Category Archives: Home & Family

My husband John and I took a joint
three week business trip to China in April and May
this year. We went to the Sun China Engineering and Research Institute on
the campus of Tsinghua University in Beijing. I was there to recruit participants
for the SEED Engineering mentoring program and John was there to talk with the
Engineering staff about Sun’s ARCs (Architectural Review Committees).

On one of the weekends, we flew to Xian to see the terra cotta warriors.
We made the mistake of going during the Chinese Labor holiday so it was
very very crowded. The archaeological site is an hour’s drive from the city of
Xian. Xian has some lovely old buildings and a big city wall. The night before
we went to see the site, we walked through the hot streets of Xian.
The city park was full of teens and little kids roller skating. The
Science and Technology museum was closed but we could see painted figures on the
windows: a local version of
NASA’s Pioneer space plaque. The differences were that the figures on the
window in Xian wore underwear and were Chinese in facial feature.

Outside of the city, the countryside has scattered brick houses and walls with
many neat piles of sticks, tiles, and bricks around. Some of the walls and
shacks are dry-laid brick, others use mortar. There are tiny towns with small fruit
tree orchards and grain fields between. Brick outhouses stand between the road and
the homes. All the space is thoroughly used with old and new jumbled together.
You can see the stacks of what looks like a nuclear power plant past the farms
and muledrawn cart and bicycles on the road. As we drove closer to the Qin Army Vaults,
there were factories, some with rows of terra cotta warriors for sale in front.

We spent about three hours visiting the 2000-year-old
tomb itself. We mostly had to squeeze around the tours because the tour guides
would take up a position in front of their group at the rail over the pit and talk
for a very very long time. This meant that no one else could see what was below.
There are four buildings: 3 covered pits and one museum. Visitors get from one to
another using a credit-card-like ticket (from Xian Typical Brother Industries Co., Ltd.).
The pit earth is yellow brown and seeing the clay faces and bodies standing or lying on
top in their orderly rows is awesome. The bodies are strangely perportioned: the
trunks seem too long and the legs too short on the men. The horses have full size heads
and 3/4 size bodies and no tails. On the warriors, there are slight facial differences
from man to man, particularly when comparing the rarer figures and officers.

The museum room displaying the two small bronze chariots was absolutely packed with
people around the central glass cases but as usual in China everyone
seemed calm and good tempered. There was little elbowing and grouching. Kids were
protected from the crowd and everyone looked to be enjoying themselves even in the hot airless crush. Most of the tourists at the site seemed to be Chinese nationals rather
than foreign tourists. It was like visiting Washington DC where Americans go to be
proud of their heritage rather than just gawk at the sights.

John and I knew before the trip that we wanted to buy a full-size terra cotta warrior
copy while we were in China. I have wanted one for my garden ever since my Mother
visited China for the first time ten years ago. We had gone shopping at http://www.terracottawarriors.com/
so we knew what was available in the USA. Bargaining in China seems as much
interactive theater as
commerce. It took four hours at two different factories to make a deal everyone
liked. We tore up two sets of contracts along the way as part of the discussions
of what, where, how much, and how to pay. We had some advantage because the
http://www.terracottawarriors.com/
web site is blocked from viewing in China so the Xian salesmen did not know their
competition’s prices. After very hard bargaining, we bought two figures in dark
grey clay – like this original:

kneeling archer. One archer is for us and the other for my parents.

Last week, I got email from the Xian shipping company that two boxes are coming
in. Our warriors are in Los Angeles now, headed for Oakland, California. We will
borrow a truck and some hefty friends to pick them up when they arrive.

My mother has been distributing some of her larger family
furniture to my brothers and me. Last weekend, I brought home
a parlor screen painted in the mid-1800s. It would have originally
been used to shield someone from drafts. It has 3 sections hinged
together; each being about 54″x20″. The frame is made of
some dark fruit wood mounted with paintings on canvas panels.

The six paintings are by my ancestress Mary Esperandieu who came to
Knoxville, Tennessee USA in 1840 from Vevey, Switzerland. The panels tell
the story of her move to what was a lovely but relatively
primitive new country. She came to America as a young woman with her family.
Her father, Reverend Frederick Esperandieu, was a Huguenot (French protestant)
minister and teacher.

One screen panel shows a woman in white waving a hankerchief
goodbye to Lake Leman (Lake Geneva) and the Swiss mountains. Another shows
a tiny church in a field of wildflowers with hills behind. There are panels
showing lilac and sunflowers and another showing the dogwood native to the
Knoxville area. A very different panel is of a lively snow play scene with
children on sleds, a horse drawn sleigh, and a mansion in the background. This
is probably out of Mary Esperandieu’s childhood memories.

The paintings are in a Grandma Moses primitive style. My mother says this is
one of several family screens she inherited and is restoring. When she got this one,
the paintings were all crumpled up and in very bad shape. She remounted them
on new canvas with rabbit skin glue and tacked them back on the old screen frame.

Rev Frederick Esperandieu ran a French-English bilingual school in Knoxville. Both
he and his sons fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
Mary Esperandieu eventually married Edward Bolli. My brother Mark has her diary from
the crossing to America, including the sad story of the death of her Mother’s new baby
at sea. My cousin Rip has Mary Esperandieu Bolli’s diary from the time of the Civil War.
In it is her story of telling the soldiers who came to take her chickens that they were
no gentlemen. They slunk away ashamed.

My daughter took her last final yesterday. Tomorrow I take a vacation day
so that her girls’ choir at Harker can come over for an end-of-year swim party.
Today, she and I took a few hours to practice taking CalTrain and BART trains
to San Francisco from San Jose. Jessica has a part-time unpaid summer internship
at the EFF – Electronic Frontier Foundation –
which starts Monday. She is very excited to be working in an area she cares a
great deal about. EFF is in San Francisco’s Mission district so we needed to try out
the public transit route to be sure she knew where to go, what it cost, and how long
it took.

We had been advised that the 16th & Mission BART station was a little “colorful” so
we got off at 24th & Mission. We walked to EFF then wandered around the neighborhood.
Jessica and I ate some pastry at a paneteria, did some shopping (3 formal dresses
for $20 at Thrift Town), then I participated in a work conference call on my cell phone
while sitting on the BART station plaza bricks in the sun among the pigeons.
After the call, we ate lunch at a taqueria featuring a delightful mural of the Virgen
de Guadalupe on the wall, and took the train home. It was a good trip and I think
Jessica feels more sure of her way.

My own summer intern started on Monday. Shilpam will be supporting the SEED program
between her Harker high school graduation and starting as a Freshman at Cal Berkeley.
She was our intern last summer too and did a fine job.

My daughter Jessica is preparing for her music teacher’s end-of-year
recital on Sunday. Dina Mirskaya has Jessica singing Durante’s “Danza, Danza”,
Webber’s “Close Every Door”, and a duet with Nina of Lehar’s
“Music Says it Simply”. Jessica’s vocal range is moving lower – she can
now sing either Soprano two or Alto comfortably – so Nina’s higher voice gets
her the girl’s part while Jessica sings for the boy. Since they will both wear
evening gowns, this will be interesting. Jessica says that Soprano ones
get most of the good parts.

Today is also the first day of finals at Harker. Jessica took her Latin exam
this morning. We are putting together Jessica’s performance outfit at the same time
as she is discussing Victorian romantic
poetry (for Honors English), and preparing for tests in Chemistry and Geometry.
She already took the European History advanced placement exam and choir does not
have a final test.

My son Paul does not have finals so today his 7th grade class is off at the Raging
Waters water theme park for their end of year party. All he has to finish
this last week is collecting money pledges for the countries he named and located
in Mr. La Sala’s Geography-a-thon to benefit
Heifer Project. I think Paul made over $100. The 7th grade wants to collect
over $5000 to donate enough for two “arks” worth of animals.