How do you manage your IT issues when you’ve always relied on someone else to handle all things computer-esque in the house? Hopefully you are not reading this because I am still in the process of figuring out how to publish some semblance of a website without it looking too crazy.
This morning I rolled out of bed and into the garden to take care of the watering that Gong Gong & I didn’t do last evening due to our busy schedules. My chatty Chinese auntie next door came over to ask me for the sixth time what I was growing (eggplants, bell peppers, hot peppers, green beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, loofah squash, okra, and lots of herbs and sunflowers) and tell me how foolish I am to waste so much water growing nonsense (that is, non-Chinese) things and ask me, hey, why aren’t I working.
The past two weeks I’ve been helping at my paternal family’s liquor store, which has involved developing a nice set of biceps from toting beer and soda bottles and also sharing the caretaking responsibilities of my bed-ridden, Alzheimer-stricken 93-year-old grandfather, who likes to ask me ten times a day if I’ve gone back to China to visit the village where we grew up (he thinks I’m somebody else).
And then my mother called me this morning to tell me that my aunt, one of my grandfather’s caretakers and the one who runs the liquor store, had a mini stroke last night.
Who wants a full-time desk job when there’s so much fun to be had with the family?
I wish I could say I left a high-powered executive career to come take care of ailing, aged family members and am finding such richness in our time together… But the career I left was not so executive, and the time I spend with my ailing, aged family members is not so very rich — well, rich with temper tantrums, family infighting, and self-pity. And I’m sorry to say that I add to the pot of stressed-out stew.
Of course we can only criticize in others what we see in ourselves, and when I left one family member’s house in thorough annoyance with her sour accusations against those who try to help out in this time of family crisis, I asked myself, Okay, where am I totally rude and critical when I should be on-my-knees thankful for others’ generosity?
When I tell people that I came to live with my Gong Gong after my grandmother passed away two years ago, people usually think I am very noble-hearted and blessed, too, to spend quality time with an elder while he’s still very active and coherent.
But the truth is, he probably takes more care of me than I do of him, and with my energy stretched out in so many directions these days (family members in hospice and the hospital), oftentimes I come home with a sour face, barely saying hello before I shut myself away for the night. Unless I have something to criticize him for.
Spending more time with my paternal family now, I’ve been receiving updates on my first and second cousins – who’s getting married, who’s graduating, who’s been promoted, who’s winning district honors… and here I am unemployed, hauling beer and selling drug paraphernalia in my family’s downtown convenience store (now I know the answer to: Why do homeless people buy tiny silk roses in glass stems and shiny Chore Girl® copper scrubbers every day?).
Why does my ego still cringe in comparison when I know I am not full-time job, marriage, mother, nor real estate material? In my more Zen moments I recognize that I’m being tested to see if I’ll ever stop angst-ing that the other parties going on around the world are a whole lot more exciting than the party I’m at right now. This is the party that I’ve been invited to. Hey, this is the party where I’m the guest of honor. If I were smart, I’d open my arms wide to the gifts of my well-wishers. And put on my best party dress!
What was I doing in acupuncture anyway? Either all my compassion was burned out of me, or I have always been impatient and controlling. Probably a bit of both.
In carting my aunt around to her various doctors’ appointments, I became increasingly annoyed with her slowness and mix-uppedness, and when her blood pressure was checked at 220/70 and the doctor wanted to double her medication, already doubled from the previous week, I fumed to the nurse about my aunt’s lousy diet, zero exercise, minimal intake of water, and her horrible treatment of people (ha!) who were trying to help her.
She was so happy to visit with the kind nurse, and I agitated her into her usual state of stress and venom against her family. I might as well have jumped up and down and pointed my finger and said, “See, see? See how she is!?”
I did a great job of raising both our blood pressures.
Sometimes I am just not a nice person.
I’ve not written in a while, as I’ve been in the secretarial chair lately, typing my way towards spending money for the West Coast Contact Improv Festival in July. Whoo-hoo!
I’m glad I took a software class my last year of college (way back when Word was still in DOS), as I knew I wouldn’t be making much money through art. I’m proud of my can-do attitude, as temping has funded my world travels and expanded my budget during slumps in business, but I recognize that my starving artist mentality has followed me throughout my adult life – through world travels, acupuncture studies, professional healing, and now freelance writing.
I’m glad that I can live comfortably (and no doubt eat WELL – or should I say, too much) on a low budget, but I do want to shake this starving artist mentality, that I’ll always be scuttling about in thrift store duds and scouring grocery store bargains and passing up on opportunities because I’m pinching pennies towards my next trip or extension of my enjoyed unemployment.
A few weeks ago I was making a salad for myself when a rummage through the fridge revealed that I’d neglected to harvest and clean a couple of carrots from the garden the previous weekend. Darn it. I was going to have to go out into the desert heat, yank myself up a carrot, get my hands all dirty, mumble mumble grumble.
Then I began laughing at myself as I realized that I was groaning about having a lush, organic garden a few steps away from the kitchen.
Lucky me.
Does anyone have a cuter mom than I?
This is a photo of my mother and my proud baby em lthim (what the Cantonese call dim sum), a pleated pastry pocket filled with ground pork, shrimp, and other savory bits.
When Hoo Hoo used to make these by the hundreds come special occasion, she called in the troops of helpers. As a child, my job, after Hoo Hoo rolled the snowy white dough into a thick rope and sliced off one inch chunks, was to smash the chunks into thin circles with a tortilla press. (I say, the Chinese must have gone crazy joy when they discovered this gadget in the Americas.)
As I grew older though, I never did graduate to the high chair of pleating the em lthims into their proper shape. It’s easier to shape the em lthims into simple half-moons with a twisted edge, but to Hoo Hoo, making tays (Chinese pastries) was an art. To feed people — what an art, a holy calling!
But last month my mother made some em lthims for my aunt Janene’s MA (excuse me, MSD, as in Masters of Science & Design) graduation party, and oh, how tasty it was, reminiscent of Hoo Hoo’s community-if-not-world-famous treats! And she also patiently taught me to make my first ones!
Auntie Janene is enlisting my mom to teach the younger generation of Chinese Americans to make Hoo Hoo’s repertoire of tays. Oh, we can only hope…
I made a salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, basil, and shallots, all garden-harvested, for the office where I was temping. I massaged the cucumber slices with sea salt, then splashed everything with a blend of grapefruit juice (hand-squeezed, picked from a Chinese elder’s backyard), honey, and extra virgin olive oil, and topped my mound of tomato chunks on a bed of cucumber slices with freshly ground black pepper.
As one associate waxed on about my garden and kitchen exploits, for the first time I felt honestly happy with my life in the company of corporate professionals. I shrugged off their compliments with: “Oh, it’s what you do when you don’t have to work full-time.”
But later I realized that what I should have said was, “This is what I choose to do instead of working full-time.”
Of course not everyone has the choice to live with their widowed grandfather, someone like my Gong Gong who likes to shop for food, mow the lawn, water the garden, wash the dishes, wash my car, pay the bills, sweep, mop, vacuum, and clean clean clean. (Just think, all this without having to perform sexual favors!)
He picks the day’s offerings of fat, soft, bright green figs, and I eat them all, just about. We hunt for plump red tomatoes from the plants that have sprung up all over the yard from our buried compost. We watch the slow growth of tiny white eggplants under the canopy of their wide, dark green leaves. We peer through the leafy, trendilous foliage of squash and bean vines for Chinese pumpkin, loofah sponge, yard-long beans, French beans.
We have done this together, reviving Hoo Hoo’s garden. It’s how we honor her and her spirit of endless giving of the fruits of Mother Earth. People are often amazed that I can share so much food and so much time making it. What greater joy than sharing your abundance and creations?
All you have shall some day be given;
Therefore give now, that the season of giving may be yours and not your inheritors’.
You often say, “I would give, but only to the deserving.”
The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture.
They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.
Surely he who is worthy to receive his days and his nights is worthy of all else from you.
And he who has deserved to drink from the ocean of life deserves to fill his cup from your little stream.– Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (1923)
Today I found a lone okra, less than three inches long, amongst our twenty or so okra plants. I snip it from the plant (are you supposed to harvest them with scissors?), flick off an ant, and bite through the bristly skin into the lightly crunchy, slightly viscous flesh. Yummy – and I must call one of my Atlanta friends for her awesome raw okra salad recipe with fresh corn kernels!
I admit, I have often been embarrassed about my family’s lack of concern for ultra-hygiene, from Hoo Hoo’s insistence that children eat the food that they dropped on the floor (it certainly taught us to be more careful about food handling – well, not me), to Gong Gong’s casual, often soap-less dishwashing techniques, to my blasé attitudes towards garden taste-testing, but after reading M.F.K. Fisher, I feel a lot better about our relaxed view of germs, dirt, and cooties.
Surely I have eaten a tart that felt the floor before it felt my plate, and more than a hundred bowls of soup whose temperature was tested, consciously or not, by a fat thumb. I have even pushed dead flies to one side of an omelette or ragoût, and eaten to the last bite undaunted. I have not really minded, inside of me, because what I ate was good, and I do not think that good food can come from a bad kitchen.
– M.F.K. Fisher, Serve It Forth (1937)
Because, of course, if a respected Caucasian person says it’s okay, it means we’re okay, too!
I visited the Chinese Senior Center today to videotape and take photographs of the Chinese elders making more than 200 doongs in honor of the next day’s Dragon Boat Festival (the fifth day of the fifth lunar month).
I went because I no longer have my Hoo Hoo here to teach me her art. It’s been 2½ years since she left, taking all her secrets with her. She wasn’t withholding them from us; we just never followed through on our claims that we wanted to learn from her.
If Hoo Hoo were here, she would be making doongs today. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them.
There would have been preparations weeks ahead of time -– the eggs soaked in brine for some three weeks, the freezer packed solid with sausages, peanuts, and mung beans. There would have been mounds of sticky rice coated with oil and salt. There would have been the sausages sliced lengthwise and then cut on the diagonal. There would have been the fatty pork sliced into two-inch long, ½” wide wedges. There would have been the preserved chestnuts, wrinkled and brown-gray, like tiny brains. There would have been the preserved eggs cracked open over a sieve, the salty egg whites dripping away as she collected the bright orange-yellow egg yolks in her wide-mouthed porcelain bowl.
There would have been the dark olive green bamboo leaves scrubbed, boiled, and soaked the day before. There would have been spools of string and scissors placed strategically on either side of the table. There would have been the call to arms to the daughter-in-law, the daughters, the niece, the neighbors. Come help make doong, 9 a.m. or so.
But she is not here, and as more and more of our elders pass onward to the great Dragon Boat in the sky, we younger generations wonder where our culture is. Chinese holidays barely register in our jam-packed minds. We readily honor the Western holidays with credit cards. But what about getting our hands dirty, slick with oil from mixing the rice grains, sticky with preserved egg yolks?
Without the command of Hoo Hoo’s kitchen, our family drifts apart. We do not gossip and tease over the fat-speckled sausages and slick-wet bamboo leaves. We do not share our stories; we do not share our disappointments or dreams; and the elders do not pass on the cultural ritual to the younger generations.
We don’t make the doongs, and we don’t make community. Hoo Hoo -– was she doing her best to force feed us remembrance of the sacred? To honor not with shopping mall gifts but with the gifts of time, of friendship, of collaborative creation.
We lost Hoo Hoo, and we’ve lost each other in the un-making.
I’ve just returned from the West Coast Contact Improv Festival in Berkeley, CA and a most excellent visit with my childhood best friend M (we actually met our last year of high school — but we really were just children then, no?).
A year or two ago my sister told me that she didn’t like being carried and swung around anymore in her contact improv dances. I was aghast -– how could she not lust for the gravity-defying lifts by strong men that make you feel like a weightless, ever-graceful figure skater? (Never mind the occasional landings on the head.)
But in this series of contact improv workshops and jams, I felt the same sort of sobering, or desire for the ground. I didn’t want men to swoop up my relatively light body and flip me over their shoulders, across their backs. I wanted to feel my center, revel in the strength and fluidity of my own dance.
Isn’t it funny how the way we move parallels the way we behave in everyday life? It used to be that, eager for the easy ride that made me feel so light, free, and feminine, I threw myself at strong, seemingly sturdy men. (I tried not to mind the occasional tramplings of my feet, my heart…)
Now I am finding the joy and beauty of dancing (standing?) on my own two feet. I am finding my strength, grace, and loveliness without the support of a man, and I believe I am a better dancer for it.
When I attend extended contact improv dance workshops or jams, I don’t eat much, mostly fruits and salads — either because I’m so filled with joy when I dance that I don’t need to eat or because with all that up-close-and-personal-touch, I don’t want to booot on the dance floor. (I wish my dance partners had a similar sense of digestive modesty.)
But when I write, my munchy demons rise up, ravenous. Perhaps I am procrastinating? Perhaps I am not fulfilled by writing? Perhaps, without an audience, I have no shame in my excess junk food consumption and boisterous boooting?
To be honest, I started this blog because I hoped that if I recorded my travails with emotional and mindless eating, I would feel the urge to give up my wicked, wicked ways. But I don’t think I’ve written about my sad addictions.
Today’s salad, composed of seaweed, apple, avocado, shaved carrots, and leafy greens, was complemented with two peaches, three purple sweet potatoes (delicious! — thank you, Ai Kim), two bowls of dry bran flakes, and two dozen peanut M&M’s. That was at the office, while writing. Now, at my brother’s house, I tackle three tamales and two bowls of cherries, while writing.
I would eat more, but he doesn’t have much in his house. When I paid a visit earlier this week, I was so munchy that I ate half a jar of salsa, while writing.
I’ve written articles about this (and eaten many sweets while writing them). I know part of what is going on. I start eating a lot, mindlessly, when I know I shouldn’t be doing something (like staying up too late to surf the Internet) or when I really don’t want to do something (like editing other people’s or even my own work).
And then I suffocate my voice of conscience with food. Lots of it.
Yesterday I went under the knife — not something I’m prone to do. Luckily the incision, made by the world’s cheeriest periodontal surgeon, was only in my front gum line, which leaves me looking like I ate glass for breakfast.
It’s funny how well-behaved I can be with eating when it hurts to chew.
No, I don’t like people, um, penetrating my person, especially with scalpels and rubber gloves. It just seems to be my mouth that gets the most action — especially in this past year of racking up thousands of dollars worth of dental bills and having too many hands and sharp, motorized tools in my mouth.
I didn’t have cavities for some fifteen years — and then boom! A million of them in a year or two from all my emotional stress and eating too many dried fruits for comfort.
I ate much more processed sweets and other forms of junk food in years past, with lazy toothbrush action and without incident, so it just goes to show sugar can be trumped by youth and happiness.
About the only time I watch TV is when I am at another person’s house and the boob tube takes center stage. Gong Gong often has Hong Kong satellite on in the background when I’m not home making bee bee bong bong, and when I come home, I often have to lower the volume of the relentless Hong Kong pop videos from full blast.
The other day I caught a glimpse of the Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant and was stunned into watching a few minutes of the ridiculous event — unbelievably skinny Chinese beauty queens in strappy, sequined swimsuits and high heels being interviewed by three thick-bodied, fully, frumpily dressed men in their thirties and forties, who guffawed all the while.
One pale, bony contestant smiled politely throughout her “interview,” her hands twisting in front of her crotch, her belly, her hips, and her eyes nervously scanning back and forth between the auditorium and the panel of interviewers.
It was painful. It was horrible. And no one blinked an eye at the irony of it all.
It riled up my old art grrl fury — yeah, yeah, why don’t we have men standing there in their spangly Speedos and high heels with full-bodied, fully dressed women assessing their intelligence with inane questions on pop culture?
But who would watch?
While dropping off a donation to Goodwill and breezing through the store for funky fashion finds (to replace all those I left behind in Atlanta, when I swore that I would never own so much stuff again), I browsed along with a Caucasian couple. The man found a pointy-topped straw hat and put it on his head and, giving me a glance in my round-topped, wide-brimmed straw hat, proceeded to hum the old Hollywood Chinaman/Chinatown jingle and say, “I’m General Kung Pao!” or something of the like.
I gave him a cool glance and tight-lipped smile, wondered whether I should ignore him, and said quickly, “You know you’re not funny, right?” I walked quickly away to get out of line of any retaliating fire and heard him say jovially, “Sure, I’m funny…”
Later in the car I wished I could have acted more maturely, not scurrying away in fear of his reaction and my own confused anger, and treated him more like the educated, culturally conscious gentleman that he had the potential to be. After all, as Marianne Williamson said, people do respond at the level with which they are treated.
I wished I had said something akin to: “Pardon me, sir, I don’t find how this joke very funny, and I would appreciate it if you would stop.”
At least this time I said something to express my upset instead of my usual silent slithering away, furious inside, as my mother taught me.
Oh, I wrote too soon about “boobs and tubes.” This past weekend I passed through the living room and Gong Gong’s Hong Kong satellite when the most awful singing erupted from the television set. I turned to see a handsome young Chinese man belting out a love song into a microphone, badly. (The irony -– Chinese elders and teachers are merciless in abusing you towards your greater good, but Chinese audiences are completely supportive when it comes to applauding the wretched singing attempts of cute and pretty model types.)
I became mesmerized by the following scenes of this apparent Mr. Hong Kong beauty and talent pageant -– young Chinese men showing off their skills in martial arts, combat acrobatics, hip hop dance, spray paint art, punk rock fantasies… I wandered in and out of the house to tend to the garden, and each time I returned, I saw something even more outrageous on the television screen.My Chinese isn’t good enough to know what the glamorous female hosts were saying, but it seemed the 700 or so women in the audience (mostly Chinese) were casting votes for their favorite male contestants, who were rated over and over for their apparent talents and occasional ripping off of shirts. One of the last challenges had the men walking through water fountains or emerging from a pool in matching unbuttoned white dress shirts and colorful Speedos.
Good gods. I did say in a fit, Why don’t men get up there in their spangly Speedos and answer inane questions from fully-clothed women? Apparently Hong Kong television has answered the call.
If things are so equal, why do I feel so bad?
I just returned from two weeks in the woods at my sister’s dance retreat in Massachusetts, where she is the center’s kitchen manager. My favorite kind of vacation –- the opportunity to work (I was her kitchen help), play, have quiet personal time, and be a part of the community. I dropped five pounds while I was there. Being away from the office M&M jar was a factor – and even more so, the communal living situation, in which I had to walk from my room, three flights down and three minutes stroll along a dirt path away to get to the kitchen.
Plus, I try to be on good behavior in communal dining and bathroom situations. (Salads, fruits, and vegetables exit so much more quickly and politely than the yummy chocolate cakes, biscuits, and breads that my sister made from scratch, alongside the garden-plucked salads, garden-plucked steamed kale, stews, tofu, and rice.)
How easy it is to fall back into overeating, lazy eating, procrastinatory eating (that is, eating to procrastinate, not procrastinating the eating), greedy eating. I’ve managed to stay away from the office M&M jar, just barely, but sigh, bloaty belly just doesn’t seem enough to stop me from binge eating.
“Think about your cheongsam!” my mother cries out at the sight or report of my overeating. She refers to the two snug Mandarin-collared silk dresses I purchased in Shanghai earlier this year, which fit me perfectly off the rack – and the embroidered white one ripped right off the mannequin displaying it.
I have just inherited a bunch of cheongsams from the grandmother on my father’s side. She hoarded Chinese dresses and jackets on her trips to Hong Kong and never gifted them to her six daughters or wore them much herself, if at all, working in her liquor store in seedy downtown Phoenix. A lot of the dresses are too big for me, so I could console myself with: if I get too chubby for my Shanghai dresses, I can fatten myself up to fit into Grandma’s!
I don’t feel the same drive to work in the garden this fall as I did last year. Of course last year planting the crops of kale, lettuce, carrots, and leeks was a novelty. The garden was my raison d’etre in my return home, my goodbye to Atlanta and my former self. Cheesy as it sounds, I was digging for my roots — my Chinese culture, yes, and also the root of my being. I’d lost track of that, flailing desperately my latter three years in Atlanta. I was coming home to rest and recuperate. Reviving Hoo Hoo’s backyard garden gave me a focus outside myself as I otherwise sighed, cried, and read/listened to self-help books and lectures for some four months.
I hacked at the sun-baked soil down to the spongy loam of Hoo Hoo’s 30+ years of gardening. I dug two-foot holes, much to Gong Gong’s disapproval, in an attempt to train him to throw all our vegetable and fruit scraps into the soil. I bought dozens of seed packets and scoured the desert gardening library books. I irrigated my seed beds morning and evening in the broiling summer heat and yowled at Gong Gong for blasting my cruciferous seedlings with his faster-and-harder-is-better overhead spraying. I marveled at the seedlings curling through, breaking through the soil and thickening, widening, stretching into sturdy plants. I protected my greens too lovingly and realized in November that I’d crowded all my plants in my horror of yanking the runt seedlings and that I had too much lettuce and kale and that I’d better start plucking and cooking and whipping up salads and sharing before I became overrun with greens. I admired my beautiful, surprise cauliflowers too long and within a week had my ten plants faltering in old age.
Abundance, I learned. Many times I have felt and sometimes still do feel broke, but then Hoo Hoo’s garden — the hard work, the too much, the needing to share my work and bounty because I couldn’t possibly eat it all myself… This is the way we’re supposed to feel about richness, isn’t it?
What good is wealth not shared? Not consumed and relished with great thanks and joy?
Having the garden and feeding others has been great practice in sharing and knowing my wealth. I must make time to dig and seed again.
We buried my paternal grandfather on Saturday. And then we celebrated the lunar birthday of my maternal grandfather, Gong Gong, on Sunday. All the emotions and family socializing have left me a bit rent – together with last week’s responsibilities of writing my grandfather’s eulogy, organizing the service, officiating the funeral (my first), leading the first meeting of a woman’s writing group, and going into the office every day of the week.
With my paternal grandfather’s funeral, this is the third grandparent I’ve lost in three years. I’m really lucky that I was able to keep all four grandparents into my early thirties. Having all my grandparents growing up, I thought everyone was going to live forever (and take care of me). And then my father passed away when I was twenty-five.
I’d say that was the most dramatic turning point of my life so far, bringing me on intimate terms with death – and awakening in me an ache for all the stories that are left untold in the human race, particularly in the elderly Chinese community.
It’s an ache that echoes, of course, the stories untold, unwritten, in me.
Long time, no post. I’ve been busy working, preparing for writing classes, gardening, and tackling Hoo Hoo’s recipes in the kitchen.
In September I realized that I had lived with Gong Gong one year, and I thought I would have mastered all of Hoo Hoo’s recipes by then – and finished the book that I’d been working on for seven years! But in one year I had only learned two recipes (granted, I have also learned how to work Hoo Hoo’s garden).
In the past few weeks I tackled Hoo Hoo’s blossomed Chinese cupcakes, white jellied belly buttons, and slick white rice rolls. These were all my second attempts – and I have to say I did very nicely! Especially with the steamed Chinese cupcakes, where the challenge is whether or not your cupcakes will “faht,” or break open in a four-cornered blossom. Dare I say, my cupcakes are even fluffier and moister than Hoo Hoo’s!
After spending a few marathon kitchen sessions with Hoo Hoo’s steaming wok, I know why Hoo Hoo was such an angry woman. It’s hot in that kitchen! No wonder why she yelled at everybody and was known as Ai Seng Hoo, or Very Loud Lady. I wanted to do some cursing as well in that crazy kitchen heat.
But Hoo Hoo’s anger I think stemmed from her not knowing the power of her own gifts – well, in a way, she did, because she yelled at us quite enough for not appreciating them. But being illiterate and being so dependent and isolated in Phoenix (almost 35 years living in the States, and she never learned English, never learned how to drive, never wore Levi’s or tennis shoes, and never gave up her mantra that money, money, money would be the key to our security and salvation) – I think that kind of disempowerment can make you hate yourself, make you take it out on other people, even if you do feed them.
I had lunch with some co-workers some time ago, and the table banter turned to car theft — handles toyed with, electronic gadgets snatched from within, new vehicles disappeared from parking lots, and car theft twice from the same house! The co-workers spoke of the need for surveillance devices, alarm systems, increased police forces… I had little to contribute towards the conversation, except: “Hey, my family uses dirt as an ant-theft device.”
It wasn’t the right place to chirp: “Hey, you get what you expect!” “Your mind is a magnet!” — or as my mother would say, Pa see nai see: Fear the crap, step into the crap.
I don’t take the best care of the car I drive. A blotchy layer of dirt covers its white exterior, and I throw shoes, paperwork, water bottles, pens, and change willy-nilly on all horizontal services inside.
When people climb into my car, I say, “I’m not going to apologize for my messy car because keeping a car clean is not one of my priorities. Here, just toss all that into the backseat.”
I’d like to think I’m less materialistic and status-conscious than most people, but this doesn’t make me any more noble. I met with valet opportunities a couple of times this month, and I had to sheepishly ask for self-parking because the car is just too messy inside. — So I admit, I still care about what people think (and yeah, I can be really cheap, too, but such measures add up to me not having to work a full-time job).
But, as illustrated by the incident my part-time working brother experienced with a co-worker… He drove her to the shop where her car was being worked on, and she scoffed at the dusty, scruffy insides and outsides of his nine-year-old car. “Don’t you ever clean your car?” “If you haven’t noticed, mine runs. And look where I’m taking you now.”
This fall Gong Gong and I are repeating our feats of last year, when we first worked together to revive Hoo Hoo’s backyard vegetable garden. I scoured library books for desert gardening tips, and Gong Gong fearlessly marched into the soil with his thirty years of experience as Hoo Hoo’s garden assistant. We disagreed on just about everything, or let’s say, I nagged him about everything.
“Gong Gong, you’re supposed to dig the soil two feet deep, not just rough up the first four inches!”
“Gong Gong, you’ve got to work the manure deep into the soil a few days before planting – you can’t just throw the seeds in and throw the manure on top!”
“Gong Gong, I told you, quit blasting my plants with the water! You’re knocking them all over and breaking the steams. Let the hose lay on the ground, let the water slowly drip!”
“Gong Gong, you have to water the plants deeply – lay that hose on the ground! You can’t just splash the soil with water and think it’s enough just because the ground is wet!”
“Gong Gong, don’t throw the vegetable scraps away! Dump it into the ground so we can compost it!”
“What are you doing picking it already? It’s not even ripe yet! I told you to leave it alone!”
“Agh, what are you doing planting in this section!? I just planted my seeds three days ago!”
The above is all spoken in really bad Toisanese, so Gong Gong could argue that he didn’t understand anything I said, which is why he did everything contrary to what I desired. But yeesh, just writing all those sentences out above makes me cringe in my control freakiness. And you know that’s not even one-quarter of the things I fuss about with Gong Gong – repeatedly. (Yeah, call me cham hee, but he doesn’t seem to listen anyway.)
The poor man! He rarely ever fusses back at me except when I apologize for being so critical and testy. “Yeah, you are,” he says. “Gnahm gnahm chahm chahm.” (All rhymes with “bomb.”)
However, if I had just kept my mouth shut… Gong Gong the other day asked, “Hey, what’ve you got planted there, under that chicken wire?”
I didn’t know how to say “three different types of kale” in Toisanese, so we brought it up to my mum at dinner one evening.
And then I realized – Gong Gong was wondering why my three rows of kale were growing so perkily when his twenty rows of gai lan (Chinese broccoli) were for naught.
Gong Gong admitted his envy. “Yeah, I look at your greens, which came up in three days, and I haven’t had anything come up in three weeks!”
My poor Gong Gong (grandfather). How did he end up with the roommate from hell – dirty dishes in the sink and the stove splattered with sauce for cleaning whenever he comes home; clothes and hats tossed over every chair and sofa; books and newspapers piled up on the floor in every room; shoes jumbled at every entryway; and gardening gloves, bags of manure, shovels, and a tangled hose tripping him up in the backyard – that’s me!
The other day I saw Gong Gong washing the trees – spraying the leaves with a hose.
“I’ve never seen anyone clean a tree before!” I cried out.
“Why not? Look how covered with dirt the leaves are!”
“They’re just going to get covered with dirt again!”
“What kind of excuse is that? Why do you bathe each day if you just get dirty again tomorrow?”
I really am thankful to be living with someone so tidy, though not to the point of clean-freakishness. Who else would put up with me?
Sometimes I wish I weren’t allergic to alcohol. Otherwise, I would be able to more appreciate the writings of M.F.K. Fisher and French dining. I would know the differences between vodka, gin, ale, lager, martinis, rum, and brandy and act snooty with a wine list. (Once I bought three liter-sized bottles of Everclear at the grocery store, and everyone thought I was going to throw a party. Actually, the Everclear was for disinfecting my hands and making homeopathic remedies.)
Most of all, I imagine that it would be a lot easier to stop the occasional excessive consumption. According to the movies and the tales friends tell, if you drink too much, eventually you will vomit and pass out. In my booze-free naiveté, I observe that, hey, at least you stop.
This is not the case with food. You can eat and eat and eat until your stomach hurts – but if you sit down for a while and moan that you’ve eaten too much, after an hour or two, you can eat again. That wonderful, abused stomach of ours stretches itself silly to accommodate our indulgences.
Also, I imagine alcohol can be used to make you less liable for your less than noble acts and decisions. (The few times I tried to drink way back when, I found myself acting loud and giggly because wasn’t that what you were supposed to do? That lasted only a few minutes though, before I crawled into a corner and held my aching, flaming head, with my pulse ferociously pounding and face bright red.)
Ah, what a curse – living life sober and awake to one’s actions – except, of course, when I drown my sorrows and stress in a half gallon of ice cream or full pot of rice (with fu gnui, spicy fermented tofu – yum!).
Ah, at last the holidays are over — the pressure to overdo, to properly act out one’s part in familial propriety. My sister called from her fire-lit, snowed-in cabin to say she was concerned about my continuing need to care for others at the sake of my own well-being.
“Whatever do you mean?” I asked. “I’m just sitting here in the kitchen making six dozen tamales on my own!”
My heart ached for some magic yesterday. Maybe I have too many scenes from romantic comedies in my head. But.
In many ways I have anchored myself in the physical world — being more consistent with biking and yoga, writing, cleaning out the house (not to mention binge-eating and reading simultaneously, my worst habit). However, when my sister asked me if I were doing any ritual on my birthday, I had to say no.
And that’s another reason to miss being a part of the world of holistic health — having daily conversations about crystals, essential oils, meditation, affirmations, smudge sticks, fasting, organically tomatoes, ethically traded chocolate, spiritually grounded relationships, healthy bowel movements.
I’ve taken on a part-time gig decorating the homes of the locally rich and famous for the holidays, which is an amusing distraction, describing to others vast domestic interiors and feeling myself superior for not wanting so many possessions, so much pomp and circumstance. Ah, the ways we try to make ourselves feel better for our own life choices and situations…
Where is the magic in my life? The answer of course, is that I need to create it on my own.
This would have been a perfect scene in my hoped-for short documentary on the relationship between my Gong Gong and me, but as usual, the camera was not setup for such spontaneous moments in the everyday mundane.
The next door neighbor visited us with the news that her live-in brother, a healthy 55, had passed away last weekend, perhaps from a heart attack. Gong Gong and I gasped, as her brother was so helpful and kind, so young and fit, seen jogging every morning.
After she left, Gong Gong and I settled into peeling garlic cloves so he could chop up a jar of ready-to-go minced garlic. We bemoaned that someone with so much life left in him had been taken away. There are so many others, feeble-minded, ornery, infirm, and/or laid out with disease, who keep hanging on to this cycle of breath. My other grandfather spent the last four years of his life in hospice status, every year losing more of his memory, hearing, weight, and ability to feed, wash, and go to the toilet himself.
I asked Gong Gong, “What if you were like my other grandfather?”
“No way,” Gong Gong said. “If I’m like that, I hope I’ll be taken away quickly.”
”Really? You don’t want me to wipe your bottom?”
“Aiya, forget it. Who wants to live like that? It’s no use.”
My Hoo Hoo never let us talk about death as she and Gong Gong aged. In fact, she sometimes protected him from imagined bad luck by preventing him from accompanying her to the sickbeds or funerals of their friends.
Perhaps it worked, as we had all expected my Gong Gong to go first with his history of surgeries and medications. She had never been in the hospital before the fateful January weekend that took her away. She, of the tireless energy and shouted everyday conversation (“I’m not yelling at you! This is the way I talk!”), was the one who left us first.
Omigod, I am at the library, and it is quiet. It is like being in my own office. It must be that the kids are back in school and that the phlegm-y folk are still at home watching TV.
Is it only here in Phoenix or is this standard now for younger generations — people don’t speak softly in the library anymore. Now it’s:
“Come see my MySpace page!”
“Hey, did you hear what that bitch said at lunch?”
“Hello, hello? I’m calling about the job opening you have?”
“Can you believe what Britney Spears did!?”
“Hey, whassup, dude? I’m just chillin’ at the library. Whatchoo up to?”
“Get over here before I whoop your butt!”
Even the library staff speaks in loud voices as they interact with patrons, and it’s not just the younger employees.
My sister came home last month, and at the library (first stop for any of us when we return to Phoenix, before calling any friends or extended family to get together), she ducked her head and whispered a conversation with me as we browsed foreign film titles in the DVD section.
It was obvious we’d been raised in another era, where the library was sacred ground, where respect for others’ privacy and concentration was part of the territory.
The library still is sacred ground, even with the noise. This is why I still come for my anointment.
During one of my sleepless nights, I began thinking about Asian women in the media, specifically the movie Babel, in which young Japanese female nudity, especially crotches, played a prominent role. In one scene, in a fast food joint, an un-pantied schoolgirl sits with her legs open under her miniskirt for the viewing pleasure of a naughty boy across the way. The camera took a medium close-up shot of her crotch under the table. That scene would have worked easily without the crotch shot, and if it had been a young white teenager, no way would that scene have been allowed.
It reminded me of the observation I made in high school: when white women are naked, it’s a rated R movie; when black women are naked, it’s a PBS documentary. You could also say that naked white women are portrayed in art, naked black women exhibited in World Trade Fairs and freak shows (Saartjie Baartman, otherwise known as the Hottentot Venus).
I recently descended into reading a book of humorous essays by women writers reflecting on their imperfect body parts (The Bigger the Better, the Tighter the Sweater – I do not recommend it). I was especially disappointed by the essay of the Chinese American writer, who hawed and guffawed at how in the delivery room, a nurse compared her breasts, her aureoles specifically, to those of African American women. She questioned her flaws but did not question the inappropriateness of the comment and her designation as Other.
In Babel, I suspect that the crotches and full frontal nudity of young Japanese female actresses were sweetly flaunted because Asian females tend to have slimmer, more aerodynamic bodies. Asian females are not fully women perhaps, with our small breasts and small hips and polite triangles of pubic hair. The nudity and crotch shots I did not think were necessary in an otherwise very good film.
(Watching the movie with my brother didn’t make things any more comfortable.)
I talked with a Generation X writer friend of mine about our failure to update our blogs. Maybe we are a different generation in that we’re not as eager to splay our private lives and thoughts out for everyone to see. Maybe because we’re writers we are more careful in crafting the words that will be seen in public — however few people end up reading our blogs. Also, as writers, we have plenty of other things that we need to be writing besides witty posts.
At any rate, I’m taking two creative writing courses right now at a local community college. I thought the workload would be easy, having been a star student in my youth and already being a writer. Right now I’m in the thick of final projects. My sleeping schedule is wrecked; I barely talk to my friends; I don’t touch my blog; and I’m subsisting on nuts and dark chocolate. It’s the glamorous life.
Leave it to me to finally write a post in a fit of procrastination.