Blame the Baby Jet Lag
We'll always have Shanghai
How did you come to New Zealand?
That’s the question I get. How, not why. The charms of the place are a given. How wants something more, and not just the hearty logistics required to reach these islands. How demands the measure of your fate.
For four years here I’ve fumbled through elevator versions of an answer. It was the pandemic, life was crazy, we got on a plane. Then my heart swells up, and I cut myself off. Kiwis can’t bear a full-scale American confessional. I’m trying to cut back myself.
But this is a letter, so I can just let ‘er rip:
Baby jet lag. That’s the how.
Not adult jet lag, not exactly. By January 2020 we’d been teaching at NYU Shanghai for nearly seven years. We loved that megacity, but never fully lived there. Instead we commuted back and forth for thirteen semesters, flying in a week before classes and often bailing the day we filed our final grades. We missed our families and friends in Iowa and Texas, we loved the road trips of a long US summer, and the university generously paid for plane tickets home. Those free (!) hops over the Pacific got harder once we had kids, sure, but by then we were salty cosmopolitans. Overpack the snacks and toys, drink everything the flight attendants serve you, and surrender when the smiling aunties across the aisle want your baby on their lap. Jenny’s a champ sleeper and never sweat the time change much. Me, though, I’d started blaming jet lag for all manner of middle-age blues, not least an unfinished novel. I even tried to write poems about jet lag. Never finished one before the evil spell broke, as it always does. Drop a body anywhere in time and it’ll float towards daylight.
Baby jet lag, though! Even staying home babies and toddlers live in their own time-space continuum. Toss ‘em through that twelve-hour wormhole between Central Standard Time and China and your whole family becomes unstuck in time.
We when boarded that plane in El Paso at dawn on January 13, 2020, we had no illusions about what lay ahead. Our three-year-old son was on his sixteenth (I think?) flight over the Pacific, including one memorable febrile seizure over Kamchatka; his 15-month-old sister was on her sixth. Back in Iowa we’d do a midnight shift or two in the Walmart toy aisle and they’d settle right in, but what worked with kids last time never quite works the next. We got home to our apartment on the evening of January 14. We gave the kids dinner and a brief nap. They woke at 8 p.m., ready to party.
Four or five nights running, this went. The kiddos were possessed by some new, almost evangelical fervor: We’re home! With each other! And no bedtime! The Christmas presents we’d hauled back only worked so long. So, as Jenny slept—she was department head now, she had job candidates to interview in the morning—I bundled the beasties up and we hit the streets. Didn’t even bring the stroller. The 15-month-old wanted to march, so we marched. Two, three, four in the morning, didn’t matter. Shanghai was safe as a movie set, and probably still is; over the holiday the light poles had all sprouted another set of surveillance cameras. This was also Spring Festival, when half the city heads home to see their folks. The streets were empty, all the noodle shops closed, the moon-like silence one we’d all soon know in lockdown. We wandered up and down Suzhou Creek, through shiny plazas of vacant skyscrapers, past the ruins of neighborhoods leveled to build still more skyscrapers, and then, always, to Family Mart.
Family Mart never closes. The sliding doors greet you with the same cheery jingle every time. You would think this gets annoying, but in seven years it never did. There’s a promise in that little chime—of order, safety, desires met? (Sayaka Murata’s great Convenience Store Woman is the gospel here; in Shanghai, an english-teacher punk band rewrote the tune as a cheapo nightlife anthem.) For the kids, the song meant playtime. My daughter stacked the yogurt cups. My son raced his cars down the aisles. The morning baos weren’t ready yet, so we microwaved noodles for another dinner. Maybe it was lunch. We drew stars in the fogged windows. What the hell we were doing here?
Which, whatever—it’s a daily koan for me, jet lagged or no, and Jenny and I had already started gaming out the move home another semester or three down the line. But in that graveyard Family Mart, watching our little stars weep down the glass, I found myself, as new dads often do, facing a once-familiar question utterly recast by the new beings before me. What were they doing in Family Mart at three a.m.? And what came next?
Wuhan was rumbling. Each morning as the kids slept we scanned the headlines. Our deans huddled. Our chats pinged. When Spring Festival ended, would the returning millions bring the flu? Would we just teach online? Jenny starting searching for flights back out. Bali, which we’d loved before kids? One of those islands in Thailand?
I resisted. Jet lag for me forecloses all sense of possibility. Jenny pressed. What about New Zealand, where her sister lived? We’d visited the year before. It was pretty great? But last-minute Auckland tickets ran north of US$6k, out of our own pockets this time, an intergalactic impulse purchase for a couple of stingy university lecturers. And good ol’ Iowa was, like, half the cost? Spring Festival emptied out US-China flights, too. What if, Jenny asked, we just went back home to ride it out?
Hell no, I said. C’mon. Baby jet lag.
The little vampires were just beginning to recover. I refused to send them, or me, their sleepless manservant, back through that time warp. Bali, Thailand, even NZ five hours east—this we could do. But I would not cross that goddamn ocean again.
And there it turns. Had I Jenny’s parental sangfroid—had I been able to say, what the hell, they’ll sleep it off—I suppose we’d have gone back to grandma’s house. It wouldn’t have lasted. Like many of our colleagues, we’d have bolted back to our China lives when the second wave hit the US that summer. Something in Jenny and I wanted off that wheel.
We fiddled. We ogled Phuket airbnbs. We watched the annual Spring Festival spectacular on TV and felt proud for catching the odd word. When the kids saw daylight we took them to Starbucks and fed them reheated pastries from paper sacks. In the empty malls our remaining neighbors were already masking up. In China they remember SARS.
On the night of January 26 the email dropped like a starting gun: semester delayed two weeks, await further instruction.
There is no jet-lag blur to this memory. Jenny sits across from me at that IKEA table we never saw again. Our company laptops are open back to back. The light in her eyes, the charge in the air, the silent city below.
Let’s go, she said. Let’s go.
We checked the tickets. Bali was holding steady. Thailand was still the cheapest.
Then Jenny checked Auckland one last time.
I can still see the numbers. Hell, I still got a screen shot: PVG to AKL, direct return, three seats and a lap baby on a China Eastern red-eye the very next night, had suddenly, against all market sense, dropped to US$4k.
We screamed, I think. A door had opened. We could hear the song.
BUY IT, I bellowed like a trader on the stock market floor.
Jenny was already typing in her credit card.
Feels almost dirty to name the number now. Kiwis swap dollar figures—salaries, rent, home improvement—that Americans would never dare. We fear of coming across as too rich, too poor, too ungrateful for the good fortune we’ll overshare in any other terms. But prices only reveal desires. I like to think we would have eventually bit on $6k to NZ, that we could read our souls that clearly? But who knows. Who cares, now. We’re here.
Those China Eastern tickets had us flying back to Shanghai two weeks later. We had some notion this wouldn’t happen. But we didn’t really know. Nobody did. As we bundled kids and suitcases out the door on the night of January 27, 2020, we took no pictures, we blew no kisses. Thirteen semesters we spent in those rooms. We planned a wedding at that IKEA table, brought our newborn son home through that same front door. First meals, first steps, first words. The galley kitchen where pigeons once nested in the ceiling. Out the smog-streaked casement window the Sparkle Building, our pet skyscraper, was probably winking goodbye.
But we didn’t look. The taxi was waiting. The kids were already running down the hall, Jenny rolling suitcases in pursuit. I patted the passports in my pocket. Then I shut the door, and pulled hard until I heard it lock.
Loved this, Dan. I HAVE wondered how you and Jenny ended up in NZ and, as a mother of two, I found this logic tight as a drum.