With a name like Gipsy Danger, she seemed destined for
international travel from the very beginning.
My Shanghainese street cat has now logged more cage time
than an MMA fighter, I'm fond of saying.
We've arrived in America.
But it wasn't easy.
********
Her story began about two years ago, when she wandered past
the lobby of the apartment building I lived in.
My neighbors, Balvinder and Cissy, were with me on the couches, drinking
3 RMB (50 cent) 750 ml bottles of Qingdao beer. Bal had Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" on
repeat and was smoking cigars.
"A kitty!"
I exclaimed. I'd had a couple of
Qingdaos by this point, so my enthusiasm wasn't unexpected. Cissy followed my pointing finger and drew a
quick inhale. "She's lovely," she breathed.
And she was. The
kitten was five months old, we found out later, and had the most incredible
markings--gray and black tiger stripes and orange marmalade whirled over a
white belly and four white paws. At the
corner of each eye was a downward cheetah tear stripe that could've made her
look pathetic--but her eyes were bright and her body language was confident and
curious.
As Cissy and I cooed over the kitten and tried to coax her
into the lobby. "That cat is from
the street. Probably has fleas and God
knows what," Bal said.
Cissy and I zipped to the nearby convenience store and
bought a can of mackerel to feed the cat, and a few more beers. The cat sniffed curiously at the fish we'd
placed outside the building, but didn't eat it.
"Well, there goes my 7 kuai," I grumbled, but I was smiling.
"I'm talking to myself right now," Bal griped from
the couches. The cat followed Cissy and
I back inside. She made figure eights
around Bal's ankles and meowed, purring.
"This is a helicopter cat!" Bal said.
He seemed delighted now that he was receiving the cat's attention.
I picked her up and checked under her fur. "No fleas. Or flea eggs," I reported. My orange tabby back home, Sitka, had had
quite a few of both when I'd gotten him five years ago. It'd been an easy fix, but in China? Probably
can't pick up a flea collar at the supermarket, I thought.
"Boy or girl?"
Cissy asked.
"Hold her upside down and check!" Bal laughed.
We all giggled.
"I can't tell, I'm not a vet," I said, "but most calico
cats are female. My guess is girl."
We all commented on the silky smoothness of her fur, and how
she didn't appear to be starving. Cissy
and Bal both asked several people, including the lobby security guard, about
the cat. The answer was always the
same: "Homeless."
A couple of hours later we'd grown attached, and Cissy asked
me if I'd take her home. "I can't
take her, I already have a cat at home!"
I protested, holding up my hands.
"I can't cheat on Sitka!"
I'd only been in Shanghai for a couple of months, and I was only
planning on staying for a year. But
Cissy was Chinese, and her and Bal were committed to staying in Shanghai for
the next year or two.
I told Bal about how my sister had captured kittens in her
hoodie, and so he did the same--we rode the elevator up to their floor.
The next morning I showed up at their door with cat litter,
a plastic basin for a litter box, and some kitten food I'd purchased at
Jiadeli, the local supermarket. Cissy
was in the pajamas that Bal's mom had made for her, and she looked delightfully
Asian in the bright red and pink colors.
"Oh, this cat," she started worriedly. "She's too wild, Bal says. She kept running over us all night, meowing
and meowing. Bal says we might put her
back on the street."
I remembered how Sitka had been at that age. "She'll outgrow it," I said, as we
set up Gipsy's things.
Gipsy wouldn't have survived the winter at her young age, a
Chinese vet later revealed. A
subtropical city, Shanghai is nowhere near as cold as Spokane, but we did have
a couple of freezing cold mornings.
But Gipsy had other challenges ahead of her, most notably,
an unstable living situation. Frustrated
with China and especially EF, Bal had resigned his position in April and
returned to England. At that point, he
and Cissy had been married only a couple of months, and she'd decided to return
to her hometown of Guangzhou in the south to take care of her ailing
mother. Taking Gipsy was not an
option--Cissy already had a dog at home, and she'd be busy with her visa application
and studying for her IELTS (English language test).
I encouraged Cissy to call the two Shanghai animal shelters
we could find, but one never returned her call and the other was full.
Cissy missed Bal terribly.
Though we watched Jason Statham movies and went to a pub quiz once a
week, I was often working, so Cissy was quite lonely. She also told me she'd started feeding Gipsy
people food.
"She likes it.
She'll eat anything, even the spicy dishes...But then she
vomits." Cissy looked at me, her
eyes watery. "I'm trying to get her
ready to return to the street."
"What are you talking about?" I demanded.
"You know I'm taking that cat."
"What?" she
asked, startled.
"Sure, I'll take her," I committed, "and I'll
try my best to find her a good home."
When Cissy left at the end of May, she hugged me
tightly--something she didn't usually do--with tears in her eyes. "Thank you so much for everything,"
she said.
I asked around:
coworkers, my chiropractor. I
posted a cute sign with Gipsy's picture at Avocado Lady, a small local shop patronized
by many wealthy ex-pats. I went home to
Spokane for three weeks and had a coworker take care of Gipsy. By the time I got back to Shanghai, I was
growing quite attached to her.
I started looking into taking her home with me. Oh, the regulations! Oh, the horrors of quarantine! Oh, the horrors of shipping animals in
China! I heard about epic quarantines--beloved
family pets incarcerated in cages for six months; the pets were never the same
afterward. I heard about pets
suffocating or freezing to death due to Chinese airline staff failing to
pressurize the cargo hold.
I learned that certain airlines would allow in-cabin pets
(thank you, United). I learned that
Chinese bureaucracy, while a slow nightmare of paperwork and money, can be
handled, even if it means waiting in the vet's office for two hours with your
cat for that official pet health certificate that cost 1150 RMB (about $200
US). I discovered that China has strange
demands--the rabies shot Gipsy had gotten the year before wasn't
"official", so she was revaccinated, and micro chipped, on the same day--in
spite of my reservations that the microchip wouldn't work in the US.
When Gipsy and I arrived at Pudong International Airport an
hour before our check-in time on July 8th, she'd already been in the carrier
for an hour.
Going through security, I had to take her out of her carrier
(with about 25 curious Chinese passengers behind me, and doors opening up to
the rest of the airport on either end) so that they could scan it. What if
she runs away? I was sweating and
tense by the time we got to our gate, and the sweat really popped when an cute
female employee approached me, saying my carrier was too big to fit under the
seat.
"Well, what am I supposed to do now?" I said angrily. Why
tell me now, after security and
everything? It seemed that
everything I did in China had some kind of problem, and after two years, I was
more than ready to leave.
My rude response should've earned me a smack in the face,
but the employee and her coworker called the purser of the plane to come out
and speak to me.
"My name is Laura," she said, shaking my hand, "and
I have nine cats myself." She
smiled at me and eyed the carrier with a sharpness. "Well, the flight isn't fully
booked. Let's go for it." (Again, thank you, United.)
And the employees were right. The carrier was about a centimeter too tall to go under the seat, but I shoved
and tried. About five minutes after we
got settled, a couple of older Chinese ladies wanted to sit together and asked
the attendant in Chinese to ask me to move.
I rolled my eyes and grumbled, but we ended up sitting in an aisle seat,
rather than a window, a blessing on an 11-hour flight, and had an empty seat
between us and a quiet Chinese man.
We landed in San Francisco.
The Customs guy calmly and carefully looked over her Chinese certificate
and took her Ziploc baggie of cat food.
"You and I both know what this is," he said kindly, "but
Uncle Sam has rules."
"That's okay," I sighed. "She's not eating, anyway."
And she wasn't. No
eating, no drinking, no bathroom accidents.
I was starting to wonder if Gipsy's body had completely shut down. I was starting to worry, but I couldn't do
anything about it. I sweated some more. I'd only slept a couple of hours the night
before we left, and maybe dozed an hour on the flight from Shanghai to San
Fran. I have no idea if Gipsy slept at
all.
Again, we had to take her out so that security could scan
her cage. This time we were allowed to
wait in a private room with ridiculously high walls. I kept telling Gipsy how much I loved her,
what a good cat she was being, and how proud I was of her. My mom had sent a hormone collar from the US
with supposedly calming effects, and although Gipsy still seemed nervous, it
appeared to be working. When the TSA guy
returned, he commented, "By now, most cats are climbing those walls. You've got a nice, mellow cat." I beamed with pride and put her back in her
carrier, and she was pretty good about it.
We landed in Denver.
And there we waited. And waited.
A computer glitch had grounded some United flights earlier
that day, I learned. We'd already planned
for a 7 or 8 hour layover, but it got later and later. I'd eaten, but, as the airport's restaurants
closed down, I felt hungry again. I
peered into Gipsy's cage. She seemed
fine, and she hadn't eaten. I drew
strength from that. As we waited some
more, I curled up around her carrier, draped between two chairs, freezing
cold. I'd forgotten my new jacket in San
Francisco--my only worry then had been getting us through Customs. The sweat seemed to have frozen on my
body. I was tempted to take Gipsy's
blanket and use it for myself, but I kept it draped over her carrier--partly to
keep her warm and partly to block off any sights that may have frightened her.
Finally we got on the flight. It was full.
Gipsy's carrier wouldn't go under the seat. I had to prop my feet on top of it, and my
backpack on top of my knees. It's only for a couple of hours. Strangely, I never got reminded or reprimanded
about her carrier or my backpack. Lucky. No one bugged us.
We finally, finally landed in Spokane. It was about 1 am. And I could hear jack hammering coming from
near the luggage carousel. My sister
Laura met us and I could tell she was worried about us and the jack
hammering.
"I think Gipsy's kind of in shock, anyway," I
said, laughing, loopy from lack of sleep.
It hadn't quite sunken in that we'd made it--that we were in America. I unnecessarily reminded my sister that we'd
lived next to a construction site for two years. I joked, "It's probably a 'welcome home'
sound for her."
********
It's been over a week now, and Gipsy has met Sitka and
Nellie, my sister's cat. She's explored
both levels of the house. So much space
compared to our tiny 40 square meter studio in Shanghai! Yesterday, she even went outside with the
other two cats. She has fallen for
Sitka, following him around like a starry eyed teeny bopper. There's been some hissing, and some batting
of paws, but no biting or scratching.
My Shanghainese girl is now an American girl--out in the
open spaces of the West, enjoying the fresh air and grass under her paws,
exploring this New World--just like I'd promised.
