Donna Scaramastra Gorman

Your dishes may break in a move. Here’s how to ensure your marriage doesn’t.

Jennifer* had just moved to a new city where she knew no one when her husband of four years sprung the news: He was leaving on a three-month assignment to another country. Furious, this Beijing resident and mother of two did the only logical thing she could think of: she locked her husband out of the bedroom.

The couple worked through their problems and stayed together – they’re even expecting their third child early next year. But, recalls Jennifer, it wasn’t easy weathering that three-month separation with neither family nor friends nearby.

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A new kind of Thanksgiving, far from home

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. What’s not to like? There’s no need to spend weeks in overcrowded malls buying presents for uncles and siblings and kids. Instead of exchanging gifts, we gather around a table piled high with turkey and trimmings. We surround ourselves with loved ones and, after we’ve finished bickering about who forgot to bring the wine last year, after we’ve remembered that it’s never safe to talk politics with relatives, after we’ve told the kids for the thousandth time that no, they may not use the turkey drumsticks as light sabers, we take a moment to give thanks for all that we have.

We’re thankful for our health, of course. We’re thankful for our families. We’re thankful that it’s someone else’s tablecloth about to get covered in gravy.

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Learning to let go

He was a puppy in Russia and a bird in Armenia, back when he was too young to choose his own costume. He was Bob the Builder in Kazakhstan, and he refused to take the costume off for a full week after Halloween. Back home again in America, he discovered superheroes and Star Wars, so he struggled with the choices before finally settling on Batman.

We’ve celebrated Halloween all across the globe, but nowhere is the holiday quite as popular as right here in Shunyi. Last year, on our first Chinese Halloween, we ran out of candy within an hour. Witches, skeletons and other frightening creatures overran our neighborhood, proffering goody bags in tiny hands as they darted from house to house.

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Sometimes, it all seems too foreign. But with a little effort, you can bridge the gap

After months, perhaps years, of planning, you made it to China at last. Now what? This place, with its tangle of roads and signs in Chinese, can seem so intimidating that you’d be forgiven if you’re tempted to stay indoors and watch your new ayi mop the floor. Or maybe you’ll be so relieved to learn one of your neighbors is from your home country that you’ll break down in tears when she invites you over for coffee.

It isn’t always easy for expats to break through the cultural and linguistic barriers that prevent them from fully experiencing China. Some people give up entirely, settling into a routine that includes playdates and entertainment just like what they had back home. But, with a little bit of effort, you’ll find it possible to escape your expat circles and learn to maneuver outside of your comfort zone. Heck, you might even make a Chinese friend or two. So let’s get started.

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Keys to surviving the plane ride home

Maybe your kids are really good travelers: They don’t whine, don’t get sick or kick the seat in front of them. If so, go ahead and skip this article.

For the rest of us, however, the time is here. That’s right – the dreaded summer travel season. And though you’ve been dreaming of family reunions, poolside barbeques and trips to your favorite restaurants back home, there’s still one major obstacle between you and your dreams: the plane ride home.

We all have horror stories about unsympathetic fellow travelers. Deborah Vaughan of Seattle recalls a recent flight with her 3-year-old, when she slept fitfully through the flight, vaguely aware that a child nearby was crying, only to be suddenly shaken awake by another passenger demanding to know why she wasn’t giving her daughter a pacifier. Apparently, the other passenger thought Vaughan’s daughter was the source of the noise, even though she wasn’t.

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Finding my way to the hospital

The night I drove Kyra to the emergency room, it was raining. Not only that, but the roads all over Shunyi were being repaved. Everything was torn up, with traffic cones haphazardly scattered to mark the places where the manhole covers were missing.

I’d only been distracted for a moment (that’s what everyone says in the ER, I imagine), but that moment was all it took for Kyra to grab a bottle of medicine, open it up, and chug the entirety of its contents. I had to get her to the hospital, and quickly.

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Beijing expats who do both

I was interviewing a source for this article when my eldest son barged into my office, clutching his throat and coughing wildly. He’d been sick, and it seemed his cough had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. Unable to hang up the phone, I tossed a can of soda his way, figuring it might calm his cough long enough for me to finish the interview. By the time I emerged from my office 20 minutes later, he was coughing so badly that we had to leave for the hospital.

Here I was, writing an article on how to balance working life with parenting, while my son was writhing around on the floor, gasping for breath. Clearly, there are no easy answers.

Nevertheless, many Beijingers manage to make it work, even starting their own companies while simultaneously raising families. I went in search of one who could tell me how to do it properly.

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I was desperate when I sent the e-mail out that evening: “Help!” I wrote to the Beijing-wide online support group to which I belong. “My 20-month-old hid her last two pacifiers, and none of us can find them. Unfortunately, she won’t go to sleep without them. Has anyone seen them for sale out there in the wide world?”

In the two days since my daughter had tucked her pacifiers away, no one in the house had gotten any sleep at all. Every hour or so throughout the night, Kyra would wake up and grope around in her crib for the missing “pa.” She’d then begin wailing inconsolably – a heart-rending, glass-cracking sob that drove my husband from the room, leaving me behind to explain, yet again, that Mommy simply didn’t have a pacifier to give her.

I had looked. I searched in drawers, in trash cans, inside of shoes, in Lego bins and toy chests. I’d even searched the dishwasher and the bushes outside the front door. But pa, it seemed, was gone for good.

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Preparing your kids for college

Congratulations! You’ve made it past the potty-training phase, the learning-to-read phase, the first crush, maybe even driver’s ed. However, now is not the time to rest – you’re about to face that mother of all challenges: It’s time to get your child ready to go off to college. We talked to experts in Beijing and overseas to figure out just what you can do to help your child find the way to the right college.

Choosing the Right School

First, according to Hamilton Gregg, the high school counselor at ISB: Back off. “We want kids to be in charge of the college process,” he says. “It’s the first time in a child’s life when he makes his own choice. He needs to choose his own college and find his way to success. We try to eliminate parents, relatives and friends from the process.” In other words, even if everyone else in your family has attended Yale, don’t expect your children to want to go there, and don’t push your own choices on them.

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Learning to count in the Forbidden City

When I arrived in Beijing, the only words I knew were “ni hao,” “zaijian” and “xie xie,” which I found were enough to navigate Jenny Lou’s. After a week, however, I had to venture out, and so I went to the Forbidden City, simply because it was one of those places on our list of things to see.

We piled into a taxi, my husband up front chatting in Chinese with our driver, and me in the back with 1-year-old Kyra in my lap between our two boys, each at a window. I sat there, alternating between worry that I couldn’t grab all three seatbelt-less kids in case of an accident and annoyance that I couldn’t understand what was being said up front.

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