The closest my husband and I ever came to being groupies was when we traveled around China for a month with Alessandro, our blue-eyed, blond-haired two-year old son. I had traveled in China before and was used to being approached—often by children—who wanted to touch my hair, exchange a few words in English, and take a photo with you. I once even had a screaming Chinese toddler practically thrown into my arms.  Her mother told me the child was scared of foreigners and needed to get used to foreign faces!   Judging from her wails, it wasn’t working.

But nothing prepared us for the mobs wanting to catch just a glimpse of our (apparently) endlessly fascinating little boy. Our first evening in China should have tipped us off as to what lay in store. In the middle of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, a huge crowd of Chinese tourists started gathering around us. We were also curious about the commotion. Had the Chinese Premier made an appearance on the square? Chinese actress Gong Li?

Not exactly.

The interest was aroused by our jet-lagged toddler sucking his thumb in his travel stroller.  A crowd of well-meaning, but curious Chinese smiled at him, spoke to him in Chinese, touched his hair, stared into his eyes, and took his photo.  To this day, I have a strange mental image of these tourists returning to their towns and villages scattered across China with photos of the strange western boy they met there, the one with the deer-caught-in-the-headlights stare.

This scene was repeated frequently during our month in China. Suffice it to say that our son transformed from the terrified little toddler assaulted by the crowds to a preening celebrity, smiling, waving to the crowds and mugging for the cameras.

I should point out that we live in Italy, a place where children enjoy a great deal of positive attention, but China was a whole new universe of adulation. The Chinese are very friendly and love children. There is a one-child policy in China, which also means that children are quite coddled and, even in a country of 1.3 billion people, foreign children really stand out. Wherever we went, crowds of people would admire our “beautiful boy” and take his photo. They would even pluck him out of his stroller to hold him, something which would have worried us back home, but was so commonplace in China that we came to accept it. Young men would come over as he was sleeping in his stroller and just stare down at him lovingly.

We started factoring in extra time for the photo-ops. We took advantage of the cuddling/ogling sessions to ask the locals fordirections.  In restaurants, a hostess or waitress would invariably whisk our little boy away to play with him, feed him, and introduce him to the cooks and staff.

My husband and I joked about getting used to the romantic dinners and built-in babysitting service. Once I made the mistake of trying to reclaim my son, who was playing with him in a Koi pond. When I approached to urge him back to the table, I received a resounding (and embarrassing) “No mommy. Go away!” as he happily returned to the kisses and cuddles from his new admirer.

It dawned on us that Alessandro’s return from Shangri-La might be rather difficult on him, and that an immediate return to normal life was crucial, before our little Emperor became even more unbearable. Indeed, our departure from that enlightened country where he was truly appreciated was a heavy blow for our little boy.

We stopped in Vienna on our flight back to Rome. On our first post-China evening, we were walking along Kärtnerstrasse, a bustling shopping street in the center. I watched, with combined awe and horror, as my little boy started to flirt with the passers-by, trying desperately to catch their eyes and offering up his biggest, cutest smiles. Alas, all for naught. No longer exotic, Alessandro looked like any other little boy walking down the Viennese street. No more paparazzi, no more cuddles, no more boundless admiration, no more adoring crowds hanging on his every move.

Although Alessandro may have been devastated by this return to normal life, his father and I were thrilled to retire from our secondary roles in the entourage. Don’t feel too sorry for Alessandro. Italy is definitely what I would call a “soft landing”. We his parents, on the other hand, definitely deserve your sympathy – we have never relived those precious moments of dining with built-in babysitting.

June 19th, 2009 | by Kimberly Sullivan 10 comments