Host Dad

I’ve found little use for facebook since my last VPN expired a couple of months ago. That cut me from half of the IM world. Only from occasional alerts on gmail that I know we are alienated by technology but still connected by heart.

Today, I got birthday greetings from my host dad, Craig Shulstad, from the twin cities in Minnesota.

“You’ll always be our Chinese son, Hongyong.” he wrote.

It’s been in my mailbox for a month yet didn’t reach me because my everything — newsfeed, payment, work, life — goes through WeChat now. Email is honestly dysfunctional to me except on a few occasions.

The Shulstad’s, one of many host families that I had the luxury to stay a few nights with in 2006, on my tour of continental America over a little more than three months as a WPI fellow, are brilliant people. To Marianna and Craig Shulstad I owe so much of my great memories of that fantastic trip.

Proximity to Lake Superior and the other big lakes in North America, right between the US and Canada, has made Minnesota home to the big mills and a fine venture of the Vikings. Craig, son of Norway, spent much of his career as corporate communications director for General Mills — maybe Cargill — before he retired into a colorful life including a much contested solo singer for Christmas choruses in Minneapolis, the modern part of the twin cities.

Marianna and Craig keeps a 4-storey condo near the sculpture park in Minneapolis, where in the cosy antic, I stayed for a week. In the living room 3/F was a coffee corner where I used to throw verbal attacks with Craig.

Craig, looking down from his height, in a pretended solemn, denouncing voice:

“Hongyong, you really from China? ”

Why? I asked. Anything wrong with that?

“I’ve never seen a Chinese nearly as talkative as you are! ”He protested.

Well, he got a reason to be sorry hosting a guy like me. One role of the host families was to cheer on their weeklong tenants when they gave public speeches, given the 10 of us international journalists came all from non-English speaking countries. Lest they’d sputter in public attention, I think.

Unfortunately, they’ve never had such a moment of compassion for me because I’d speak non-stop once on the podium. So their role switched to the embarrassing opposite: counting me down on my slot of time. Most of the speeches they’d sit through at the top of the audience,  last but few rows obvious enough so I’d see their raised fist — five minutes to go… last minute…15 seconds… done….shut up…. go! Things like that.

Marianna was on the board of WPI  but quitted soon after John Ullmann, a Pulitzer investigative report laureate, stepped down as the program director. During my tenure in WPI, John had a quick visit to the J-school in Fudan U. When he reemerged at the WPI office in the Macalester basement, he shared a secret:  hay, John, I don’t think communications professors in Fudan knows how to write hard news.

She’s such brilliant lady and acclaimed US attorney of native American law. North Minnesota is home to some of the Sioux tribes, or seven groups of native Americans who survived history after their ancestors retreated to the last of their reservations in the Dakotan hills. To the tribal chiefs, Marianna was ostensibly their goddess of judicial faith.

At the end of the trip, which was for the international journalists to see how the Seven Council Fires would beat each other in their yearly sun dance, adorned in feathers and mimicking horse riding and all that stuff, under the terrifying heat of Minnesota summer, Marianna offered me a ride back to the city.

She was driving a BMW convertible — the trouble, after I squeezed in the back seat in my great yearn to get out of the place fast, was two-fold. There was no leg room for an adult on the back seat, and the wind pounded on me as I crouched there all the way.

“How do you like the ride?”Marianna playfully asked at the end of the trip.

“Well, I honestly enjoyed it — it’s like sitting on the back of a WWI gunship.”

Like the Clintons, she’s the Hillary back home, which explained why unlike her favor for Democrats, he voted for the Republicans. It must be fun sleeping with the opposition party for over a half century.

That’s partially why they retired into a house of cards. Both play bridge very well, a game that has brought them to many domestic tours of bridge tournaments. They are the most restless senior couples in America, either reporting their safaris in Africa or cross-ocean cruises now and then. Years back, their cruise boat had a stop over in Shanghai while on its way from Hong Kong to Tokyo, and I jumped at the rare chance of rendezvous with them on the Bund. Under the pale light at the exit of the international cruise terminal, they emerged in the nightly wind, feeble, tired as any couple in their late 70s could be. But their smiles and hugs warm enough just as years before

I left the Twin Cities shortly after Thanksgiving in 2006. At the festival dinner where I was the only stranger, they proposed that I do a talent show. I said I could sing, only if they could stand up to the song. “I know few songs, and this one needs everybody to stand up.” I said. “If you could forgive me for the inconvenience.”

They obliged and I stood them up to the Chinese anthem. The night in a bar for beer near the Bund, I recalled my mischief and asked for a comment.

That sucks, said Marianna.

Come one more time, mom and dad. My treat. No song.