Our main goal for coming to China as often as we do, is to have my kids become fluent in Mandarin Chinese.  Both my husband and I know how hard it will be to ask them to take an interest in the language when they get older. As both him and I have struggled with our own parents against learning Mandarin.

One of the barriers of putting our kids in school here is they require some lab work. It’s not a huge barrier, but taking your kids to the hospital to get a needle stick is never fun. However, this year, our neighborhood school started a parent participation infant class that doesn’t require the lab work. It’s great because both my kids can also be in the same class. That’s twice a week.

For the other days of the week we’re going to Gymboree. Today my daughter started art class and painted with her fingers. My son went to gym. I think these next few weeks will pass very quick for them with classes everyday.

At lunch, my mother-in-law: Nina, brought up an interesting thought.  It seems to her that people here in China are a lot more bossy of each other, in a good way.  IE: During a simple meal, people would routinely tell their family and friends to eat more, even if they already had a standard sized meal, they should have another bowl of rice or soup.  In US, if you were eating a simple meal with a good friend and you told them to eat more, they might look at you weird.

The part that is kind of off putting is that what if it wasn’t your friend or family member that was doing this, but a random stranger in the street? This is definitely something we have noticed during our stays in China, than random people would come up to us and give us random advice – as if they knew us.

Why is that?

Subsequently, we could not help but start sharing our stories of when and where we have been given advice out of the blue on the streets of China.

Once my husband and I were walking on a street with our 15 month old daughter. She had her pacifier with her because it was close to her nap time. I believe we were walking her to try to get her to sleep. A random grandma type person crossed our path and yelled at us for letting our daughter use a pacifier and said it would ruin her teeth.

Once my husband and I was at the Beijing Zoo. I was 34 weeks pregnant. A couple of grandma type persons again first asked us for directions to get out of the zoo. We told them. Then, looking at my bulging belly, one of them told my husband that he should not sleep with me for the next few weeks.

Coincidentally right after we had this fun conversation about how it’s just so different here in China and how in US people just don’t butt into other people’s business – it happened again. My mother-in-law, I, and my son walked my husband out to the gates to wait for his ride to send him back to US.

Yet again, a grandma liked person started talk to us by asking “Where are you going?” “Wow these are nice luggage”. “Is it expensive or cheap?” She even went ahead to lift one of them for a feel without asking. Went on to say how much my son looked like by husband. And my husband not like her mother, but if he had he would be even more handsome. Where were we from. If I was from Taiwan, was my parents still in Taiwan. On and on and on.

Maybe it’s just these grandma types in China.

Merry Christmas everybody!

I spent my Christmas at the Sheraton Resort in DaMeiSha. It’s a beach-y tourist place on the outskirts of Shenzhen, still part of Shenzhen. This 5 star hotel with its own private beach with sand shipped in from Hainan was just built in 2008.

The hotel it definitely architecturally 5 stars in itself. It was gorgeous. Just driving up to the hotel was candy to my eyes. The rooms were extremely spacious and luxurious, we had ocean-view suites with two master bedrooms and balcony.

I just wanted to write a quick post about its somewhat lack of experienced management. It may be designed to be a 5-star hotel and it may look like a 5 star hotel, but it’s people were not 5-star trained.

- My husband turned on the do-no-disturb sign when our kids were napping. Shortly after we get a phone call to our room. Thankfully it didn’t wake up the kids. My father-in-law picks up and tells them that the do-not-disturb sign is on. The staff on the phone says that they saw the sign and didn’t want to knock so decided to call instead to give us our welcoming fruit platter and wine. I believe the next words were along the lines of “are you guys crazy! we have kids sleeping here”

It’s really only funny because the kids didn’t wake up. At a couple meals it also took the waiters 20 minutes just to get a couple of classes of chilled milk for the kids. And when we asked the waiters what took so long, they actually told us not to feel rushed. It’s not really us feeling rushed, it’s our crying toddlers. Do you not hear them asking for their milk?

Otherwise it was fun getting out of the house for a day. It’s only half an hour away. We made the mistake of forgetting my daughter’s blankie, but she wasn’t too upset about it. They both got to play on the beach and swim for a little bit. We were literally like the only clients there, I loved it.

 ”It was love at first sight,” she said, “even though he was flea infested, had a terrible skin condition, was not neutered and was missing half the hair on his back.”

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2009/03/16/moneytales031609.DTL

I was in ShenZhen for about 2 months. WordPress is blocked in China, so I didn’t even bother trying to write.

I’ve been back for two weeks now. The two babies are finally over their jetlags, I’m starting to get at least 5 to 6 hours of sleep at night.

Soon I should be posting some more blogs!

Haven’t had much stuff to write about or time. So let’s see…

It’s freezing cold, and I’m heading back to China in Friday. 

My baby boy recently had his 2 month check-up, he was 16 lbs and 11 ounces. BIG BOY. 

I was thinking about what’s been going on in my life in the past few years and this is what I came up with:

2005 – Graduated college, Cruised Alaska, went to Costa Rica, started medical school

2006 – Went to China, and then China again, then cruised Europe, got married

2007 – Had my first baby

2008 – Had my second baby

I don’t plan on anything big for 2009.

I’m back from Beijing and very very jetlagged. There was a week in Beijing where I couldn’t post any blogs because wordpress.com is blocked over there. The first two weeks – I was able to post, because that hotel I was staying at routed their internet through Hong Kong – or so I heard, not like I understand these things.

Either way, definitely have more stuff to write about in terms of Olympics, opening ceremony, traveling back to US with a 16 month old baby, etc.

It’s been 7 months since I last blogged. I used to blog for The Medscape: The Differential, you can find my old posts at this link: http://medscape.typepad.com/thedifferential/pinchieh_chiang/.

I’ve finally got some free time now to try and start writing again. I will just have to see how this goes. I always have great ideas when I’m not actually writing. I think this will be a bit easier than my previous blog since I’m not always interested in writing about medicine.