Baci Abroad Blog
Buttery, the Story of a Neighborhood Café
It's Sunday afternoon. Lulu, the owner of my favorite neighborhood café, Buttery, moves about her open concept kitchen space gracefully. She's making lattes and delivering them in small artsy mugs to the few of us here working today. As Lulu moves over to the stove to check on her chili, Mary Wells' words Nothing you can say can tear me away from my guy/ Nothing you could do 'cause I'm stuck like glue to my guy softly float into the air from a tiny iPod placed underneath the table with hand-crafted jewelry that Lulu sells in the cafe.
Those of us enjoying this warm space today are breathing in the aroma of blueberry, raspberry and blackberry jams simmering on the stovetop. Fresh pumpkin spice and blueberry scones are propped up in front of me, deservingly elevated on a cake stand -- the flavors from Buttery have been raising the community's spirits for the past three weeks, the same amount of time fears and restrictions from the novel coronavirus have been spreading.
Lulu opened Buttery in May of 2019. I remember catching a glimpse of the café as I descended Nanshan Mountain in the spring. I peaked in a couple of times, but it wasn't until this fall that I opened the door and ventured inside her haven.
"This is so much of my love," Lulu told me as we sat down to talk last week, a lull in the afternoon business opening up space for some storytelling. When you walk into Buttery, you feel the love, the warmth, the sense of community that emanates outwards from Lulu into the space surrounding her.
Lulu at her industrial-sized mixer. She bakes bread daily.
The set-up of the café is an open-concept kitchen with a horseshoe of small tables and chairs surrounding one end of the cooking space. The decor is eclectic: carved gnomes stand on a shelf along with hand-crafted pottery and other knick-knacks; it's not kitschy, nor does it exude sophistication. The entire space works together to embrace you; you have the warm feeling of having just eaten your grandmother's best comfort food even before you've sunk your fork into Lulu's homemade dishes.
Photo courtesy of Lulu
The menu at Buttery is inspired by Lulu's memories of watching her grandmother cook homemade recipes for the Chinese New Year. As Lulu and I continued to sit and talk, her tone becoming more animated, she told me of how she wants people to understand that wholesome eating is achievable.
Soup Joumou, steaming with pumpkin, chunks of savory beef, squash carrots and fragrant herbs. Photo courtesy of Lulu.
In 2006, Lulu met her husband, Kodiak, at a wellness center in Harbin Hot Springs, California. Lulu's friends brought her to the retreat after she volunteered at an event for Obama's campaign in the Bay Area. Kodiak was helping to build a temple at the hot springs.
As the two were getting to know each other, Lulu shared with Kodiak her dream to open a café someday. "What will you sell there," he laughed, "frozen food from Trader Joe's?" Lulu stubbornly told him that living her younger years in Shanghai and Shenzhen, she knew about cooking fresh food. When he asked her to make something, she didn't have any recipes at her fingertips ... yet.
Kodiak and Lulu's relationship deepened, and the two moved to Mendocino County in 2007. They were surrounded by people who were growing their own vegetables and Lulu's consciousness of the impact of whole foods on our health deepened. She began spending time with new friends who taught her about growing her own food. She began to read and watch videos about food science. She began to experiment with making her own bread. She noticed how she felt when she ate such fresh foods.
You can dine in or out at Buttery. It is placed on a quiet corner, so it offers the perfect nook for some reading. Photo courtesy of Lulu.
After spending five years in Mendocino County, Lulu and Kodiak made the move to China. In 1983, when Lulu was four years old, she had moved to Shenzhen with her family from Shanghai. Over 30 years later, her return to Shenzhen would see the realization of the dream that she had shared with Kodiak, though not for some years still.
Lulu and Kodiak opened a language center once they had settled into Shenzhen. In a small space at the learning center, Lulu began to bake fresh goods such as bread and scones. In time, two food bloggers stumbled upon the space and wrote about her "mysterious confidence."
Over time, Lulu and her husband grew tired of teaching English at the center they had opened. Their vision did not always match what parents who sent their children wanted. When Lulu and Kodiak received a strong offer for the space, they sold the center, serendipitously drawing Lulu even closer to the location that would become Buttery.
On Sundays, Lulu, Kodiak and their son, four-year-old Atticus, came to Shekou to walk Nanshan Mountain. One day, as they were dining on their favorite dumplings after a hike, they noticed that there was a vacant storefront nearby. In January of 2019, Lulu and Kodiak began renovations and five months later Buttery opened to the public.
The public includes the neighborhood cats. When Lulu saw this sweet one outside, she rushed to her refrigerator to get fresh, organic chicken to serve her.
"I remember the day that you first came in," Lulu told me. "You were the first foreigner to order my chicken." I feel special in this moment, that I have somehow made a mark on Lulu. The truth is, I have, but so has everyone else that has entered Buttery. Lulu has a knack for names, and for remembering others' stories. It is, in part, the reason why, even after a lull in business from July until October, the café is now thriving. At Buttery, you are at home.
Most days, during this coronavirus outbreak, I have snuggled right into a chair here, feeling safe and cozy. While many restaurants have remained closed, Lulu has kept Buttery open, becoming a haven for the community.
Lulu uses her calligraphy to communicate to café visitors that we all live under the same sky and the same moon. We are one, she reminds us as she paints this Buddhist message.
As we close our conversation today, I am getting ready to go cuddle with the cats, and Lulu is getting ready to return home to Kodiak and Atticus, she leans towards me, and says, "Life just kind of takes you ... you plan ... but what's inside of you drives you. You will say verbally what you want to do, but in the end, you will be driven to where your heart is."
Update, May 5, 2022
The pandemic has brought so much change to the world, on global and community scales. Not so long after this article was first posted, Lulu and her family left China for Japan. Since Kodiak does not have a Chinese passport, the family was locked out of China long term. Due to these circumstances, Lulu and her family moved to the United States where they have extended family. Last we spoke, her spirits were high and she was doing well.
Reporting from China: Another Call for Higher Love
I've just returned from a date with the Denson's. Dinner "out on the (ghost) town" felt like a real event given the way we've been laying so low this week. We first went to a Hong Kong-style eatery named Gaga Garden, only to walk in and find that it was closing for the night. It felt like this ...
I don't know how to smize very well, but I think it's clear that I can pout with my eyes. This look did nothing to convince Gaga to stay open an extra hour. Ho Hum.
We ventured a bit further into Seaworld and this led us to Baia, a restaurant owned by a couple of European men that serves "upper-scale" food. I had the best meal that I have had in three weeks, the amount of time that I been Candida cleansing. Alli, Charles and I had the entire restaurant to ourselves -- we did choose to eat outside in the open fresh air.
I'm ever so grateful to be a third wheel with this duo. These two are my kind of happy hour.
The fine dining dinner did feel well-deserved after finishing our first week of online teaching and learning -- as an online educator now, I am definitely learning about how to reach all of my students through various modes. Altogether, though, it seems the instruction has generally been effective this week, and I do feel connected to my students, even from a distance.
While I have worked to separate church and state, for the most part, going to school and to Buttery to type out lesson plans and send audio feedback to my kids, yesterday I decided to work from home in the afternoon. .
Mom has always said, watch your children when they are sleeping (because when they are being pills while awake you'll be able to remember that they have sweet moments).
While my new routine has begun to feel quite comfortable, my heart feels weighted with how some of the world continues to respond to the new virus that came out of a city in China that was hardly on most people's maps until last week.
My friend and her family decided to fly home while we are not physically in school. The neighbors caught wind of my friend's family's arrival and interrogated her mother about where my friend and her family had been exactly. The neighbor was worried that her child, with a more compromised immune system, might catch the virus from the family just home from China. While I think we can empathize with a mother's fears for her child, her call to my friend's mother wreaked of ignorance.
My sense of the world's perception of the virus is that it has gotten the stigma it seems to have because it came out of a wet market in a country that doesn't have "great relations" with the US. A wet market is particularly foreign in a way that incites disgust, perhaps, and misunderstanding along cultural lines.
John Pomfret, for The Washington Post, writes, "At a middle school a few blocks from my house, a rumor circulated among the children that all Asian kids have the coronavirus and should be quarantined. Misinformation has also reached higher education: In college campuses across the United States, some non-Asian students have acknowledged avoiding Asian classmates for no other reason than, well, the coronavirus came from Asia."
This is rough stuff: xenophobia, ignorance, and baseless assumptions. To look at someone as a walking virus is to deny a person the very humanity that should lead us to care more deeply for one another.
I know, though, that it's not the whole story. I know there are communities of us working to share truth and love and open our arms to one another.
And here is when I put in another plug for you to join the #internationalhigherlovedanceteam. I have a handful of videos so far from friends and family, and it would be amazing to muster up more, of everyone dancing to Higher Love. Do whatever your soul moves you to do as Whitney belts out:
Think about it, there must be a higher love
Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above
Without it, life is wasted time
Look inside your heart, and I'll look inside mine
Things look so bad everywhere
In this whole world, what is fair?
We walk the line and try to see
Falling behind in what could be, oh
Bring me a higher love
Bring me a higher love, oh
Bring me a higher love
Where's that higher love I keep thinking of?
Reporting from Shenzhen, China: Back to School ... Online
It is nearly 4 o'clock in Shenzhen. I am just wrapping up my school day -- a very quiet, but productive day of delivering curriculum and feedback to my students on online platforms.
Because with Google and China #itscomplicated, Shekou International School uses Microsoft Office as our collaborative learning space. I have spent a good part of my day monitoring and dropping into book club discussions happening in Microsoft TEAMS.
I would prefer to be conversing with my students in person, but what was cool about today is that I could drop into multiple book clubs in the same hour; generally, during class time I can only sit with one book club each day.
I did start the day with some yoga, and then made it to a cafe near school in time to catch the halftime show.
This is the only part of the Superbowl that I understand. All hail Shakira and J. Lo!
I was getting sweet updates from Minnesota while I watched the halftime show, and I was excited to see that my two youngest nieces are working on being in the show in a few short years. #justaquickheadbang
After working for a bit at school, a few of my friends and I ventured out for lunch. There were two other individuals eating at a restaurant, Les 5, on what we call The Strip, the long line of massage places, restaurants, bars and pet stores that runs for several blocks adjacent to SIS.
Today's new norms: temperature checks when you walk into a restaurant and complimentary (read: mandatory) hand sanitizer at the same time. Later, when I walked into my apartment building, I stepped into the elevator to find that a box of tissues had been taped to the elevator wall. Convenient, I thought.
After school, I was blessed with almond cookies and almond bread baked by Alli, time to get down with my #wholebowls routine in my kitchen, and space to meditate.
Stepping away from devices now so that I can turn back to Ronan Farrow's Catch and Kill.
Good night, or good morning, certainly have a good day from me and the kitty who loves to live on my air purifier.
Reporting from Shenzhen, China, in the midst of #coronavirus fears, rumors, and new norms
Hello, dear friends and family,
I am snuggled up in my apartment tonight, writing as my second batch of chicken bone broth cooks in my instant pot, and the cats lounge at my feet.
I am pretty tuckered out tonight, largely because I ran a kick-ass 10k along the boardwalk with my friend Ann. This weekend I was supposed to be in Hong Kong for the 9Dragons race -- Alli was going to run the 50k, and I was slated to run the 10k. Understandably, the race was canceled, but my runner's lungs were still craving a little race pace. As Ann and I ran, masks (mostly) on, the scene was quiet and quite lovely. Along the boardwalk, instrumental music plays out of speakers in the bushes. Guards were posted regularly along the boardwalk to ensure runners, walkers and those strolling along were indeed following the mandate that everyone wears masks outside.
Some of the new protocols set in place this week have been strange to get used to. Just today my building stopped allowing visitors in, so my friend Katie, who came by for a bit, was not allowed to enter. This is disappointing, but we still were able to head out on our favorite hike nearby and enjoy coffee at our favorite cafe.
Altogether, I appreciate the measures that China is taking to prevent the virus from spreading further. I now get my temperature checked some 3 or 4 times a day as I enter and re-enter my apartment. Every time they put the temperature gun to my head, the apartment security is very kind. Honestly, I am thankful these are the only kinds of guns hanging around here. The biggest gripe in my day was actually the fact that when I blew my electricity yesterday, I forgot to turn on the water heater again ... the water was running mighty cold after that run.
This is a time it is especially useful to be inclined towards the introvert end of the spectrum. I love my solitude. I have many books, podcasts, Netflix shows, and a Shutterfly book that I started three years ago to attend to.
Earlier today I met with my colleague and friend Clayton to collaborate about how we will work on online platforms to deliver curriculum to the students. As of right now, we will be working online until February 17th.
I am largely ignoring much of the media. If you want to hear more raw truth, I encourage you to drop CNN and FoxNews, and tune in to Harvard Health and NPR. I logged in to Twitter tonight to find that what was trending for me was #coronavirus. Not surprising. Just below that, though, was the #NoMeatNoCoronaVirus and I was like I just cannot with you opportunists right now.
I am fortunate to be part of a community here that is one to offer support, outreach and just some laughs to one another. My principal and director have been close at hand when I have needed to offset some anxiety with a conversation. Those of us who stayed in Shenzhen rather than opting for Thailand, or other destinations, have formed a group chat. Only honest and useful updates are posted to the chat, which was started by an elementary teacher who has continued to offer family hikes to look for bugs and enjoy nature. My friend Megan, also an administrator, has arranged for a viewing of the SuperBowl tomorrow. We are #shekoustrong because of this caring community. I feel so blessed to feed off of this community, and also give back to it.
I plan to offer daily updates here at lettersfromasojournista. No fake news, no bullshit, just what is happening from here in the bubble of Shekou in Shenzhen, China.
For tonight, I sign off with a picture of Ms. Silvermoon Free Solo, shortly, Silvie.
Be well, everyone. Sending love from Shenzhen.
What does 'expat' have to do with it?
A few days ago, I opened up a message from Mom to Linds, Cass and me. Within the blue iMessage bubble, I found a photo of the four of us getting pedicures six years ago on that date. It was the eve of my move to Ecuador.
It is interesting to read Mom's caption here. At the time, I hardly knew how I would last two years abroad. And now two years has has turned in many more. There is just no predicting ...
The little clock with the arrow going around to the east transported me back in time. I remember coming home from our spa time to opening up two large suitcases in the living room. Piles of clothes were strewn all over. My mind was running amuck about how to even begin to fill the suitcases. And this is where sista-friends always come in first. Linds and Cass developed a system and set to work stowing away the pieces of my life that made the cut to travel south with me, beginning my life as an expat.
So much has changed and evolved and shifted since that evening. Here is something that has not: I still cannot be left to pack my own suitcases. They end up a scrambled 70 pound -- no hyperbole here -- mess that one or both of my sisters has to unpack and repack before I lug them through security.
Those first months in Quito, Ecuador, as a newly minted international school teacher, were exciting in many ways, and excruciating in others. The pain of missing home -- so visceral that it could knock the wind out of me. I had some sanity savers, though, in the friends that I was making. And as Trini, my madre in Spain, had been my earthly angel in my study abroad experience in college, Analuisa, my Ecuadorian cousin in spirit, became my South American angel.
I had met Analuisa many years before, when we were both primary school children when my Aunt Abby and Uncle Tony became her legal guardians. As she became a member of the Baci/Marquart crew, what I remember most in thinking back to those times was what she taught us. She would make empanadas, delicious crispy half moons filled with meet and vegetables, to add to the table for holiday meals. Analuisa also taught the North American chiquitas how to line dance -- she was bound to have better rhythm than us, she hails from a village that salsas day in and day out.
And so it was, that when I arrived to Quito as a thirty-year-old woman, her family embraced me, offering me delicious guaguas de pan and colada morada on the holiday for Día de los Difuntos, and smiling as I spoke to them in broken Spanish.
During my time in Ecuador, I would be fortunate to also join Analuisa's family for her niece's quinceañera in Mascarilla. During this day, I saw how Ana's family joined efforts to prepare a feast for guests, I was a parishioner in the church as the special ceremony took place, crowning Meli a young woman, and I was a delighted but shy participant at the dance later that evening.
walking towards the church ...
looking muy guapo outside the church....
about to step into the ceremony that will mark Meli's passage from childhood to adulthood
The time Analuisa and I spent hanging out together in the city or taking a trip to Mascarilla to visit her family cut through the loneliness and saved my sanity in those most intense months of culture shock.
And then it was, some six months in to my life as an international school teacher, that I reemerged from the confusion, anxiety and stress of culture shock. It would be many more years before I would feel that I was really on steady ground as an expat.
When I was home this summer, during an evening with a dear friend and fellow English teacher, I identified myself as such. "What's an expat," she inquired. "An American living abroad," I replied. I immediately thought of Gertrude Stein and Earnest Hemingway as scenes from Midnight in Paris played across my mind.
As an American passport holder, I chose to move abroad, taking advantage of the privilege afforded me simply because of where I was born. While I struggle with where the Unites States of America is along social, political and philosophical lines, I certainly was not forced out. As a white American, I do not generally feel unsafe within the border of the USA. And I do feel some sense of power to make positive changes were I to choose to live in the United States.
I chose to venture from home in search of adventure; my sojourner spirit had surfaced. With an education that an upper-middle class life afforded me, I was able to land a good job abroad. And thus I get to sit comfortably in a category called expat.
In my experience as an expat at an exceptional international school, I have access to extensive services. I am offered daily assistance on how to navigate banking, housing and my visa. As an expat, I am left rather unjudged at the fact that I know fewer than 200 Mandarin words. As an expat, my working conditions are comfortable and safe. Due to my own privileged circumstances, I can utter things like, "the world is my oyster", feeling empowered to live in just about any country of my choosing.
I do not mean to cast a simplistically fairytale filter onto living abroad. For so much of my time abroad, it has felt like I have had dozens of tabs open in my brain, slowing my processing system to the speed of the super-sized snails that I now see slowly glide across the sidewalk in Shenzhen. At the end of so many days, even getting up to file my nails has seemed an exhausting task.
There can be many initial frustrations to living abroad, and at moments, situations may feel insurmountable. When my close friends Alli and Charles moved from Quito to Shenzhen, Alli found herself on the corner of an unknown street outside of Ren Ren Le (a store akin to Walmart), uncertain of how to flag a taxi, unable to tell the driver the name of her apartment in Mandarin, and so weeping in frustration. Anyone who has lived in a foreign place can recount many experiences like this.
It also warrants acknowledging that an altogether positive time abroad is not every expat's experience. There are spouses that are left alone while their partner travels, those that turn to excessive drinking in order to distance themselves from the difficulties of living and working in foreign lands and expats who have been transplanted by their work rather than a whole hearted-choice. There is resentment, affairs and dysfunction in the memoirs of many expats. I am fortunate that these are not part of mine.
Today, as a rather content expat, I am sitting at a new eclectic cafe that has opened near my apartment as a friendly rain falls outside the floor to ceiling windows, contemplating the privileges of my life while so many thousands of others around the world are having vastly different experiences because rather than expats, they are considered part of other categories: the asylum seeker, the refugee, the immigrant and now the evacuee.
I am remembering back to the year that, as a young girl, Analuisa's visa was revoked, and she was not allowed to return to the States for that school year, for unknown reasons. I am thinking about how more recently we spoke about her returning to the States to visit her North American family, but again, she was not granted a visa for no clear reason.
Recently I was reading an article in The Atlantic entitled, "‘Expat’ and the Fraught Language of Migration". The article provides reflective questions to ponder when considering the connotations that accompany the labels we put on different groups. Yasmeen Serhan asks her reader, "But what defines an “expat”? Does it matter whether you are coming from a richer country, or how long you intend to stay? At what point are you an “immigrant” instead?"
When I think about my own experience as an expat, and what I know about the experience of immigrants -- namely through reading fiction and non-fiction and listening to various podcasts -- to other countries, especially the United States of America, one of the stark contrasts in the nature of the experience is the expectation of assimilation.
Often when an individual or family moves from the USA to a foreign country, they are welcomed into, or at least have access to, an expat community in their host city. Between my own experiences in Ecuador and China, and those of my friends who have lived in places from Doha, Qatar to Aberdeen, Scotland, there are many reports of feeling at home away from home when we have connected with these communities. We celebrate holidays from our passport countries together, enter atmospheres where we hear the familiarity of our native tongues and participate in cultural events such as Fantasy Football drafts.
While peoples labeled asylum seekers, refugees or immigrants may find communities with others from their native lands in their new places of residence, these communities and gatherings are often met with suspicion, resentment or outright hostility. Whether it be on social media, or between neighbors, words of resentment arise towards Latino immigrants when they are viewed as taking away jobs from 'bona fide' Americans; there is a rhetoric of suspicion surrounding immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries; outright hostility rears its head when the sentiment towards Asian and Somalian communities, who are perceived to have overtaken the community in numbers, reaches the boiling point.
Asylum seekers, immigrants, refugees or expats, whichever the category we are all people born in one land living in another. But semantics matter. In the 21st century, political candidates are hotly debating the topic of immigration, not the topic of expatriation. Prior to living abroad, I reflected on my privilege less, largely unaware of how deeply it has affected the way my life has looked in the past and now in my present. Prior to living abroad, I voted in presidential elections, but as a less-informed citizen. Prior to living abroad, I did not understand the very privilege of saying, "I'm just not really interested in politics."
My current life is largely a tapestry of beautiful moments created with and by kindred souls that I have connected with for a few moments, or for many years now. But there is also a shadow side to my life outside of the United States. It is connected to the shadow that has been cast by my home country onto the peoples and places sometimes just across the border, sometimes all the way across the world.
This weekend I began listening to the memoir Notes on a Foreign Country by Suzy Hansen. As a former expat, Hansen reflects on what she is learning about the United States' role in offering aid to foreign countries, and as she is about to embark on her time abroad as a resident of Istanbul, Turkey, she asks herself, "But what would I learn of America that was beyond good intentions, beyond sympathy, beyond the luxury of time? What else was there?"
As Hansen went on to learn, as I have been learning, what else was there? So much more.
As Hansen recounts her conversations with her new friends, colleagues and those she interviews in Turkey, she goes on to discuss the sense of betrayal that many countries feel towards the United States, the "abuse from America for material gain." It is through her "newly recognized ignorance" that she describes the feeling she has inside as "A persistent dull ache, and a tooth that would never be the same."
My time abroad has led a blind patriotism to wane within me. Perhaps, in the best of cases, the government in office has good intentions, but often the actions of Americans towards fellow Americans, and peoples living within the borders of the United States, as well as America's actions towards foreign lands leads my heart to leak sorrow.
Ignorance is bliss, they say. But how would it serve me to go back to a time of ignorant bliss?
In moments I can find myself sinking in the quicksand of despair, but I do not, in the end, find futility. When I listen to my students discuss global issues, when I consider the selfless actions of so many of my family members and friends, when I look at the goodness in my nieces, I think that there must be hope to hold on to. That even if the fabric of my homeland's government is frayed and flawed, the hearts of so many individuals surrounding me have the capacity to weave together a tapestry of truer love.
The last six years have lent themselves to a great deal of reflection that a government and its people can represent different idealogies; the corruption of a government is not indicative in many cases of the humanity of the people within the boundaries that are governed.
I once again find words from L.R. Knost moving: "It's not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It's our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless." I think that it is only through our own education, and educating our children, whether they be those in our classrooms, or those in our homes, that our eyes will be opened to our calling to bring light.
So then,
“Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.”
― L.R. Knost
Tonight I am here typing, reflecting about the care and love shown to me by strangers in new lands. I wonder how we can all do a little more to offer empathy towards those we encounter who have voyaged outside of the known, by choice or by circumstance? To those living in a space that may seem less than inviting and be devoid of the sounds, smells and hugs of home, I wonder how we can each extend compassion?
note: My colleague and good friend, Faye Krouse, was instrumental in helping me process my thoughts, feelings and words for this post. While when writing about my own experiences, my words flow rather freely, I found myself a bit stuck in composing this post. Faye, thank you endlessly for engaging in so many discussions about life and writing with me. Cheers, dear friend.