Should We Take Our Son to China Over Christmas Even Though He’ll Miss School?
The call came on a Tuesday afternoon, right as I was cleaning up the lunch dishes. It was his teacher, Mrs. Aoki. She’s the kind of teacher who sends quick emails just to say your kid did something funny in class, so I didn’t worry when I saw the school’s number. But this time, her voice had that careful, measured tone you use when you’re about to discuss something awkward.
“I heard you’re thinking about taking Leo to China for the holiday,” she said. “That’s wonderful. I just want to talk through the school piece of it.”
And there it was. The trip we’d been planning for months—my sister’s wedding in Shanghai, then a week visiting our old neighborhood and family in Beijing—suddenly had a third party weighing in. I’d known Leo would miss ten days of school. I’d even packed it into the back of my mind. But hearing it out loud from Mrs. Aoki, with her quiet sigh and the shuffle of papers, made it real. Ten days. Two full weeks of second grade.
I told her we hadn’t decided yet. Which wasn’t entirely true. We’d already booked the flights.
—
Here’s the thing about missing school in the middle of the year. It’s not like summer vacation where you expect the slide. It’s this tiny, punctured hole in the rhythm of the classroom. Leo would miss the last week of the unit on place value. He’d miss the winter assembly. He’d miss two days of the read-aloud book his class was halfway through. Mrs. Aoki was kind—she said she’d send a folder of work for the plane, that she’d pair him with a buddy to catch him up, that he’d be fine in her class. But I could hear the strain underneath. She was being realistic, not enthusiastic.
I hung up and stood in the kitchen, staring at the calendar. My husband, Dan, was still at work, but we’d already gone back and forth. It’s not just a vacation, I’d argued. My grandmother lives in Beijing and she’s eighty-six. Leo hasn’t seen her since he was three. My sister is marrying a guy the family still hasn’t properly met. This trip wasn’t about a holiday. It was about mattering.
Dan’s argument wasn’t wrong either. Leo has asthma, and the air quality in Beijing can be brutal in winter. He’d be jet-lagged. He’d come back right before winter break ends, and for the first few days, he’d be spaced out and tired. He’d lose his spot in the classroom leadership chart. He’d miss the unit test. And what exactly would he learn from sitting on a train for six hours between Shanghai and Beijing? He’s seven. He won’t remember the architecture or the food. He’ll remember the plastic airplane toys and the gummy bears in the airport lounge.
Neither of us was wrong. So we decided to do it anyway, but with a plan that made both of us feel less careless.
—
Before we left, I set up a short meeting with Mrs. Aoki. Not a formal parent-teacher conference, just fifteen minutes after pickup. I brought a list of questions, but I left it in my pocket. What I needed, really, was to hear her say it would be okay. She said something more useful: “The work can be handled. The bigger piece is helping Leo feel connected when he comes back. If he knows he’s coming back to a classroom that’s glad to see him, he’ll catch up faster.”
That changed how we approached the trip. I stopped thinking of it as “school versus travel” and started thinking of it as “keeping a thread alive.” We checked out three books from the library—one about Chinese characters, one she recommended, one Leo picked out—and I made a small folder of worksheets from the teacher’s website. Nothing heavy. Just a few pages of math and a journal where he could draw and write one sentence each day.
On the plane, Leo slept for seven hours straight, which meant I sat with the folder unopened and felt guilty until I felt tired. The first day in Shanghai was a blur of suitcase chaos and lukewarm hotel water. My sister’s rehearsal dinner was at a round table in a restaurant that smelled like sesame oil and smoke. Leo hid under the table. He refused to eat dumplings. He said, loudly, that the “chicken soup” tasted like soap.
It’s easy to imagine a trip like this deepening a child’s soul. It’s harder to watch it turn into a bad mood in a hotel room at 9 p.m. while everyone else is downstairs drinking tea. So we adjusted. I stopped trying to make every meal an adventure. We found a supermarket and bought Leo cereal and crackers. My aunt taught him to say “hello” and “thank you” in Chinese, and he practiced on every waiter, who mostly smiled and ruffled his hair. He learned to use chopsticks, sort of. He carried my grandmother’s cane when she walked from the living room to the courtyard. She told him, in English, that he was a “big boy,” and he stood up straighter for the rest of the day.
—
The schoolwork happened, but not in any orderly way. On the high-speed train, Leo did two pages of math while I held a napkin under his pencil. He wrote in his journal that the train was “not as fast as an airplane but smoother.” He drew the Bund skyline and wrote “Shanghai has tall buildings” in crooked letters. Mrs. Aoki had told us that place value would be the tricky part. So every time we bought something, I made Leo count the change. He was terrible at it. He would hand over a twenty yuan note and stare at coins like they were alien fossils. But by the third day, he understood that ten ten-yuan notes equaled one hundred. He’d figured it out from watching. The aisle of the grocery store became his math class.
The two weeks went quickly. Christmas there wasn’t a big deal—the hotels had plastic trees, but the streets didn’t. We spent Christmas Eve in my grandmother’s apartment, eating hotpot and watching Leo open a small gift we’d brought from home. He didn’t seem to miss his classroom elf or the winter party. He was too busy feeding the grumpy alley cat that lived by her building.
The messiness showed up when we got back. The jet lag was real. Leo woke up at 4 a.m. for the first three nights and shuffled into our room with a groggy look that said, “where are we?” The first day back at school, he cried in the car. Not because he was sad. Because he was tired and overwhelmed. He walked into class and stood by the door, holding his folder like it was a shield.
But Mrs. Aoki had assigned him a buddy—a girl named Maya who collected stickers and apparently loved showing Leo where the new pencil sharpener was. His teacher read his journal during morning meeting, and when she got to the part about the alley cat, several kids laughed and asked questions. Leo spent the rest of the week explaining chopsticks. He taught a boy named Marcus to say “nihao” during lunch. He was behind in math, sure. Mrs. Aoki sent home two extra practice sheets, and we did them at the kitchen table over the weekend, with Dan grumbling about borrowing vs. carrying. Leo was frustrated. But he wasn’t lost.
—
Would I do it again? Probably. But I’d do it slightly differently. I’d push the return date to give us one extra day to adjust before school. I’d pack more familiar snacks. I’d lower my expectations about the airplane worksheets. I’d also tell the teacher before we booked the flights instead of after, so she could plan ahead with the class rather than react.
I’m still not sure if Leo got more from the trip than he lost in the classroom. The math worksheet catch-up was real. The missed read-aloud book? He never caught up on it, and his class still quotes a line from it sometimes. He sits there quietly when they do. But he also has a memory of sitting next to his great-grandmother, both of them watching the evening light hit the wall, not talking, just existing together. That’s not in the curriculum. And it won’t show up on a report card.
We’ve been home for three weeks now. Leo has stopped talking about China unless someone brings it up. The other day, though, he asked me when we could go back. I said maybe in a few years. He nodded, then asked if he could miss school again.
I told him we’d see. I’m still telling him that.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Should We Take Our Son to China Over Christmas Even Though He’ll Miss School