Ahhh, the beach.
Some folks divide the world into two groups of people: beach
people and mountain people, where – if one is of a privileged enough class to
have vacation time/money – a person would be more likely to gravitate towards
the beach (sun, surf, long lazy hours of nothingness but pina coladas) or
mountains (climbing, testing one’s skill and strength against the elements, munching
granola on snow-capped peaks).
I am a beach person: lazy and lizard-like to the core of my
being.
We spent two weeks outside the city of Sanya on the island
of Hainan, said to be “the Hawaii of China.” It did not disappoint. We were
outside the city at a grand hotel, the kind of hotel where they supply plush
white bathrobes with matching slippers to patter around the marble floors. Our
room had a balcony with a humongous bathtub that overlooked palm trees and
beach and sea. There was a killer breakfast buffet with flaky, buttery
croissants, real coffee
The hotel, The Grand Fortune Bay Hotel, included several
pools of different temperatures and depths that ran right up to the beach. One
of the pools included a host of little fishes that would nibble on you as you
lounged in it. This sort of “flesh eating fish” is a type of massage in China.
When one is walking down the back streets in the cities, one can
see shop stalls with
chairs and fish tanks set up so people can get a “fish massage” on their feet.
This pool offered the whole body version of that in
beautiful gold and blue
mosaic tiles. The fish creeped Zephaniah out, but I rather enjoyed wee, biting
nibbles up and down my legs, arms, hands, and feet.
There are several differences between a high-end beach hotel
and a mid-range one. Here are some:
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Every room faces the beach and has a fantastic
view versus some rooms having a “pool view” and some rooms having an “ocean
view”
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The lounge chairs on the beach and at the pool
are all nap-inducing in their comfort, unlike some hotels where the deck chairs
are made of vinyl strips that mark your back and legs as if you were beaten savagely
with a switch
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The towels are as thick and soft as a Midwest
snowstorm (only deliciously warm) and big enough for an Amazonia warrior
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The morning breakfast buffet includes features
like brie cheese, fresh sushi, crusty bread, poached eggs, papaya and pineapple
cut into flowers, watermelon and mango juice chilled on beds of ice instead of
cold cereal, cold, hard pastries, and Nescafe
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You can choose to eat outside on white sand
under straw umbrellas (who wouldn’t?) instead of inside by the toaster oven
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The lifeguards roll around on the beach on
Segways instead of simply strolling and twirling their whistles on idle fingers
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The bathroom amenities include shaving kits,
q-tips, bamboo combs, tooth brushes and paste, and luxurious smelling bath
salts, all packaged in gold decanters and boxes instead of bad shampoo and
watery cream rinse
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There was a scale in our hotel room; this could
go either way depending on your disposition about body image and scales. For
me, someone who only gets weighed once a year when I go in for my well check at
the doctor’s office, I was uninterested in the scale but Z found it fascinating
and would weigh himself several times and report on the differences,
speculating on the reasons (major entertainment if you are nine)
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The breakfast buffet doesn’t end until 10:30 (it
seems most hotels think 9:30 is the outside limit that they are going to wait around for vacationers
to roll out of bed and find their way to the dining room); this is huge because
it allows lazy people like me to sleep in and have a run and still amble
leisurely down for breakfast
Why would anyone ever want to leave? I would get up and go
for a long run on the coast while Zephaniah whiled away the hour watching
cartoons or The Discovery Channel (the two English channels on the hotel t.v.
were Discovery and Cinemax). I’d run along and watch the women on bikes hauling
sundresses, scarves and hats set up a spot along the surf to sell their wares;
I’d see the coconut men re-create their drink stands; I’d pass the tai chi
groups doing their morning constitution on the warming sad. Once back and after
a shower, we would head down to gorge ourselves on carbs, caffeine, fat and
sugar. After that, we waddled upstairs, put on our bathing suits and head to
the beach for some serious shelling. The beach outside our hotel was said to be
a “good shelling beach.” I think this was largely due to the few number of
people around (the closest public beach was at least a mile up the coast).
While we were there, the waves and pull of the ocean were extremely strong,
which we loved (red flag days every day except one yellow flag day). We would
bound into the ocean and get swept out and knocked down and then scurry in when
a lifeguard was approaching in order to avoid the inevitable reprimand: on red
flag days one was only allowed to “wade” in the water. After an hour or so of
being tossed about by the pull of the South China Sea, I would retire to a
chair and read; Z would continue his frolics, occasionally reporting on his
booty, scraped from the sands and surf. Eventually we would move back to the
pools for no reason other than a change in position and scenery. After the
first day, Z had burn lines where I had tan lines. After that I got serious
about applying sunscreen to his fair skin every couple of hours. His natural
complexion is the bluish white of skimmed milk, no friend of the sun. The
Chinese have products and processes to “whiten the skin” – one of the spring
water pools at the hotel promised to do just that. I told Z to steer clear of
that one, but after his first burn he said, “I think I need to sit in the
whitening pool for a while.” There was one Chinese woman on the beach whose
skin was so white she looked like Michael Jackson. A beach vacation seemed like
an odd choice for her. She was swathed in gauze and hats and black glasses,
hovering under a beach umbrella like a spooked rabbit.
As a former pool rat and life guard, I could spend weeks in
my bathing suit and wouldn’t be happier. There is, however, a down side to living
in one’s bathing suit . . . especially when one is turning the corner to 51 and
one is hanging around with a brutally honest nine-year-old. “What is the ratio
between your arm flab and your belly fat? Here. Hold still. Let me calculate.”
Me: grimace and gritting my teeth, trying to suck in my belly (no hope of doing
that with arm flab). “Hmmm. About 1:1, I’d say.” Whew. Not bad. I’ll take that.
I exhale. “No, wait. I’d say . . .” Never mind. This is why I don’t home
school. The math problems can become painfully personal. Not unlike this one
that Z is still pondering: “If mom takes 5 gingko biloba pills a day, but one
day takes 4, what will happen? She will a) have a severe loss of memory because
the gingko biloba is all of her memory, b) not much because she has no memory
anyway, c) nothing at all because she needs all five before they have any
affect. This could also be the argument for not
having a child when one is 42: when one is 51, you are the butt of geezer jokes
told and retold by your kid.
Z’s idea of a great vacation is being able to spend equal
amount of time in front of the television and at the beach/in the pool, so he
was often flipping from Discovery to Cinemax while I was drooling into,
languishing limp on a deck chair. One night he wanted to stay up late to watch
a show called “Forbidden” that had been advertised on Discovery. We ended up
watching the show all about people who had social “oddities” or engaged in
taboos. One was a man who wore a mermaid’s tail, another was a man who dressed
up like a lion and ran around London. But the one that caught Z’s eye enough
for him to want to stay up and watch the show was a philosophy professor who
was a “plushie”: a person who fetishizes stuffed animals (plushies). This
philosophy prof talked to his plushies (and they talked back, of course; he
created cutsie baby voices for each to personify their different personalities).
He had “speed dating with plushies” so that his plushies could meet/date other
plushies. It likely goes without saying that he didn’t have a love
interest/partner. Zephaniah, who is very attached to his Lambie, was captivated
by this grown-up soul mate. Lambie and Z both watched the segment and conversed
about what they saw during the show. At one point, Z turned to me and said, “I
feel bad that Lambie is so . . . basic.
I mean his plushies date and have
political causes . . . his bear is an environmentalist! Lambie is only good at
two things: snuggling and being cute. It isn’t enough!” I assured him that
Lambie was perfect and that it was, in fact, a bit odd that a grown man would still be wandering around talking to his
plushies, but that it was perfectly age appropriate for him to have Lambie.
“But why is it odd? Shouldn’t he get
to have his plushies?” O.K. Right. Yes. It’s all good. Everyone is different.
People can be all sorts of things and do all sorts of things. It is all good.
Please, oh, please. Don’t let my child grown up to be a
plushie fetishist. Before I thought my biggest worries were Z becoming a
Republican or a Fundamentalist Christian. Now I have to worry about him
becoming a Plushie? Thanks, Discovery
Channel. Reason #413 that television is inherently wicked and serves only to
damage people’s brains and lives.
The shopper in our small family was thrilled with the bazaars
and there were plenty of those to pick through. Purchases included many bead
bracelets and necklaces, a ring that has a watch in it, a laser pointer to
drive one’s mother crazy by shining it in her eyes at all hours of the day and
night, a water blaster (also designed to drive one’s mother crazy to squirt her
with cold water just as she is dozing off in a beach chair), and small statues
of Buddha that turn color when hot water is poured on them – I am not sure
whether this is a commentary on Buddha or just a cheesy tourist tchotchke. Z
has become adept at bargaining and happily uses his Chinese skills to engage
with shop keepers and street peddlers. I knew that Z was learning the language in
incremental steps forward, but I didn’t realize how much he had zoomed ahead of
me on his language skills until this trip. On the beach, without thinking, he
was writing Chinese characters in the sand instead of English. I would have to
make a conscious effort to do that. One night we went into Sanya for dinner, and
once we had settled in to a table, a woman came up and began asking him
questions (How old are you? Are you a boy or a girl? Where are you from?). She
was so delighted with this American boy who could speak Chinese, she sat down.
Before I knew it we were surrounded by ten adults all firing questions at Z who
was deftly answering without hesitation their rapid-fire Chinese inquiries. At
one point, one of them said, “Your father must be Chinese, right?” Z turned to
me and said, “This is going to be a looooong dinner.” Fortunately, once our
food came, the interrogation ended and the adoring crowd politely disbursed. During
the trip, I came to rely on Zephaniah to hail cabs and tell bus drivers and
pedi-cab drivers where our stop was; he also was aware enough of what was being
said around him to know when people were talking about us (I tune out what
people are saying unless I am talking directly to someone). He can decipher
most characters on signs which helped us get the general information we needed
to know. All those brutal hours in the Chinese classroom have paid off, if only
for the language skills. But that was the point, wasn’t it?
We also went on a
couple day trips, one to Monkey Island, a Rhesus monkey preserve on a small
island north of Sanya. There was an acrophobic-inducing cable car ride to get
to the island, way above the tree tops with a stomach-lurching view of the bay.
Once we got to the preserve, we walked around encountering monkeys everywhere.
The monkeys are quite tame; I felt as if I might step on one if I wasn’t
careful. At one point a baby monkey kept trying to jump on Zephaniah’s head.
Zephaniah was interested in the idea
of having a baby monkey on his head, but the reality of a monkey leaping at his
face caused him to finch and shriek which would cause the baby monkey to launch
back to its perch. This went back and forth several times before the monkey
finally gave up.
On the preserve there was a “monkey circus,” “monkey color
guard” and “monkey comedy show” – funny for whom, I am not quite sure, but I am
pretty sure, not fun or funny for the monkeys in sparkly vests, neck chains,
facing handlers with intimidating whips and sticks. We didn’t last long at any
of these performances. The first time a handler hit a monkey with stick for
walking the wrong way or going too slowly we stomped off in an indignant huff.
“Why can’t they train the monkeys with positive reinforcement and give them
treats instead of hitting them with sticks and yanking chains on their necks?”
Z asked as we walked off. Indeed. Where is P.E.T.A. when you need them? Clearly
they need to create a chapter in China . . . the Rhesus circus performers need
a liberation action.
Other snippets of Sanya:
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Street sweeping women in straw hats and calico
veils to keep the sun and dust out of their face
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Beach bead sellers with baskets on their arms,
dripping with strings of pearls like a treasure chest
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Smiling beetle-juice teeth, stained red and
splats of orange spittle on the streets and sidewalks
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Women in flowing dresses and floppy hats
meandering barefoot along the surf, swinging sandals in their fingers
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Bored lifeguards on
the beach killing sandcastles with deft Segway skills
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Sugar cane, mango, papaya, dragon fruit, and
star fruit carts every two meters
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Rice paddy workers with cone-shaped straw hats,
bending over endless green rows
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Enormous black sows suckling litters in the
dusty sun
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Sea creatures plaintively treading water in
murky tanks, waiting to be someone’s dinner
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Minority women, faces creased by the sun, in
straw fedoras and colorful aprons, walking arm-in-arm through the market
After two weeks, it was difficult leaving Sanya. It is
unbearable to shake the sand out of sandals and put on long pants and
sweatshirts to cover up tanned skin. It is depressing to bag up beach bounty
and say goodbye to blue skies and ocean air. It is weep-worthy to take the last
walk along the beach, watching footprints disappear in white froth.
When we arrived back in Xian it was cold. Back into winter
coats. I went to the bathroom in the airport and wanted to scream with the
stench of it that can only be likened to a summer camp outhouse, mid-August,
raw sewage fermenting for months in a cedar box: is it so difficult to flush after you go, people? We got into
the bus to take us home and I felt sick just looking at the pollution haze that
hung over the city.
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