The Shanghai Department of Culture gave my grandparents on my mom's side a nice apartment in the longtong alley on Fuxing Lu, and the apartments here also house the students from the Shanghai Conservatory of music, so from 7:30 in the morning until 8 at night, I hear someone practicing a sonata, and someone singing soprano, and then violin piano duet, and low bass, and the cello, and another sonata, then a sonatina or fugue, or whatever it is, my vocabulary way too limited to properly describe it, and sometimes I hear someone making a mistake on the piano and it gets me thinking that maybe I wasn't so terrible in middle school when I performed at the annual recital and made three mistakes and why did my mom have to dress me in a big fat pink bow on the top of my ponytail and then seven years later when it was my brother's turn to play he got to wear a sweet little bowtie and suspenders and when we took a picture of him from the side, boy oh boy, did his head look like big round apple or what!

The apple effect seems to have diminished, I think:





Maybe I should have kept practicing?

So there is this type of crab that everyone is obssessed with and we went and saw what a thriving industry based on crab looks like

We went on my second day in Shanghai. My big auntie's husband took us to CRAB CITY! Also known as Yangcheng He, a very nice lake town where they grow these crabs that everyone in Shanghai wants me to eat so so badly.



The ride to Yangcheng He takes about an hour and a half and my father, mother, brother, and I immediately set ourselves apart by wearing the thickest jackets of anyone in the twelve passenger bus that my cousin Jing rented.



In the summers, we set ourselves apart by walking stoutly and my father wears shorts and sports socks halfway up his calves, and I don't comb my hair and my mother wear short shorts shorter than my shorts so that my grandmother says, look at you, unsightly thing and my mother says, so what. So what.

In the winter, we bring our warmest coat and we take up four passenger seats just by taking off our coats and laying them down. While the little minibus is still moving I take a running leap down the aisle and jump on our coats and my brother says, that's racist! I school him on the meaning of racist and he waves me aside.

--I know, I know.

--So admit that it's racist when in Yo Mamma, a white guy says to a black guy, 'Yo, is that a black hoodie on your back or just some extra skin?'

--How's that racist?

My guofu uncle takes us to meet a guy who has his own crab hut, and he seems to be on familiar terms with him because I think we are just going to buy some crabs but instead we go on a boat, no lifejackets, no warning, and we start to weave our way through the crab huts and I feel happier than I can remember. I really do. We get into an argument with a woman who has low cheekbones and she looks sun burnt even though I have never remembered seeing the sun in China in the times that I have been back, only dust, fog, and gray, but the man steering the boat calls her some bad names and tells her to move her fucking boat aside, and she says, what the fuck, I'm going to move it, you don't have to fucking yell, and I do the translating for my brother and stop midsentence because my cousin Jing might be listening and I don't want to sound so obscene on the second day.





We go back to the crab huts and buy twenty crabs, each one at a 100rmb, but the pretense is that these crabs are a gift, and the owner says he'll come for my dad when he goes to the US, and my dad says, of course, just ask for me, and I'm so fucking dumb that I tug at my dad's shoulders and I almost say, dad, but you didn't give him your name, and then I realize my guofu uncle has paid for these crabs way in advance, and then to make up for my lack of insight, I pretend to push my brother into a crab cage.





You know what, if I could fly above YangCheng He in a small helicopter and take an aerial view of the restaurants and huts, I could show you just little tiny dots of crab faces and the character for crab like a constellation map of orange stars. Long ago, I remember my dad coming home to Shanghai for the first time in fifteen years and our two families, my mother's family and my father's family were sitting down at a round table, and my father was explaining the utter absurdity of American and he said:

--Here's the ridiculous thing. In America, people want to go and spend time at farms. People drive two-hundred miles to get to a farm so they can pay to pick strawberries.

And then the collective, "Really."

--Yes, they pay to go to the country and do work. Imagine that. They pay to 'rough it' in the woods. They call it 'camping.' If only we could take a couple million of these fools back in time and dump them in the rural camps and have them do that work for us, we could have actually gone to high school and learned something.

And the collective, "Hahahahahaha!"

And the other thing about these crabs is that they have this bundle of hair around their big legs, and I waste the first ten minutes trying to take the hair off with my chopsticks. At lunch, we eat in a farmer's house, only it can't be a farmer house, because it has been renovated to look like a restaurant, and I don't see a farm, or farmers, only a few young women who work in the kitchen and bring us our food, and a very old woman who either walks very very slowly, or paces back and forth, I don't know, because in the hour that we walk into our room, eat, and come out, I see her only steps ahead of where I saw her last.

Toothless at forty-six

My mom has one brother and he's my favorite uncle and he used to put me up all the way to the ceiling where the helium balloons hovered and I used to scream, "Put me down," because the sound I hated the most was the sound of a balloon popping, and two days ago at dinner, my aunt who is married to my uncle told us that my uncle blew out his last two teeth sneezing, and now he has a row of fakes, and we all said, Eh-yeuuuuuuuu, which roughly correlates to Oh God! and my mom, his sister, said, Forty-six and already an old man.


When my father took me and my mother to Fudan, his old university where he spent thirteen years of his life, there were some kids on bikes, who were wearing sweatshirts and shivering, and had pimply faces and fairly unwashed hair who seemed like the other side of the globe equivalent of Stanford kids in red sweatshirts on their way to IHUM, and one kid said to the other, "We'll want to remember this when we we're forty and fifty," and the other agreed and for just a split second I thought we'd all just think about this in our minds, but my dad changed that by saying to my mom, "That's us. Forties and fifties," and I have to say, that felt strange, because my father was wandering around the place he spend 13 years of his life trying to reconstruct the buildings that had been razed, changed, or built over, and when we entered the Building of Foreign and International Studies, his building, we walked in on a man who seemed suspicious, and he came out from a haze of smoke to sort of greet my dad, mostly shoo him off, and watching to the two of them talk was painful.




Haven't you seen those movies or documentaries where they built up this meeting, this return home, some adoptee, or someone returning to a place that has been important to them, only to realize no one remembers him or her, nothing is quite the same, and even the people he or she had been secretly hoping to embrace are not interested, don't even know what this is all about.



But we did get to go in the library, and a man with missing teeth, and the rest completely brown black and yellow, wearing his sweatpants very very high on his waist told my dad that he had been a staff at the Foreign Languages Center the longest, and now it was its own college, and my mom and I were like, Dad, did you know that guy when you were here, and my dad was like, Of course not, and I wanted us to wait there because the earlier uncaring guy had said that some of my dad's colleagues and former friends who were now heads of departments or professors were in a meeting together but my mom was ready to go back and maybe my dad wasn't really so invested in the kind of ending I thought he wanted, so we went back and met a girl on the bus who called me little sister, and said a lot of words and I only half listened and half read my book, which Karan recommended me, and thanks Karan, it's a pretty good book!

I thought it was a leisure trip with ten other men to see the US but turned out he went on business

The last thing the man on the plane said to me before we part ways was this:

--Hey, do you want any more of that alcohol that you asked for before?

--What? You mean the red wine?

--YEAH!

--No. Not now.

--Okay.

I really don't know if this man was too friendly, and too little self-conscious or if he was trying to get me liquored me.

Actually, the last thing he said to me was:

--Well, this is it. I'll be getting my luggage now, but here's my card and give me a ring sometime.

He worked for the The Administrative Committee of jilin National New & High Technology Development Zone Science & Technology Bureau, and actually to be honest, the very last thing he ever said to me was:

--Hey! Let me help you with that.

Which, I was really grateful for because I did indeed, need some help with my big freaking piece of luggage that took a little bit of top skin off the part of my hands where my fingers join my palm.

And then, I was in Beijing.

And then, finally, I was in Shanghai.

And then my parents came and greeted me and my mom had dark circles around her eyes that I had never seen before and I didn't know if it was the airport lighting, but we took a bus to Xinan Shi, where Shanghai was all night dust and lights, and on the ride back I slept on my mom's shoulder and my dad slept with his head thrown back, and when we got home my grandmother was in the hallway, cooking handmade wontons, and my grandpa was in my dad's old windbreaker and he said what he always says when I come back, "Jianing hui lai le!"

I wrote a travel guide to Shanghai in my little tiny brain and it came out all like a raw egg, all weird, and here's the first part

I sleep three or four hours before getting on BART to try my luck getting onto a SFO to Beijing flight and it turns out I’m sort of lucky, sort of unlucky. When I arrive no one takes any notice of me and no one understands the kind of ticket I have.
--It's a standby ticket.

--Don't look like it.

--It's an employee ticket.

--Why did you say standby?

--It's a standby employee ticket.

--What? Wait over there where no one is going to pay any attention to you.

I’m wearing two sweaters and a new coat that makes me look like a green pillow and it’s hard to swear and look upset in that state, but I do my part by banging my head against a column while the only Air China employee, a man who looks like my friend Hanzhi’s grandfather circa 1992 is tending to all the passengers who are bringing overweight luggage on board, and for some reason, they are all South Asian, except for one man who has a dog, and he is a nice Chinese man who looks concerned when I start hopping around and leaving my luggage unattended. Anyone who stands behind me in line gets to A)be attended to before me by the only Air China employee at the Air China counter, and B) have my suitcase fall on top of their foot while I say nothing.

At 1 pm, twenty minutes before my plane is schedule to take off, I get my boarding pass and race through security and to the gates. Air China stewardesses all have straight black hair which they wear short or in a bun. They wear scarves around their neck and I am reminded of the time my poetry teacher asked me, “Hi Jenny, are you subbing for a Singapore Airlines stewardess today?” and I pulled at my purple-flowered necktie in response. A good response at that! Pulling! Brilliant.

I sit between a woman who wears five or six tiny tiny small braids in her hair and I can’t tell what her ethnicity is but when she sleeps her lips are fixed in such a way that I think of the Pringle commercials—I can’t elaborate further, and a man who is so overeager to help me with my bags that he doesn’t even mind when my jacket and my laptop falls on his head. He looks confused for a minute and then grabs my bags out of my hands and takes it to the front of the cabin. I’m gladdened by his good-heart but as all seemingly innocent things, they have a sinister undertone. As for my seemingly good thing, he talks to me every five minutes. He reads one newspaper throughout the entire twelve hour flight and he analyzes the butter we receive with our meal and puts it in front of me.

--That's for your bread if you like to have some cream with your bread.

--And this?

--A towelette if you'd like to wipe your mouth after or before the meal.

I don't fault him for not knowing these things. In about another few hours most people I encounter will think I'm a retard of sorts. A grown woman, 22, now 23 years old, but with a vocabulary of a first grader, and the linguistic ease of a third grader who has a speech impediment. That's my fate. My current fate is trying to sleep while the man on my left reads a newspaper with great relish and with his two elbows greatly jutting into my side so I sleep towards the woman on my right who has the little tiny braids, as if she were my mother, and she's not because she's very very strange, and the only thing she does is sleep and at one point mention that at a mall she got a free gift, which was most certainly not pertinent to whatever topic of conversation was presently at hand.

The minute I wake up from my nap the man next to me shows me the duty-free catalog and asks me to pick which makeup case I find more impressive, the Lancome makeup set or the Shiseido makeup set and I say the Shiseido because it has more colors and will have a greater chance of being liked by whoever is receiving the gift, but I personally find the Lancome to be more elegant and he shakes his head with a great big smile and tells me that if I were awake he could have asked for my advice but left to his devices he picked the Shiseido set.

--That's the one I got.

--Oh, great. Good choice. Very good choice.

--And you? You would have picked?

--That one too. Yes.

He has a funny accent and it turns out he's from a very cold place near Harbin and Heilongjiang. My mother tells me today that my grandfather on my dad's side spent ten years in Heilongjiang working on the farms during the Cultural Revolution. The weather channel says it's -12 to -18 degrees Celsius and I feel embarrassed each time I complain about the cold. The entire flight tires me out. I sleep for one hour and then talk to the man next to me for ten minutes. When I wake up the fourth or fifth time I find him standing up next to a few other people and looking out the emergency window.

--It's good to stand up and stretch huh?

I say this in a meaningless kind of way, but I feel bad that I keep turning away from him in mid-conversation to pretend to sleep and then to actually sleep, so I say this to him.

--Yeah. All that sitting is bad for the legs. You should stand too for a while.

--Oh. Haha. Yeah.

Speaking of hahahas, the story of how my cousin Jing met her boyfriend is a delightful story but the kicker climax is when my younger cousin Jiayang, aka Young Jenny, writes my cousin Jing's now-boyfriend an email that goes like this (but of course, in Chinese!):

Hello you!

So you met my cousin today. What'd you think of her hahahahahahaha!

Young Jenny

Here's the reply:

Dear JiaYang.

So good to see you and your family. Your cousin is very pretty and seems like a nice girl. Hope all is well.

Yours Truly,
My Cousin's Current Boyfriend Whose Name I Do Not Know

When I see my cousin Young Jenny on my 23rd birthday she is all smiles and she says this: something something something something something something something something HAHAHAHAHA!

It's official. I'm a dunce. When my fifteen year old cousin talks I can only understand 10% of the things she says.

D-U-N-C-E. Everyone's afraid of me.