brake pulled and eking us down the hill at such a snail’s pace that even Finn is impatient. Tate, our oldest and in the sled behind us, escalates her annoyance at me with every careening, inevitable crash into the back of ours.
The Great Wall is a masterpiece, and the kids sketch it in their drawing books as it fades in the van’s rearview mirror. Our driver takes us to a farm-to-table restaurant in a nearby village. There, I sample pumpkin ice cream and the kids eat spaghetti. It’s surprisingly delicious. Beijing’s countryside is a welcome respite to city life, an exhale to a metropolis pace and population. I call our first field trip a success.
Jet lag is harder to shake than we anticipated. The next day I share a phone conversation with a friend in America while standing on our apartment balcony overlooking a behemoth piazza with weeds sprouting through cracks, strangers’ underwear drying outside the surrounding windows. Inside, the kids build a fort out of blankets and pillows on one of the beds. We wash our first load of laundry for the year and toss in the guesthouse’s two towels. Kyle stirs oatmeal on the hot plate while the kids wrestle in the fort.
Tate joins me on the balcony and says, “China isn’t what I thought it’d be.”
“What did you imagine?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she admits. “Maybe more red and dragons.”
China is one of the countries she was most excited to visit, so I wonder what’s playing in her head. Does this year already smell like disappointment to her? Will there be an unavoidable sullying of childhood imagination, where dragons fly Asia’s skies and lions dance with zebras instead of eat them on African savannas? I secretly love that she’s disappointed, because it means our nine-year-old’s childlike spirit is still intact.
We force ourselves to stay awake with an evening trip on the metro to Wangfujing snack street. The asphalt shimmers, reflections from lantern lights swinging above collecting in puddles from the spray of booth operators on either side of alleys, booth operators who pour out buckets of ice melt that keep their edible creatures fresh. These narrow alleys house family-run booths of anything imaginable on a stick: starfish, seahorses, turtles burned to a crisp, impaled scorpions still wriggling for life. These are the original food trucks. Vendors shout their wares, hoping to entice us with charred lizard and raw spiders. Reed panics, begs us not to make him try them. We buy corn on the cob.
At an alley’s dead end, a woman painted with a white face, pink eyes, and black villain eyebrows trills Peking-style opera into a distorted microphone on a small stage. Her peacock-like hat sprouts blue and gold triangles; she wears a polychromatic silk robe and flutters a yellow fan besotted with red roses. It is for the tourists, and we listen briefly until we end up with headaches from her shrill voice.
The kids do not normally care for McDonald’s, but they are hungry for the familiar and beg for hamburgers. We sit at our second-floor booth, nibbling fries and watching out the window as throngs of bodies inch through Wangfujing—teenagers carrying shopping bags emblazoned with European brands, tourists taking photos of St. Joseph’s Church, planted by Jesuit missionaries in 1655. The McDonald’s speakers play loud American pop. Reed wonders, out of curiosity, if there are any Panda Expresses nearby.
Tonight I take more melatonin and lie awake, restless on our mattress that burrows deep into my shoulder blades and hips. I pull back a sheet corner and my suspicions are confirmed: it is a slab of plywood covered in quilt batting. On the floor next to me, Finn mumbles something about hiccups, eyes twitching beneath his eyelids. I hear the showerhead drip, drip, dripping from the bathroom.