Tag: Yani

Yani

Posted on by Elise
The girls — Luna, Eva and Isa — on the beach with Yani, June 2022.

There is a real tedium and grinding labor to parenting small children. It involves hassles like bottle washing, endless loads of laundry, or contorting your body to pick up the crayon that fell underneath the plane seat in front of you, again and again and again. For the past seven years, most of that labor has been borne by Yani, our caretaker, cook, cleaner, pet sitter, gardener, travel companion, and friend.

Born and raised in East Java, Indonesia, on lush farmland that grows bananas, papayas and other fruit, Yani moved abroad when she was 18 to take on more lucrative work than she could find near home. She worked as a domestic helper in Singapore, then returned to Indonesia briefly to await another placement, which led her to Taichung, Taiwan, caring for my grandparents. My grandma taught her to speak Mandarin and to make all kinds of Northern Chinese dishes and dumplings from scratch.

She ended her stint in Taiwan after a few years to return to Indonesia, where she got married and eventually had a baby, in 2015. That year, I gave birth to Isabel, in Seoul, and, given my unpredictable travel schedule as a foreign correspondent, needed additional help at home. We filed papers to sponsor Yani’s visa and boom, one day she arrived at Incheon, dazed and confused from a long flight, moved in with us in our 35th floor apartment, and instantly charged with the most tedious tasks of caring for a newborn, save for nursing, which only I could do. Luna arrived less than two years later. Yani has nurtured Luna since before she was born.

Yani and Luna in the kitchen in Seoul, summer 2018. My memories of Luna during that time were always of her plopped on a counter.

As we transitioned from a family of four, to a family of five, traveled constantly across the Asia region and beyond, hosted numerous guests and gatherings, marked birthdays, holidays, lost tooths, and other passages, grieved various cat goodbyes and welcomed new kittens, managed the international move to Los Angeles, two house moves since coming back, a COVID crisis, lockdown and the logistical hassles of divorcing amid a pandemic, Yani has stayed the steady presence.

She makes all the lunches, mops all the floors, cooks all the dinners, puts away all the groceries, waters all the plants, changes the litter, makes all the beds, and always knows where all the loveys are. She is the night time sitter when we all go on vacations, unpacks my suitcases every time I return from a trip, makes all the scallion pancakes from scratch.

She embodied so many different and significant roles, during the years I really built my career towards greater flexibility, and during crucial developmental time for the girls. It is no stretch to say my career, my children’s perspectives, and my life as i know it would not be possible with Yani. No one asks me “How do you do it all” because the answer is simple: Because I have Yani.

All dressed up and nowhere to go. Dressed up for dinner in lockdown, April 2020.

Thanks to my stint at NPR a few Thanksgivings ago, while I was nursing Luna, Yani was granted a business visa to come with me to the states, and it had five years on it, so she could come again when we moved here as a family. She has encountered so many places and people that she would never have otherwise, something she appreciates, as she likes to explore and expand her horizons. Quick to pick up languages, now she speaks Indonesian, and Mandarin, and English. But being with us has meant being away from her own family — namely her daughter Intan, who is seven, the same age as Isa. Yani’s visa is up next month, so Friday she goes home. My sadness that she’s leaving our family is streaked with a happiness she will reunite with her own.

No one carves up the leftover Thanksgiving turkey like Yani! Thanksgiving 2017, in Washington, DC.

My loved ones all worry for me, saying things like, “You are going to need to be on lithium” without “ayi,” which means auntie. I have stayed up late at night, wondering, how will we cope without her? Luna was so overwhelmed at our last Thanksgiving, knowing it would be Yani’s last, that while sharing our gratitude for Yani, Luna crawled under the dinner table and silently sniffed her stuffed bunny lovey.

The only option is to take it one day at a time. Though I will say, we’re so blessed to have had her for this long. The youngest is now five years old and can fend for herself in ways that were impossible just a year ago. And we’re beyond privileged to have had Yani at all.

Yani has braided so much hair over the past 7 years. Glamping, summer 2021.

Goodbye Rubens Avenue

Posted on by Elise
OK the pit is giant but this just fell off the tree in our backyard on Christmas morning 2019.

Our backyard is home to a guava tree, which gifted us with guava abundance the first fall we lived in LA. And it turns out we have an avocado tree, too, which delivered perfect avocados on Christmas morning last year. And at some point I learned we had two tall banana trees, which led to one of the funnier cultural misunderstandings between me and our Indonesian helper, Yani.

Yani is more than a “helper” — she cooks and cleans and also basically raised Isa and Luna, as she’s been living with us since moving to Seoul to join the family in the fall of 2015. She previously worked in Taiwan to care for my grandparents, so she’s been caring for two different generations of us.

She is from a rural village in East Java, and her family owns a lot of farmland where they grow fresh fruit and vegetables. When she saw the banana tree sprung ripe bananas last year, I found her outside in the backyard taking a kitchen knife to the base of the tree, as it were a machete. She was like, the bananas are ripe, time to hack down the tree!

I had to stop her and explain hey, uh, we don’t need to do that, we don’t need those bananas and this isn’t even our house, we’re renting! This baffled her, as she said it was the best way to get the bananas down.

I’ll miss those trees. I’ll miss toddler Luna walking up and down the streets and making herself at home in random neighbors’ yards, just lounging on their patio furniture or gardens while sometimes wearing nothing but a diaper. I’ll miss hooking on to the Ballona Creek bike path for a run or a ride by essentially just crossing the street. I’ll miss trying to chase Isa and Luna around on their scooters as they raced through the hood. I’ll miss how freely the cats got to roam inside and out. I’ll miss our next door neighbors, the Davidson’s, who we drove to the airport when they made a COVID19-prompted decision to move to DC earlier this summer. And our smart and sarcastic neighbors the Taylors, across the street, who also grew to be close friends.

We moved to the rental on Rubens from South Korea, so it’s my first California home. Now we are headed to a townhouse I closed on a couple weeks ago, three miles away, in Culver City. It’s conveniently located a block down from NPR and across the street from Luna’s ballet studio. I don’t know if it’s smart to buy during this crazy uncertain time, but the monthly payments on a house I own will be way cheaper than rent on the westside of LA, that’s for sure. Friend Skyler is decorating from afar, with a Pinterest board and lots of detailed links and digital drawings and text messages. My guidance for her was to decorate a nest that matched my personality — warm, but with whimsy. Or, “mid-century meets the Muppets.” Her wallpaper choice for the master bedroom went up today and it’s cute AF.

Wallpaper in my new nest, selected with love by my friend and pro bono decorator, Skyler Stewart.

Ever forward, ever forward.

The Summit

Posted on by Elise
With Josh at the end of a long day, before our appearance on MSNBC

I slept about three hours a night for a few nights so the recovery feels like a really bad hangover. Matty is in such poor shape that (egad!) I had to take care of ALL THREE GIRLS AT THE SAME TIME yesterday. But gosh, I loved Singapore. The food, the expertly planned out thoroughfares, the rooftops, the polyglots, the sunshine, the pools available everywhere … if I were a super-rich expat I would totally live there! I mean, are you kidding? The place is so great that it seems fake. That is, if you like having malls at every corner to get whatever you need and no hassles whatsoever, and you’re okay with trading your civil liberties for it.

I did get lost in one of Singapore’s ubiquitous underground malls one time and I feared I would never be above ground again, and the irony was I went to the mall to buy sunscreen.

While Trump’s big accomplishment at the summit was the reset of the US-North Korea relationship (and world peace, of course), I completed the US cable news network hat trick (CNN-Fox-MSNBC) inside of about 12 hours! Anderson Cooper was probably the biggest star I got to appear with, something I was reminded of when we were in commercial break waiting to go live from a second floor hotel balcony when passersby on the sidewalk yelled, “ANDERSON COOPER!” He says they don’t usually have any material besides that. On the day of the summit, my friend Josh Lederman and I coincidentally got booked on Bret Baier’s show together, but the greatest coincidence was that for my last booking of the day, an hour with MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson, Josh was ALSO my studio buddy. Josh and I became friends in Laos and then reunited in Hawaii. This time around we got to hang in Singapore on rival cable networks. Journalism breeds some random and memorable friendships.

Because both spouse and I had to cover the bejeezus out of the summit, and my parents are off on some Canadian adventure, we brought the children and helper Yani with us to Singapore. Eva’s bestie Jonah of the Wan-Yau’s lives in Singapore so the Wan-Yau’s helped entertain the girls the whole time. Almost positive we will never be able to repay them for their friendship.

Choke

Posted on by Elise

Luna is crawling around, so we have to really watch out for small items on the floor that she might try and grab and sneak into her mouth. Today after a quick breastfeed for her afternoon snack, Luna went about her normal business of crawling around the floor under the supervision of our helper Yani. All of a sudden her laugh turned into a panicked throat-clearing/hacking noise. I looked over at her and she looked like she’d just seen a ghost and her eyes said “SOMEONE HELP ME.”

Yani looked similarly panicked so I called upon that crazy time I spent in the English countryside last fall and just smacked her really hard in the back of her chest (harder than I thought I would need to, as my former Royal Marine instructed) and she instantly puked up the contents of her tiny tummy. I searched the beige puddle of puke (this is the kind of thing that does not phase you once you’ve been a mom to numerous dogs, cats and/or humans), and found a small square of Scotch tape that she must have eaten and accidentally gotten lodged in her throat.

Crisis averted, Luna instantly returned to smiling and laughing. So uh, THANKS, my British hazardous environment training instructors! Really glad I wasn’t called upon to deal with a “sucking chest wound” though, which I vaguely remember learning something about in the same course but really not enough to do anything about should someone have one.

Odyssey to Bali

Posted on by Elise
These guinea hens were just hanging out by the pool

Eva has this exaggerated, four-year-old way of asking “what’s happening” by punching each word out: “What. Is. Happening.” She never uttered it yesterday, but it would have been appropriate for every travel snafu we ran into starting from the moment we arrived at the airport check-in counter at 10 in the morning. First, our noon flight had been pushed back by four hours. Then, I realized I left baby Luna’s passport at home, because I packed passports still thinking we were a family of four. Whoops. Then, a more severe passport snafu for her dad: Matty didn’t have six months left on his passport before its expiration date, so the airline straight up would not let him fly. The Matty situation required a lift from the embassy (which, thanks to having friends who are in consular affairs at the embassy, got him on the access list to get a new passport within hours). But even still, we had to leave him behind.

The Luna situation required calling back the driver who brought us to the airport, driving an hour+ through typical maddening Seoul traffic back HOME to get the passport, turning around and taking a train to the airport, get to the security checkpoint and have Eva’s boarding pass not clear due to a hyphen, walking her BACK to the counter on the other side of the departure hall, getting the hyphen fixed, going through security as a family of five (since Matt’s left behind, I have our helper Yani THANK GOD), then getting to the airport tram.

We had Isa in a stroller so this required an elevator. After attempts to take three different elevators — none of them air conditioned — all were out. We finally get to the gate via escalators and tram and that’s when Eva starts tantruming out because she’s hot and tired from all the walking. Our flight’s delayed another hour, Isa needs snacks, I have three-month-old baby Luna pressed on me the entire time with a look of “What. Is. Happening.” We finally get on the plane and amazing, have two empty seats next to us in our row, but before we can snag them to allow Isa and Eva to stretch out across them to sleep, Koreans rush up like they’re fleeing a war and belt themselves in them, leaving Yani stuck holding 30 pound Isa in a single seat while Isa sleeps for HALF THE FLIGHT. By the time we arrived at midnight, after first leaving the house for the airport at 9am, the girls were frayed but holding it together, I was sweatier than I’ve ever been and sleepy, Yani was just relieved to have Isa’s hot body not pressed against her and Luna was wishing she was back in the womb, I imagine.

Anyway I’m writing this down so I won’t forget yesterday. It was our first trip as a family of five and only four of us actually made it on the journey. (Yani became our fifth yesterday, and it was and is absolutely critical to our functioning.) And while we ran into annoying frustrations, it comes with the territory. (Ahem, like how our flight to leave the US and move to Seoul became several flights after the first attempt to move from our home country was aborted after we’d boarded and sat on a tarmac in Dulles for six hours. And still not nearly as bad as the night I slept in the baggage claim of DFW Airport.) Frankly it was an awesome day depending on how you look at it. But for that super long delay, we wouldn’t have had time to get Luna’s passport. But for our amazing friend at the embassy who we could just call up and get on the American Citizen Services access list, Matty wouldn’t have a new passport so fast, fast enough to get on a flight tonight to see us tomorrow.

And the destination after our arduous march was Bali — paradise! Over mango juice this morning at breakfast al fresco, Eva said to me unprompted, “Momma, Bali is so beautiful. Like 100 beautiful,” awarding imaginary points to it on her arbitrary (but valid) Eva scale.