I have had it with talking, with explaining. "I have a kid's book coming out next fall," I say to Wood's millionaire Shanghai-sweatshop-running Uncle, who's smoking a cigar while I'm singing Juniper to sleep in my arms outside the funeral home, and he's pestering me with all kinds of questions about what a person---who is by all accounts a man---does with his days when he no longer has a job. This is the man whose white-gloved driver once gave us a tour of turn-of-the-century Shanghai back when Pudong still seemed like it had suddenly emerged from the muck, while he was off cracking the whip at the Chinese street urchins who knit the sweaters he sells to Land's End and JCrew. I might as well have told him I had taken to wearing adult diapers and playing video games all day.

Wood's mother has seven siblings, and all six that are legally allowed to return to the United States made it to the funeral. It must be something to be a part of a family that big. As the night grew long and the bottles of scotch and rum emptied, the conversations grew louder and louder, and you could almost imagine yourself back forty-some years in the days when seven kids between the age of eighteen and one sat around a single dinner table. They always tell stories of communal childhoods one or more of them haven't heard, like how their mother used to tie one of them to a tree in the front yard when he was a baby because she couldn't watch him and the others and do laundry and make supper all at the same time, or they discuss how another one wasn't circumcised and how the rest of the sons gave him such a hard time. So one child who was there will tell a story and the others who were also there pipe in to tone down hyperbole or outright falsehoods, and the ones who were babies or in the army or working as stewardesses at the time sit enraptured as though listening to the stories of some other family who grew up on a tea plantation in Sri Lanka. "Do you remember the night I had to watch the youngest five while mom and dad went downtown, and I thought someone was breaking into the house because I kept hearing these loud booms at the front door?" Some admit they don't remember the story, so she continues: "I had to call the restaurant where they were eating and dad rushed home to find a blind man at our front door, banging a broom handle against it over and over. I guess mom had bought a broom from a blind traveling salesman, and I mean, he's blind, so he didn't know it was the middle of the night I guess when he tried to drop it off." Then the sisters launch into a fifteen minute conversation about who used to wear whose clothes and how they tried to sabotage such thievery or conceal it.

One of Wood's aunts lives in Hollywood; her husband is ten years younger than her, a television editor who used to work on Family Matters and send Wood autographed photos of Steve Urkel. They have two young daughters, and they used to lavish them with princess birthday parties and carefully arranged meetings with the Olsen twins. Now, it's all about Hannah Montana, who is apparently the Elmo of the 8-14-year-old set. This aunt is one of the family's dominant storytellers, so everyone was regaled with tales about how her husband "got tickets to the Hannah Montana concert because he knew somebody who knew somebody, and this is like the hottest act in Hollywood right now---we even heard John Travolta couldn't get tickets---and would you believe it the next day we were shopping at one of those chic boutiques you always read about in Us Weekly and in walks Miley Cyrus and her entourage, but she was totally down to earth and signed autographs" for her girls. Clearly, Hollywood aunt is a "cool mom." Remind me to keep Juniper away from her in about six years, lest I be forever known as the least cool parent in history. Hollywood aunt is, as I write this, packing up a box of "princess outfits" that no longer fit her youngest, postage paid to Detroit, Michigan.

As with any family of eight, along with the millionaire sweater magnates and Hollywood gossip queens, there are sisters who drink too much and brothers who never got a break in life. But for all their craziness, every few years or so these people come together and prove they really are family, bound by something greater than themselves. Weeks like this one help me to better appreciate my mother-in-law, the median child, to better understand why she sometimes repeats things over and over as if she doesn't believe she's ever going to be heard. It can't have been easy to have been born right in the middle of all of this. Weeks like this do also help me appreciate the inherent virtues of family, those people willing to travel to you from all over the world to let you lean on them when you are so close to falling. And there, at his own wake, after hours of increasingly drunken stories, I found an even greater appreciation for Wood's late step father, a man who lived for twenty years on the periphery of this family, working his way into their hearts, until one day, like me, he must have realized he was a part of it. And, as a true measure of his character, he didn't turn tail and run.

Six years ago on Christmas Day I flew to Beijing to spend a few weeks with Wood. We hadn't seen each other in four months, and during those four months we'd hardly spoken. IM programs were just becoming popular, so we'd do that for a couple hours a day, but I went weeks without hearing her voice. When I arrived in Beijing, we knew the kind of joy that only people who've suffered through long-distance relationships know, that intense joy you get from visits that keeps you sustained through all of those hard days and nights apart. As it was the turn of the millennium, we thought we should celebrate it in style, so we headed down to Shanghai to do it properly. Wood's millionaire Uncle runs a mysterious company that ships cashmere from Mongolia to sweatshops in various parts of southeast Asia, and he told us we could stay at his penthouse in Shanghai, as he and his family were in America at the time. A couple of our friends were teaching in Japan and they agreed to meet us in Shanghai to celebrate the big New Year.

I had never lived like that, in luxury, looking out from a seven-room beautifully-furnished apartment at the top of one wing of the Shanghai Center in the Pu Xi district, having a driver drive us around, thinking about where the money to pay for all this came from, realizing that people who live like this in China could never think about that and keep doing it. We spent our days wandering through hutongs and eating street food, shopping for trinkets our eyes wide at the skinned rottweiler-like dogs sold for meat in the narrow street markets. At night we'd walk through the brightly-lit streetscapes wondering what we could possibly do in such a place, past arcades where hundreds of Chinese businessman played pachinko bathed in gaudy green light. One day Wood and the girls from Japan went to a tailor on Nan Jing West road and had fancy old-school Chinese dresses made. They picked the dresses up on New Year's Eve, put them on and we clinked champagne glasses on the terrace looking out towards the Bund and the haze of Pudong. That night we didn't know where to go, so once sufficiently drunk we headed to Mao Ming Road, the bar district. What a sight we must have been: three American girls, one blond, one black-haired, and one redhead, all dressed up like Qing princesses, accompanied by a drunk guy wearing his girlfriend's Uncle's Armani suit. Rough-looking characters would try to get us to come into their bars, and eventually we went inside one that was reasonably well lit and almost empty, Wood ordering drinks in her best shanghaihua, negotiating a decent price so we wouldn't get screwed and have to make a scene when they brought the bill. The bar started crowding with rough Chinese men and rough-looking young women. We ordered more drinks, and the bartender created an impromptu dancefloor in one corner, blaring J-Pop music from the karaoke TV. One of the girls from Japan, a smokin' six-foot exhibitionist got up and started singing Japanese pop songs into the microphone, bringing a room of fascinated men to their knees with her karaoke skills honed after many months in the Tokyo bar scene. Wood and the girls danced, and they kept bringing us more drinks, telling us they were on the house. The dancing white girls in the Chinese dresses were a great source of amusement to the other patrons, who kept turning to each other and smiling. I sat there watching while some Chinese guy with a decent-sized knife in a holster fastened to his alligator-skinned belt and a cigarette between his lips danced with an extremely serious look on his face. I looked around the room, trying to figure out the dynamics of the situation. I finally realized there was some prostitution going on there. I was in a Chinese brothel with three girls who didn't know it was a brothel and we were all drunk. It wasn't Wood's first misadventure in a Chinese brothel; months earlier she and a friend had once gotten their hair cut by a pimp after the female "cosmotologists" at a Beijing "hair salon" turned out not to know anything about cutting hair.

We left not long after that, when the scene seemed to be getting out of control, and the proprietor pleaded with us to stay, offering us more free drinks, smiling and smiling and telling the girls they should dance more. When he saw we would not relent, he brought us V.I.P. cards and told Wood we could come back any time.

I don't know where exactly we ended up ringing in the new year. I do know we weren't watching the fireworks above the Oriental Pearl Tower in Pudong from the Bund. We were in some expat bar, and Kool & the Gang was playing when it happened, when the clock turned into a new millenium, and I remember wishing that Kool & the Gang hadn't been playing when that happened. Hours later, sobering up we walked back up Mao Ming Road, we passed that dubious place where we'd started our night. It was empty, with a few straggling men, a bored prostitute maybe. We grabbed a cab and I woke up the next morning back in the penthouse, sitting there with Wood in a full bed that was all ours, a luxury beyond any other I could have imagined then in those lean times. I remember thinking that the world was the same as it always was, no planes had fallen from the sky. Shanghai hadn't changed overnight. Shanghai was Shanghai underneath us, teeming with 15 million souls. I only had a few days left with Wood in China, so I held her close that morning, and we slept a little more and I can remember how it all felt so good.

I was just rifling through one of my old wallets looking for a frequent flyer card and I came across my V.I.P. card after all those years, the gold plastic card identifying membership No. 1412-168 for "Shanghai Annie's Recreation Centre, No. 170, Mao Ming Road."

This year we will be celebrating a quiet New Year in a cabin in the Sierras with a cast-iron stove and no television or internet or anything but a bottle of Dom Perignon we got as a wedding gift, just me and a sleeping baby and a wonderful woman I get to see and talk to and touch whenever I want to, to just reach out and find she is right there after all these years.