On our first full day in Yingtan, we drove to Mama Zhu’s house, located in one of the little villages on the outskirts of the city. The village is surrounded by rice paddies, and we had to park on the main road and walk the narrow alleyways to her house.

As soon as the van approached the village, we could see a small crowd gathered for our arrival, with Mama Zhu right at the front. She eagerly embraced each one of us as we got out, and rushed us up to her house where she had food waiting for us. Bountiful meals would be a recurring theme on each of our visits that week.

Since we had three lengthy visits with Mama Zhu, we were able to spend some excellent quality time with her. We had conversations about her family, her past, and her experiences fostering Lia and the other girls over the years. We shared with her about our life in Canada and now Malaysia. We got to meet lots of her family, including her children and grandchildren. Her son took us fishing at a local pond. We were even able to exchange email addresses with her grandson and nephew so we have an easier way to send updates and photos in future. It’s so amazing how technology can shrink our worlds, where we can now instantaneously connect by email or video to a 70 -year-old woman living in rural China.

Considering all the attention she received, Lia did pretty well with the visits. There were a few times where she clung hard to us or found a quiet place to play with Nico away from the crowd. She showed off her growing Mandarin vocabulary, and beamed like a peacock when Ali showed Mama Zhu and family her school workbooks.

If all we did was visit Mama Zhu and her family, this trip would be considered a success in our books. However, we were also able to enjoy the great spring weather that week and explore the area around the city. We spent one day in Longhushan (“Dragon Tiger Mountain”), a mountainous scenic area that is considered to be the birthplace of Taoism and a big draw for tourists from all over China.

The day began with a visit to a beautiful Taoist temple, where a monk we met reassured me that Alison and I are good for each other. Glad to hear that we didn’t waste these 16 years of marriage!

We then took a raft trip along the river, where we enjoyed floating with the current and viewing the massive rock formations flanking both river banks. The men navigating the raft had a name for each of them and pointed out human and animal outlines in the rock face. A number of formations featured large horizontal caves, and the local people have been burying their dead for centuries in these openings in wooden caskets hoisted hundreds of feet in the air. At the end of the tour, we were able to catch the tail end of a demonstration where they showed us how they used pulleys anchored high up in the rocks to winch the caskets up the massive rock face.

We ended our visit with a stop in one of the ancient villages located along the river. For some reason, the large tour groups we had been encountering all day skipped this area, and we found ourselves alone in this tiny village with empty restaurants waiting for the tourists to arrive. We picked one, sat down and ordered a meal of chicken and mixed vegetables. About two minutes later, I was startled by a chicken running past the door, with an old man on its heels. One of the cooks quickly rushed out of the kitchen, hissing under her breath, only to appear a moment later clutching the chicken by its feet. We were laughing so hard I didn’t manage to take a picture in time, and she disappeared quickly into the kitchen, embarrassed by having us witness the bird’s escape. I’ve got to say that it was the freshest meat we’ve ever had!

On our last day we stopped at the local school in Mama Zhu’s village, where we were able to visit one of the classes. Since it was the end of the day, kids from all levels ended up jamming into the small classroom where we introduced ourselves and chatted with them for a while. They loved to show off their English, and we exchanged our versions of “Twinkle, Twinkle” in our respective languages. At one point, Lia and Nico were asked to write what Mandarin characters they knew on the board, and the kids yelled them out as they finished each one. A very reaffirming experience for the two of them! We handed out gifts of pencils and sweets, and they spontaneously gave Lia and Nico little gifts from what they had on hand: rulers, pens, pencils, erasers, etc. It was very sweet.

Afterward, we all gathered for a group photo, and before we left, many asked for hugs and autographs in their school notebooks. Even Lia and Nico were asked to sign the schoolbooks. When a few of them looked at Nico’s scrawly signature (often complete with a backwards “N”), they clucked their tongues and said that their teachers would never approve of such messy handwriting. Heh. Unfortunately, somewhere in all that our guides promised the kids that we would write them a letter, and now we have over sixty names (in Chinese characters, of course) of kids we have to write. I think we’ll be opting for a group letter.

During our last visit with Mama Zhu we got the chance to celebrate her and Lia’s upcoming birthdays. Our guide brought along a cake, and we had fun singing and wishing the two of them a happy birthday. While the cake was beautiful and delicious, this is the first time we’ve ever seen a tomato decorating a birthday cake! As when we arrived, firecrackers announced our departure from Mama Zhu’s house, with Mama Zhu, her family, and many of her neighbours walking us to our van to say goodbye.

Having taken the train back to Hangzhou by ourselves, we stayed in the Sheraton on our last night in China. It was a fun way to end the trip, as the hotel had great beds, an amazing pool, and a McDonalds a few feet from the door. We were able to make our way to the airport and onto our flight back to KL the next day without incident.

We are so glad we ended up going to China. While we weren’t sure if it would be worth the hassle and expense for a week-long trip, it ended up accomplishing so many things. For one, it further cemented our connection to our children’s homeland, and in particular Lia’s birthplace. It allowed us to get to know Mama Zhu and her family better, giving her an opportunity to see Lia again as she grows up. We were also excited to see how it reinforced for both kids why they are learning Mandarin. It has evolved from being a language that they are learning for the sake of learning, to one that they are learning in order to communicate with people they care about.

This week will be our last in Malaysia for a while. As we head to Europe and eventually back to Canada this summer, we don’t know yet how we will continue Lia and Nico’s Mandarin lessons, but we’re so pleased how both kids’ enthusiasm for their culture and language has only grown through the experiences they’ve had in Asia these past eight months. It is everything we could have hoped for.

A slideshow of our photos from the week

If you’re interested in learning more about travelling to Yingtan or the guides we used for the week, feel free to drop us a line through our Facebook page or by email at manylives<AT>gmail.com.

One of our big goals for spending time in Asia this year was to travel to China at least once. As our time here progressed, however, we kind of lost sight of that goal. The kids have been doing very well in school, and we were reluctant to take them out for any length of time. Ali and I are also starting to make some good headway on our business projects, and we have been trying to take advantage of the time the kids are in school as we don’t know what our work situation will be like once we hit the road again in May. There just never seemed to be a good time for us to go away for a week or two.

However, we realized after Christmas that if we were to make good on our plans to visit China, we’d have to bite the bullet and just go for it. We decided that we’d do a more focused trip this time, spending just one week exclusively in Lia’s birthplace of Yingtan. After a bit of searching, Ali found a guide through some online contacts and we bought our Air Asia tickets to Hangzhou.

Travelling in China is a challenge. Maybe we’ve been softened by our time here in Malaysia, where English is commonly spoken by most people and the many Western influences make daily life easy. By contrast, English is pretty rare in China, especially where we would be travelling, and we knew we’d have to arrange for a guide to help us get around. Ali and I picked up a smattering of Mandarin when we lived in Beijing in 2009, but we know we have to get moving on being more intentional about learning the language. It has become the country we’ve visited the most after the US, and we foresee many more trips as the children get older.

Boarding the plane in Kuala Lumpur

Even before we boarded the plane in Malaysia, we had already encountered one of the major hurdles of travelling to China: the visa process. Penang has no Chinese consulate, so we had to do the three-hour trip to Kuala Lumpur to get our visas. Since we wanted to avoid multiple trips to KL, we chose the one-day express option, paying triple the fees to have everything processed in one-fifth the time. This meant a full day of submitting mounds of paperwork in the morning, coming back 5 hours later for an in-person, seemingly superfluous interview, and then returning once more at the end of the day to pick up the visas. A bunch of unnecessary steps because that’s just the way the Chinese bureaucracy works.

If you’ve ever been to China, you’ll know that one of the major challenges to visiting any of its major cities is the smog. Every time I arrive in China, no matter if it’s Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and now Hangzhou, I’m hit by its distinct odour as soon as we get off the plane. While it was oppressive during the first couple of days of our first trip in 2007, it’s now become like an old friend welcoming me home. Seriously, the smog in China makes me nostalgic. As soon as I got a whiff of the air walking down the gangway, I was immediately transported back to some amazing experiences from our previous visits, starting with the times when we met both our children for the first time. Those are powerful and important memories for us as a family, and I’m struck by the irony that something that may be repulsive to most people only floods my brain with good thoughts.

Despite its challenges, we love China and can’t wait to go back. For sure, a big part of our affection for China is due to the fact that it is our children’s birthplace. Our lives have been enriched by our connection to the place and its people. We’ve been filled with an insatiable curiosity about this huge nation with an ancient and enigmatic culture. Every time we travel there, we only feel a stronger pull to return and connect more.

This trip was no different.

Our goal for the trip was to visit Lia’s birthplace and spend more time with her foster family. It was designed to be very focused; we would spend one week entirely in her hometown of Yingtan, which would allow us to have multiple visits with her foster mother and learn more about the city and region where she was born.

After several unsuccessful attempts to reach the guides we’ve used in the past, Alison found a Jiangxi-based guide through an online adoption group. One of the group members vouched for her, and the fact that she responded promptly and enthusiastically were all encouraging signs. Due to a school holiday in China, we ended up having both the guide and her husband accompanying us for most of the week, which was fantastic as they were both great with the kids, giving Ali and I some space to converse, sightsee, and research without managing them all the time.

Spring blossoms in Hangzhou airport

Despite Yingtan being a sizeable city by Western standards (population of 1 million), it felt like we were travelling off the beaten path on this trip. Our hotel, while quite pretty, was very much geared to Chinese travellers, with staff who spoke no English, breakfast that included no Western options (not even coffee or tea!), and rock-hard beds. It also had no central heating, which meant that everyone walked around in heavy coats in the common areas and we had to crank up the heater in our room to get a good night’s sleep. Unlike Beijing, where Westerners are pretty commonplace, we were quite the curiosity as we walked around the city. In fact, we did not see another white person from the time we left the airport to when we arrived back in Hangzhou.

Since we asked for a room with two beds, the hotel offered us one of their mahjong rooms. It featured beds on two levels, with an automated mahjong table that magically sorted and restocked the tiles at the push of a button. Needless to say, the kids had a great time with it! Unfortunately, it meant that we were located in the gaming area of the hotel, and every morning we’d walk by rooms strewn with cigarette butts, peanut shells, and empty glasses. The hotel’s massage parlour was also located across the hall, and the very well made-up “masseuses” spent most of their day playing mahjong and talking loudly while they waited for customers to come. Not an ideal locale, but we were glad for the extra space in the room.

Due to its central location and proximity to China’s major river systems, Yingtan is a major transportation hub. It meant that we had high-speed rail service that only took four hours to travel from Hangzhou near the coast. If you’re not aware, China has been rapidly developing its high-speed network and is slated to have more high-speed rail than the rest of the world combined by the end of this year. In Yingtan we drove by a static display of a steam train that read “1982”. The technological leap that the country has taken in the past few decades is mind-boggling. The high-speed trains are comfortable and quiet, and we enjoyed the round-trip back-and-forth to Hangzhou.

View from our hotel: The brand new bridge across the Xinjiang River

Despite the weather being a bit on the chilly side, we knew we would have a week of decent weather with lots of sun and temperatures approaching 20 degrees Celsius. Our guides had arranged an itinerary of visits to Mama Zhu’s village interspersed with a few sightseeing trips. We couldn’t wait to get to the village and visit with Mama Zhu and her family, and we looked forward to simply staying in one place and learning more about the cultural heritage of the region where Lia is from.

[Continue reading Part 2 here]

We’re pretty worn out from all the festivities, but here are the highlights from Lia’s sixth birthday:

– Delicious dinner and cake with her foster mother in Yingtan, who is turning 70 in April!

– Week-long pinata-making preparations — our first time doing papier mache with the kids

– Easter Sunday afternoon party, with friends coming for swimming, hamburgers, and pinata-bashing

– Gleeful breakfast in bed, with bacon, scrambled eggs, and toast

– Cake and party bags for her class at school

– Skype chats with Gresik and de Raaf family, and video messages from friends

Our girl is passionate, curious, outgoing, and stubborn. She loves learning Mandarin, swimming, exploring playgrounds, and her stuffed puppy Yo-Yo. We thrive on her exuberance, intelligence, creativity, and affection. Happy birthday, Lia Na Fei, and may your sixth year bring many more adventures and discoveries! We love you!

According to our guides—and we had no reason not to believe them—this was the fanciest hotel in Yingtan. And indeed it was very pretty. However, it had no central heating, meaning everyone—staff and guests included—wore heavy coats throughout the day. The hotel breakfast was also quite modest, with no Western options (not even coffee!), that was strictly served between 7 and 9am (we nearly missed it a few mornings). The joys of travelling off the beaten track in China (i.e., a city of only 1M people)!

On the plus side, our room did feature an automated mahjong table. The table had two complete sets of tiles and automatically reshuffled and reset the walls for the next round. Needless to say, the table got a good workout from the kids.

That sentence is deceptively simple, and belies all of the conversations, decisions, emails, and errands that went into making it happen. Back in the winter of 2010, when we were deciding where to spend our first year of Operation Hejira, we toyed with doing an extended period in China, but in the end chose Malaysia because it is warmer, and easier to manage as English-speakers, and doesn’t have the Internet blocking issues. But we were glad to be close to China and hoped to make a trip from Penang as a home base.

Four months ago we started seriously debating whether we would go or not. The last time we visited Lia’s hometown of Yingtan, we met her foster mother, who told us that she hoped we would come back for a longer time. Nurturing that relationship is important to us, and much more effective to do in person than through letters. We also wanted to do some research into Lia’s birth family. It is difficult to find those connections given the circumstances under which children are relinquished in China, but it gets harder the longer one waits.

The trip is costing us an extra chunk of money, but in the end it came down to the priority we place on deepening Lia’s attachment to her birth place, her family, and the woman who raised her for her first months of life. The bonus is that Lia’s Mandarin studies are really coming along, and a trip to China where she can show off what she’s learned and see the importance of being able to speak her birth language will be invaluable.

We are not travelling to Nico’s home town this time. Given the distance from Yingtan, the extra stress of another week’s travel under emotional circumstances, and the fact that we did not have a local contact there to arrange travel and guiding, we decided to leave that trip for another time. On the plus side, he will be a little older when that time comes (possibly in 2013), which may be better for him.

Actually arranging the trip involved finding a guide to act as our translator for the week and also book hotels, train tickets, and other sightseeing outings. We had a few false starts but at the last minute found a woman through the Yahoo group for families who have adopted from Yingtan. She was very responsive, and within a week we had booked our airline tickets and wired her the money for travel and guide fees.

The next big hurdle was getting our Chinese visas. We had to calculate the cost of rush fees vs. staying in Kuala Lumpur for a few days, and eventually decided on an overnight trip and paying for same-day service. At the last minute, our friends Colin and Tracy offered to watch our kids for us, so Shawn and I had an unexpected child-free 24-hour trip to KL! After the nerve-wracking process of assembling and submitting our paperwork, we were very happy to pick up our passports with those beautiful permission slips to visit.

Now all the arrangements are complete. We drive to Kuala Lumpur on Thursday, then fly from the airport on Friday to Hang Zhou. A guide will meet us at the airport and get us onto our train to Yingtan for what is certain to be a memorable week.

I’m nervous. Every visit is momentous, of course (I wrote a 5000-word journal entry about our last visit with Mama Zhu, which only lasted a few hours). It will take a lot of energy, physical and emotional, to look after the kids and get to know Mama Zhu and do some research. But we are grateful to have this chance to visit China again, which I know many adoptive families wish for.

Lia practising her Mandarin on the way home from school. With daily lessons and after-school tutoring, her Mandarin has progressed by leaps and bounds. She is now reading and writing dozens of characters, and in the video she’s reading from her lesson book. She adores her teacher and is very self-motivated; she’s even taking her books along with her to the pool to practise!

Here’s what our view has been like for most of the day.

Travel has a way of distorting time like nothing else.

It’s been nearly six months since we left our home in Ottawa. In many ways, the days have flown by. In that time, we’ve travelled in six countries on two continents, lived in two apartments, and visited with many family and friends, meeting new friends on the road. I feel like I’ve blinked and we’re now in 2012.

While time has zipped by, itâ€s also hard to imagine we’ve been doing anything else.

Our old life feels like a distant memory: bundling the kids up in snowsuits for school, going to work at a 9-5 job, taking care of all the day-to-day stuff of owning a home and the large stack of bills that goes with it. It’s amazing how quickly the cares and worries of that lifestyle can slip away. A year ago we were recovering from a Christmas holiday that required careful planning, lots of anxiety, and at least a week’s worth of recovery. While these visits are incredibly meaningful and important, holidays always seemed to require a vacation to recover from our vacation.

Our life now has become so stripped down that taking a holiday is a pretty straightforward and stress-free affair. We took a 5-night trip to Kuala Lumpur over the Christmas break and our preparations involved a quick Internet booking and then throwing a few things together in a suitcase the morning of our departure. When you don’t have much to begin with, packing is a piece of cake. And when your life isn’t a complicated tapestry of commitments and responsibilities, leaving town isn’t much different than staying home.

That’s not to say that our life can now be characterized as easy. We still worry about the kids and their schooling, paying the bills, and taking care of the household.

What we’re grateful for is the simplicity we now enjoy.

It gives us more time together, more time to do things we love, and more time to make new discoveries in a place unlike anywhere we’ve lived before. This time may pass, but we’re enjoying it while we can.

As we have closed out 2011 and prepare for the Chinese New Year, itâ€s hard not to reflect on everything that has happened in the past 12 months.

A year ago, we announced to our families that we were leaving in July to travel the world. With their generous and surprisingly overwhelming support, we began from that moment on to focus all our free time and energy on setting our plans into motion, downsizing all our possessions and extricating ourselves from our life in Ottawa.

In May I gave two months†notice at work. For me, this was one of the hardest parts about the whole process. I had worked for SRDC for 13 years and loved the work I was doing; I’ve been grateful for the chance to remain somewhat involved in their work since I left.

In May we also made the decision to sell the house. Thankfully, this part of the process went very quickly and smoothly (thanks Andy!).

With the house sold and our final plans in place, we spent most of the last two months selling and/or giving away most of our remaining possessions. Each day there was a pile of items by the door for pickup by potential buyers, and we had a steady stream of visitors carting away all the things that accumulate in 15 years of marriage.

In June we booked our round-the-world tickets. After a summer in Michigan, we would be flying Toronto-Hong Kong-Singapore-France-Toronto. The trip was on!

We held a series of events to say a formal good-bye to our Ottawa communities. We held open houses and an amazing coffeehouse where many friends gave generously of their gifts of poetry, song and dance.

On July 9 we packed our remaining things into a rented car, said good-bye to the house, and began a road trip through Southwestern Ontario. Our destination was Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, where we rented an apartment for the months of July and August to be near Alison’s sister and her family for the summer. The summer whizzed by, featuring the kids being enrolled in a day program with their cousins, trips together to Detroit’s zoo, children’s museums and play places, as well as many visits to Grosse Pointe’s amazing parks.

On September 4 we flew from Toronto to Hong Kong. This trip over was the smoothest long-distance flight we’ve had yet with the kids, thanks in big part to Nico’s blossoming independence and in-seat entertainment systems. Based on previous trips to China, we knew we HAD to book a two-bedroom flat in Hong Kong to deal with the jet lag. The apartment we rented was tiny, but with lockable bedroom doors and a TV in the living room, it gave us the space to sleep or be awake as we needed while we waited for our bodies to adjust to having our internal clocks turned upside down.

Hong Kong, with its many distractions, was a great place to get over jet lag. The city’s trams and metro are easy to navigate, and we spent time taking the Star Ferry, walking the waterfront, riding up to the Peak, and playing in the parks. Our Ottawa friends Anne and Taylor are from Hong Kong, and they gave us a very generous gift of admission to Ocean Park, one of Hong Kong’s major theme parks. We all had a blast. Each night we’d stumble home with a couple of super cranky kids and collapse into bed.

After four days in Hong Kong, we caught a much shorter flight to Singapore. While we managed to walk the waterfront and take a ride on the Singapore Flyer, our two days didn’t give us enough opportunity to really explore the city and get a sense of everything it had to offer. We’ll definitely be back.

The same could also be said for Kuala Lumpur. On our third morning in Singapore, we caught an early morning train up to KL. We weren’t really prepared for the train trip, and had assumed that we would be able to purchase snacks on board. We were very wrong. By the end, Nico’s hungry complaints were growing so loud that a very kind lady a few seats back reached over and offered him a sleeve of cookies. Thank you, kind stranger!

In KL we stayed at a hotel within walking distance of the Petronas Towers. Knowing that we would be back in the near future, we didn’t place a big emphasis on sightseeing, and spent quite a bit of time in the hotel pool as well as the KLCC park, relaxing and enjoying the warm weather. We had read about the park from Colin and Tracy Burns, and once there the kids did not want to leave!

After two nights in KL we caught our last train to Penang. We learned our lesson this time and not only brought plenty of snacks, but also upgraded our seats to first class. Unfortunately, first class on Malaysian Railways is nothing to write home about, but we were glad for the somewhat larger seats and the free bottle of water.

The Burns family very graciously hosted us for our first few days in Penang. They have two kids of similar age to Lia and Nico, and itâ€s been cool to see how our two families–despite being from opposite ends of the earth–share similar values and interests in both our personal and professional lives.

We relied on Tracy’s extensive knowledge of the local school scene to select a school for the kids, and checked out a number of apartments in the area around Batu Ferringhi. Within that first week, we were able to move into a lovely apartment complex with two pools, a gym, a tennis court and squash court, and the kids began attending a private, English-based preschool.

We were amazed at how easy it was to set up a new life here in Malaysia.

Malaysia offers a generous 3-month tourist visa. English is spoken everywhere and the cost of living is quite reasonable. Although it may not be as cheap as some other SE Asian countries, we figure we’re paying roughly a third of what we paid in Canada for basic necessities such as housing and food.

Our time so far in Malaysia has provided us with a wonderful opportunity to embark on a new chapter in our lives.

While both Alison and I have continued to do some of the work we were doing before we left Ottawa, we have both been exploring opportunities that hopefully will take us in new career directions in the coming years. The kids have experienced tremendous growth as well. Not only are they being pushed academically much further than they would have been in Canada, they are also getting advanced instruction in Mandarin and Bahasa (Malay). It thrills us to see Lia beginning to read and write in Chinese, and to see both of them at a school with mainly Chinese teachers and classmates.

We have been posting mini-updates, photos and videos on our Facebook page, so I won’t review everything we have done since we arrived in September. While we’ve enjoyed visits to Koh Lipe and Kuala Lumpur, as well as a bit of sightseeing around Penang, we’ve spent most of our time and energy on settling into our new lives, establishing daily routines around school and work, and building our new businesses.

We miss our family and friends from home a great deal, which has been mitigated somewhat by the new friends we’ve made here. While there is a fairly large group of expats teaching at the international schools around town, there is also a constant influx of new folks travelling through the area, some of whom we meet beforehand online, and some we meet out shopping or eating at the local food courts. We had a fun experience at one Christmas party hanging out with a group of Canadians, and it made us a bit homesick to be sharing stories about life back in Canada. I’ve also been playing Ultimate again–something I wasn’t really expecting to do, given that I didn’t even bring my cleats!

2011 was a year of tremendous transition for us as a family.

We have been so grateful for the support from family and friends as we took on this big new adventure, and itâ€s been great fun to connect with many of you through Facebook, email, phone and Skype. While itâ€s going to be hard to top what we experienced this past year in terms of both the highs and the lows, we are excited about what the new year will bring. At this point, we know for sure we’ll be leaving Malaysia in April and heading to France and Holland before returning to Canada in July. We hope to go back to China somewhere in there too, although the details of that trip are still being worked out. We also don’t know what will happen next fall. At this point we embrace the mystery.

I’ve put together a 20-minute video slideshow that provides some highlights from our journey this past year. Enjoy!

We wish all our readers the very best for 2012 and happy Year of the Dragon!