Hot weather arrived, and although the air conditioning stayed on indoors, Little Bear still broke out in heat rash under her bangs. My mother, Little Melon, tied the bangs back with an elastic band. Hillway objected: he thought pulling the hair back was bad for our daughter's hair and scalp, and he found the single topknot unfashionable—never mind that I had worn the same style until I was five or six. To keep Little Bear cooler, we decided to take her to the barber. She had gone with Hillway every month to watch him get his hair cut and was fascinated by the ritual. When she heard we were going, she was excited and pleased. At first she sat still in the chair while the barber snipped away, and the owner and customers kept praising her as a good baby. After a while, though, she grew impatient and began looking around, asking loudly, 'Why isn't it done yet? I want to go home... When will it be done? I want to go home and drink water...' The barber had to speed up. He cut her hair the way he would an adult's, sectioning it with clips and working layer by layer, over and over, so it took a long time. I sometimes feel impatient when I sit there for my own haircut. The Fengshun shop Hillway usually goes to is different: the owner runs the clippers over a head in a minute or two and still does a good job.
One night before sleep, Little Bear lay in bed with a toy phone and talked to herself: 'I have a phone, but I don't have a watch. Lingling in our complex has a watch. You press it and it sings. Her aunt bought it for her...' The next day when Hillway came home from work, he found Little Bear crying and fussing, so he gave her his Seiko mechanical watch to play with. She was in a bad mood and threw it hard onto the glass top of the shoe cabinet; it fell to the floor. Hillway picked it up anxiously and shook it. The parts rattled badly and the hands moved slowly. He had to take it to a repair shop. The staff there opened the back, tightened the axle, and put it together again in a very short time, then charged him 50 yuan. On the way home Hillway felt the repair had been too simple for the price and was indignant. If a repair really is that simple, perhaps it should not be done in front of the customer—it creates too big a gap between expectation and reality. To comfort him, I told him that a colleague at work had once been charged 80 yuan just to adjust the strap on a Longines watch, even though Hillway always adjusts our watch straps himself.
Little Bear can quickly recite '12345678910,' though her '4' is funny: not 'si' but 'xi.' After her nap she called us to get up: 'Xi dian la, xi dian la, time to get up.' Besides turning 'four' into 'xi,' she says 'fangbianmian' (instant noodles) as 'fangmianmian,' 'anchundan' (quail eggs) as 'anquandan' (safety eggs), and 'Buhang Lotus' as 'Putong Lotus' (ordinary lotus). For objects she doesn't know, she names them by their features: kiwi fruit is 'all hairy,' and the opened cooked chestnuts she had never eaten before were 'little shells.' Actually, that is pretty accurate.
I bought a set of Gauss Math workbooks online and took out the two books for ages 3–4. Little Bear could tell high from low, big from small, and far from near, but she still didn't really know the names of colors, the names of shapes, or how to count with numbers. No matter how Hillway tried to teach her to count, she would poke at the book with her finger in random order. She knew 'here is one person, here is one person, that's two people,' and would gesture with her fingers, but beyond three she seemed lost.
This month the parking lot at Suning Plaza changed its rates: the free period went from two hours to one, and the fee rose to 5 yuan per hour from the previous 2. Receipts and member points could be exchanged for parking vouchers. I had been feeling sleepy and hungry very easily, so our evening and weekend outings dropped a lot. After dinner, Hillway usually took Little Bear for a walk near our complex. After school started in September, the children's playground nearby went back to full price. My mother took Little Bear once, and there were only a handful of children inside.
Thanks to a credit-card promotion of Hillway's, we went to Tanyu at Suning Plaza for grilled fish—the flavor was all right, but the portion was small. We also bought bread at Bread Diary several times and mooncakes at Jiwei Village for Mid-Autumn. Because I have a teacher's certificate, I took part in two merchant promotions on Teachers' Day: I got a 100-yuan voucher for Yumantang and went to Hesheng Mall to collect a 'gardener card.' With Little Bear, I had Ajisen Ramen for lunch and Yipin Huangji Huang's three-sauce simmer pot for dinner. My mother doesn't like the taste of restaurant food and insists on cooking at home. She has a point: restaurant dishes can be heavy on salt and oil, and the ingredients are not as fresh as what she buys at the market. Still, if we always stayed in the same routine, life would feel a little flat.
The day before Mid-Autumn, the forecast warned of a super typhoon. The office issued a notice that male colleagues would take night shifts, and everyone's Mid-Autumn holiday was cancelled—we were to work as usual. On Mid-Autumn morning I woke to find it calm and quiet; the typhoon had made landfall in Xiamen in the middle of the night. Hillway went to the supermarket for ribs and fruit. Since the earlier forecast had ruled out outdoor plans, we spent the day at home. The mooncakes and orange juice had been bought a few days earlier. When Little Bear wanted to eat them, I told her she had to wait until Mid-Autumn. That morning she got out of bed, took a snow-skin mooncake, asked me to open it, and said, 'It's Mid-Autumn, so we can eat mooncake, and we can drink orange juice too.' Her memory is quite good.
After Mid-Autumn came my 31st birthday. I got up and ate two boiled eggs. At noon Hillway drove the family to Chenji Shunhe for beef hotpot. We ordered lean beef, fatty beef, diaolong, sanhua, shibing, beef balls, and kway teow. The nausea I often felt at mealtimes disappeared, and everything tasted delicious; the meal came to nearly 200 yuan. After lunch we picked up the birthday cake I had ordered. Little Bear was thrilled and kept saying it was her birthday. Before nap time, even though everyone was full, we opened the cake because she looked so eager. We lit the candles, made wishes, and shared it. Little Bear ate a piece happily and got cream all over her face; my mother and Hillway quickly took a few photos. Besides giving himself as a birthday present, Hillway had arranged a full schedule. After dinner he took me to Hesheng Cinema to see My War in 3D, a film about the Korean War. What struck me most was the cruelty and senselessness of war, and how much we should treasure a peaceful, stable life. Little Bear was too afraid of the cinema environment for us all to go together, so the next day my mother took the 3D glasses and saw the same film.
When Hillway is home after work, he takes over caring for Little Bear. After dinner or in the early evening he takes her out for a walk, visits shops or the cinema, and lets her ride the little coin-operated cars. Back home he runs her bath, feeds her milk, and brushes her teeth. When he finally puts her in a diaper and pajamas, he lets out a long breath: 'The day's work is finally done—time to rest.' These days Little Bear doesn't need to be coaxed to sleep or told a story. When she sees Hillway and me lying quietly in bed, she settles down and falls asleep on her own after a while. Sometimes when Hillway and I are lying in bed talking, she feels we are keeping her awake and shouts, 'Nobody talk! Sleep!' or 'Talk quieter—time to sleep!' On weekend naps, if she isn't sleepy yet, she doesn't make a fuss. She lies obediently with her toys or talks to herself. Sometimes I wake up and find her still lying between us with her eyes open, murmuring 'um-um' as she tells herself a story.
Her ability to express herself is getting stronger, and communication is smoother, but sometimes we disagree over small things and she sulks and cries for a while. Once Little Bear starts crying, it's hard to reverse. Even if we redo what she asked or give her the thing she couldn't have, she still cries for a while. She isn't like some children who can turn tears into laughter the moment they get what they want. It seems that when she cries, she is genuinely angry—not using crying as a way to ask for something.
The cartoons she watched on TV used to be mostly Big Head Son, Small Head Dad; Thomas & Friends; Super Wings; Boonie Bears; GG Bond; and Big Ears TuTu. She had also seen some SpongeBob SquarePants and Garfield. Among them, Big Head Son, Small Head Dad, Thomas & Friends, Super Wings, and Boonie Bears were the favorites. Recently I found a warm, gentle, simple, and funny cartoon, Peppa Pig, which seemed just right for her. In the end, all of us liked watching it too, and we were won over by the happy atmosphere of Peppa's family.
From September 19 to 22, Hillway was sent by his company to Jiujiang on a business trip, which came with a cancelled flight and other complications. Before he left, he had dinner with colleagues at the Paulaner German restaurant at Suning Plaza. He said it was all sausages and various meats, very greasy, and he wasn't used to it. This month I read three books: The Lover by Junichi Watanabe, Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, and Send You a Bullet by Liu Yu. I also watched three films: Shaun the Sheep, Lu Yao Zhi Ma Li, and A Chinese Odyssey Part Two: Cinderella.