IN TIANANMEN SQUARE

Dear Spike:

We couldn’t be more proud.

Just minutes into our flight from San Francisco to Beijing, you were making small talk with one of the flight attendants.

“Do you live in China?” she asked you mother and I after you ordered some apple juice in Mandarin.

Then today, outside the Temple of Heaven, a young man complimented your accent. And later, with riding in the back of a pedal cart, you sang songs along with the driver.

Awesome.

But while we’re proud of your developing language skills — and excited by the way your eyes lit up today as you realized how valuable your second language can be — the biggest compliments you received today had nothing to do with your ability to shoot the breeze in Chinese.

“Doc,” a former Army medic who is one of our fellow travelers on this tour, said it best: “You were better behaved than most of the adults on this tour,” he told you on the bus ride back to our hotel after a 12-hour day in freezing temperatures and biting winds that started in Tiananmen Square, weaved through the Forbidden City, featured a visit to the Heavenly Temple and a tour of a silk factory.

He wasn’t kidding. You were.

Love,

Dad