Reasons Why: my brother

Spirited Shenanigans just got a facelift! Hope you like the new look. It took me a heckuva long time to set it all up, what with China’s knack for blocking blogs, and my VPN’s consequent slowness.

My last post was something of a rant. But tonight’s will be a tad different. Tonight, I am going to continue writing about my Chinese family. I concluded with my sister last, and shall regale you now with tales of my younger brother… the six year old (we’ll call him Mark), not the four year old… you’ll have to wait for that delicious little post a little longer.

I have about 8 days before my visa expires, and then… I leave China for good. Am I ready to leave? Not in the slightest.

But enough whining, Madeleine! These dear friends on the other end of the screen need to know about their future king!

I say “king,” because Mark’s new favorite game is to pretend that he is the king. What of, I’m not exactly sure. But he’s king nonetheless, and I must say I can’t imagine another six year old who’d make a better one.

The kid’s a whiz. He can juggle being a tough guy, a math genius, a monkey, a kung fu master, a jokester, a world-leader, a pianist, a lego-engineer, a philosopher, an explorer, and a sweet bundle of kidness all at the same time.

Every night, when the family gets home from their various jobs at the kindergarten, Mark is always first to ring the doorbell. Often repeatedly. He then bursts into the room, breathing hard and wielding some massive log or rock or some other such natural soon-to-be weapon. Sooner or later, it joins the arsenal of sticks and pebbles in the corner, replaced with some new form of imaginary war-making. His next move? Re-conquering the bedroom from the evil lego armies that’d taken over while he’d been at school. Once he starts doing battle, any hope I had of a quiet evening vanishes among the enthusiastic sounds of explosions and thrown plastic.

Once dinner comes around, he’s trying in vain to teach D kung fu in the livingroom, and the lessons continue far into the first serving of noodles, often at the risk of our plates and bowls.

The first time he sat in my lap, we were on our way back from a family outing during the October festival, the National Holiday. I sat in the front seat, and he plopped down in my lap, bony and skinny and stronger than I thought most six year olds could be. Dirty, out-of-breath, sweaty, and still entirely full of energy, he immediately began to explain to me exactly why the trees outside lost their leaves, and why the birds that used to live in them had flown away to more beautiful places.

“It get’s very, very cold in winter,” he said with solemnity. But with second thought, he adds, “but I don’t get cold!”

“Oh, is that so?” I ask.

He frowns, very self-assured, “Of course!”

He started taking piano lessons in early winter…  and since then continues to excel with a good deal more talent than I had at that age. Do we have a musical protégé on our hands? That’d be a solid yes.

Those precious little brown fingers, still covered with dirt from an afternoon mining pebbles… gripping chopsticks that are far to big for them… latched around my neck in an often successfully executed endeavor to knock me over… held straight and firm in the fiery power and strength that is kung fu… curled around a pencil while he slaves over English homework… poking occasionally up one nostril… cradling some new ingenious lego submarine or plane… wrapped around his mother or sister or father’s hand in the unchecked adoration of a child with joy in his heart…

Whether he’s standing in his too-short, grass-stained pants and t-shirt on the arm of the couch, preparing to pounce on my unsuspecting, book-absorbed self… sitting with his nose and imagination buried in the pages of a TinTin comic book… furiously peddling the tricycle down the road back and forth in constant flight from policemen or robbers, depending on the day… sneaking in to watch movies with me and D on the weekend evenings… He’s always moving, from the moment he bounces out of bed to the moment he’s back into it, doubtlessly busy conquering other worlds in other dreams, that child is the Energizer Bunny and the Justice league all wrapped up in one bundle of scrawny, innocent vivacity.

The boundless energy he stores away for ever moment of adventure the day could possible offer is matched only by his insatiable desire for knowledge and for a world full of God’s love, a love he’s known and understood with an uncanny amount of wisdom for his age. We’d be playing “pretend” together some winter night, each of us, in the spirit of pretend, continually topping the other’s various hyperbolic super-powers…

(don’t you miss those good old days when anything was possible?)

“I can fly!” he’d say. I’d follow up quickly with,

“Well, I can turn into a dragon!”

“Well I can turn into a tornado!”

“I can be fire!”

“Well …” He stops, mouth puckered in deep thought for a moment.

“What?” I ask mentally preparing myself for the unavoidable, impending, and entirely humbling deluge kung-fu strikes I’d be receiving. He sighs.

“Well, I was going to say that I can create things… but, you know, only God, can do that!”

The wisdom of this child never ceases to bring a special sense of peace to my heart. If our children can still see some truth in the world around us, then there must be some hope for this lost little blue planet of ours.

Who knows where he’ll end up… in 20 years, he could be leading his own country, he could be a hardcore stuntman in Hollywood, he could be heading an expedition to Mars for all we know! But whatever he IS doing, I know that it will be great, and that I will always love my little superhero with every fiber of my being.

Once a big sister, always a big sister… especially when you’ve got siblings as awesome as mine.