Our son has just become engaged to Sha, whose parents speak no English, and we have been racking our brains for ways to communicate when we meet them next year. Chris already got a colleague at work to translate a message that could be sent on a greetings card in Chinese characters––this has been posted to Beijing––and I have started creating a picture book which I hope might give them some idea of what George's childhood was like and where he has lived between 1977 and 2010. The search for appropriate pictures is taking me back through many old memories and to the places where we used to live––Bern, for instance, in the winter of 1981-82 when George was 4 and his sister 6 years old––or visited, such as Settle and Giggleswick in 1986, the year we moved to Hertfordshire, England, in the days when Emma and George were keen rail riders.
The picture book is a project that will take weeks to finish and is probably something of a displacement activity instead of the real effort I should be making to learn some useful Mandarin (普通话 ) during the next nine months, before we arrive in Beijing for the wedding!
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