K: Lonestar Pie goes to Beijing
This past weekend we made a quick trip to Beijing for my halfway prenatal appointment at the International Hospital there. I have visited the hospital here in Yinchuan once this semester just to make sure that everything was going well and though we're considered remote China and going to the hospital is a little bit like being on a scavenger hunt (pay this money here and take this ticket there where they will take your blood and give it back to you. Then take your blood around the corner and come back here with the results...), I was actually pretty impressed with the care. But it's absolutely impossible to get anyone to tell the gender of the baby out here even with a foreign passport. (It's illegal for Chinese in China to know the sex of a baby before it's born because of the national gender imbalance. The country doesn't want parents to decide that if they can only have one baby, then they will abort if it's not the desired sex.)
We get enough ambiguity in our lives, so we decided that we would like to know what sort of baby to expect. Hence, the trip to BJ. We had an appointment on Friday and found out that Lonestar Pie is healthy and... shy. When the doc moved to find the gender, all we saw were the bottoms of two tiny little crossed feet. Bummer.
We spent the rest of the weekend eating western food, hanging out with good friends who work in BJ, shopping at IKEA for LP's nursery, and relaxing at the Mac (our organization's headquarters). We had a great weekend, but were still pretty bummed that we didn't get to find out LP's gender. So on Monday morning, N turned on the charm and called the hospital asking if there was anything we could do to get that information (for free). We were quite surprised to be told to come on back in at our convenience, so we hopped on a bus for the 1.5 hour ride across town to the hospital... Beijing is on the big side for a city. =) We might have been at the hospital for all of five minutes. We got to the office where they took us right in. I hopped up on the table and the doc had barely started the ultrasound when he announced, "It's a boy." Huh? He froze the screen and swiveled it around and sure enough, you didn't have to be a doctor to know what you were looking at. Lonestar Pie is a boy!
Immediately after we left the doc's office, we were sending out text messages to announce the news when I started to feel really dizzy. N said he felt it too and then a minute later, it stopped. We didn't know it, but we were just in our first earthquake. Beijing is in northeast(ish) China and the epicenter of that quake was in Sichuan in western(ish) China. 1300 miles away. Imagine how big that quake must have been for us to feel it all the way in BJ. Yinchuan is closer to Sichuan so our teammates and students and friends were shaken even worse than we were, but thankfully nothing was damaged and no one was injured where we live. Remember the folks in Sichuan these days as they're dealing with the aftermath of great devastation.


























