Yeah, I lived There Once

For the first few months Julie, the girls and I felt like tourists on an extended stay. More and more, it’s beginning to feel like we do actually live here.

A while back, I was chatting with an acquaintance who said he lived in Ecuador a few years ago. When I probed a little deeper, it turns out he had been there for just over a month one summer. I thought that was kind of pushing the definition of “I lived there.”

While waiting for a train, the girls and I got into a discussion about what exactly constitutes “living” somewhere. I was in Japan for twelve months back in the late eighties. I think it’s pretty safe to say I lived there. I was in London once for three days. We can all agree that I definitely did not “live there.”

When I was sixteen, I spent six weeks in Beirut Lebanon. Is if fair to say “I used to live in Beirut”?

The girls and I (it was a very long train ride) decided that it was not only a question of duration, but there are also certain criteria that have to be met before you can say “I lived there.” We came up with a point system.

We submit the following for your consideration.

1 point You receive mail while there.
4 points You do not have in your possession a return flight ticket.
3 points You’ve rented videos from the same store more than three times.
1 point You celebrate a birthday while there.
1 point You use a screwdriver.
2 points You are there for both Thanksgiving and Christmas.
1 point You drop off clothing at a dry cleaners.
2 points You buy light bulbs.
3 points Women, you get your hair cut.
1 point Men, you get your hair cut.
3 points You visit a dentist for a cleaning and check up.
2 points You spend more than US$100.00 on a single visit to the grocery store.
4 points You buy a hamster for yourself. ("No Elise, we can't have a hamster.”)
7 points You give birth.
2 points You use the word “home” and realized you meant the place you’re sleeping tonight, not your address back in the States.

If your accrued over fifteen points, you definitely “lived there”. If your scored under seven points, sorry, but you are just visiting.

If you scored somewhere in between, why don’t you stay put, I’ll send you some mail at your current address. That ought to do the trick.

Or better yet, why don’t you go buy yourself a hamster.

-Jack

Copy of a Copy of a Copy

Alex is a seventh-grade boy at our school who is a non-Chinese American. He is well-liked by his fellow classmates.

Alex has this little shtick he does where he good naturedly slips into a Chinese accent. While a little stereotypical, it’s pretty good and actually quite funny. He does it a lot. It’s kind of his thing.

Because he’s genuinely funny and because he is popular with the other seventh-grade boys, they are inclined to copy whatever Alex does.

So we find ourselves in the surreal situation that we have thirteen-year-old Chinese boys doing really bad imitations of a western boy imitating a Chinese man.

Anybody else getting the irony in this besides me?

-Jack

(posted with permission)

Hot Blooded

Hallelujah!

When we returned from Christmas break, the following email was waiting for each of us in our in-box:

“Based upon the recommendation of the Hong Kong Center for Health Protection, effective immediately, International Christian School will no longer be taking daily temperature readings of every one who enters the building.”

Not that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy having my temperature taken every single time I entered the building we live and work in, but I'm glad to done be with that.

Hopefully, we all stay healthy so that we don’t have to see the return of the thermometer guns.

-Jack

picture by Annika VanNoord

Fail!

Thirty years ago, when I was in junior high, the one-word retort “psych” was in vogue. It was a shortened version of “psychological” as in “You were psyched out.” If you just pulled a fast one on your buddy or tricked him, you could add insult to injury by yelling “psych.”

Well, it’s not 1978 and we’re not in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

The equivalent I hear in Hong Kong –and that my daughters have quickly adopted- is “Fail!” As the term implies, you use it when your buddy tries to do something cool or funny and . . . fails.

Your friend tries to hurdle over that “Caution, Floor is wet” sign and trips. “Fail!”

Your classmate tosses you your pencil case but it lands way short. “Fail!”

The thing that keeps it from becoming completely obnoxious, is that I hear students –including my daughters- using it on themselves as much as on their friends and classmates. Forgot to pack socks for p.e.? “Fail.” No one laughs at your knock-knock joke? “Fail.”

I want to be young and hip so I tried it once when one of my students retrieved only five literature books from the shelf for his row of six kids. “Fail.” Instead or raising my hip quotient, it just got me a bunch of rolled eyes from my students -including my daughter. “Yeah, nice try Mr. VanNoord, but I don’t think so.”

Fail!

-Jack

Shameless Plug

I hesitate to use our blog to promote commerce, but I was recently introduce to what I thought was a really cool idea. When young friends of ours –Tone and Shannon- were expecting their first child a year ago, they solicited wisdom from family and friends. They took these quotes, compiled them, added graphics, and had the whole thing printed into a high-quality coffee-table style book.

It was so successful, that they started to get requests from people to help them put together books for their babies. They soon started doing books for birthdays, graduations, and other life milestones. They have since gone fulltime with their business.

They named their on-line business “A Whole Village” after the proverb “It takes a whole village to raise a child.”

You can check them out at http://awholevillage.com/

Sorry about the diversion. Now back to the adventure and mis-adventures of the VanNoord Family in China . . . .

-Jack