Daughter, my daughter - she won't stop talking. We are not alone - apparently this is just about typical for four-year-olds (and typically exasperating for their parents). Son (son!), on the other hand, is not talking at all, really. Doctors are beginning to raise their eyebrows, but not saying anything yet. He's 26 months old, just about. (This age is, incidentally, about when this humble typist began his career with words, according to those who were around at the time.)

So, of course, we fret about language delays - but not overly, and only late at night, when worrying is easier. Son (son!) spent a year of his life hearing nothing but Mandarin (if you want to get technical, Sichuanese, which is something more like a heavily accented accented Mandarin than some other Chinese dialects), and is now immersed in English all day, every day.

If we really wanted to throw him for a loop, I suppose we could move to Cuba (or maybe just Little Havana) and switch to Spanish, in which case he'd probably be speaking by his 14th birthday. Sometimes, though, I wonder if it's more that he simply can't get a word in edgewise.

This, more or less, is what seems to have happened with the the baiji, China's river dolphin, now officially extinct. They'd swum the Yangtze for 20 million years, and now they're gone - killed by engine noise. It messed up their sonar and made it impossible for them to find each other.

This is the price of progress, one supposes. The noise. The confusion.

These are busy times. At the same time as the last baiji-count found nothing, the tallest building in Shanghai has caught fire. They think it was electrical welders on the 40th floor. The thing was going to be 101 stories tall. That's progress. One can't be sure that kind of progress is worth the existence of the baiji (indirectly, of course, but part of the same bustling explosion in industry); still, it's impressive. As are China's newly announced plans to map the entire surface of the moon. As if 101 stories wasn't tall enough.

When in China, it's easy for the English-speaker to be overwhelmed by noise and confusion because none of it makes sense - crowds of people going about their lives in a language that one doesn't understand. It's probably important for adoptive parents to understand that the two or three weeks they spend in China is what the next two or three years are going to be like for their fresh, young associates. Confusing times. Lots of looking up and wondering.

Is there a word for that?