Retiring in Mexico Prologue

Retiring in Mexico Prologue

As much as it hurt, in the end I had to leave my beautiful terrier mutt behind in China.  It was unrealistic to try to take her with me when my first few months post-China would be as a vagabond.  Not to mention that the paperwork for exporting/importing a dog must be begun far in advance of the travel.  I began thinking about it in September, and that was not nearly enough time for a November flight.  A neighbor in the same apartment complex took her, in the end, because of the 7-year old daughter.  The mother is a doctor, an educated person.  My Italian friend, Francisco, lives a few floors down with his Great Dane and assures me she is a responsible person, a good family.  Farewell, my dear MeiMei.

Mother Goose (cat) is no doubt wandering the grounds of the complex, waiting for the sound of my jingling keys.  When I traveled in late October for a week, she stayed outside.  When I returned it was raining, but she was warm, dry and well fed.  She has an incurable gum infection, which makes her cranky and uncomfortable.  For that reason I could not burden another family with her care.  She came to me a stray, and she returns to that life but hopefully in a better endowed neighborhood.

So much for my separation sorrow.

That is not to say that there aren't a few friendships that I am leaving behind with sadness. Former students, former employees, I forged bonds with some very dear people.  This is the inevitable outcome for a gypsy such as I.

My retirement begins with blessings.  My departure date was triggered by the expiration of my rental lease.  It coincided with a meditation retreat in Mexico, led by an old acquaintance, Jhampa, from 40 years ago in India.  This week of quiet reflection was a very good transition.  After the weekend crowd left we were just a handful of people, including the retreat leader and his translator.  We had plenty of opportunity to forge new bonds here in Mexico.  Dr. Rudy decided to go out of his way and drive Jhampa and me to Guadalajara from Morelia, before returning to Durango.  It doubled his journey, but he wanted that extra time with us.  The three hour drive was lively and enjoyable.

I had asked the good doctor to do me a favor and take my heavy suitcase back to Durango with him. But when we arrived at the Guadalajara bus station we forgot, and hauled all the luggage out of the car.

From the Guadalajara bus station I took a taxi to Chapala Lake, where my American artist friend, Catherine, was living (temporarily).  I saw first hand how well we North Americans can live on our meager government pensions.  I was impressed, and relieved.  Next to the village of Chapala where she rented a house, there is a village called Ajijic.  It sits on a small bay of the lake, where the hills gently curve around.  It is quite beautiful.  It is overrun with retired foreigners.  We spent a day there, and on that day I ran into Venerable Amy.  This was another blessing.

Catherine has been retired for maybe five years now.  She went to Thailand, but then returned to our continent.  She lived in Oaxaca for three years, but then when her best friends were leaving she decided to leave too.  She moved to San Miguel Allende.  But after six months of that, she wanted to explore something else.  She found this home in Chapala, but in the living of it she felt it was too quiet.  In the end, she will go back to Oaxaca.  I will get to visit her there in the Spring.

When I arrived in Chapala, I found that Catherine already had a house guest.  Sofia is an artist, too, and they met in Miguel San Allende.  This woman blew me away with her wit, her energy, her grace and her talent.  She was on her way to Berlin, where she would have a showing of her art.  Then to Paris, and Italy.  She speculated that perhaps, as some had hinted, her art might find a more welcoming audience in Europe.  She was prepared to continue her retirement there, somewhere in Europe.  I was stunned at the answer when I finally got the courage to ask her age.  She is 79!  This should encourage me to pursue my writing career, in spite of my late start.  Would that I could be half the woman she is.

Jhampa is the Tibetan name given to Joe at his ordination as a Tibetan Buddhist monk.  We were in India at the same time, studying with the lamas.  He had the good fortune to hold a Canadian passport, while mine was from the US.  Such were the visa laws in those days, that Commonwealth countries had no visa requirements, but Americans were tightly controlled.  He stayed many more years, but I left after three.

He had the idea to organize a retreat/retirement center for those of us of that generation, who had studied with the lamas either in India or in North America. High in the Sierra Madres, in apple orchard country, he formed a non-profit organization and secured a plot of land.  He divided it into 20 lots, and put in the infrastructure of water, sewage and electricity.  I heard about it in 2010 or 2011, and decided to begin to plan my retirement there.  I had enough savings to pay for the property and have a shell erected.  But then I opened the bakery, my personal Money Pit, which haled any further construction.

When I left China, my top priority was to see this property.  I was dependent on Jhampa for making arrangements.  After the retreat he was busy for a week or so, and could not spend the time with me that he wanted, to show me our nascent community.  After a few days in Chapala, I headed out to Durango through Guadalajara.  When I went online to see the bus schedule, I discovered that there were two routes.  One was inland, through Mexico City, the other was by coast to Mazatlan, and then up the mountain to Durango.  Why not?  I was in no hurry.

I opened the AirBnB website, and scouted a place to stay in Mazatlan.  I booked the room.  I had an excellent experience, staying with that AirBnB host for a week, and so I got to see lovely Mazatlan, and swim in the warm Pacific.

Jhampa had arranged a hostess from among his Durango dharma center group, a place for me to stay until he was free to show me around our land in the countryside.

I met a few people from this group, during my prolonged stay in Durango.  One evening Ven. Amy gave a lecture and meditation session, which gave me the opportunity to visit the center and meet other members.

Venerable Amy is an American nun having roots in our same 'sangha', or community of students of Buddhism. She is currently in Mexico scouting out a location for a home for a group of nuns.  There was one location in Guadalajara, besides ours and another.  Not surprisingly, she took a side trip to Chapala Lake, where we bumped into each other on the streets of Ajijic.  I introduced myself, assuming who she was, and we agreed this was auspicious.  I mean, seeing a caucasian dressed in the maroon robes of Tibetan Buddhism and a shaved head doesn't require a leap.

Our little community, called Luz de Compasion, is born of a noble idea.  We baby boomers coming into retirement age, so many of us independently single, trend towards thinking of coming together in like-minded communities.  I just read of one such noble idea come to realization in the UK, and we will all watch it closely over the years to see how it fairs.  Not that we have that many years to sit idly by, to wait and see.  I speak of the Older Women's Cohousing group, in High Barnet, UK.  There, 26 woman begin taking possession of the newly built complex this month, December 2016, after 'planning ahead'.  I wonder how many years it took to make this happen.

I haven't asked Jhampa recently, but when I made my purchase of two lots I recall that more than half the lots had been sold.  Right now there are four buildings on the land, intermingled with corn fields and squash rows.  Only one house is completely finished, and this Canadian has already put it up for sale.  In the intervening years, waiting for others to decide to move onto the land, he found a better situation in Canada and will no longer be part of our group.  Another house, nearly finished, belongs to Jhampa.  He and his wife are currently living in Torreon, three hours from Durango in a desert valley.  It is unlikely his wife is going to want to move.  The other structure is completed on the ground floor, but a second floor is under construction.  This person has actually used his house, coming for a four-month retreat.  At the moment no one lives on the land, and so there is a caretaker, from the adjoining land, who watches over the houses in exchange for planting his corn and squash there.

This land is beyond a small village named Canatlan, which itself is a 40 minute drive from Durango city.  From the paved highway which leads to Juarez, a dirt road runs about a mile through fields and woods to the property.  During rainy season, it turns to mud.  It is a rutted bumpy ride, at best.

So here I am, caught mid stride.  Do I go forward, or do I go back?  Do I try to put this unfinished house on the market, or do I try to finish it and use it.  The caretaker has a beautiful black horse.  I could strike a deal with him to provide grain for the winter feed, in exchange for the right to ride him to town when I need groceries and socialization.  Straight out of a childhood dream.

In fact, many of the western cowboy films that fed those dreams were filmed right here, on this plateau.  John Wayne himself bought a large plot of land, many acres, where films were shot.  Right around Canatlan.  His wife was Mexican, for those who didn't know.

Ven. Amy is spending a few nights on the property.  She will decide at a future date whether or not this will be her choice for her future convent for Buddhist nuns.  We are hoping she will share this property with us, to bring some life into it sooner rather than later.

I could finish the house very cheaply, or I could use quality materials that will reduce the dampness and better control the interior environment. At minimum, once I finish the house one way or the other I will stash my extra stuff there while I explore the rest of Mexico.  You know, the winter clothes, the tankas (Buddhist iconography), photos etc.  Jhampa estimates I could finish it and furnish it sparsely for between $10,00 and $15,000.  I think if I were to do it up nicely, using sheet rock in the bedrooms, some laminated flooring as well as tiles, a well-equipped kitchen, a Franklin wood-burning stove, double paned windows, it would run me at least $25,000.  Is it worth it?

These are the choices facing me, in the Spring.  Right now I am heading to the States to enjoy the holidays with family, and then work on getting the Florida house ready for sale.  The post-sale bank account will allow me to wander for a while, visiting friends in the States, and then exploring Mexico.  My next post should be give details about the nitty gritty of retirement in Mexico, after I have done my explorations.

September thoughts

Hello, dear blog followers, both of you.  I'll bet you've been wondering what's been going on for the last month or so, right?

I finally got to sign off one item from my bucket list.  I climbed Jara Mountain and soaked in the hot springs there, at 4,100 meters altitude.  I did due diligence, checked the weather,  booked the horse trek from my friend Angela, booked the air ticket, and arrived in Tagong.

I had two Danish friends accompany me.  We all behaved as the proper tourists, making our bookings ahead of time, like our hotel in Chengdu for the night we arrived in Sichuan and so forth.

We were feeling the altitude, and asked Angela if we couldn't move back the start of our trek, to give us another day of acclimating.

I would have preferred to push it five days out.  However, the return flights had already been booked, my Danish friends planning to leave Chengdu even earlier by four days than me.

Angela informed us that if we delayed even a day, we would clash with a tour group of 100 Chinese people and their 80-yak cargo load, also going to the pristine valley of the hot springs.

And this is why I prefer spontaneity.  I break out in a rash, if I must plan my activities more than a day or two before my next travel move.

We did the trek suffering severely with altitude sickness.  It was a nightmare, an ordeal, an endurance contest.

Now I am back in Changzhou.  First, begin the long process to renew the work permit and residence permit.  Simultaneously, start packing up the apartment.  I am leaving Changzhou.  If I return to China, it will be to Chongqing or Sichuan province.

It is difficult to sort through 6 years of accumulation, especially when part of it comes from the bakery.

Then, on to unfinished business.  The house in Mexico, begun but not completed, needs to be visited.  I have never even been to the project site, or anywhere in Durango State.

The house in Florida.  After this summer of illness in Changzhou, I pretty much know that I could never live in a climate as hot and humid as Florida.  Time to give that up and move on.

And then there are the pets to be considered.  I know about cats, but I am still learning about dogs.  Cats are 1. place identifying and 2. people attached.  So if I remove myself but leave the cat in familiar surroundings, she'll not be traumatized.

Dogs, however, are people-attached.  I saw it when I left her at the kennel for two weeks while I traveled.  On the day I took her there, she screeched and screamed whenever she lost sight of me.  When I returned, she had licked a spot on her leg raw.  It cleared up as soon as we got home.  Except that in all that irritation, she may have picked up some kind of bug, because now there is a rash on the skin that she licked constantly.  Or did the rash come first?  She will visit the vet this week and have all that taken care of.

I called the airlines.  She can travel with me in the passenger cabin.  So she will go to Mexico with me.  Then on to the States.  Maybe I will have to leave her with my daughter, if daughter thinks this is a good idea.  I think the dog will recognize the similarity between daughter and me, and instantly feel at home.

This latter is a result of not knowing what comes next, after the house in Florida sells.  Will I want to return to Mexico?  Not likely, if I am the only resident in that desolate spot.  Then, what?

Is there family I want to live with?  No matter.  No family is expressing interest in my company.

Of course, at my age, I like many of my peers wish for a sudden aneurysm to bring the story to a swift and happy ending.

Today I will go in search of a smartphone to replace my iPhone, which stopped connecting to the internet a couple of months ago.  Thankfully, being a minor holiday in China (mid autumn), I have two days off from work.  On Friday, back into the classroom.

Retirement begins

Post-bakery

                The bakery episode is now ended.  What next?  Now I explore retirement.  What does that mean for someone still intellectually active, physically able?

                I made up my mind that if I was going to continue to live, I must have a life partner.  This seemed a bit unrealistic.  I haven’t found one in all these years.  Why now, particularly when the physical limitations of old age have transformed a once desirable body?  If my partner is a woman, that doesn’t matter.  What are my chances of finding a Chinese like-minded woman? 

                If I moved back to Florida I could post ads, like in Craig’s list, for a housemate of a certain age and financial stability.  It feels like trying to find a good employee at the bakery.  Many come and try out, but the good ones never stay.

                Then along comes this bizarre text message from America. Someone is enquiring if I am the Satina as seen on China TV, under ‘Life of Foreigners in China’.  I say yes.  This person explains that they think their father is the man I was looking for, according to the TV show description. 

                That person, as it turns out, was the daughter of a retired man in Chongqing.  She connected us.  We began communicating.  But over the phone, with my limited Chinese, there was little we could say.  He calls every day, to say ‘good morning,’ and ‘have you eaten?’  After a while this gets tedious.  I like the sound of the voice, however.  Once, Jamie helped translate through a conversation.

                I decided it was time to meet.  If he comes to Changzhou, how would I entertain him?  I am a visitor here myself.  Also, being summertime, my friends are all traveling. 

                I booked a flight to Chongqing, for five days.  He planned my introduction to Chongqing, and himself. 

                The flight to CQ was delayed by typhoon-like weather up north, where the flight originated.  We were in phone contact.  I told him, I have heard no news of when the flight would actually depart, so he should go home and wait.  He stubbornly stood at the airport, clutching a bouquet.

                Just before midnight the plane finally arrived in CQ.  As I headed for the baggage carousel I glimpsed a figure beyond the exit doorway.  A serious-faced many clutching a bouquet of roses and lilies stood facing the door.  The luggage took forever to finally arrive. 

                We recognized each other from our pictures.  He greeted me warmly and took my suitcase handle.  We rode the subway to my hotel.  The pavement was wet, it had been raining all day.  He saw me checked in and settled, and then he left. It was well after midnight.

                We spent two days touring the city, and a third day just relaxing at his apartment.  I was glad for the rest, because he had walked my legs off.  We watched a soccer match, and then a ballet of Romeo and Juliet (his choices).  I got on his computer and found translation software, so we could have some deeper conversations.  He cooked lunch for me.  Chicken soup, unadorned with the famous Chongqing spiciness.

                On the final day, he collected me for my morning flight, and saw me off at the airport.

                He is on a fixed income.  He spent a lot of money on me, for food, a romantic evening harbor boat tour, park entrance fees and transportation.  I would have to wait patiently until his coffers filled again for his flight to Changzhou.

                As the weeks went by, our communications became more sophisticated. He learned to use WeChat, with the translation feature.  I no longer had to try to write in Chinese, fraught with selecting the wrong character and sending gibberish.  I wrote in English, he in Chinese.

                By the time he bought his ticket and fixed the date, four weeks later, I was very eager for his arrival.  ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder,’ I kept hearing in my head.

                I did a careful search for a suitable yet affordable guest house for him.  I would provide the housing.  I worked hard on making my spare room suitable as a bedroom, but the sheer quantity of my ‘junk’ was making it nigh impossible. 

                When my well-publicized attempted relationship with LaoZhu failed, a year earlier, Changzhou online gossip withered my reputation with assertions that ‘it was all a publicity stunt.’

                Xiao Wang has always been more a friend than a journalist.  Reading about me in the first serious photo-journal piece in a small Changzhou newspaper, in January of 2013, he tried my baked goods and liked them.  I got to know him first as a customer.  The TV station is in the same block as the bakery.  Then he asked if he could do a short ‘human interest’ story for his station’s evening newscast.  It was cute, showing me interacting with the community buying supplies for the bakery, baking, and greeting customers. 

                Two years later I was thinking about my future.  I decided that my best bet was to find a Chinese boyfriend.  I asked my repeat customers, with whom I felt comfortable enough, to consider introducing me to their elder widowed friends and relatives.

                Xiao Wang thought it would make a good story.  By this time I had rented the next-door larger space, and it made a nice backdrop for the piece, where I asked the viewers to help find me a ‘gentle hearted man’.  Xiao Wang has a lovely sense of humor, and so the piece was light hearted and very well received.  It led to the other Changzhou station wanting to do a piece, plus another newspaper, plus another writer who wanted to do an in-depth piece (I never knew what happened with the latter’s work, if he sold it independently or what).  All this became a hot topic of discussion on the internet.

                Eventually it caught the attention of a reporter in Beijing, working for CCTV4.  That station was doing a sporadic series on lives of foreigners in China.  Though I can’t be sure, I think that is the one that Linda eventually saw, while living in Brooklyn

                I could not resist assuring XiaoWang that my search had not been a publicity stunt.  I sent him a picture of HuiWen.

                A week later he contacted me, and asked how things were going.  I told him HW was due to arrive in days.  He wanted to meet.  We met at Starbucks, and there were two people with him.  The lady was the reporter in training, and the other guy was the cameraman.  Poor anonymous cameramen, I thought maybe I had worked with him before but couldn’t remember, and never got a chance to ask.

                I knew that Xiao Wang was no longer ‘just’ a journalist.  You see, the station entered his video of my romantic search to a Jiangsu Province-wide competition.  He won first prize.  With that award came a promotion.  Now he trains budding journalists.  He says he has 150 trainees!!!  The two he brought along would be doing the piece.  They don’t speak English, so we did the interview in Chinese.  At one point, Xiao Wang must have felt that they weren’t getting the whole story, so he jumped in and led the interview for a short bit.  We talked about the rumor that it had all been a publicity stunt, and how I felt about that.  That part we did in English.

                We agreed that they would film HWs arrival at Changzhou airport.

                Now, how do I include HW in this?  I don’t want him thinking about it ahead of time, with time to be nervous.  Yet it would be unkind to just spring it on him, a camera trained on him while he exited the secure area, and a microphone stuck in his face.

                I wrote Linda.  I asked her to ask him if he wouldln’t mind being interviewed for the TV spot.  He replied that he did not want that, he did not want to ‘be famous’.  I gently reminded Linda that it was too late now, that she only knew me because of my TV appearance, and it was only right that Xiao Wang should be able to produce the last segment, the end of the search and the beginning of true romance.

                And so he was aware that at some point he would be interviewed.  He took with good humor the work of the TV pair at the airport.  He hugged me warmly, as I gave him his symbolic red rose of love’s declaration. 

                I am not above being an opportunist.  The weather is very hot.  I had bought a special dress for the occasion, which was two-layers thick.  If I said no to the journalists, I’d be traveling for almost two hours in crowded hot buses to get to the airport.  They, on the other hand, would provide an air-conditioned trip there and back.

                On the trip back I thought their questioning of him was a bit intrusive.  I sat quietly, hoping Xiao Wang would make sure in the editing that things didn’t get too personal.

                I thought we would have to drop off his luggage at the hotel, and then come to my apartment.  But as it turned out, he brought just one small backpack, so we came directly to the apartment.  Later on I would take him on my ebike to the guest house.

                My bilingual friends were all out of town.  Sonja is probably in Jilin with her family.  Siok-Eong and Mark were visiting family in Malaysia until the end of the month.  Christel and Steffen would arrive a few days after HWs arrival, but they are not bilingual.  Jamie is still in town, and happy to serve as a translator.

                I thought of Lucy and her husband.  I met him only once, and would like to get to know him.  He is a bookworm, a gold mine of Chinese history and culture.  He does not speak English however.

                Meanwhile, HW and I are trying to get to know each other, while enduring temperatures hovering around 100 degrees.  At least the humidity has left the 88% range, standing around 64%.  Even so, this is the kind of weather where you dip in and out of the shower all day, unless you sit in an air conditioned room all day.

                On our first night alone, we walked to the Italian restaurant, Monkey King.  He is staying very near that location, which is also across from Yancheng Park.  We had plain pizza with garlic, and linguini with shrimp and pesto.  I ordered us two glasses of pinot grigio.  The bill was over 200 rmb, but I didn’t care.  My gesture of welcome.

                The next day we just hung around the house.  We watched TV, movies, chatted, played with the dog and cat.  I ate leftover dal, and he bought take-away pulled noodles.  We cooked a simple meal of egg plant, and cucumber

                On Saturday I had an 8 a.m. appointment at the dentist.  The previous night as I walked him halfway home, I told him I’d like him to come with me, and have his teeth looked at.  He said, no, no, his teeth were fine.  I said they needed attention.  His breath stinks.  He protested that it was because of all the garlic we at that day.  I gently disagreed.

                He came of age during the pioneering age of the revolution, where men were tough, life was rough, and it was all for the better good of building a new China.  Dental hygiene was the least of their cares.

                On the third day we went to the dentist.  I had a root canal done.  His cleaning took longer than my root canal.  Afterwards the dental assistant told me he wasn’t finished, and needed to come back for more.  I made an appointment for the following Monday.

                We went back to the hotel.  By then I was already feeling tired.  His room has twin beds.  I thought I’d lay on one, he’d lay on the other, and we’d chat and nap.  I lay down, and he sat on the side of the bed with me.  We talked.  One thing led to another.  We kissed.  Sparks flew.

After that we walked arm and arm around the retro Old China buildings outside the Park gates, looking for a place to eat.  The area has grown up a lot since I first visited it.  They no longer have a family-style small noodle shop.  Everything is expensive there now.  We wound up finding a pulled noodle place down from his guest house.  We came back to the flat and I opened the translation software. 

                I put a light-hearted Chinese movie on the TV, and took a nap on the couch.  He was sitting on my favorite chair (not using the foot rest) and wound up falling asleep too.

                We cooked and ate in.

                We spent the evening playing cards, with much laughter.

                I have paid his room through Sunday night.  We decided that Monday he would move in.  No need to prepare the spare room.

Transgender

Transgender

Suddenly this concept is popping up wherever I look.

There is the Oscar nominated film, the Danish Girl.  My good friend Cal revealed to me that he is transgender. North Carolina passes a law around transgenders and public toilets.

I cannot give this topic a superficial pass.  Suddenly this condition is ascending to claims on constitutional rights.  I have to ask myself, where has this issue been all my life?

I was certainly aware of transvestites, men who like to dress in women’s clothing.  There were plenty portrayed in movies as being prostitutes, flirting with men.

In grammar school there was a boy who was in my dance class.  He was more sensitive, gentler than other boys.  He grew up, got married, and raised a family.

Another boy, handsome, Italian, slight build, flamboyant and a hairdresser to boot, appeared at the 20-year high school reunion with his wife on his arm.  I would not have predicted that.

There were what we called dykes.  Females with masculine preferences for dress and demeanor.

How did we come from that, to a state where a mother says she knows her three year old son is transgender?

Our culture is becoming more and more fractured, with everyone indulging their individuality at the cost of a cohesive society.  Why suddenly do they claim special rights and privileges, special concessions to their preferences.  I don’t get it.  As someone famously once said, ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’

I look at my own life through these newly ground lenses.  I never played with dolls.  In our day, the name given to girls like me was tomboy.  No one ever called me a dyke.  I played nice with boys, when forced to, like having a crush in high school, and needing a date for prom night.  None of this ever came to anything.

Years and years ago when I was in the workforce, I had the sense that I was a man in a woman’s body.  I was independent, self-reliant.  I didn’t know how to pick up boys.  Boys sensed no pheromones from me.  Of course, I did live through the sixties when men suddenly had permission to screw anything that moved on two legs, and women were persuaded to think this brought them ‘hip’ status. 

It didn’t help that I was raised in a home without open displays of affection.  My mother was indoctrinated into the child-raising philosophy of the time, that to give too much attention to a child is to spoil them, give them an over inflated ego.  She took it to the extreme, closer to the ‘cold bitch’ side of the spectrum.  Once I discovered sex I had a spell of insatiability for physical intimacy.  But before long I was able to distinguish between the biological act of sex, and genuine affection and love based on mutual respect and admiration.  In fact, I found that latter to be extremely rare, though I held onto the possibility that it might be more than an urban legend.  I got tired of pretending that I was finding love in each encounter, when in fact I was being used as a dumping ground for male sweat and sperm.

While traveling alone around the world I gradually found my balance.  I developed a sense that I could do anything a guy could do, and often better.  I did not relate with the women whom I met traveling, who seemed to require a male counterpart to help make her decisions.  I did occasionally run into the rare couple who absolutely did complement each other, and I did envy them.  You never know a book by its cover, but they had the appearance of being best friends.

I did encounter women to whom I was attracted.  That is, their femininity and grace made the sun shine a little brighter for me.  And then there were the other women like me, such as the famous Miss Jones. 

We met on a Greek Island, and met again on a kibbutz.  I had already started to meditate, so we would meditate together.  Her energy helped me find my center, and my meditation improved.  Then we went our separate ways, only to meet again in Nepal.  I had heard of this American who ran a café in Kathmandu.  My colleagues at the monastery would visit her shop when they were in town.  It was a meeting place, also a place to dump the shopping while you go out for dinner, that sort of thing.  When eventually I had the opportunity to go into town with these people, she and I rediscovered each other to mutual delight. 

I think of her, when I see how my bakery in China has served a similar purpose in its short life.

Would my life have been easier if I taped my breasts and walked around in men’s clothing and hairstyle?  That seems weird to me.  I would have complicated my life even more.  The only possible advantage I could imagine would be if women were then attracted to me.  But in fact, I think my personality is a put off to men and women alike, so I doubt that would have been the result.

I speculate as to how different my experience is to someone calling themselves transgender.  I guess I will never know.  As I said, I didn’t play with dolls.  I played cowboys and Indians.  I dug out dirt to make runways and villages for what is now called matchbox cars and trucks, together with the neighborhood boys.  I climbed trees, played stick ball (when the cruel neighbor kids weren’t ostracizing me, for whatever reason of the moment).  I flew with the wind on my bicycle, exploring the town, visiting the far flung kids from my school class.  Alone, always alone.

This was all excellent preparation for the long and adventurous life I led, taking me around the world, learning languages, absorbing cultures, and having many careers.  This life was well-suited to someone who has given up romantic dreams of idyllic love.  The romance was in the travels, the possibilities that lie just around the corner.  Had I been a dependent woman, waiting for my identity and security to be provided by a male, I would have been stopped in my tricks thousands of miles and decades ago.

I feel bad for people who are not confident in expressing themselves.  For that poor little boy who likes to dress up as a girl and play with dolls, that he should have to be stigmatized for the rest of his life by his mother telling him his gender roll was confused, I feel for him.  Why must everything be so black and white.  Why cannot I be both male and female, in whatever body God gave me?  Why do I have to choose one or the other?  From talking to my transgender and gay (or should I say LTGBQ) friends, I feel that the real problem is a lack of tolerance in our relationships.  If a guy wants to wear ruffles and laces to work, why can’t he?  Why must he be gossiped about, judged wanting in masculinity?  If a woman chooses a mannishly short haircut and is given to wearing three-piece suits, what’s the problem?  Why must we treat these people differently, to where they develop a chip on their shoulder, and feel the need to run from civilized society and develop a subculture?

My cousin, when here four children were under ten years old, came home and found her husband in flagrante with a man in the basement.  Did she have to get hysterical?  Did she have to treat him like he was a felon who should never be near his children again?  For the rest of her life, does she have to go ballistic whenever they need to have a conversation?  He did not go on to develop a stable relationship with a man.  She forced the breakup of the marriage, and her children to grow up without a father, for what?  I admit I am not walking in their shoes.  Maybe I would not feature being penetrated by a tool that had been dunked in shit.  Or maybe, just maybe, enlightened people could find a way around such traumas and let their friendship go deeper.  We are all flawed human beings.  Can’t we make a better effort at loving each other unconditionally, accepting our flaws and theirs, and just get on with life?

Why do we have to fragment our society into smaller and smaller peer groups, and then demand special treatment because our decisions stand in the way of our sharing the rights and responsibilities of the society we have chosen to leave?  Many States have passed laws given gay couples legal rights, such that if one of them were hospitalized the other would have the right to be treated as family; they can be on each other’s medical insurance.  Why must they go a step further, and demand the right to shatter the milleniums-old established institution of marriage?

Truly, our culture is on the brink of extinction, no less than our planet as we know it.  Young people can’t see it, they are caught up in the moment.  Like not seeing the forest for the trees, they are blind to what is happening.  We old people are marginalized, so clearly our perspective is quaint and irrelevant.

There is nothing new under the sun.  When we have to develop a whole new vocabulary to describe what has been going on forever, we are ascending a tower of babel.

Expansion and Contraction

Summer 2014

The business is going well.  We have three full-time employees, myself, and a few part-timers.  Xiao Lan has become a strength.  She reliably makes the lemon cakes and brownies, can make the muffins and in a pinch, can shepherd the bread through the baking.

We have gone through a number of bakers.  Peter lasted one year, then came ‘Jean’.  She was also from the Xuzhou district, as was Peter, and had also worked for the bakery chain 85°.

Jean was temperamental.  She was gentle but sensitive, an introvert.  At first I thought she didn’t have the strength to handle the stresses that tight schedules and multitasking demand.  I had that talk with her, put her on notice, and she rallied.  She proved me wrong.  But in the end she still preferred baking cakes to bread.  My extroverted nature also wore her down.  She left after six months, to get married and move to Nanjing.  This was an arranged marriage, by parents who decided she was too old to hold off for Mr. Right.

Next came Julie, Zhang Yu Ling.  A mother of two, ages 3 and 8.  I don’t know what her work history was.  Rachel and Xiao Lan interviewed her, and gave me to understand that she would not be running off to Xuzhou or somewhere for long holidays.

Julie is the salt of the earth.  A hard worker, a fast talker, alert to her surroundings.  She would do her work and look to alleviate me from my hard chores.  She was the one who would remember to water the plants.  She quickly learned to make very good bread.  I tried to always make sure she had a part time assistant to help with the washing up and restocking.  She didn’t always get that, though, and rather gave in to their begging to learn to bake.  Not the bread, but the rest. She was still doing too much of the washing and restocking.

By the second summer business was solid.  We had a solid core of regular, Chinese, customers and new ones were always coming to check things out.  It felt like the walls were growing smaller, as we were buying our food supplies bulk online.  It was getting harder and harder to store the bags of flour, raisins, nuts, chocolate stuffs, milk powder, and packaging for product.

The tea shop, two doors down, became available.  Although business wasn’t so good that I had a lot of extra money in the bank, it was certainly covering all our expenses.  Customers were regularly trying to squeeze into our small space to sit down and have coffee with their goodies.  I felt it was time to expand.  I would have preferred the shop immediately next door, but the knitting shopkeeper seemed impermeable to changes in fortune.  No matter how the business was, she kept the doors open.  I presumed her husband was well-heeled and liked her to keep busy.  They had no children.

I had to borrow money to secure the shop.  Summertime was when my home and shop rents came due.  After paying them, there just wasn’t enough to also pay rent and transfer fee for the new space.  A gentle lady, an old friend to the bakery,  DuoDuo, came and offered the money. 

That was in August, the same month that a young cat perched on the bakery windowsill and screeched for hours until I let her in.  Within 24 hour she went into labor and gave us seven kittens.  DuoDuo is also a great pet lover, so this seemed auspicious to us.

We moved into the new space, keeping the old space just for baking.  The new space has 150 sq meters.  We could sit 20 at tables, and still had a small front room as a salon.

Customers appreciated the space to just sit and visit for a while.  We built up the sandwich business, even advertising on meituan.  We had brunch on Sunday mornings, popular with a small group of foreigners.

All the time, I was trying to find a cook to take over the second kitchen, in the new space.  I wanted to offer suppers of simple meals, and pizza, American style.  Sandwiches, soups, stews.  But I could not find the right person.

We took on a second baker, xiao zhang.  He had 6 years baking experience.  Of course, he preferred the sweet stuff, but I also required him to make breads.  He worked the second shift, 12 – 9, and I wanted him to start complex breads to be made the next day.  [he was not really interested in that, as it turned out]  I thought he could really teach us some stuff, so it was important to hire him.  But he wanted 5,000 rmb.  I persuaded him to accept 4,000.  But then I had to raise Julie’s salary to the same, because she is the lead baker.  This put a heavy burden on our budget.

In the end, he did not pull his weight and after six months he left.

We peaked at a steady gross revenue of 30,000 over the spring months.  All looked good.  I was feeling overworked, and still wanted to find a manager and a good cook. 

Then the construction began for the subway.  There would be two subway stations serving us, at the major intersections north and south of our mall.  Between those intersections the northbound bus had three stops.  Two were eliminated, though the one on our block remained.  Traffic was heavily impacted.  It was then that I learned that a lot of my customers drove to our shop for their breads.  Because they stopped coming. 

There was a large chain supermarket across the street from us, in the MoiYi mall.  A large chain appliance store, Gome, was next to that.  Those two packed up and moved away.  Just south of us there was a large chain high-end Mall department store called Golden Eagle.  It closed, all the vendors failed to renew their rental contracts.

You get the picture.  Road construction can bring commerce to its knees.

And so our sales plummeted. 

I was getting deeper and deeper into red ink.

DuoDuo called in her loan.

We had one last bash, a Thanksgiving Dinner with about 18 guests.  It was a success, and great fun.  But after that I had to make a bitter decision.

In January I called in a contractor to build a second story in the original bakery.  Then I started moving stuff out of the Café and back into the bakery.  I put up the larger space for rent.

The landlord was willing to take it back.  I had paid rent until April.  If he got a tenant, he would refund some rent money.  But then I realized that if I found a renter myself, I could get back some of my investment through the Chinese tradition of a Transfer Fee.  I had paid 26,000 transfer fee when I took the café space from the tea shop.  It had a toilet, and two rooms in the back served by a hallway across the back.  The wood paneling on the wall, all the cabinet space, was valuable to me and in reasonably good condition.  I thought it attractive, although later critics would say it was inappropriate for a coffee shop.  I thought I was getting a good deal at 26,000 rmb.  I tried to negotiate them down unsuccessfully.  When it was my turn to sell, I came up at the wrong end of the stick.

By the time the new renters took over, and negotiated my transfer fee down to a mere 20,000 rmb, there was not much rent due back to me.  But at least my financial obligation was unloaded.

It had been stressful, exhausting, to staff the café.  Mostly college students applied for the work, the training was ongoing, the turnover frequent.

This brings me back to Grandma’s Nook’s roots.  With the addition of the loft I had also partitioned the bakery to allow just a small shop area in front.  I did not put much effort into decorating it.  By then I was broke and burned out.

One day Craig came to visit us.  He was opening an Australian themed café bar in Xin Bei.  He casually mentioned that I should have a cabinet along the wall for my product.  It was a ‘duh’ moment.

My health deteriorated in February.  I suffered from severe edema.  Through complicated circumstances, my medical care was sporadic, not consistent.  It took many, many weeks to finally heal.  During that time I made the decision to retire, for real.  Meanwhile, I did not have the strength to spend much time in the bakery.  This apparently upset Julie greatly.  Perhaps she did not believe the extent of my illness, or perhaps she thought I should have hired temporary help.  I don't know, because she refused to share her thoughts with me.  She would always say, 'it's none of my business, you are the owner.'  This frustrated me endlessly.

I could not bear the thought of the bakery and its unique products going extinct.  For one, I myself still needed the bread for my own consumption.  So I discreetly advertised the business for sale.  Not only the shop, but the business.

One of those who spoke up was the baker, Julie.  I felt she did not have the business acumen to make a success of it.  She also didn’t have the capital.  In fairness I tried to have the conversation with her.  But by then, for some reason, her respect for me had severely disintegrated and we could not have a conversation.  Every word from her mouth was scorched with anger.  I said if she really wanted to make a go of it I would defer the transfer fee, but she’d have to step up production in the following months in order to have enough money to also pay the rent.  Then she said she had money for that.  I thought, wait, either you have money or you don’t.  My fee comes first.  But I held my tongue.  We talked a little about the plans.  I asked if she would try to open the upstairs for customer table.  She was saying she would buy sweet goods from other shops to expand the product line.  But what about the bread, I wanted to know.  She said she didn’t agree with my business model.  I tried to tell her that she had to agree, we needed to talk it out, because I wasn’t just turning over the shop, but the business. 

It went downhill from there.  Since we couldn’t agree, I kept looking for a buyer.  She had already spread the word that she was buying it, and so now she lost face and became even more derisive of me.  One guy came to talk.  After he left saying he'd come in the following week to observe and learn before we signed a contract, I asked Julie if she would stay on to help him as baker.  She said she would not.  She turned in her one-month notice.  So there it was.  Two years of training that I had invested in her, and she was going to walk away.

Then Peter stepped up, my first baker/apprentice.  He wanted to take over the business.  He couldn’t do it right away, but in a couple of months.  He was still living in Xuzhou, and planning his wedding.  Eventually he and his bride moved back to Changzhou, and took over the business.  I promised I would help him as much or as little as he would like.  He asked Julie to stay on until he could move back here.  She told him 'yes', but after a month she left anyway.  I was then the sole person in the bakery, for about three weeks.  Somehow I survived, risking closing the business on days I could not cope (still recuperating from the illness).  Peter finally arrived, and said he would take it over from here.  Go, he said, rest.

And so I looked around me, beginning to think in terms of being retired.  What shape would that take?  The most pressing need was to improve my physical condition.  All the stress over the previous year had contributed to my putting back the weight I had lost two years earlier.  I was too heavy.  Clothes didn’t fit, or fit very snuggly.  I am tired all the time.  So job #1 is to begin walking

I am happy that the new Catholic Church in QingFeng park has agreed to offer mass in English each week.  So this is a new page in my life, having a church family again.

The future is open.  I have considered and discarded thoughts about returning to the States.  I have a good and affordable life here.  Can’t see any benefits in returning to the States.  The Chinese puzzle at this, assuming my family would want me back into their fold.  Not so.  I feel more taken care of here than I ever would in the States.  I enjoy minor celebrity, thanks to media coverage over the years of this eccentric energetic old foreign lady who decided on a change of career instead of retiring.  My apartment complex has a delightful large garden with car-free paths for walking with the dog and cat.  My life is good.  That is, as long as I have access to good bread.