haonowshaokao

It’s twelve days now since the baby was born and things are settling down into a manageable routine. He sleeps for three hours, wants to be fed, is fed, wants to be changed, is changed, goes back to sleep again. I’m not particularly experienced with babies, but apparently this puts him on the more manageable end of the scale. I’m very fortunate to have three people in the house (V, her mother and father) with not a lot to do besides cater to his whims, my part is to be out most of the time, earning money, caveman style.

Yup, still a baby.

This weekend two of V’s aunts from Hubei have come to visit, so the baby has the kind of constant attention and interest usually reserved for celebrities. Mixed race babies get a lot of attention in China anyway – people seem for some reason to be endlessly fascinated by the very idea of them (white/Chinese kids that is – the treatment of black/Chinese is not quite so pleasant). A few weeks ago I saw three mixed race kids singing and dancing on one of the evening variety shows. They weren’t particularly talented, but the whole audience were cooing over them like they were some new species of cute performing animal. I fear for their egos.

There are a lot of things I like about Chinese culture, but the way children are treated isn’t one of them. At the start kids are carried everywhere, wrapped up tightly, not allowed to run or play on their own. On public transport I’ve often seen old people stand up to offer their seats to children. The fact that most people can only have one child has exacerbated this too – some kids I’ve taught seem so spoilt that I’m apparently the first person to say “no” to them, at the age of six or seven.
It’s at that age that everything changes. As soon as a child gets to school it’s solid repetitive study for the next 15 years with no room for creativity, self-expression, daydreaming or independent thought. They have to cram as many facts and figures into their heads as possible in order to get into a higher percentile on the standardised tests, get into a better university, get a better job, earn more money. We can see this happen to a certain extent in the west, sometimes, but in China it’s the only way. Even international schools just offer a more expensive version of the same deal. It’s an arms race out there, and the only way to win it is not to take part. That’s why we’re planning to leave in four or five years, probably to come back to the UK. I’m very happy in China but I have no intention of raising my kids here.

If anyone wants to look at any more photos of the baby I’ll just be putting them up here from now on, rather than turning this into a baby-themed blog.

I guess it’s finally time that I got round to writing something about the last week, but, well, where to start? I’ll take it one day at a time, I suppose.
This time last week V went into hospital to check up on the progress of the week-late baby. The doctors were unequivocal – it needed to come out, by caesarean section, as soon as possible. V wasn’t happy about that, she’d had her heart set on a natural delivery from the start, and she suspected that the hospital were just covering for a lack of expertise in dealing with natural births. She stayed in hospital that night, and I arrived with her mother the following morning to take her to another hospital for a second opinion – but this plan never happened. When we got there she was on the baby heart monitor machine, a frightening little box that amplifies your baby’s heartbeat so that you can squirm and panic for 10 minutes a time. When the results were out the doctors had a further word with us – the baby was too big now, every movement or contraction was restricting his air supply and making his heartrate drop – a c-section was needed ASAP. We had to agree. A few hours later and we had one more monitoring session before the surgery. Around halfway through it the baby’s heart-rate started dropping dangerously. A crowd of doctors and nurses rushed in, looking panicked, and ordered me and V’s mum to leave the room. I paced up and down the corridor while she prayed and shook. It was a truly terrifying five minutes before they let us in again. The heart-rate had risen again, the dip had been caused by constriction, surgery was needed immediately.
V was wheeled up to the fourth floor. I waited outside with V’s mother, she continued praying and I continued pacing. After 20 minutes, at 5.30pm on the 25th of February 2011, we heard the sound of a baby crying from behind the door, and ten minutes later my son was wheeled out in a hospital cot, and I got my first look at him. He was BIG, 4.05kg (8lbs15oz) apparently. V isn’t a big girl, so it’s fortunate that we didn’t press for a natural birth. She came out half an hour later and we all went down to the ward. I hope she can forgive me for posting such an unflattering photo of her, but it pretty much says it all

While I took care of V, her mother looked after the baby, who was sleeping soundly. He was very pink and looked a little like me, a little like V, and a lot like Winston Churchill.

We stayed in the ward for another 5 days. I left occasionally to go home and even went to work a couple of times, but V’s mother went home for only about three hours, on the 4th day, otherwise staying on constant baby-watch. She can’t have got more than 10 hours sleep – quite a feat for a 59-year-old woman. We were all feeling pretty exhausted by the end of the stay, and tempers were frayed a bit of course, but generally all ended well.
We shared a “ward” (a little room with three beds in it) with two other mothers-babies-and-families. At times I would count how many people were there and get a figure of 17 or 18. At the start there was an immense, red-faced woman in the next bed, but she was replaced by the wife of a soldier who’d named her baby ‘TangTang’. V’s mother helpfully told them that was the name of our dog, and they didn’t speak to us for the next day.
Our baby needed a name too, of course. Since we’re in China right now it’s a Chinese name – 梅亚雷, pronounced Méi yà léi (the accents show the tones – up, down, up). An English name isn’t needed immediately, but we’ve chosen one anyhow. The closest sound I could find to “Meiyalei” is “Milan”, a Czech name and nothing to do with the city in Italy. V & I also like Milan Kundera, and Milan Baroš played in the famous 2005 Champions League final against AC Milan, so it seems to have a good lineage. The middle name is Curtis, partially because I love Curtis Mayfield and Adam Curtis, but mainly because “Milan Curtis Errington” sounds like a very distinguished individual, in whatever field he decides to try. On the other hand it doesn’t sound like a baby’s name, and people are going to ask endless questions about AC Milan. But we’ll have a nickname soon enough, and people always ask annoying questions, so it saves a bit of thinking time for them.
Yesterday V was feeling well enough, and walking around unaided, so we came home with “The Baby”, and set off the traditional firecrackers outside the apartment building. Here he is again, with his eyes open (finally!), looking a bit grumpy.

No, we don’t know why the nurses put a red splodge on his forehead

PS – a note to anyone who gets here from a link on Facebook – I’ve set up an automated thing where LJ forwards posts to FB, because the Great Firewall means I need a couple of proxies and a bit of good luck to get into Facebook at all. I only get on there for ten minutes every couple of weeks, and after I press a few buttons it tends to stop working. If you want to leave a comment could you please put it here? Ta.

The baby is six days late now, and we’re seriously considering going to the hospital tomorrow and asking for it to be induced before it’s too big.
Two days after the due date, on V’s birthday, we went into the centre of Beijing to see her sister’s new pet shop. She (“Scarlet”) has just got engaged to a guy from Hubei. He seems nice enough but he needs to stand up for himself a bit more. This month he’s been persuaded to open a pet shop in one of the most expensive areas of Beijing, apparently just to take care of Xiaobei while Scarlet goes to work. They sell dog accessories and groom dogs, but there didn’t seem to be any animals on sale, so I don’t know if you can even call it a pet shop technically. I don’t think they’re really earning enough money to break even, so if anyone in the Sanlitun area needs their dog washed, let me know.

I thought it was a bit silly to go on a day trip when the baby could come at any minute, but she persuaded me by taking along all her documents, her hospital bag and her mother, and we ended up having a nice day walking around the hutongs, checking out expensive imported food and wine. The sun even came out. It felt like the first day of spring.

A few days later and we’re back to grey smog. I’m keeping myself busy with all the organisation necessary for a new baby. We’ve picked a boys name and a girl’s name in English and in Chinese. My surname doesn’t work as a Chinese one, so we’re sticking with V’s family name for the Chinese names. This presented another problem as her family name 梅 (“mei” – Plum tree) sounds exactly the same as the word 没 (“mei”) which means “not”. All Chinese names have meanings, for example Scarlet’s given name means “outstanding culture” and her father’s means “the people awake” – however since their family name goes first it sounds like their full names are “lacking in outstanding culture” and “the people stay asleep.” Fortunately V has avoided this as her given name just means “flower” – and anyone hearing “mei hua” will just think “plum blossom” and not “without flowers.” The ones we picked had to work in a similar way, and I think we’ve got it right. We came up with plenty of ridiculous ones along the way too – “meiwenti” (no problem) “meiyou” (don’t have any) “meixi” (Lionel Messi) and “meisaidesibenchi” (Mercedes Benz).
I think we’ve got some pretty good names sorted out now, and the English names sound quite like the Chinese ones too. While we were planning these names we were for some reason under the impression that it would be normal to write both an English version and a Chinese one on the birth certificate, but a very helpful woman at the British Consulate set me straight this afternoon. Apparently we have to just register with a Chinese name if we want the baby to have a Chinese passport. Our plan is to stay in China for about the next four years or so, and if the baby had a British passport we would need to apply for a visa for him/her every couple of months, in Hong Kong, and that’s obviously a stupid idea. So it looks like when we move to the UK we’ll have to go through the process of resigning our infant from Chinese citizenship, applying for British nationality and perhaps even changing his/her name by deed poll. Such are the ways of the world.

V’s back from hospital, but the baby’s still inside. False alarms are pretty common, but the due date is tomorrow, so next time will most likely be it.
I had planned to come and stay with her in the hospital, but when I got there I found that she was sharing a room with a woman who’d just given birth by cesarean, and her baby. The only bed they had for me was a camp bed without any sheets or pillow which would block the other woman’s route to the toilet, so we decided I’d be better off at home, only a five-minute taxi journey away.
The other woman and her family were entertaining enough – particularly her four-yer-old niece who, as far as we could tell seemed to be allowed to do absolutely anything including climbing into the baby’s cot and sticking her hands into sterilized milk bottles. The woman’s husband was also one of the meekest most frightened looking men I’ve ever seen. Apparently he wasn’t happy that his wife had given birth to a daughter, but he’ll just have to get over it.
V seemed ok, her sister and mother stayed with her in the daytime and I came to hang out in the evenings. Here she is:

The baby is HUGE now, he/she must be coming out before the week’s up.

We’re all back at home now, the false alarm over, but the next blog is very likely to be from the hospital. The bags are still packed, waiting by the front door of the flat.