papparazzi
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009by the lady, who has given birth to eight full-term children 😉
Guilin, China
All through Laos and Cambodia, people frequently compared New Zealand to China, asking, “Are you ALLOWED so many? Your country is not like China?”
We had wondered what kind of reception we would get here – after all, as those Lao-folk had observed, we do have a few more than the Chinese national average with regards to offspring.
You just don’t know what people will think when they have only been allowed one child. Do they think one is the right number? Do they think eight is greedy? Do they wish they could have had more? Do they think eight is wrong?
Now we know. We’ve only been here a few days, but the conversation has come up over and over and every single person has been wonderfully supportive. Amazingly positive. Unbelievably interested. Before coming to China we had been subject to stares and finger pointing, and we had been the recipients of countless oranges, but here we are nothing short of a complete circus act. People look incredulous as they ask if we are one family, if I am mother to so many, then they grin broadly, give the thumbs up and pat my arm or shake it wildly. They press the children’s noses and pat their heads. At least a dozen times in these five days in this country we have listened to people sing the do-re-mi-fa-so-la scale. Usually the stop at “la” and I now finish with “ti-do”, which brings about guffaws of laughter. I have progressed from knowing only the number eight to now being able to add “eight children”…..and this is enough for the crowd to think I can speak Mandarin (or Cantonese or whatever it is – I don’t even know – perhaps it is some dialect I’ve picked up 😉 But it works!), and the questions flow.
At this point in the conversation in Laos or Cambodia I would ask how many children the lady I was talking to had….and often it would be as many as me or her mother will have had half a dozen more…..but here, it would be insensitive to show interest in the same way. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t know which person to ask first….you see, we don’t tend to be having this conversation as a one-to-one thing. It’s our big family and a big crowd.
It happened in Yangmei yesterday….
And it happened on a far grander scale when we got to Guilin today……
One minute we were wandering along a fairly deserted street and deciding to stop for a bite to eat….the next we were surrounded on all sides. And the questioning and arm-patting and thumbs-upping began. We had passed lots of food sellers on our jaunt from the train station to the hostel, and now we wanted to go back and try out the full range of delicacies. Each time we stopped, the crowd gathered. And do you see those two ladies in the blue jackets? They walked the entire length of the street just behind us, stopping whenever we did. Curiously, when we got to our last food seller, the one next to a row of shoe menders, some of the kids were asked by the shoe ladies “eight children?”. Word had gone before us!
We never expected this. How do we feel about it?
Sometimes we crave the cover of anonymity, but we do understand the sheer size of our group makes us somewhat of a spectacle. So we’re OK with it. In fact, more than OK, some of the kids love it! Some of them want to be famous, you know 😉 Others don’t really notice (although today was hard to ignore!) and just play the goat wherever we are, regardless of who is around.
A comment on our blog this week drove home to them how important it is to be “good ambassadors” –
My family of 5 just returned from a month in Thailand and Laos. We had a really great time and I wanted to let you know that when we were in Chiang Khong, a lady on the street was telling us about, “the family from NZ that had 8 kids….”
It is sobering to consider our lives are on show. But aren’t they always? Whether there’s one of us or a whole army…..and perhaps this is just a good reminder of a reality that always *is*.
POSTSCRIPT:
By the way, ER2 was given so much food on the train today that she couldn’t hold it all!!! And please excuse her grubby fingernails – she was just playing with purple playdough!
Oh, and while we’re talking about ER…..when we got to Guilin it was COLD. We hopped off the train and Mboy6 asked “Is the airconditioning on?” It felt exactly like walking into an airconditioned room from a sweltering 30-something outside, only this time we were dropping from a 20 degree train compartment to obviously considerably less outdoors. It’s so cold people close doors behind them! We were (understandably) the only people in town shivering along the road in short sleeves. As soon as we got to the hostel we dragged our jackets out of their hibernation and set off to explore. Thinking that jackets would be enough to warm us up, we failed to change from short pants into longs and quite a number of old ladies chided us for not having ER2’s legs covered. Certainly they were right – we had thought it just seemed cold, because of the contrast to what we have been experiencing…..but in reality, it turned out we would be huffing out “smoke”, our cheeks would be cold to touch and we would have goosebumps everywhere. Tomorrow we wear long sleeved-shirts, long pants AND jackets.
rayres