Happy "We Kicked the Imperialist Americans Out of Our Country" Day

On April 30, 1975, the North Vietnamese sucessfully stormed Saigon and the southern forces surrendered. The Americans started evacuating the embassy a few days before. How surreal to be visiting Vietnam now, on this day in particular. I was born in August 1975, a mere four months after the handover of power in Saigon. Yet, we Americans have all been raised with the knowledge of this war, with stories of the war.

We visited the War Atrocities Museum in Ho Chi Minh city yesterday. While the museum itself was not as shocking as it could have been, the vast collection of photos on display of victims of this war - both Vietnamese and American - broke my heart.

War cannot be entered into lightly. May we never forget the lessons of the past.

Dong?

Did you know that one US dollar is 16,000 dong? I gave out some really wild tips last night after I got to my hotel in Ho Chin Minh (at 4 am). My breakfast this morning cost so many dong that I almost couldn't do the math. It's just not right, people.

But our afternoon snack before wandering through the Reunification Palace? One strawberry shake, one lemon soda and a plate full of the freshest shrimp and pork rice paper rolls ever made on the planet = 102,000 dong.

Love it. I am going to eat the whole country.

My Story - Part 1

I opened my email this morning to a really nice request from Johnny for some details of my story. Even though I feel awkward, I am happy to answer questions - primarily because I have enjoyed reading his story so much.

I want to start with a picture. This is actually one of the family life pictures that went into our adoption dossier. It is crazy how you take a billion pictures, but somehow so very few of them seem right for the CCAA.

This was taken on a group ski trip to Austria - the very first Ski Other Countries.* It was our first international trip together, and it was a lovely, lovely time - despite the fact that we were both sick as dogs almost the whole visit. We are on the top of some castle museum in Saltzburg here. Not sure if you can tell, but we were freezing our a**es off.



When the social worker came to do our inquisition, she asked us to talk about what we did for fun. We both said: we travel. Homegirl was not satisfied with that response, though, and kept asking the question. We were confused as to why she needed a better answer. Yes, we scuba dive and ski, but to really understand us, you have to know that, between the two of us, we visited ten countries last year: Egypt, India, Cambodia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, the UAE and the United States. Besides China and the United States, Chris has lived in Canada and the United Kingdom, while I have lived in the Philippines and Bangladesh. Completing our child abuse clearances and compiling a list of all the places we have lived for the last 20 years was a nightmare.

Traveling is in my blood. I was raised in Asia as a child, and it gave me an insatiable wanderlust. Chris lived all over North America when he was young, and his dad, uncle, and grandparents were born in the Netherlands. We are peas in a pod, he and I.

The problem with all of this is that it really makes us weirdos back home. Our friends have a hard time relating to us. They either think that our stories are not interesting or (even worse) they think we are bragging when we talk about life in China or our latest trip to Angkor Watt. When we were preparing to move to Shanghai, one of Chris' friends took me aside and told me I was crazy, completely crazy to move to China. As I looked at his face, I could tell that he would never understand why we were going. Would never understand that China's growth right now is one of the most interesting phenomena on the planet. Would never understand that there is life - good fulfilling life - outside of Atlanta.

Chris and I lived in Chicago for three years before we came to China. We moved there together (but initially lived separately...), got married there, bought a house together, adopted Frankie. But we kept talking about how neat it would be to live outside of the United States again.** So I told my work that we wanted to do an international rotation - a long one, somewhere cool. Surprisingly, they agreed to send us here, first to Shanghai and now Beijing. So we packed most of our stuff into storage, shipped some clothes and a nice mattress to Shanghai and flew halfway across the world with our dog.

And that is how we came to China.

*We have organized two other SOC trips with our friends since this one: to Canada and to Argentina. All three have been riots. The next one is probably to Japan in the very near future (we hope).

**It is much, much easier to live internationally when you have someone with whom you can share the experience, vent your frustrations, laugh at the silliness. When I came back to the United States after living in Manila in 2000, I decided that I would not do it again unless I was married.

Where are all the Bees?

Oh my Lord! Have you seen this story? Do you know the honeybees are disappearing from the United States? A full population collapse in less than a year!?

Who cares, you say? Well, farmers care. Anyone who eats food grown by farmers should too.

My gracious.

Stitchin'

I am over a year late to the party. Every one else has been on the Stitchettes bandwagon for some time. Truth be told, I was a little wary. The very thought of embroidery brought horrific flashbacks of all of the *shudder* cross stitch that I did as a teenager.

But I have visions of a crib quilt for Miss G with these girls featured in several embroidered blocks. Something like these. So, fears aside, I stitched one up. And she is indeed cute.



Ms. Lang's Stitchette patterns are available here.

Singapore in April - Trip #2

You Know You Travel Too Much When

Your passport is less than a year old and it already needs new pages.

The only time you have to get new pages is during a business trip to Singapore.

You have memorized your passport number - and your China Visa number.

You know exactly which security line to pick in the Beijing airport for domestic flights.

You know which China airports have Starbucks and/or internet.

You avoid the first flight out of PEK because that is the one with all of the obnoxious American Chamber of Commerce tour groups.*

You know that taking the bus from HongQiao to downtown Shanghai is often faster than waiting in the taxi line. And it only costs 4 kuai.

You know that Air China Business is worse than Singapore Airlines Economy.

You regularly tell your driver as he drops you off at the airport that you have no idea when you will be back.

You buy all your makeup at the dutyfree stores in airports.

You intentionally buy two sizes of perfume: regular and travel.

You know which shops to hit at each airport during a layover - Jim Thompson in Bangkok, Liberty and Smythson in Heathrow, Khiel's in Hong Kong, the bookstore in Dubai, every single store in Singapore, and no stores in Bangalore**.

You recognize the Singapore Airlines flight attendants.

* No, I will not apologize for that comment.
** Worst airport experience ever. Well, except for the time in Guayaquil when the drug dog identified a ham sandwich in my bag. But that was situational.

(Cheap) Art

When Chris' parents were here for Chinese New Year, we went to a big touristy mall to look at souvenirs and gifts for their friends at home. I found these cute little watercolors of kids that I bought for 12 kuai each (around US$1.50). Handmade art, for reals. We had them framed locally and, last week, we finally bought sticky hooks needed to hang them on the tile in Miss G's bathroom.



Well, three of them are bathroom pictures and one is for inside the closet. With framing and everything, these four pictures cost less than US$20.

All in all, I am quite pleased with them.*

* Notice the fingerprints? Yeah, I'm classy. Darn you, new SLR!

First Dolls

This past weekend, I made some of the First Dolls from Making Waldorf Dolls by Maricristin Sealey. These guys were incredibly simple to make and turned out to be pretty cool. The bodies are made from poly-cotton velour, so they are really snuggly. The heads are wool, but the book says that they will still be machine washable on the delicate cycle.



I need to find little jingle bells that I can sew into the tip of the caps. Each cap is then securely sewn to the head so there is no danger of baby extracting the bell and choking. But where to find jingle bells in Beijing? Hmmm, perhaps another trip to the fabric market is needed.

The pink one will be part of a gift for friends of ours in Shanghai who are expecting a baby girl in June. I also made her another petal bib from Leigh Radford's One Skein. Love that pattern.

Inspiration: Beatrix Potter

Chris and I watched the movie Miss Potter with Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor today. Such a sweet little film. It really reminded me of how much I love this woman's work. I also did not realize just how difficult it was for a female artist to be taken seriously in a man's world, less than one century ago. If she hadn't been born into a wealthy family that could "indulge" her quirks, we would be bereft of these books that we all know and treasure.

And the world would have been lesser for it.



Beatrix Potter's original The Tale of Peter Rabbit is now in the public domain in the United States. Images in this post are courtesy of Project Gutenberg, which is a resource that I highly recommend.

Obligatory language: This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

A Road Well Traveled

A wood carving of St. George slaying the dragon, found in the Coptic quarter of old Cairo

Someone wrote to me this week saying that "The Bible clearly states that women cannot be Elders." Now, I come from a Protestant Church and tradition that believes the opposite, so I was a bit taken aback by this statement. All this week, I have been studying to see if this could possibly be true. My reading and discovery has shown me, at least, that the Bible is not clear on this issue, not clear at all.

Peter himself says that Paul, whose writings are often used as reasons to deny women positions of leadership in the Church, is difficult to understand.

His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures to their own destruction. (NIV, 2 Peter 3:16)

So what have I learned this week? Here is a sampling.

- Many people point to Paul's listing of the qualifications for Elders in 1 Timothy 3:1-7 and Titus 1:6-9 as evidence that God meant this office for males only. When you read the text in English, it may appear to be so, as the language appears to be male. However, we have to delve back into the original Greek to see if that was indeed so. I don't read Greek, so I am at a severe disadvantage here. But people who do read Greek note that words that are often translated as "man" in some versions of English Bibles are more appropriately translated as "people" or "anyone" in the original language. The same is true for other Greek words signifying office, as Suzanne McCarthy notes here.

Here is a trustworthy saying: If anyone sets his heart on being an overseer (footnoted as 'Traditionally bishop'), he desires a noble task. (NIV, 1 Timothy 3:1)

Some Bible editions translate the word ei tis, which is provided as "anyone" in the NIV verse above, as "man." Not so.

- When Jesus was in Bethany at Simon's house, he was anointed by a woman, Mary, with perfume. When the disciples (specifically Judas in John's accounting) rebuked Mary for this act, saying that it was wasteful, Jesus rebuked Judas saying, She is preparing me for burial.

It is important to recognize that Mary's anointing of Jesus was a priestly act. Everyone present at the anointing and first century Christians reading the accounting of the story later would have recognized it as such. If Jesus did not believe that women should perform priestly acts, then he would have rebuked Mary. Instead he rebuked the disciples. This story is so important that it is told in three out of the four Gospels, in all but Luke. (Matthew 26:6-13, Mark 14:3-9, and John 12:3-8)

-During the time of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, the women were ever present. According to Matthew 27:55-56, they were watching from a distance, having followed Jesus from Galilee to care for his needs. The 12 disciples were in hiding, in fear of political persecution. Why, then, were the women not hiding even though they had also been publicly associated with Jesus? Why were they allowed to approach the tomb even though Pilate has expressly ordered it secured so that the disciples would not steal the body (Matthew 27:64)? The simple answer is that women were not considered a threat, as they were not allowed to hold leadership roles in that society and would not have been viewed as capable of doing anything consequential.

Here is the interesting part: soon after Jesus' death and resurrection the situation is quite different. When Saul (later Paul) is searching for followers of the Way, he specifically seeks out and is persecuting both men AND women (Acts 9:2). So why would Saul care to find and arrest female followers of Jesus? Because they were now free to speak and teach of him, spreading the Word alongside men. That made them equally dangerous in Saul's eyes. There was a shift in women's place in the religious community that directly resulted from Jesus' coming.

I am not a theologian, so I am not prepared to enter into scholarly debate on these issues. Going back to the original topic at hand, though, I feel that I am pretty confident in saying that the Bible does NOT clearly say that women cannot be Elders. If you are interested in this topic, I encourage you to read the work of many, many people who have thought about this from a scholarly perspective.

Here are some easily accessible writings related to this issue that I found to be particularly eloquent.

Junia: The Apostle, by Suzanne McCarthy
The Scholarly and Fundamentalist Approaches to the Bible, by Peter Kirk
Presbuteras, by Kevin Knox

I have also ordered a tremendous number of books on Amazon on the writings of Paul, women in the early Church, and other related topics. It takes a billion years for books to reach me here in Beijing (not really, but a while), so it may be some time before I can read through them. If I discover any other resources, I'll be sure to post them here.

Thanks for listening.

Let Down Your Long Hair

I finally finished the hair on one of my New Year's babies. The delay in completing him was due to many reasons: forgetting to order the mohair from Australia, waiting for the order to arrive, staring at the yarn next to my bald baby for the longest time. But now he is done. Over the past months, I have grown to understand that he is meant for a special little boy we know, whom we hope to visit in person this July.

Here is a better look at the hair in question. Doesn't the boucle add lovely texture and character?



I promise I will not repeat this shot when I have a live baby as a subject. On second thought, I really shouldn't promise anything at all.



Chris saw the baby a few weeks ago with his hair half finished and hanging down, and immediately named him Rapunzel. But that is not right. Not right at all. I have stared at him for a while now, trying to figure out his true name. But maybe it is not up to me, or Chris, to name him. Perhaps that job is for his friend to be. Welcome to the family, baby with no name.

Thinking About Today

Chris and I had the immense fortune to spend two weeks in Egypt last summer. I was impressed by many things during our visit there, but I was really intrigued by the Coptic Christian quarter of Cairo, in particular the Coptic museum. The museum had a few displays discussing Gnosticism, specifically the political battle between the Gnostics and other Christian groups that was waging during the time that both Timothy and Titus were written. The Gnostic scrolls which have given us so much scholarly insight into that period were discovered in caves outside of Cairo, hidden there by people who fled from Ephesus. When people who read ancient Greek have examined these scrolls, they have discovered numerous and sometimes shocking examples of the heretical teachings and writings that inspired Paul to write the very passages in question. First Timothy was explicitly written in opposition to heretics, most notably the Gnostics. A fuller understanding of culture helps us to reconcile seemingly contradictory writings by Paul in these books.

How wonderful it is that our God is complex and mighty, that he challenges us intellectually and culturally to think about his teachings in such a deep and difficult way.

There and Back Again

Chris and I just took a quick three day trip to Singapore. I had to go for business, and airfares were so cheap that I was able to convince Chris to come along. It was a good thing because I missed him desperately while he was away in Shanghai and then Denmark for the last three weeks. We had a really nice time. Singapore was so very sunny and green and wonderful. Instead of being my normal cranky pants, I was smiley and almost giddy.

Returning to dreary, dusty Beijing would have been a bit of a let down if it weren't for all of the flowers for sale on every street corner. We bought two big pots for the back patio and a smaller one for the front door. A guy came over yesterday to fill them up with loads of color. He had to go back for more flowers, in fact. After all that work (not by me mind you), our house is starting to look a bit brighter. Notice we picked up a new camera too?



Happy Easter every bunny!

Softie Awards

About a month ago, I stayed up until 11 pm Beijing time to have the chance to purchase one of WhileSheNaps' fabulous creations. I was so pleased to be able to buy one of her unicorns and a bird. These are examples of "Mom's" babies that I mentioned earlier.

Yesterday, the softie awards were announced, and it turns out that the bird, the one I bought, won for best animal! My birdie is famous.

Congratulations Abby! Your art is astounding.

Hotels I Have Known

Lately, there have been many. Some days I stay in nice hotels, some days not. Three weeks ago, it was the Four Seasons Shanghai and the JW Marriott the following week. Bliss, I tell you. Almost makes the whole traveling thing OK.

This week, however, I got to stay at the Shanghai Jian Gong Jin Jiang hotel, which was conveniently located near the office, but very Chinese. This hotel wasn't so bad, actually; the bed wasn't hard as a rock. But the bathroom had the weirdest stuff for sale on the counter, like Senior Woman Trousers (15 RMB) for example. Wha? Who is checking into the hotel thinking "Crap! I forgot my Woman Trousers!"




Also, there was this lovely little hygiene container, vending all sorts of items.



There was the requisite condom, of course, but there were also these odd little "sanitary" packets that claimed to kill all sorts of sexually transmitted diseases - one for men and one for women. Whoa - what kind of hotel was this? And do people really believe a wipe with a little sanitary goo will solve those kinds of problems?

Lastly, there was a weird circular container with a compressed towel. Now, I am a grown, married woman, and I have no idea what I would do with a compressed towel. No idea. But apparently they go with condoms and people need them when they stay at a hotel.

More Bibs, Please

Who knew that bibs were the perfect airplane knitting? Well, besides socks, of course.

I'm diggin' the stripes these days, can you tell?



This pattern is from Mason Dixon Knitting, made from leftover Denin yarn. When I say leftover, I mean that I barely made it through the last row. One strap is a row shorter than the other, in fact, but you cannot REALLY tell unless you know. And now you all do.