Author: gwenborg

The Driver’s Seat

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Sometimes sitting in traffic on Gloucester Road, inching my way toward the Aberdeen Tunnel, I fantasize about becoming a taxi driver in Hong Kong.  It hasn’t always been this way.  When I first arrived in Hong Kong I swore I would never, ever drive in this city.   This is a city where driving is in large part left to the professionals, relegating the faint of heart to hiring drivers or taking public transportation.

Winding, single lane roads with sprayed concrete on one side and precipitous cliffs on the other are treated like speedways by aggressive trucks and mini buses, double-decker city buses and confident professional drivers careening around hairpin turns only to find a lycra-clad cyclist on a training ride, or unexpected slope maintenance underway.  There’s no margin for error on these slick streets.

Nonetheless, a few months after we arrived, we bought a car from a departing expatriate.  One quiet afternoon, in need of milk, I reluctantly took the keys and white knuckle drove to Stanley, a five-minute trip to an easy outdoor parking lot.  That became a regular route.  Later I drove to Redhill Plaza to see a friend and to Repulse Bay to a big indoor lot.  Within a month I was a relatively confident “South-side driver,” never intending to venture to the other side of the island.

But one day my son had a tennis lesson at Wong Nai Chung Gap up the hill.  I gripped the wheel and made my way up the windy Stubbs Road to the top, turned into the lot and parked.  I was sweating, but I made it.  Later I reasoned that if I could get to the top of the hill, I could probably venture down over the other side.  That sparked the next automotive milestone when I committed the route to Pacific Place to heart and drove to Wan Chai.  For some time I would park there, run errands around town via MTR, trolley and taxi then return to Pacific Place.   I’d spend just enough money at Great supermarket to get three hours of free parking and head home.   This was good enough in my book.  After all, I had heard stories of people making one wrong turn and ending up in China.

One fortuitous social day changed my perspective.  A friend who lived in Pokfulam invited me to go for a hike.  I drove from my house in Tai Tam to meet her at the horse stables in Pokfulam.  We parked there, hiked up to the PEAK and looped Lugard Road on foot, then headed back to our cars.  She suggested we have lunch at the yacht club in Aberdeen, so I followed her in my car, around Kennedy Town, through Central to the club in Causeway Bay and we had a great lunch.  I left there and took the Chai Wan route back to Tai Tam.  I made it there in time to meet the school bus.   I realized that I had gone all the way around Hong Kong Island (with a hike and lunch too) in less than an hour’s driving time.  So, I reasoned, as long as I am driving on HK Island, I’ll eventually come to a place I recognize.   If I mistakenly end up in a tunnel and find myself on the TST side?  No problem.  All signs lead back to HK Island, and then refer to rule number one.

With Hong Kong Island less of a mystery, I made it my business to identify parking lots all over the city.  Learning to park at IFC gave me Central, and Centrium Building, a tricky spiral of a lot with a one-way section, gave me LKF.  I found a lot in Sheung Wan and that mostly covered the places I needed to go on the island.

But what about Kowloon side?   Early in my driving tenure, my friend Debi told me there was an ice skating rink and a Bed Bath and Beyond type store in Megabox; an easy trip through the Eastern tunnel.  I decided to try it one day, but unfortunately missed the exit.  I spent the next forty-five minutes driving through neighborhoods on the Kowloon side I could never identify.   I actually laughed out loud when my haphazard impulsive turns eventually took me right to Megabox.  That time being lost in the city was fundamental to my learning curve.  I could drive to Kowloon side.

I learned to drive to King’s Park and KGV School thanks to a brief foray into the world of soccer mom.  My kid gave up the sport, but left me with two more parking lots under my belt.  Mongolian BBQ with long-time HK resident friends gave me Nathan Road, the need for a new cotillion suit for my growing teenager opened the door to Shenzhen, and my determined hiking quest gave me Sai Kung.  Now we’re getting somewhere!

But there are places even the most seasoned drivers take a deep breath before tackling.  One of these for me was the elevator parking lot.  My friend Eunei drove me in her little Prius for lunch at Din Tai Fung in Causeway Bay one afternoon.  We entered the lot and she drove into an elevator, turned off the car and the door closed behind us.  We were taken up to a floor with available spaces and she backed out and parked.  I was amazed, but planned never to attempt it myself.  Certainly my Volvo station wagon would be too big.  But then, several months later another woman who had lived in Hong Kong for a year less than I had, pulled in her mirrors and drove the exact same car as mine expertly into the car lift.  I went back that same week to do it myself.

My husband drives just enough in Hong Kong to be dangerous (or at least that was the case at first).  After casually rolling out into a busy intersection in front of a minibus, forgetting that a right hand turn is across traffic, and being one lane off for the tricky Wong Chuck Hang to Repulse Bay Road cut off that sent him unnecessarily through the clogged Aberdeen Tunnel on a busy Saturday afternoon, he relinquished the keys and left the driving to me.  My driving in Hong Kong is the “talent” he singles out for the most amount of praise.

As time passed, my grip on the steering wheel loosened.  I began to turn on the radio or plug in my podcasts.  I delighted in a new route, parking garage or street discovered.   And, returning to Hong Kong for our fifth year, I am thrilled getting back in my car and venturing out into the city.  Driving in Hong Kong is more than transportation to me.  It is a daily recognition that, contrary to popular opinion, it is not impossible to “teach an old dog new tricks.”  Just don’t try to convince me that the same logic might apply to learning to speak Cantonese.

Michelins and MacLehose

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Forget visas, flights, Airport Express and all the other hassles of international travel and instead hop a taxi through the tunnel and you’re set for a fantastic “staycation” right in your own HK backyard.  Here’s my suggested itinerary for 3 days of hiking the first half of the MacLehose trail, dining at Michelin starred restaurants and staying in style.

The Serious Hiker’s Guide to Hong Kong is a great resource.  I recommend photographing each page of the stage you’re doing on your i-phone for frequent reference rather than lugging the book.  Also, we loaded up on almonds, dried mango and a Snickers bar.  Food is not always available along the trails, so take your own.

Day 1:  Kiss the kiddies goodbye, drop your bags at the W Hong Kong on Kowloon side and head to Mong Kok for the first of your incredibly inexpensive and delicious Michelin starred meals at Tim Ho Wun (2 Kowong Wa St).  You may wait an hour to get a seat in this cramped, no atmosphere, world’s cheapest Michelin starred restaurant dim sum place, but it’s worth it.  Put your name in, get a number and an order form and go wander the local markets until it’s your turn.  Don’t miss the char siu bao.  For roughly a dozen dishes our bill for two people came to a whopping $111HK.

If you’re up for it, start your hiking adventure that very day with Stage 3 of the MacLehose trail (we did stage 5 and part of the Wilson trail, but I think this plan works better).  Taxi to Pak Tam Au (or 94/96R bus toward Wong Shek Pier) with plenty of water, as there’s no place to buy it along the way.  This stage will take you roughly three hours at a steady hiking pace and alights at Kei Ling Ha where it’s easy to hail a cab back to the W.  That night we chose to eat in the hotel, but you could probably find a better meal if you venture out.

Day 2:  Start with a swim at the W’s gorgeous rooftop pool, then a hearty breakfast at the clever and stylish Kitchen. Tank up for a fabulous day of hiking stages 1 & 2.  If you’re in it for the exercise or bragging rights, take a taxi to the Country Park Visitor Centre at Pak Tam Chung in Sai Kung and start your hiking adventure just past the gate.  This first stage is largely flat, entirely on road surface and rings the enormous man-made reservoir created by damming a narrow inlet on both sides.  This stage took us about two hours at a walking pace, but I would recommend either running this phase or skipping it altogether by taking a green taxi to the end of Sai Wan Road and meeting up with the trail just before the start of stage 2.

Stage 2 of the MacLehose is indescribably beautiful and should be a must-do for anyone with a Hong Kong ID card.  We completed this stage in about four hours, but would have spent more time enjoying the beautiful series of beaches along the way had we not walked the first stage too.  The first of several amazing beaches is Long Ke.  This beach has white sugar sand and a perfect pine grove for camping. Interestingly, the only development located there is a rehab facility; most definitely the finest located one in the world! If you can drag yourself away from this paradise, the trail continues with a steep ascent over Sai Wan Shan, but one is royally rewarded with the descent into Sai Wan for a gorgeous beach filled with starfish and a funny “Oriental Restaurant” where you can stock up on water and sometimes food.  Up and over again and you get to Tai Long Wan, Big Wave Bay, with a perfect little rest spot beckoning from the far side of the beach across a rickety little wooden bridge.  This is a perfect, grab-a-beer-and-ponder-the-view spot, not to be rushed.

From here the trail turns inland and goes through several abandoned villages.  It’s slightly creepy with many stray dogs and no people along the 8K tree-canopied path, but it eventually opens up at a place where some catch a ferry, or continue on to the end of the trail at Pak Tam Au.  The 94 bus leads directly back to Sai Kung town.

Reward your considerable efforts by making a beeline for Michelin starred Loaf On (49 Market St.) in downtown Sai Kung.  Famous for abalone, crispy chicken, fried tofu & salt & pepper squid, this place knows how to fry!  While Rod would argue that fried food is not the best hiking fuel, I stand by my recommendation that this is too good to miss and you deserve it after all that work!

Day 3:  After another Kitchen breakfast (we switched to the new Ritz Carlton in ICC after one night, but I much preferred the W.  Learn from my mistakes!), take a taxi to the start of stage 4 at Kei Ling Ha Lo Wai for a solid day of hiking 4 and 5.  Stage 4 is a relatively rigorous climb up Man on Shan (the second highest peak), Pyramid Hill and Delta Pass.  Hopefully you will be rewarded with stunning views on either side of this exposed trail.  Unfortunately the day we did it was shrouded in fog, so it was a bit tedious and slippery for us, but still a great workout.  The second half of Stage 4 goes through woods along the Gin Drinker’s line with several emplacements from WWII still visible.  The end of stage 4, by Gilwell Camp, is a hard place to get a taxi, so definitely plan to continue on through stage 5 that leads up and over Tate’s Cairn, Shatin Pass and Lion Rock.  The views of Kowloon along this trail are stunning.   Since you’ve spent the day hiking back towards your hotel, a quick cab ride from Tai Po road will have you back at the W in no time, ready to celebrate!

We opted for a foot massage at the no frills but authentic Tai Pan on Nathan Road in TST then an al fresco meal at BLT Steak, but if you want to continue with the Michelin theme, there is no shortage of options within a few minutes of the hotel.

Day 4:  Sleep in, read the whole paper over a leisurely breakfast, check out and head back in time to pick up your little one from preschool.  Congratulations! You’ve just completed, in three days, one-half of what some crazy people do in roughly 24 hours at the Oxfam Trailwalker 100K.  But, you’ve actually had a relaxing vacation in the process and enjoyed the sites along the way.

Pretzel Class

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Settling into my 43E seat for the 14-hour Cathay Pacific flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong at bleary one a.m., already 17-hours and two domestic flights into the journey, I folded my legs beneath me in lotus and stashed my water bottle in the seat pocket in front of me. Twenty years of practicing yoga has found a practical application in surviving international economy air travel.  As a result, instead of boorish “economy,” I propose renaming the back of the plane “pretzel class.”

Business class is an elusive pleasure for my family.  You would think with seven years of overseas travel we would have accumulated a flight status that would enable us to upgrade, but alas, no.  About the only thing my Marco Polo Club membership has ever gotten me is early boarding, the pleasure of settling into my pretzel class seat for an even longer period of time.  Many families in HK get annual business class tickets for home leave as part of their expat packages.  On several occasions I have walked past families of six snuggled in their supine splendor in business class, sheepishly wishing me a good flight as I trudge past the curtain to a land unbeknownst to them.

I figure that once you fly business class you can never go back, so I take comfort in knowing I’ve protected our family from that traumatic experience of having to fly a post-business-class economy flight in their young adult lives.   So, instead of bemoaning first world problems, I will instead offer some constructive tips and advice for managing pretzel class with children with as much comfort and style as any of us can muster in the back of the plane.

If you have a few children to choose from, always opt to sit next to the six-year-old. Younger children require attention and entertainment throughout the flight, and older children have long enough legs that they need the foot space, but six-year-olds are the sweet spot of travel companions.  That is, provided you have rules in your household that limit electronics use like we do.  Assuming they’re thirsty for as much electronic entertainment as you will allow, this is the perfect time to indulge their wildest dreams of hours of uninterrupted TV, movies and video games.  You take the aisle and give them the dreaded middle seat (this protects their sleeping head from beverage cart bonks anyway).  Once they’re settled, headphones in place and legs cutely dangling, you are free to turn sideways, luxuriously stretching your legs across their allotted leg space and hook your toe on the magazine pocket in front of their seat.  Tuck the standard issue pillow by the aisle armrest behind your back and you are good to go for a half an hour of straight leg bliss.  Your first yogo pose of the flight.

When your toe falls asleep, gather your inside leg beneath you, tuck your other leg in your own magazine pocket and raise the arm between you and your child, but not all the way.  There’s a sweet spot where you can rest your pillow on the end of that arm and lay your cheek upon it, your forehead bolstered by their seat (still in the upright position, while yours is reclined; for their viewing pleasure of course.).  Perfection of sleep yogo pose number two.

Eventually your leg will fall asleep, so you’ll have to shift to the third pose, classic upright.  Shift your carry on bag to the space in front of your six-year-old, thus leaving your foot space free and clear.  With the standard issue pillow supporting your back, grab a neck pillow, recline your seat as far as it will go and stretch out.  Savasana! …well, almost.  The neck pillow gives just enough lift to allow your head to fall gently side to side as you take a few deep breaths, elbows resting on both armrests without competition.  Yogo pose number three.

Repeat these three poses in half-hour segments, throw in a few lotus interims, crossed leg traditional seated positions and double magazine pocket toe tucks and you’ll find the time passing without requisite stiffness and claustrophobawigglyitis – that condition where you just can’t sit still.

If you don’t have the luxury of traveling with a six-year-old, here’s some advice for traveling with older and younger children.

Older children are no worries on a flight provided you have some control over their viewing choices.  On Cathay Pacific, individualized viewing content is extensive and indiscriminate.  I made the mistake of choosing the seat in front of my young teenager once, rather than behind, so I couldn’t easily monitor his choices and he made some poor ones.  I learned to always choose the seat behind, and regularly pop in for random content checks.  My 10-year-old prefers to hibernate on airplanes, refusing all nourishment and libation.  We had to make a deal that she will drink water, but I do not force her to eat airplane food and she chooses not to bring other snacks.  A stop at the smoothie place right outside arrivals usually does the trick for her.  She manages a strange circadian cycle of cat naps and TV episodes, but is entirely self sufficient and it works for her.

Infant travel in pretzel class is just “plane hard.”  I had one flight to London with a sixteen-month-old who threw up on me the entire six-hour flight, and then we circled for an hour and sat on the ground at Heathrow for another six hours because of a freak snowstorm.  Thirteen hours of aviation captivity of the worst sort.  The flight attendants refused to even get me paper towels, much less sympathy or support, but we survived.  As I tell my friends who are afraid to fly with children, “Time passes at the same rate whether it is the best moment of your life or the worst.  This too will pass.”   Take more diapers than you could ever possibly need.

Toddler travel in pretzel class is a little tricky, but do-able with some forward preparation.  If you’re feeling Martha Stewarty, wrap up a bunch of tiny items, one for each hour of the flight, and dole them out accordingly.  It doesn’t matter too much what is inside the packages.  The unwrapping process and the surprise of the new is what you’re going for.  Stickers, crayons, a matchbox car, all of these things will keep them busy for a long time.  When you run out of gifts, the barf bag makes a great puppet, band-aids stick lightly to everything, and walks up and down the aisles are a necessity.  Go to the back of the plane and play “head, shoulders, knees and toes” a few hundred times and they’ll be all right.  Lollypops, goldfish… all the otherwise limited snacks work wonders to amuse and delight little ones too.  The biggest advice I can offer is to be gracious to fellow passengers from the get go.  If you demonstrate that you’re engaged with your child on the flight they will feel sympathy, not annoyance, at the inevitable meltdown moments.  This is NOT the flight for you to chill out with People magazine and watch a movie.

So, what to bring on your flight?  While Gwyneth Paltrow recommends atomized silver and Lypo-Spheric Vitamin C to survive air travel, I don’t think she’s ever even seen pretzel class.  I can honestly say I get the most mileage out of good headphones, a neck pillow, thick socks, raw almonds, good dark chocolate and a big bottle of water.   The smartest thing I did several years ago was to fill out the on-line Cathay meal preference form.  I now regularly receive a special Indian vegetarian meal.  I always feel slightly guilty when the flight attendants approach my seat to confirm my special meal and realize pretty quickly that the blond isn’t actually Indian, but that was not stipulated as a requirement on the preferences list, so I can live with it.   The special meal is hand delivered an hour earlier than everyone else’s meal, is spicy and tasty and avoids any questionable “meat” in the regular food choices.

Some may be tempted to confuse the origin of the new name with the paltry alternative served on some flights now due to a strange explosion of peanut allergies, but after reading this you know the truth.  Pretzel class finds its origins in the long standing traditions of the East; yoga and Indian vegetarian food.

My Kind of Revolution

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On paper, a personal revolution fit perfectly between Golden Week and the last day of school before summer vacation. A revolution that fit around real life sounded like the ideal plan, but as de Tocqueville so aptly stated, “In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.”

PURE Yoga Hong Kong was offering Baron Baptiste’s ‘40-Day Personal Revolution Programme’ taught by a lovely former snowboarder turned yogi from British Columbia.  From the brochure I picked up, the program seemed the perfect combination of structure and flexibility.  I rationalized that the six, two-and-a-half-hour Saturday afternoon sessions would nestle in between morning kid activities and evening social obligations without too much family disruption.  From a cursory look at the textbook, the rest of the program was pretty flexible, encouraging daily yoga and meditation in increasing durations and a generally healthy but un-prescribed whole foods diet.  No problem-o.  I got this revolution thing in the bag.

But why launch a revolution at the busiest time of the school year when I was gearing up to leave town for two months with three kids in tow?  Well, because I have a disability that it’s high time I address.  I’m metaphysically challenged.  I’m like the black sheep of the new age world.  Not that I really know anything about it, but when I talk with people who do, I get the sense that I have a rather disagreeable metaphysical composition.  I’m a Virgo, numerology 8, and a 9 on the Enneagram.  Put those all together and you get an organized peacemaker with visions of grandeur.  Time to get to the bottom of this personal narrative, and what better than a disciplined program of physical and mental growth to cap off another season in Hong Kong?

Ironically, I missed the first Saturday class on “Presence” because I was having my energy rebalanced at a swanky wellness retreat with my husband in Hua Hin, Thailand.  I know, so cliché, but the trip had been planned for a while, and as I said, I was fitting revolution in AROUND my regular life. I read the first hundred pages of the book, donned my new citrine bracelet to balance my solar plexus chakra and headed back to Hong Kong for week one of my revolution.  Our marching orders were simply to “be” where we are.  The twelve “Laws of Transformation” prescribed by Baptiste provided the framework for excavating our best essential selves.  I was on my way to revolution.

I rocked the first week.  Five minutes of mediation twice a day?  Check.  Twenty minutes of yoga daily?  I did more.  Mindful eating?  I mulled over every morsel.  Revolution?  No problem.

When I finally joined my fellow revolutionaries at the start of week two, “Vitality,” I was surprised to walk into the room and see sixty unfamiliar faces.  Sounds strange, but despite the high density living, the chain yoga set is an insular little group in Hong Kong and can feel downright provincial at times.  Never one to miss an opportunity to meet someone with a good story, I was pleasantly surprised with the potential that surrounded me.  My fellow revolutionaries were similarly bursting with self-awareness and healthy habits on their own personal voyages.  As I sat listening to each and every one of them share the details of their week, I had my first lesson in patience and presence, but I was actually surprised by how charming it was. We made an agreement that information shared in the studio would stay there, so I will respect that and not tell any stories unrelated to my own experience, but suffice it to say that in competitive Hong Kong, the athletic yoga component was generally easier for folks than the quiet meditation.

The class assistant passed out a nifty matrix each week on which we were encouraged to record our mediation minutes, every morsel we consumed and our yoga practice.  Being goal oriented, I found this sheet to be entirely motivating and was often the sole reason I would sit in meditation some evenings instead of diving straight into bed.  It worked, but as days passed I began to feel that I was missing the point.

The jump from five to ten minutes of mediation that week was huge.  I can do just about anything for five minutes.  A few long deep breaths and some exercises to notice thoughts without reacting to them, and the timer sounded before I knew it.  But ten minutes requires an actual practice and discipline that I just didn’t have in my conscious bag of tricks. Despite my mother being a meditation teacher, I’ve never been able to do it well.  As soon as I sat that week, I was transfixed by the image of each thought as an enormous fish caught on the line as it thrashed itself to submission in its attempt at liberation. “Get off.  Seriously, go!  Get off, get off, get OFF!”  I would implore my fishy thoughts to leave, but the more I battled, the more they stayed on the line.  Ten minutes of this battling felt interminable, but would eventually pass and I’d finish feeling more relieved to be back on shore than enlightened.

I’ve been practicing yoga for fifteen years and, after living in Santa Monica for more than a decade, healthy eating has become so ingrained that neither of these elements of the program presented a big challenge. Getting to Central for the daily yoga class was the only tricky part, but on days that I didn’t make it to class I found the YogaGlow website to be useful.  There I could take classes from global favorites like Amy Ipoliti in the comfort of my own room and for the duration I had available.  Gotta love the Internet!

Rounding the corner into week three, “Equanimity,” I was hitting my stride and feeling really great. We learned some new meditation techniques to try at home, and talked about Baptiste’s principles for stepping to the edge.  Sitting knee to knee with the person sitting next to us in the room, we had to share about our week.  We were asked to pay particular attention to our intuition this week and to let it guide our actions.  Bingo, that solar plexus chakra thing was all about listening to intuition, so this would be the week it all came together for me.  Right?  Sure.

The meditation increased to fifteen minutes in week three and I was surprised that something clicked and I was getting it.  I actually had a few of those buzzy moments where the top of my head was electrified without a specific thought in mind.  Could it be that I just fell asleep momentarily or was I really meditating?  I was never able to discern the difference between the two, but I got a feeling that’s what it feels like when you do it right.

My oldest son was initially surprisingly uncomfortable with the idea of me meditating, and even walked in on me one time with the same shocked expression as if I were doing that other thing kids walk in on in the bedroom.  But modeling positive behavior is a parenting fundamental, so I did it anyway and was rewarded with two sweet moments that week.

My five year old, who has an uncanny psychic connection to my biorhythms, opens his eyes in the morning at precisely the same time I do each day (5:25).  There’s no getting up before him to meditate.  If I’m up, so is he.  So one morning I asked if he would join me instead of just wandering about.  He sat right down, criss-cross-applesauce, placed his thumb and pointer finger together, turned them to the sky, and, gently resting them on his knees, closed his eyes.  We made it for 3 delicious minutes and it was a great meditation.  Later that week I told my 12 year old that I was going to my room to mediate and he actually didn’t roll his eyes.  Ten or so minutes into my mediation I heard footsteps and something being slid under the door.  I was torn.  Should I get up and see what it was, or continue for another five minutes first?  Well, I tried to stick it out, but curiosity won out and I got up to find a slip of paper from my nine-year-old little girl that said, “Mom please read to me when your done meditating – “Sidewalk.””  Needless to say, I went right in to read and returned to finish the mediation after she fell asleep.

But as far as “equanimity” went, I was a failure.  Wow, there’s something about where you place your attention that can expose a bigger problem and make it worse!  Focusing on equanimity made me angrier and more reactive to the mundane injustice of it all.  Easy to say, “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” but being a successful wife and mother of three kids in hectic Hong Kong is precisely about the extent to which the small stuff gets done right.

I paid particular attention to sugar consumption this week and realized that I really don’t eat much.  What I do consume is often the result of a gift or gesture.  I ate a cinnamon roll that a friend had carefully selected just for the occasion of our lovely breakfast, and I enjoyed it because I enjoy her and the fact that she invited me over to her home.  Baptiste calls these wholesome foods and acknowledges the role they play in our lives.  I like that about his philosophy and believe it whole-heartedly.

Which is why I approached week four, “Restoration” with not a little trepidation.  The one red flag in an otherwise solid program was a random three-day fruit cleanse that was neither medically substantiated nor even well laid out in the book.  Basically we were told to pick any three days within the week and eat only fruit.  We were reminded that avocados and tomatoes count and encouraged to be good to ourselves this week, but still show up for yoga.

 Having worked for a nutrition company in an office full of nutrition scientists for a few years, I have strong feelings about detox/clense diets and I generally don’t believe in them.  Still, I didn’t want to be the party pooper of the revolution, so I decided to embrace a modified version by cutting out wheat, dairy, meat, and alcohol from my diet for the three days.  I ate primarily raw vegetables, fruit and the occasional Ryvita cracker, but found my stomach was in knots and I didn’t really feel very well.  I felt even worse when I spoke with a fellow revolutionary in the locker room who claimed to have subsisted on coconut water alone for all three days.  That class meeting our facilitator asked us to think about intuition and how we’d used our intuition that week.   I wanted to scream that my intuition told me that eating only fruit for three days was a stupid thing to do, but I kept my mouth shut and privately reasoned that at this point I’ve pretty much figured out what my body needs to be fed and I shouldn’t mess with it.

Still, I had a really powerful week.  A month into daily yoga practice and I was really strong.  The point on my lower back that is always a little tweaked stopped bothering me and I was able to stand up from wheel pose.  I held my handstands longer and joyfully popped in and out of headstand and crow with little effort.  A classmate who runs a juice detox company gave me a green drink sample that included spirulina and I felt like I had consumed a double espresso all day.  I think I’ve discovered the wonder food for me, and it’s algae, not caffeine.

But things went downhill from there.  By week five, “Centering,” my revolution was in tatters.  We were supposed to be meditating 25 minutes twice a day, introducing minerals into our diets and practicing daily yoga for an hour.  I had a date with my husband, a fiftieth birthday party and a farewell for dear friends, which meant three nights of indulgence instead of piety.  How was I supposed to have a revolution with such a busy social schedule?

That week I tried to go to yoga, but I’d maxed out my class allotment for the month, so I would have to pay extra.  Since I was already there that day, I reluctantly paid for the only class available at that time.  Hot yoga.  In June.  In Hong Kong.  The smell when I walked in the 105-degree room was nauseating.  Even before the first asana, sweat poured from the men like a summer storm.  The foul common mat beneath my feet stunk, and my feet slid every time I tried for down dog.  Compounding the humiliation, I found after my shower that I had forgotten to take a bra and underwear and ended up in a taxi in my little sundress with about an inch of fabric to spare between my root chakra and the gross plastic taxi seat.

My meditation was equally cursed.  I never watch TV, but on the rare occasion that my husband goes on a business trip, I catch up on Glee.  I know, strange choice, but having grown up in a family of high school music teachers, Glee is my own personal history re-write, where being in show choir is the hottest game in town.  Anyway, in the national competition, the Glee cast sings Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”  Never in the history of music has a tune so insidiously worked it’s way into a brain to the point that even my subconscious can’t keep it at bay in a fraught filled meditation. “So now I’m praying for the end of time, so hurry up man arrive!” relentlessly repeated, over and over as visions of Greek Week at college came flooding in along with it.  I had to quit the meditation or go mad, and the harder I tried to expel it, the tighter it’s grip.  I gave up.

By Thursday I had eaten everything bad in sight and I was about to write off my revolution completely.  That morning I had an hour to spare before my youngest’s pre-school concert and I could have switched on YogaGlow and checked that box on my revolution matrix.  Instead, I instinctively grabbed my running shoes and headed out the door to do the one thing that always works to settle my mind and increase my confidence.  I went for a run.  On my regular loop along the South China Sea, I listened to my Telluride Bluegrass play list and I felt clarity seeping into my pores with the breath. As Mumford and Son’s inspirational “Awake My Soul” rang in my ears, I finally saw the way to do the two things I had pledged to accomplish at the start of the 40 days.  I crystallized my vision for expanding my women’s hiking group and, if you are reading this and you aren’t related to me, I achieved my second goal too.

I arrived at week 6, “Celebrating,” and shared my story.  I found connection, empathy and support from those familiar faces who were now friends.  One of our mediations was to sit knee to knee with the person next to us and to stare into his or her eyes without looking away for four minutes.  There was uncomfortable laughter in the room, but not from me.  My partner was nervous, but I held her there in the space and she settled into it.  We connected and I felt good.  My yoga practice was strong too.  I left that final class feeling confident and centered, went home to kiss my kids, shower and head out to a friend’s house for a BBQ where we ate meat, sugar, carbohydrates, dairy and wine until the wee hours of the morning.  What’s a revolution without a dissenter?

So, on the final morning of my revolution, I didn’t meditate, but I did make it to yoga and, as I finish off a homemade coconut chocolate chip cookie, I can picture the revolutionaries shaking their heads at my lack of discipline and self-control.   Was my revolution a success or a failure?  Depends on how you look at it.  I suppose the thing about revolutions is that you just can’t plan how they’ll turn out.  Most real revolutions aren’t planned, they are sparked, and that’s just what happened to me on that run.  Whether or not the program precipitated that spark I’ll never know, but I suspect it did.   As Che Guevara said, “The Revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe.  You have to make it fall.”  I prefer to pick apples rather than aggressively agitating to make them fall, but the sentiment is there, and as I fix my gaze and raise my arms to the sky in tree pose, my foundation feels a lot steadier now.

“Tiger Mother” or “Panda Mom,” they both face extinction.

Published on by gwenborg2 Comments

I wrote this a few years ago as the Tiger Mother phenomenon was raging.  It still reflects my thoughts on parenting:

As an American woman living in Hong Kong, so far away from family and friends, I rely on Facebook not only as a way to keep in touch, but as a pulse point for news.  You would have thought that a revolution had started when I turned on my computer to find no fewer that a dozen friends had posted links to a Wall Street Journal article entitled, “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior” by Amy Chua.   While Ms. Chua makes a very strong case for the Tiger Mother that I must admit did explain some play date behavior and made the hairs on my neck bristle at the “everybody gets a trophy” liberal parenting camp, the pressure cooker approach she espouses is bound to blow.

A wise friend in Hong Kong coined a delicious term for the alternative parental camp: Panda Mom.  As she so eloquently put it in her Facebook post, A Panda Mom “is convinced that her cub is absolutely the most adorable thing on the planet, is very proud of her cub’s vegetable consumption, favors her cub spending lots of time outside climbing trees and firmly believes that what her cub needs most is more sleep.”  I would add that, as pandas are known to leave their young unattended for long stretches of time, a Panda Mom has prepared her child to be a capable individual who does not require micromanaging at every moment.  Panda cubs are able to structure their own free time and to make reasonable, rational decisions for themselves.

The Yin to the Yang of parenting models is tempting, but the real problem is that the whole system is out of balance.  Offering an alternative to the scenario presented by Chua only serves to draw a line in the sand of our already polarized world of rhetoric and mud slinging.  And, in fact, while superficially it seems that Panda and Tiger Mothers are at opposite ends of the spectrum, reminiscent of the “mommy wars” between working and non-working mothers, their motivation is more similar than you might think.  What all those faced with the responsibility of raising children today share is the plague of fear-based parenting.  Fear-based parenting is debilitating, and most of us are falling into that camp.  Blame 24 hour cable news, the leveled playing field for college admissions, the over-diagnosis of illnesses and disabilities, corn syrup, hormones in the milk, the Air Pollution Index, or any of the myriad threats the big bad world poses, but the result is parents who view the nurturing years as a complex battle strategy of defense and attack, and we’re arming ourselves to the teeth.  It’s exhausting and, I fear ultimately not helpful to our kids.

The truth is, future success is undeterminable.  Opponents to the Tiger Mother model recount myriad examples of burn out and tragic suicides by young Asian adolescents who achieve to a high level and then find themselves one of many bright students in a more competitive pool and can’t stand not to be at the top.  Certainly the “good enough” Panda approach to parenting can be criticized for creating generations of children who don’t understand healthy competition and may lag their peers in conventional test results.  Still, neither of these critiques gets to the essential issue, which is that there is a generally accepted understanding that education is important, but there is no proven formula for future success and happiness, so why make adolescence so unpleasant?

Furthermore, if you stop and think about it, how would you really define success for your children?  For example, do you want your daughter to go to (insert Ivy League school here), get a PhD or and MBA, work in a high-powered job for a decade and then find herself wanting to start a family and joining the ranks of conflicted, over-educated, over-qualified but non-working mothers who love their children, but sort of miss making a considerable contribution to the world outside of their own homes?  A recent Harvard Business Review survey found that 37% of highly qualified women were “off-ramping” (voluntarily leaving their job for extended time periods) and that “three quarters [of the women surveyed] were on nonlinear career trajectories to the detriment of their earning potential and career advancement.” (HBR Magazine, June 2010).  From personal experience, I have spent countless hours over coffee with some of the brightest women in the world lamenting this very dilemma.

It seems to me that when we all drop out of the work force to raise our kids, our only measure of success becomes their performance, which puts a lot of the wrong kind of pressure on everyone.    As I said in a piece I wrote for GOOP last year, “Parents want the best for their kids, but sometimes, without even realizing they’re doing it, they conflate their own insecurities, disappointments and dreams with those of their children causing everyone to feel like they don’t measure up.”  Who has failed if your child doesn’t get into the right school, and who is to say that if they do get in and complete it successfully that that is a surefire determinant for their continued future success?  And, if they are ultimately successful, do you then deserve the credit for a job well done?

My intuition tells me that all we can do is enjoy our kids and listen to them, try to make the best decisions we can for them while we have the luxury of being the decision-makers, but more importantly, try to plant the seeds for them to make good decisions for themselves in the future.  I do not think that the alternative to the Tiger Mother is negligent; it just comes down to a question of extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation.  If you need external praise and measures to feel like you’ve done a good job parenting, then that does seem to be a pretty efficient way to achieve them.  But, if you believe that children are capable of independent intellectual thought and ideas and that your job as a parent (and the job of the teacher) is to give them the tools to help them draw out and further develop those theories, then respectful, intuitive parenting might just give you the space to actually enjoy raising your kids a little more, and might just create better little human beings in the process.

Ms. Chua has a provocative angle, a sexy title and an awesome publicist. She has struck a chord that plays into our fear-based parenting and has forced Panda Moms to lose more sleep over the flattening planet and changing rules of the game.  But the truth of the matter is that both species are in danger of becoming extinct.  If we don’t start working together to nurture the next generation of thinkers who must be both academically prepared AND independently motivated, there will be no future for which to prepare.