Mid Autumn Festival in Beijing

This would be our very first Mid Autumn festival away from home back in Malaysia. When we were back home, mid autumn festival were celebrated with my in laws and my youngest sister. After dinner, we would gather at our car porch, tabled laid with all sort of biscuits, cookies and the most important of all, moon cakes of every variety and fillings.

Lanterns will be hung across the car porch while the children will have a ‘FUNstatic’ time playing with their individual lanterns and candles of course. Lanterns back home comes in different shapes and sizes and Ryan’s favorite of course was his ‘Ultraman’.

However, we have much difficulty trying to lay our hands on some decent lanterns here in Beijing. We simply could not find them anywhere. We thought that we did not know where to search and hence we have been asking every local we came across, from the waitresses at Jamaica Blue, our daily morning coffee hang out to the illegal taxi drivers whom have became our friends over the last nine months.

One of these taxi drivers said he knew of a possible mall where we could get some and took us there last Saturday morning. We spent over an hour there before we came across this ONE store that has some in stock. They were nice and inexpensive, approximately RMB10 each. We bought six. Now that we have our lanterns, the next item to hunt for were the candles and that we have to buy from another store (and the only one who carries them) for RMB20 for 8 pieces per pack.

Finally, we have our lantern and our candles. Then we realised that we do not have any stick to tie the lantern to. We asked our driver friend if he knew where we could buy some. To our pleasant surprise, he drove us around on the way home and stopped by the road side, where he saw some broken branches, got down and stripped some sturdy ones for us.

With that solved, we were ready for the night. We got our Ayi to cook some noodles for the night and we have invited Coleen and her son, Slevin who is also Ryan’s best friend and neighbour to join us that night. It will be their first taste of celebrating mid autumn festival. Being Americans who have stayed in China for the last 6 years, they have heard about it but never really experienced it.

To complement the fried noodles, I made some simple appetizers for the night, mango salsa, oven baked crispy potato skin with mash potato and minced beef, and oven grilled crispy thinly sliced French loaf with minced beef dip.

 Mango Salsa, a combination of ripe mangoes, red capsicum and chopped mint leaves with lemon zest and lemon juice.

Oven Baked Crispy Potato Skin with mash potato and minced beef filling.

Oven grilled thinly sliced French Loaf with Minced Beef dip

Our newly employed Liew Ayi’s birthday falls on the following week. In keeping with our tradition and practice, where we have always celebrated our helper’s birthday back home, we bought a small birthday cake for her but kept it as a surprise. When we brought it out and sang her the birthday song, I can tell that she was pleasantly shocked.

 The children helping Liew Ayi to blow off the candle on her birthday cake.

To complete the night, we lit our lanterns and walked around the park within our apartment’s compound with Zoewe, our toy poodle happily tagging along. To our amazement, we made several heads turned when we walked past them with our colourful lanterns and some even stopped to take pictures of us with their mobile phones.

We are unsure of our future plans next year and whether we would still be in Beijing for the next mid autumn festival but for now, this year’s mid autumn festival was indeed something different from the previous years and an interesting chapter in our adventures in China.

Home Cooked Birthday Dinner

The month of September and October this year would be rather busy months of all of us here in Beijing. There will also be several rather significant changes in our daily routine.

For one, my mother in law who has so graciously came to help taking care of the children when we first came to Beijing will be going back to Malaysia after helping us for almost a year. We have also engaged a full time Chinese helper (ahyi) for 8 hours daily to help clean and cooked dinner. Ryan is already going back to school and Chenya is due to start  her first pre-school in November.

Wife has a rather full travelling schedule for the next 3 weeks of so, starting with travelling  back to Malaysia and then to Singapore for some training, after which she would be flying off to Seattle for another week or so. And I will be staying in Beijing to handle to the two super hyper active `monsters’ during this entire period. Lucky me.

Until Chenya goes to school in November, there would be no more early morning coffee or breakfast alone like I used to. Chenya would definitely be tagging along and with her around, there would be no more updating of Facebook or my blogs during my routine early morning breakfast.

With wife being away during her birthday, we had a simple pre-birthday celebration for her at home and as promised, I arranged to cook some simple dishes for her on Sunday.

On Saturday, we made arrangements to visit our favourite market at Sin Yuen Lee, where we could look for the ingredients and items I need. And the following are what was laid on the dinner table last night with some help from my local ahyi who I must said, was a little taken aback with me, teaching her to cook.

I prepared two appetizers for the night.

To start with, we have oven grilled Tiger Prawns marinated simply with some salt, black pepper, sugar and olive oil, served with Mango Salsa, a combination of ripe mangoes, red capsicum  and finely chopped mint leaves with lemon zest, lemon juice and salt and black pepper to taste. I must said that the Tiger Prawns are definitely much cheaper here in Beijing as compared to getting them back home in PJ. We had 7 tiger prawns measuring over 6 inches end to end that only cost us less than RMB50 (RM25).

The next appetizer was something that I did not expect to do but when she saw these life scallops at the market, she said that that would be nice to have. I have always worked with frozen scallops back home in Malaysia and have never work with life ones before. 1kg of these (numbering 8 scallops with shell) was RMB45 (RM22.50) which sounded rather reasonable to us. Instead of my normal oven baked scallops with Japanese mayonnaise, and since I don’t know where exactly to get them, I was thinking about a different cooking method.

And this is what we have. Oven baked life scallops, marinated with some salt and black pepper and Chinese cooking wine, baked with olive oil and finely chopped garlic. My ahyi gave an excellent proposal which I will definitely try and that is top the baked scallops with some glass noodles.

The soup is simply one of our all time favourite, especially my mother in law and Ryan, a creamy broccoli soup.

I had originally wanted to grill some beef steak as the main course but I have done that quite a couple of times and I am getting bored with that. Instead, I thought of doing a beef kebab with BBQ sauce. Hence, I bought some Australian sirloin beef from April Gourmet (a chain of small supermarkets catering for the expat market in Beijing, the other two being Jenny Wang and Jenny Lou). I also bought some green and yellow capsicum and large onions from the local wet market not far from our apartment.

The sirloin beef was cut into smaller cubes, marinated with salt, black pepper and BBQ sauce and left in the refrigerator for about 4 hours. Before grilling them, the beef cubes were pan seared with some olive oil till the sides were slightly browned before they were put into some wooden skewers alternated with pieces of yellow, green capsicums and large onions. The wooden skewers have been soaked in water for a good one hour prior to this to ensure that they don’t get burnt in the process of grilling. They were then put into the oven and grilled at 250 degrees for approximately 5 minutes before they were served.

We had a good dinner at home and I washed the food down with a glass of Shiraz Cabernet from Jacobs Creek Winemakers Selection.

Now that the pre-birthday dinner is over, my wife is now hinting that she would love to have lobster next because the life lobsters at the Sin Yuen Lee wet market was simply too tempting to resist. And that is something that I have never attempted before and it is going to be interesting.

No Longer Available

My wife's laptop has been invaded! Yes. Invaded by stickers of every kind, from Ultraman to tiny burgers!

Suddenly, her laptop no longer looked so serious nor 'corporate'.

My wife often comes home telling that some colleagues or acquaintance were telling her that she does not look like one who already had two children at home. Of course, each time she tells me these, she is is smiling and grinning from ear to ear and I guessed that is something every lady would love to hear.

To be honest, she definitely does not look her age and she always complained that I do not say that enough in front of her. So, I might as well document that down here in my blog.

When she showed me the laptop and what the children have done with their newly acquired stickers, I was telling her that it is one way that the children are labeling or branding her as a 'Mommy', 'Married','Taken' or simply 'No Longer Available'.

What would be your first impression when you see this laptop?

Back to School

The long summer holiday is finally over today.

Ryan is finally going back to school and he is more than glad because he just cannot wait to get back to see his favourite teacher, Jeff and his pretty assistants, Mari and Grace and to play with his classmates. The two long months of summer holiday have been challenging especially with Chenya at home as well, because Chenya tends to fight with her brother quite a fair bit. Most of the time, it was Chenya who bullied Ryan rather than the other way round. She bullied her brother so much so that Ryan spend most of his time in the master bedroom, watching TV and playing with his toys while Chenya stayed in the living room with her toys.

The moment they are together, Chenya would already have either scratched or beat her brother, or comes crying that her brother had beaten her, although most of the time, it is the other way around, all within 10 minutes.

This morning while Ryan was getting ready for school, Chenya was getting ready too. She said that she wanted to go school too, complete with her school bag and waiting. I just hope that she is as eager to go to school when she actually has to go and not have to be drag up the school van every morning, kicking up a fuss, screaming and crying.

We have already registered Chenya into the same school and although the term actually starts today, we have asked to delay Chenya starting date till November. That is because the first week of October is going to be China National Holiday and after that we would be going to Juizhaigou for a holiday. Hence, we thought it is best to start her in November so that we don’t have to waste paying for her school fees in October when she is going to be away from school so much.  We also did not want to start her off in September and then having to re-orientate her all over again in November after our holidays. That will save us quite a fair sum of money.

For now, daily routine is back to norm and slightly better, now that we have already engaged a full time Chinese helper (Ahyi) for 8 hours everyday to do the cleaning and cooking.

Just looking forward for Chenya to start school too.

Obsessed with Dandelion

There is no flower that attracts both Chenya and Ryan like the common Dandelion. After the harsh winter this year which ended sometime in February and when spring kicked in, there were so many little white tiny fluffy star burst like flower popping up everywhere – the dandelion.

Both Chenya and Ryan were having a blast, picking them up and blowing them into the wind. 

 

I enjoyed watching them having simple fun like this and being back to the nature, running wild in the park (although it would have been much better if they were in a real natural park somewhere with clear blue skies with little air pollution, unlike the severe ones that we get in Beijing).

 

The laughter, the squeals (especially from Chenya) and the screams from Ryan as the light tiny white dandelion seeds float in the air, being carried by the wind, landing we know not where, but with a possibility of a new beginning and starting the next life cycle was something precious and memorable to me.

I can’t really recall whether I had such fun when I was younger but from the look of both my children, I can sense the true, deep and uninhibited joy of simply blowing the dandelion flowers and chasing after the seed all over the place.

 

We just went through some hot and humid summer here in Beijing, reportedly one of the hottest that most Beijingers would attest to. Autumn has arrived and the weather is slowly cooling down a little and we can see more clear blue skies in the recent weeks as compared to the hot polluted summer days.

Days are shorter now as compared to summer and soon the sun would set by 4:30 in the evening, as winter arrives. Honestly speaking, I am looking forward to the winter although it can be very cold and harsh at times, but I am looking forward to snowfall and another round of snowball fights with my son and this year, I am sure Chenya would be able to join in as well.

 

For now, with this post, I just hope and wish (if I could) remind my children when they do grow up, that the best fun and laughter and true joy sometimes comes from the simplest of things in life, such as a tiny white dandelion.

So, if you are ever depressed and frustrated anytime in the future, try picking up a dandelion and blow it into the wind, sit back and watch them float without care nor worries, wherever the wind takes them, knowing that a new beginning for them has just started.

To Fight or Not To Fight

“There was this older kid at the slide and he just pushed my son. Normally, my son would walk away but that day, he was absolutely furious. He pushed the older kid back. I had to tell him not to and get him out from the playground.” this mommy friend was sharing with us over breakfast on Sunday.

That sounds rather familiar. Incidents like this have happened so many times when Ryan was playing at the playground where other kids, especially the older ones just pushed him around. Most of the time, I would quickly stepped in and asked Ryan to politely walk away and play something else.

I am not quite sure why I always do that. Thinking back, I guessed firstly, I really do not want Ryan to get hurt and secondly I don’t want him to get into fight. Ryan would obediently walk away but mostly with a look that shouts “WHY? WHY ME? I WAS THERE FIRST! THIS ISN’T FAIR!”

Herein, is my dilemma, just as this friend later shared. We have dreamed and wanted our children to grow up to be go-getters, not afraid to go after the things that they want in life, to be motivated and to be strong enough to defend themselves in the real world when they grow up. Yet, here we are, telling them to walk way despite being bullied, to give up their rights just because they are being pushed around. So, what message are we sending to our kids exactly?  Instead of fortifying our teachings at home, I am contradicting myself when the test of courage is before him.

Should he fight back? Should he stand his ground and defend what is rightly his? Should he risk the possibilities of being beaten up, defending what is right and just? Or should he simply walk away from a fight, not wanting to create a scene and just want to be the MR NICE GUY?

I am not quite sure. Honestly, I have been taught to walk away and back off so many times as far as I could remember when I was younger, and that has grown into an adverse effect on me, where I would back off from many arguments even though I know deep in my heart that I am right. For the same of so-called diplomacy, I have many times held my tongue and allow others to occasionally step all over me, only to feel frustrated later. Maybe, it is our Asian, in particular MALAYSIAN culture, to be always polite, seen by others as a sign of weakness to a point of being exploited.

I have seen very aggressive Caucasian children and mainland Chinese kids are no different when it comes to aggression in getting what they want. Is it time for Ryan to learn to step up and to be equally aggressive to defend what is rightly his?

What do you think? Maybe, that is one reason why I started him on his Shaolin kung fu classes, not only to build discipline but also to build self confidence, knowing that he will be able to defend himself adequately.

My Shaolin Master

Ever since Ryan was a young boy around 2, he has always been interested in `fighting’ and keen to demonstrate his `kung fu moves’ that he picked up from his favourite Ultraman movies. There are so many of his photographs that he strikes up a pretty impressive pose with his kung fu stance.

I, for one, have always been interested in kung fu although I don’t have the opportunity to learn when I was young. I remembered that I wanted to learn tae kwan do but was not allowed by my parents because they feared that I would be using those skills to fight even more, not that I fought a lot. I guessed parenting mindset then and now are significantly different. Modern parents nowadays would want their child to learn as much skill set as possible to equip them for hopefully a brighter and better future. Moreover, such opportunities or classes were not so easily available then and even if they were available, were rather expensive.

I am always impressed with my dear doctor friend, Dr Liew (our children’s paediatrician and also my long time class mate) who practised wushu. I remembered him demonstrated his wushu moves during one of our class parties back in ACS Ipoh when we were in Form Four and I had been mesmerized since then. I wanted Ryan to pick wushu as much as possible, knowing that it would do him a world of good, not only learning a skill to fight, but some form of discipline and to channel his interest in fighting in a positive way. Unfortunately, I was told that he can’t be practising till he was four. Hence, we have to wait.

Now that he has turned five, we started immediately to find out where and how we could enrol him for some classes to start him off. We were originally thinking of either starting him on junior golfing lessons or kung fu. However, I still think that at his age, kung fu would be a better choice since he is much more flexible now and is a skill set that would instil better discipline and self confidence.

While looking around, we were informed by one of our new neighbour who has also become a good friend and their son, Slevin, Ryan’s best friend is taking Shaolin kung fu lessons. We wasted no time to get Ryan there for a trial class and he is hooked. He loves it and from what we observed, he is totally focus and agile for this particular sport.

It was his third lesson yesterday after missing several weeks due to our travelling. We were happy and glad that the trainer actually came over and commented that he was totally impressed with Ryan’s commitment and focus during his lessons and training and is of the opinion that he has the talent to pick up this sport.

It seemed that my son is living my dreams. I am not looking forward for him to become another Jet Lee but I would be contended that this discipline would mould him into a better person.