Let's Not Waste Our Time Together

I love taking Gege to school in the morning. On the way, he talks to me nonstop, and I often learn a great deal from these conversations.

Yesterday we sat in the second-to-last row of the school bus. A child in the back row kept making strange sounds, repeating the same word over and over.

Gege listened for a while and said, "I don't like this." I asked him why. He said, "Because he keeps saying the same word, and I can't understand it."

I smiled and told him that little kids always go through a phase like this. I said that a while ago, Meimei kept repeating a certain phrase too. And when you were little, there was a time when you often repeated a word none of us could understand. Gege thought about it and said, "I guess so."

After a while he said that what the child behind us was saying sounded a lot like Thai. I listened carefully and thought it didn't sound quite like it. I could hear the child's mother trying to stop him, and judging from the sound of her voice, their mother tongue wasn't Thai; it sounded more like a Nordic language. Of course, I couldn't be sure.

The child still didn't stop. Gege suddenly said, "She's a girl." I asked, "How do you know?" He said, "I just know. Girls like to talk like this."

Having said it, he turned to look back, and quickly turned around again to tell me, "Daddy, he's a boy." I laughed. "See? So you'll find that some of our ideas about boys and girls sometimes come from habitual thinking."

Gege understands the phrase "habitual thinking."

I told him that we can't assume a child is a girl just because they keep making a certain sound. Being willing to turn around and check: that was the right thing to do. Society has a lot of habitual thinking about women. In many places and many periods of history, those ideas limited women's development, and limited their chances to get an education and find work.

Even as I was speaking, I hadn't fully stepped outside that habit myself. On the one hand I was reminding Gege not to judge gender from a certain behavior; on the other, I was saying, "Generally speaking, girls really do like to talk this way more." It is hard to educate others from outside habitual thinking, because it lives in us as well.

Then I asked Gege whether he remembered a bedtime story I told when we lived in Vancouver: about a woman who kept on working hard to win the chance to have a job of her own, and to help girls win the chance to go to school. I told him that ancient China also had a very special woman. She became the only female emperor in Chinese history.

Gege has been learning chess lately and is very interested in the King and the Queen. "A woman who became King" caught his attention at once. He asked if he could see her, and what her name was.

I said, "Her name was Wu Zetian." As soon as the words were out, I paused inwardly. Was Wu Zetian really her name? Then what about Wu Meiniang? And Wu Zhao?

These questions only flashed through my mind; I didn't share them with Gege. For him at that moment, the point was simply that long ago in China, a woman once became King. He didn't go on to ask about the differences between these names, and the morning didn't leave me time to look into it slowly there and then.

I opened my phone, wanting to show him what Wu Zetian looked like. What we can see today is not the historical Wu Zetian, but the version of her shaped by film and television. Without thinking, I was looking for an image of her as a majestic older ruler, but most of what came up first was the young Wu Meiniang from a once hugely popular TV drama. I didn't really want Gege, at his age, to see the rather revealing costumes from the early part of the series. I tried a few videos and didn't find a suitable one. Just then the school bus reached school, and the topic came to a pause.

After seeing Gege off, I watched a few more minutes on my own. When that series first aired, I had watched about half of it. What I actually wanted to see was the original broadcast version. Its costumes, colours, and locations together laid out an extraordinarily lavish golden age. But many of the clips you can find on platforms now have been cropped into "big-head versions" that mainly keep the actors' heads, no longer the original full frame.

Yesterday at noon I got together with a group of mothers. They talked about the hardships of pregnancy and their experiences of giving birth, and about the fun and the troubles children bring as they grow. I was surprised that children today seem to start talking about romance, marriage, and responsibility very early. Kids in second, third, and fourth grade are already discussing who likes whom, whether to be in a relationship, and whether a boy who likes a girl ought to propose.

One little girl told a little boy she liked him, and the boy turned her down. His reason: "It's still too early. I can't support myself yet, and I can't support you and me and the children we'd have in the future."

These stories made me rethink things. Sometimes, what Gege and I talk about may not be too early after all. Years ago Gege was already thinking about death and war. It isn't that I have suddenly decided to pour the heavy adult world into him; it's that I have heard other children already discussing liking someone, having children, and taking responsibility in their own ways.

This morning I naturally brought up the topic of children growing up early with the kids' Papa. He agreed with my observation, because just last week he had talked about something similar with another group of parents.

On the way to school, I told Gege that parents sometimes have complicated feelings. On the one hand, we want our children to grow up quickly; on the other, we worry that once they've grown up, we won't have as many chances to talk with them and play with them.

Gege responded quickly. He said, "Then from now on, let's not waste our time together."

I said, "Yes. And aren't you going to invent lots of things when you grow up? Then I can help you with the research. That way, after you've grown up, we'll still have the chance to work together." When I said this, I didn't think too much about it.

We climbed the footbridge together and came down the other side. Gege asked me, "Daddy, when you grow up, do you not have to watch the steps anymore?" I understood what he was asking.

I said, most of the time, yes. But have you noticed that when I walk holding your hand, I usually don't need to look down at the steps; but when it's raining I look, when it's dark I look, and when I'm carrying Meimei I look too.

When we grow up, we don't often have to watch the steps, because our bodies have grown big enough, and because we know our surroundings, the height and width of the steps. But at certain times a person still has to look down and check. Our judgments about ourselves and the world around us aren't always reliable; they are affected by the state of our bodies, by the environment, and by other people. For safety's sake, sometimes we still have to glance at the steps. Gege said, "I get it."

Then we got on the shuttle bus. Unlike yesterday, when we sat in the second-to-last row, today we sat in the second row, just behind the very front. Gege sat in the middle and could see a wide stretch of the road ahead. He seemed very happy.

I said, "You don't often get to sit here." He said, "No." I told him that the seats with the best view in a car are actually the driver's seat and the front passenger seat. When he was little, he had once or twice sat in the front passenger seat, not while driving normally on a public road, but while driving around in circles in a parking lot. Gege no longer remembered. So we recalled those one or two times together.

Suddenly he asked, "Would you get caught by the police for that and put in jail?"

And so, starting from that question, we began to talk about why different actions lead to different outcomes.

When someone driving a car injures or kills another person, do they run away or stay at the scene? Do they call the police? Do they call an ambulance? Even facing the same serious outcome, motive, the circumstances at the time, and the choices made afterwards can all affect how the matter is ultimately dealt with.

We went on to talk about more and more different situations.

Is someone helping the police catch a person who escaped from prison, or stopping someone on the street who is attacking people with a knife? What might count as acting bravely for a just cause, and what might involve self-defense? Actions that look similar, placed within different conditions, motives, and sequences of events, may be judged completely differently.

Before yesterday, I might not have talked with Gege about anything this complicated, let alone volunteered to describe to a child scenes of serious injury and death on the street. But today I wasn't worried that the content was too heavy. Gege thought about death and war very early on. And this time, too, it wasn't that I had prepared a set of adult rules in advance and forced them on him. We simply started from one of his questions, one question leading to another. I don't know how much he will remember. Maybe he'll only remember that the view from the second row was great; maybe later he won't even remember the bit about the front passenger seat.

But I remember him saying, "From now on, let's not waste our time together."

Our conversation didn't arrive at a summary, nor at some answer designed in advance.

The shuttle bus reached its stop, and we stopped too.

Text: Leo, Leo's Notebook