East Meets West

Eldest Sister's Tragedy (1)

2011-09-30T23:09:00.000-07:00

In the wee hours of November 13 that same year, we got a frantic phone call from one of Yuni’s sisters. Eldest Sister and her husband had been in an accident in the mountains. Eldest Brother-in-law and his own elder brother and their two cousins were dead. Eldest Sister had been buried alive, but she was screaming so loud, bystanders heard her and dug her out. She had had surgery and was hanging on by a thread in a hospital in Hsinchu. She was going to be in the hospital for an extended stay, and we were needed to help out.

Yuni took the phone call, and afterwards he was numb. He was in between jobs, and he had been preparing to go down to California to do some stonework for the church publishing company there. He was just sitting in a stupor, but I managed to get him to call to make arrangements to postpone the job so that he could come with us to Taiwan and stay through the funeral. At least this trip we did not need to borrow money for the plane tickets.

We got our plane reservations and hauled out the suitcases. We were going to leave in less than thirty-six hours. I did laundry and got many things packed, when I noticed that Yuni had not moved for several hours. The children were quite worried. Finally, I persuaded him to take us to a park and to go for a walk. As we were driving to the park, Yuni began talking about Eldest Brother-in-law. Eldest Brother-in-law had been Pa’s first apprentice. He had come to live with the Lius when he was 15, after he had finished junior high. He was three years older than Yuni, and the two of them had shared a room. Yuni called him Elder Brother for the first five or six years of their relationship until Eldest Brother-in-law married Eldest Sister. Eldest Brother-in-law had given Yuni his Vespa scooter and his 35mm camera. He had been so good to him.

Yuni began telling me about Eldest Brother-in-law’s family. Eldest Brother-in-law was the second son. His family had decided that he would work from the time he was of high school age so that his brother could take lessons for the university entrance exam. He supported his elder brother through medical school. The brother who died with him was a doctor, who had lived in Taipei. Even though Eldest Brother-in-law had been sacrificed for his three brothers’ education, none of his brothers or his parents appreciated him. He was despised for being a laborer, even though he had had no choice in the matter. Yuni was very bitter about this because it meant that Elder Sister suffered in their household. Her mother-in-law was always finding fault with her. For many years after their marriage, Eldest Brother-in-law and Eldest Sister lived in the Liu household; their first two children were born while they were living with Pa and Ma. They lived with Ma and Pa so that Eldest Brother-in-law could save money to give to his family to meet his parents’ demands, but his parents refused to give him any support.

After telling his stories as we walked in a park with paths along a marsh and ducks and fall weather, Yuni seemed to be doing better. The girls could get through to him, and he began to play with them. We went out for dinner that night, and then we went home. I packed the freshly laundered clothes while Yuni and the girls watched TV. I also called my ESL students to take time off from teaching them. Everyone was quite understanding.

We left early in the morning of the second day after receiving the phone call. We arrived in Taiwan on November 17. Pa got us at the airport. Ma was at home waiting for us. She had been sitting in vigil by Eldest Sister’s bed 24 hours a day since the accident. Eldest Sister had awakened, and she was conscious, but very weak. Ma had wanted me to be called back so that I could cook for Pa while Ma was in the hospital. One of the sisters was at the house cooking, and she pulled Yuni aside. She told Yuni that Ma’s ulcers were bleeding again with her worry; she asked if I could stay in the hospital and let Ma stay home with our girls and Pa. They could come down every couple of days to visit. The four other sisters had been rotating time in the hospital with Ma and Eldest Sister, but they needed to work and take care of their families. At that moment, I was quite glad we were doing homeschool. We took an immediate holiday for as long as we needed, even though I had brought some of the books and had been planning to do school in Taiwan.

We had a shower and a meal, and I packed one of our carry-on bags with what I would need in the hospital. Eldest Sister was in a large ward room when we arrived. She had two or three other roommates. She slept a lot almost every day, as she was in extreme pain and on medication. The three youngest sisters were together in the hospital with her. Yuni, Pa, and Ma left me with my sisters-in-law while they took my girls out shopping to get me food and other supplies for the hospital. I needed my own pillow and blanket. Yuni also called some friends from church to let them know that I was there and to arrange for people to visit me from the church group in Hsinchu. It turned out that a friend of his from Taipei had been the overseer on the hospital renovation project. When he heard of the problem, he paid us a personal visit that very night. Eldest Sister was immediately moved to a private room with a cot for me (at no extra charge) because he brought the head of the hospital with him on his visit. Personal attention from the director of the hospital made an immediate difference in the care given to Eldest Sister. She had some residual problems despite the surgery. She had been complaining for over a day, but people were ignoring her. When she told the head of the hospital, the orthopedic surgeon was called, and arrangements were made for further treatments. It made a huge difference.

Finally, Pa, Ma, Yuni, my children, and my other sisters-in-law headed back to Chungli. Eldest Sister-in-law and I settled in for her recuperation. I was there for seven weeks, and some very interesting things happened over that time period. (More about that later.) Suffice to say that Eldest Sister had been buried under rubble from a landslide in the mountains. Her stomach and other internal organs had ruptured, but since she was conscious in the emergency room until she went into the operating room, the surgeon decided to try sewing her up. He had done a painstaking job, and it seemed to be working. In addition to the injuries to internal organs, Eldest Sister’s pelvis had been broken in two or three places. The orthopedic surgeon had done his best to fix that, but he said we would not know until after six weeks when the bones had had time to grow back together. In the meantime, he used some traction and other physical therapy to keep Eldest Sister’s back in line and to strengthen her muscles. After everyone was gone and Eldest Sister had had her evening meds, I pulled out my cot, made it up with the sheets and blankets from home, and fell into an exhausted slumber. I had no problem with jet lag that trip.

An American Funeral

2011-09-21T21:55:00.000-07:00

After we returned from Taiwan, we repaid the money we had borrowed for our plane tickets to the funeral. Then we got Yuni a general contractor’s license by using the leftover money to put up the bond required by the state. Yuni was able to take big jobs and buy at the wholesale rate, so his business began to pick up. Word went around the Chinese community, and he began to get jobs repairing driveways, retiling bathrooms, remodeling kitchens, and laying tile floors.

We had been home a month when my dad’s mother-in-law passed away. The kids had been close to G-gma, and so we went to the funeral. This was a no casket memorial service. The family chipped in to purchase a memorial bench in a large park in Bellevue. It was set on a grassy hillside among several clusters of trees. The memorial service was for family and close friends only. It was held at the bench. We sat on the bench and on folding chairs in a circle. We read some poems, sang some songs, and then we all shared memories of G-gma. Everyone, even the kids spoke if they wanted. In the end, we sat in silence with our memories. The kids got bored and began running and laughing and playing on the grass. They were wearing dresses with bright flowers on black backgrounds. The dresses didn’t show the grass stains, but their white tights were completely ruined. It was a nice, sunny day, and we all came away with happy memories.

Not long after the funeral, my dad and his wife went to Bali for a six-week trip. Yuni was working six days a week. The girls and I did our school lessons in the mornings, and we went on “field trips” several afternoons a week.

We had bought the girls a guinea pig after we returned from our trip to the East Coast. We all worked to care for her. “Snuggles” was a gentle animal, and they loved to play with her in the TV room. One day when we went to a petting farm for a field trip, the docent showed us a stray angora rabbit that had been left with them. The girls fell in love, and we came home from the trip with “Fluffy” the rabbit in a cardboard box. We quickly bought a cage and kept him just outside the back door. Fluffy and Snuggie became great friends. They would walk around the back yard on sunny days and play together in the TV room. When leaves got caught in Fluffy’s fur, Snuggie would come close and groom him.

Almost two weeks before my dad was scheduled to return home, I received a call from his wife. She was quite distraught and at their condo moving out. My dad’s second marriage was over. This news hit Yuni very hard. It came out that my dad had another woman, and he had asked his wife to leave. Because the marriage had been quite short-lived, his second wife was not going to get anything in the divorce settlement. That fact made it even harder for Yuni to accept.

He kept asking me how a college professor and administrator, a scholar, could be such a poor pattern to his progeny. I asked him what he meant. He said that wealthy, upper-class scholars were supposed to be more moral than average people. Education was supposed to make people moral. It was supposed to make them superior to the working classes. They were supposed to be the moral and ethical compass of their families. He asked again and again why my father would set that kind of pattern for his children and grandchildren. It seemed as though he felt betrayed.

I was at a loss to know what to say. I knew that Confucian morality requires teachers to be exemplary and that Chinese culture places emphasis on morality. Parents and teachers are supposed to be a moral pattern to their children and students. But my dad is an American; he doesn’t think like that. I tried to make Yuni see that he could not place his Chinese expectations on my dad, but he refused to accept that idea. He said that I was able to live by Chinese norms. I told him that I had studied the language and culture, so I knew what to expect. He would not accept that notion.

Then he would go into a tirade about the immorality of not supporting a cast-off wife. He would get very incoherent in these tirades, but I think part of it was related to what was happening with Elder Sister in Taiwan. The social nuances went far beyond what I had learned in Chinese classes, but eventually I understood that if a wife leaves a husband, she takes her gold and the clothes on her back. She is entitled to nothing more unless her natal family can show injury to her, and her father and brothers negotiate a separation settlement. Usually, however, the natal family is embarrassed and might even cut her off as well. If the husband casts off a wife, especially a wife who has borne him children or cared for his elderly parents, then he is expected to provide her a substantial sum. The ideal situation is that he would maintain both women in two separate households. Yuni talked about a man in the village where he grew up who kept his wife with her children in a house at one end of the village street and his mistress with her children in a house at the other end. He was the hero of all the men and boys in town because both families were well-dressed, well-fed, and well-housed. We had a friend in Taipei whose father had run off with a mistress, abandoning his wife and children. The paternal grandparents had disowned their son and supported the faithful wife and her children with his share of the family property.

I tried to explain US divorce laws, but Yuni’s mind was mired in his traditions. He could not and would not accept the notion that a man and a woman could dissolve a marriage so easily, especially when the woman wanted to continue in the relationship. Men did not cast off old loves unless they were well-provided for. I think Yuni’s thinking came from the Chinese concept of marriage as a business and economic relationship rather than a love relationship. Because Dad’s second wife had spent much time and effort caring for my grandparents, Yuni felt that she deserved a handsome parting settlement, at the very least. When my father failed to provide that, Yuni lost respect for him and for all Americans. He had been disappointed by America in so many ways, and I guess this was the final straw. His emotions about Elder Sister’s situation bled into his reactions to the end of my dad’s marriage, too. The combination of all these factors made Yuni very unhappy for quite a long time.

A Hakka Funeral, Part 3: The Seventh Seven

2011-09-10T23:35:00.000-07:00

During the afternoon on the day of the funeral, all Grandma Chu’s gold and other belongings were divvied up among her children. Each daughter got a piece of gold jewelry and a funeral photograph as a remembrance. Daughters-in-law and granddaughters-in-law got larger pieces of jewelry based on how much time they had spent caring for Grandma during her final illness. The Maternal Uncles divided the rest of the gold and all the money among themselves. Because Yuni and I had taken Grandma Chu to the US and Taiwan, we got gold rings by which to remember her. In addition, the uncles came up to Yuni singly throughout the day, and each asked him in private how much our plane tickets had cost.

We went back home to Chungli that night, and we stayed in Taiwan for about three weeks. We visited the Paternal Uncles a few days after the funeral. We also took the kids to see their aunts and to play with cousins. All of Yuni’s sisters were married now, and most of them were either pregnant or had just given birth recently. There were tons of babies in the family now. When my sisters-in-law visited, I was kept quite busy cooking for everyone, although now that they were married and understood how tiring it is to cook for large crowds all day, every day, my sisters-in-law would squeeze into the kitchen and work together with me. We had some great times.

During our time at home, each of the maternal uncles came to visit to thank us for showing our filial piety at the funeral. They would invariably take Yuni into one of the bedrooms for an “important discussion” during which they would give him money to help defray our travel expenses. Pa also gave us money because he gained great face when his son returned from America with the entire family in tow. Eldest Sister contributed quite a bit as well. In the end, we came away with enough to cover the plane tickets and to set Yuni up with the bond for a general contractor’s license when we got back to the States. He kept pointing out to me how much better Chinese families were than American families because they gave money with no strings attached. He had wanted my aunt and father to lend him money to start up his contracting business, but they wanted a business plan and an IOU note in writing. Yuni was totally offended at the idea of family members needing to put financial matters into writing. I did not know what to say because I felt that his family was rewarding us for filial piety, so we had met their conditions for lending or giving money ahead of time. The face gained by the family was worth quite a bit, especially since distant relatives and neighbors had been laying bets that Pa and Ma had lost their eldest son to America. We silenced the ugly rumors and gave Pa and Ma ammunition to use back at people. In the end, I just let Yuni vent and agreed that his family was extremely generous to us.

Much of the time during family visits was spent catching up on the latest gossip. With all the cousins and siblings and their children, there were literally hundreds of people about whom we could gossip. One of the saddest pieces of news was the Eldest Sister’s husband had decided to set up a mistress in a separate household in order to try for a second son. The mistress was still pregnant, and Eldest Sister was worried that if the child was a boy, her husband would abandon her and her children. She said that he was already bringing home less money than usual and was always yelling at her when she presented him with bills. She had stopped working in order to devote herself to her son, and she insisted that her husband keep up the payments on her house and everything in it. Traditional Chinese culture allows men to keep several women, but the first wife is supposed to maintain her position, and her finances are not supposed to be affected by any of the mistresses. Of course, it doesn’t always work that way, but the women go passive-aggressive and make sure the man pays absolutely all the bills. If they earn pin money on the side, they hide it in case they get turned out in favor of the new love. Yuni was quite distressed to hear that his beloved Elder Sister was in such a miserable situation. The greatest indignation in the family was due to the loss of financial support to Elder Sister and her five children. Elder-Brother-in-Law had had numerous affairs prior to this, but he had never set up a mistress in her own household. That was a real slap in the face to Elder Sister and to the entire Liu family, especially since Pa had been Elder-Brother-in-Law’s master teacher in masonry. Without Pa’s help, Elder-Brother-in-Law would not have been able to earn such a good living.

A day or two before we left to return to the US, we all went back to Third Maternal Uncle’s home to participate in the 7^th Seven ceremony. Beginning the seventh day after Grandma Chu’s death, the family had made special sacrifices and hired a Daoist priest to perform rituals to help her soul pass on to the spirit world. These rituals were held weekly for seven weeks after the death and then sacrifices were to be made annually on Grandma Chu’s death day. The 7^th Seven was an extra-special ceremony, as it was the last event of the funeral proceedings. We all gathered around dusk (the propitious hour) in Third Maternal Uncle’s large front room. It had been completely emptied of furniture, and reed mats were spread on the floor. We all dressed in blacks and whites again, although the girls were finally allowed to wear their blue and white polka-dot dresses. The uncles, their wives, and children all knelt on the mats facing the door while the Daoist priest chanted and waved his incense and fan in front of them. He had bells that he rang at different points during his ritual, and he also had the curved wooden divining blocks that people throw in temples to cast their fortune. A boiled whole chicken, a bowl of rice, some wine, and a pile of fruit and candies were laid out on a table just inside the door. After about thirty minutes of prayer and ritual, during which the uncles wept loudly, the priest asked all of Grandma Chu’s children and grandchildren to call her to come eat. They shouted, the priest dropped the blocks, and the blocks both fell curved side up. That meant Grandma’s spirit had not come. The process was repeated about ten times. The uncles were quite desperate and began beating their breasts and crying even more loudly.

Ma and I were standing at the back with my children; I asked her why they were so upset. She said that the blocks had not been one up, one down yet for all of the seven ceremonies. That meant that Grandma Chu’s spirit had not returned to visit her children, and the uncles were afraid they had angered their mother with their lack of filial piety. I reminded Ma that Grandma Chu had converted to Christianity prior to her death. I had heard of cases where the Daoist rituals didn’t work in half Christian families. Finally, in the very end, the Daoist priest kicked the blocks as they were bouncing and got them to the one up, one down position. The Maternal Uncles were relieved, and the ceremony was over. We all went into the back kitchen/dining room area for a huge feast spread out on four big tables. While we were eating, Ma reminded her brothers about what the youngest grandson had seen, the vision of Grandma Chu being carried to heaven by two men in white just after her death. Ma told them that if Grandma Chu was in heaven with Jesus, the Daoist priest would not have been able to reach her, but they could be assured that she was happy. This made them all very relieved, and the poor boy was called to the Uncles’ table to repeat what he had seen and be quizzed about all the details. When we finally finished eating, Ma and Pa, Yuni and our children and I hurried back to Chungli so that we could get up early to pack and get things ready for our trip home.

Summer in Shanghai

2011-08-28T13:35:00.000-07:00

I apologize for my long absence from blogging. After the conference in Hawaii, I had to go into overdrive to finish the semester, get ready for surgery, and get a rough draft of my entire thesis done before I left for a month in Hong Kong and Shanghai (mostly in Shanghai). I did it!!

And I had the surgery. It was successful, and the surgeon found conclusive evidence that in the past, some procedure WAS done on me without my permission (see my post about giving birth to Peace). I will need further surgery to fix the aftermath of that, but at least the potentially dangerous beasties have been removed, and I am able to move forward to full health.

Because I got to Hong Kong just a little more than a week after my final health procedure, I did not do any extraneous sightseeing. I spent several days with my friends—the scribe, the heroine and Pommes—and did research in some archives at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as well as some interviews to bolster that research. Pommes and his servants are such gracious people; it was so nice to have a welcoming place to hang. The temperatures were high, as was the humidity, and it was nice to not feel compelled to rush around seeing sights. We did eat some awesome dim sum, but that is de rigueur in Hong Kong.

On July 31, I arrived in Pudong Airport in Shanghai. As we landed, we were surrounded by a billowing yellow fog. Looking out the window, we could not see to the end of the runway, and it felt like we were in some eerie 1950’s sci-fi movie. Shanghai was hotter and more humid than Hong Kong, and it was much more polluted. I got to my hotel without mishap, and per the program coordinator’s instructions I requested to pay for my own single room as the anesthesia from my surgery and later procedures had exacerbated my allergies, and I needed a safe haven from scents (and pollution). The people at the desk were quite nice, especially when I explained that it was a medical situation, but the coordinator had neglected to mention that I might be making such a request, and they were booked solid, so at about 10 pm, I was called out, when my formerly assigned roommate arrived and tried to get into the room. Eventually, they worked it out, and I had my single room, but the American coordinator kept trying to tell me that I would be okay sharing a room. I had had a major allergy episode in Hong Kong, and the younger women all wore scents of one kind or another with the heat, so I stood my ground. Fortunately, all three of them had been in China doing research prior to the workshop, and they all had places to stay in Shanghai.

The people in the hotel were quite nice. The service was excellent, and I think they felt embarrassed that they had not known to be prepared for my request. They had our translation group and a group of students from Japan, who were studying Chinese. Plus they had group after group of “Red Education” tours. We were in a government-run hotel, and in China, Party cadres rotate through “Red Education” weeks on a regular basis. During that week, they go to a site with significance to the Party where they stay in a government hotel and attend classes on the latest Party updates in the morning. Then they go sightseeing in the afternoon. They ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the hotel every day, and their lunches and dinners were always banquets. The rest of us just sat at small tables around the peripheries of the dining room. It was harder to get a lunch plate there, than to order a full-fledged feast. In the three weeks of our stay there, I think we went through four full tour groups, and there was a fifth just starting when we left.

The translation workshop was wonderful. The Chinese-English group met Mondays and Thursdays. We sat at a formal seminar table complete with microphones (not turned on) and elegant name plates. Our professor was Ted Huters, professor emeritus from UCLA and editor of Renditions translation journal, which is one of the top journals of Chinese-English literary translations. He has decades of experience, and his comments were quite helpful. We students came from different disciplines, and so we each chose an article in our field, one that was related to our research, and we took turns presenting our translations to the group. Professor Huters and our classmates made comments and helped us get the best rendering of the difficult passages. It was thoroughly wonderful. There were some very interesting articles. The students from the English-Chinese class could sit in if they wished, and a few of them added their input to the discussions.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday were the English-Chinese classes. That section was taught by the Dean of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences at Fudan University. His name is Deng Zhenglai, and he is considered to be one of the top five most influential university professors in all of China. He has published about 20 books of his own and 20 more of his translations, plus numerous journal articles. He edits several of China’s top social sciences journals. He was, of course, a strict, traditional Chinese teacher. I felt like I was back in Taiwan with my favorite Chinese teacher. They were all working on one text, James P. Sterba’s “Liberalism and the Challenge of Communitarianism.” It was all about finding a “non-question-begging conception of the good” that accommodates both self-profiting and moral conceptions of the good. Doesn’t that just sound like so much fun to translate into Chinese? The discussions at times got quite heated, and I felt like I was back at the publishing company in Taiwan working on translations of the Bible. All good!! I really liked Professor Deng. I sat in on every minute of every English-Chinese session.

And while I was in China, I did some serious thinking as to whether or not I would continue this blog. I have overt posts about translation clients, who are indeed blacklisted in China. This fact was not lost on the Chinese; I was invited out to dinner twice, and my work with these people and my research on underground churches in China was examined. I suppose it did not help that since May, a certain house church in Beijing has been trying to obtain a facility in which to hold public meetings of approximately a thousand people, and after being repeatedly thwarted by the government, they have taken their large Sunday-morning gatherings to a park in Beijing. I had read about this church on a house-church news listserve. What I did not know until I came back to the US and made some inquiries, is that, about the time I went to China, a group of house-church pastors had banded together to write an open letter to the government calling on China to let the church have its facility AND one of my former translation clients here in the US has been using this incident to promote human rights in China. Due to my health situation, I have not been doing much translation lately because I needed to get my iron count up so I could have anesthesia and surgery, and after my health, school work was my next priority. I had lost contact with some of my “blacker” clients (in China’s eyes), but China didn’t know that. In any event, a very kind lady went over things with me at two different dinners, and then it seems that things checked out, and I was fine. And because of that, I decided that taking down the blog now would be like closing the barn door after the horse had run away. So I will continue posting. My research on Chinese culture for my thesis and some of my more recent experiences have given me a better perspective on earlier episodes in my life, and I find that if anything, I have MORE to say.

I did not do as much sightseeing in China as I would have wished. My first weekend in Shanghai, there was a hurricane. My second weekend, when the translation workshop took a trip to a river town with canals and pretty gardens, I had a major allergy attack and had to stay sedated in my hotel room to get my airways open again. But my last Saturday there, I was able to take the Big Bus tour of all the main points of interest in Shanghai. It starts at People’s Plaza and goes to the Bund, the old French Concession, the main business district, some of the old temples, and it winds up with an evening river cruise on the Huangpu River so you can see the lights in both the old and new Shanghai commercial zones. I liked the river cruise the best. The view from the World Finance Tower was quite nice. The smog was not too bad that day. Another lovely spot was the Yu Garden and Temple of the City God market area. It’s a tourist zone, but I found that by bargaining, I was getting stuff for three times less than the other tourists I met on the river cruise. The Jade Buddha Temple was also interesting in that the statues look more Indian than Chinese. (I did not have a camera... so no pictures.)

All in all, it was a wonderful trip. To me, actually, the highlight was that as a blogger about China, I was “taken to tea,” although as a foreign blogger, I also got to order lamb chops (the most expensive item on the menu). Some of my friends at home did not see things like that. Personally, I was surprised to have even gotten a visa. I have overt posts on my blog about smuggling Bibles into China in the 1980s. I have posted my translations of the work of active (and blacklisted) Chinese democracy advocates. And yet, while I was in China during a situation that the Chinese government sees as a matter of national security, I was treated with kindness and courtesy, and no restrictions were placed on me. I even asked if there would be a problem in the future, if I continued to visit friends in the US who are “blacklisted.” I was told that friendship is a good thing, and I should keep up my friendships. (I had my computer checked, just in case, but my techie didn’t find any bugs.) To be quite honest, in post-9/11 USA, I am not sure we would have treated a foreign person with comparable connections as well as I was treated in China. Had I been someone coming our way, I just might have wound up in Guantanamo or some other off-shore site for “enhanced interrogations.” And I think it’s a sorry state that OUR society has come to.

Another View of Tiger Mothering

2011-04-27T20:34:00.000-07:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Tiger Mothering

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

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I saw this last night, and I thought I would share it with you. What makes good mothering??

A Traditional Funeral--Hakka Style: Part Two, the Funeral Cortege

2011-04-08T19:40:00.000-07:00

Early the next morning, we put on dark colored shorts, plain white shirts, and pure white tennis shoes. We grabbed a bite for breakfast and headed over to Third Maternal Uncle’s house. The tables in the tent had been taken down and stacked against the side of the house. A large altar had been erected at one end of the tent with Grandma Chu’s death portrait hanging at the top. Wooden benches were set up in rows towards the back of the tent, and in front of the altar was a large open space where the rites would be carried out.

Third Maternal Uncle’s Wife bustled us into the back of the house where we put on our funeral clothes. My girls were dressed in bright red robes with boxy hats. Eldest sister’s daughters were in bright red robes with pointy cloth hoods. Her son was dressed in white linen with a boxy hat, though, because as a boy, he had to follow the lineage lines. Ma and all her progeny were dressed in white linen. Men and boys had boxy hats, and women had long hoods. One side of the hood was longer and tied on under the linen belt that tied the robe closed around our waists. The short side of the hood could be drawn over the face when we were wailing or crying. As a daughter, Ma’s belt was made of hemp rope; all her children and grandchildren had white linen belts. Ma had a patch of burlap attached to her hood to show that she was a daughter-in-law or a daughter.

Everyone’s funeral clothes allowed experienced viewers know exactly what relationship the person wearing “filial piety” had with the deceased. The Maternal Uncles wore white linen under-robes with a burlap over-robe, and their belts were made of hemp twine. Their wives wore the white linen outfits like Ma’s. The Maternal Uncles’ hats were boxy except the hat of Eldest Maternal Uncle. His hat was something like a burlap mob cap with a rope crown tying it onto his head. In addition to his funeral outfit, he carried a wooden staff to show that he was the eldest son of the deceased. The eldest grandson, as heir of the family altars to the ancestors, wore the same outfit as Eldest Maternal Uncle without the wooden staff.

The Maternal Uncles’ sons wore white linen with burlap patches on their hats and hemp twine belts. Their daughters and daughters-in-law were dressed like we were. The maternal uncles’ sons’ children wore sky blue robes with red linen patches on their hats. Again the boys had boxy hats, and the girls had the pointy hoods. Children of daughters wore white linen in all generations.

Daughters-in-law and Daughters at a funeral

Sons-in-law and grandsons-in-law wore towels knotted around one shoulder like a sash. They acted as ushers. Because Eldest Maternal Aunt’s husband was in the hospital and unable to attend the funeral, Pa wore the same clothes as a son, except that his hat was boxy instead of mob-cap-style, and he played the role of eldest son-in-law. Chinese tradition says that sons-in-law are “half sons.” One son-in-law plays a representative role in the funeral; Pa also followed the coffin to the gravesite, but the other sons-in-law stayed at the house entertaining the guests.

When we were all dressed, the children and grandchildren of each of Grandma Chu’s children arrayed themselves in ranks with the elder who linked them to Grandma Chu. We lined up inside the house, to the side of the tent. As we were dressing, the musicians had been playing, and the invited guests had been coming in to fill up the benches. There were both a Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest to conduct the rituals. The coffin was carried by the sons and grandsons in a sling out to the center area and placed in front of the altar on trestles. There was still quite a bit of open space in the center of the tent between the coffin and the audience where each rank of progeny would perform their ritual good-byes. As the token Christians, we were all handed wreaths to place before the coffin when our turn came.

A grandson in a mob-cap-style hat with a Taoist icon before the funeral altar and funeral musician from Taiwanese-Secret.com. Note the Taoist priests in the background. Note the white tennis shoes.

At the auspicious hour, the music softened a hair, and the Buddhist monk and Taoist priest began their rituals. Then Eldest Maternal Uncle and Eldest Maternal Male Cousin came out and performed the first ritual family sacrifice to Grandma Chu. It was all in Hakka, but Ma and my sisters-in-law told me that they were asking Grandma Chu’s spirit to pass on to the next realm where she could protect the family. They also told her where her grave would be and what arrangements had been made for her. Next Pa performed the rites on behalf of the sons-in-law. They were much shorter; he was introduced by the master of ceremonies, and came forward to burn incense and bow before the coffin. The Eldest Son and Grandson had actually kow-towed three times at the end of their ritual. Pa did not need to do that.

Eldest Maternal Uncle, Eldest Maternal Male Cousin, and Pa all stood to the street side of the coffin to oversee the rest of the rites. The master of ceremonies called Eldest Maternal Uncle’s Wife and children to come say their ritual good-byes. The first of our ranks-in-waiting filed into the middle area where they burned incenses, wept, and bowed to the coffin and Grandma Chu’s picture. Second Maternal Uncle had passed away in his forties, but his wife, children, and grandchildren came out next to say their good-byes. And so it went through the families of all six of Grandma Chu’s sons who had survived to adulthood. When they had finished their good-byes, they moved to the street side and back of the tent to stand respectfully.

Next, came the families of the daughters. Eldest Maternal Aunt led her children and grandchildren to say their good-byes. Then it was our turn. Yuni and I flanked Ma as her eldest son and daughter-in-law. My sisters-in-law led my girls so that I could support Ma as she walked. We laid our wreaths before the coffin and stood with bowed heads in silent prayer for a few minutes before Yuni prayed aloud to Jesus in Hakka. Then we moved back, and Third Maternal Aunt led her family forward. All five of the Grandma Chu’s daughters came forward with their children and grandchildren to say good-bye.

We stood around at the back of the tent while one of Third Maternal Uncle’s friends from the Lions Club gave a eulogy. Then a county official spoke because it was a “happy occasion” funeral. Finally, the guests filed forward to burn incense and pay their respects to the deceased by burning incense (joss sticks) before the coffin. The musicians kept up their cacophony and at the end the Buddhist monk and Taoist priest each said a concluding prayer. Then, we moved to the next stage of the funeral.

At the appointed hour, Grandma Chu’s sons, grandsons, and Pa with the help of the coffin maker’s factotums placed the coffin on a hand-cart bier, and we began the funeral cortege procession. The men of the family pushed the coffin up the street for about a quarter of a mile, while the women and children walked behind weeping loudly and holding their hoods over their faces.

Children and grandchildren at a funeral walking in the cortege

A quarter of a mile up the street from Third Maternal Uncle’s house there is a large highway that goes out to the remote areas where the graveyards are. There were two buses for family members and numerous flower cars. The coffin was put onto the largest flower car with Grandma Chu’s portrait on the top. Flower cars are trucks with flowered panel superstructures and flower wreaths on the grille. They are used for funerals. The musicians were in the first flower car leading the way. Then, came the flower car with the coffin. Next was the flower car with the sons, eldest grandson, and eldest son-in-law. Then there was an open truck with two chairs in it. The eldest great-grandson sat on one chair dressed in his blue outfit, and the eldest great-granddaughter sat on the other chair dressed in bright red. The eldest great-granddaughter was about five, but the great-grandson was only two or three. The great-granddaughter was charged with making sure that he did not fall off the chair onto the road. Then there was a flower car with grandsons, and finally there were the two buses with all the women and children, and the grandsons who did not fit into the flower car. Each of the flower cars had pink flowers in the grille wreath among the white and yellow chrysanthemums, and there were red and white striped lanterns hanging from the four corners of the truck with the coffin. Ma told me that the striped lanterns and the two youngest generations sitting side-by-side proclaimed to viewers in the know that this was a “fake five generations” with a nephew of the fifth generation. If it had been a niece, the lanterns would have been white and pink. If there had been a great-great-grandchild in the family, the lanterns would have been solid red.

The cortege processed slowly along the edge of the highway out to the gravesite. We were in the second bus, and by the time we got up to the grave, the coffin was already in the ground, and the sons and grandsons were filling in the dirt. Later, Pa told us that the coffin had almost fallen off the sling towards him, and he had guided it into the ground. He took this as a sign that Grandma Chu was acknowledging his attempt to say good-bye and his participation in the funeral rites. He was quite happy. Once the coffin was covered with earth, the family members came forward in twos and threes and burned incense. Daughters and their descendants did not participate in the incense burning, as they were not of the Chu clan. After all the incense had been burned, we took off our “filial piety” robes on the dirt road next to the grave. The robes were only basted together, and we had to pull out all the threads and be sure the clothes were merely pieces of cloth before we left the grave area. If we went back in “filial piety” robes to the bus, we were told it would attract Grandma Chu’s spirit, and she would not rest in peace. This would bring us all kinds of bad luck. The Maternal Uncles’ wives collected all the cloth and said they planned to make underwear for the family for many years to come. Pa said that underwear made from funeral robe linen was one of the most comfortable things to wear in the summer.

The flower cars went back to the funeral parlor, so we had to pile everyone into the already crowded buses. The buses whipped us quickly back to Third Maternal Uncle’s house where the last guests were just leaving after eating a huge feast. Before the members of the family could eat, the Maternal Uncles each took one of the funeral photos of Grandma Chu and placed it on the family altars. Several of the Maternal Uncles live in Toufen within blocks of each other, and they all ran home to install the photos before coming back for lunch. Once the photo was installed, three cups of wine and some food were placed before it. Then the uncle and his family burned incense and bowed before the picture in his own home.

Since we were progeny of a daughter, we just sat at the tables and ate hungrily. Third Maternal Uncle had a friend from the Lions Club who was a videographer. He made a tape of the funeral, and Yuni and I were given a betamax video tape. Betamax video players soon went the way of the dodo bird, and we were only able to watch the tape once. Many years later, when we tried to get it converted, we were told that the tape had molded, and the images were lost. We did not get any photos, either. The girls were so cute in their bright red “filial piety” robes. They looked like little stars in period TV dramas set in the Tang Dynasty.

Aloha from Waikiki

2011-04-04T13:28:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post to say that I have been in Hawaii for the past five days. I leave in a minute, but I couldn't resist the title. I was attending the Association for Asian Studies National Conference where my professor and I presented the revised version of the paper that we had presented in Singapore. The presentation went well, and I learned a lot at the conference.

I have been staying at the Ilikai, which is the hotel featured in the opening credits of the original version of Hawaii 5-0. I am on the 25th floor just under the penthouse with a great view of the mountains. I didn't want to pay an extra $30 per night for views of the ocean that can be seen when I leave the hotel.

I was able to meet blogger buddy Cloudia Charters one evening just before sunset for a walk along the boardwalk of Waikiki (bad knees and white sands do not do well together, as I found out my first day here). Cloudia lives on a boat in the marina near my hotel, which was where the filmed the opening credits for Gilligan's Island. In cyberspace, her address is: http://comfortspiral.blogspot.com/. She always has amazing pictures and great inspirational quotes. Cloudia took a few pictures of me, since I have no camera. And here they are.

The top one is from the balcony of my hotel looking back to a rainbow in that dark cloud over the mountains. The bottom one is at the beach looking out towards Diamond Head.

So now it is time for me to power down the laptop, check out, and head for the airport to return to the grind of being a grad student. I have class tomorrow, and I have to do all the readings for it on the plane because I was not really in homework mode this past week... It was a great spring break!

A Traditional Funeral--Hakka Style: Part One, the Pre-Cortege Proceedings

2011-03-31T11:35:00.000-07:00

In July we received a phone call from Pa that Grandma Chu had passed away. It was very important to him that we all go back for the funeral. First, because the family had been saying that since Yuni was in the US, he would throw away his family traditions and no longer care for the ancestors. The Chinese idea of filial piety grew up out of funerary rites and ancestor worship that began as early as the late Neolithic Era in China (see Keightley, David. “Early Civilization in China: Reflections on how it became Chinese.” In Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization. Ed. Parul S. Ropp. Berkeley: California University Press, 1990. 15-54). Today in contemporary Taiwan, even if children have moved far away from their parents for job opportunities, they MUST return to attend the funerals or face condemnation for being unfilial.

Strictly speaking, as grandchildren from a daughter, we did not need to return as a family to attend Grandma Chu’s funeral because Chinese funeral rites focus mainly on the patrilineal descendants. The Chu grandchildren are more important in the funeral rituals than the “outside” grandchildren of a married daughter. But, we had taken Grandma Chu to the US and to Japan, and she frequently spent the weekend with Ma in our home. She was the one who had paid for my wedding rings because the Liu family was too poor. Pa spoke quite persuasively that we really needed to attend, both out of respect for the memory of Grandma Chu and to silence any talk among the maternal uncles that Yuni was becoming Americanized to the extent that he had forgotten his roots. And, of course, it would give both sides of the family great face to have an American wearing mourning robes and walking among the relatives.

Yuni and I both felt we needed to go, but he had not been getting many big jobs, and we had just finished our big trip up the East Coast. I had just bought a ton of homeschooling books. July is the most expensive month for travel to and from Asia, and we needed to get the tickets within the week to make it in time for at least some of the rituals prior to the day of the funeral cortege. Fei lent us the money for the trip. It cost $3000 for round-trip tickets for a family of five. We decided to stay for three weeks because that made the tickets a little cheaper, but not much.

Ma called me the day after Yuni called to tell Pa our flight details. She said that the girls and I could not wear colors, only black, blue, grey, and white. She kept saying “plain” clothes. So I went out and bought the girls some cute clothes in navy and white. One outfit had polka dots. When we got there, I learned that plain also meant no patterns. The girls could wear black shorts and a white blouse or a navy skirt and a grey top, but they could not have any bright colors or any patterns. Fortunately, the aunts loved shopping. Each aunt contributed a “mourning” outfit, and the kids were quite well set up for all the activities.

We drove from Chungli down to Toufen as soon as we were all appropriately dressed. Pa was already down there helping with things because Eldest Maternal Aunt’s husband was in the hospital himself, and the eldest son-in-law plays an important role in Hakka funerals. Grandma Chu’s coffin was lying in state in the front room of Third Maternal Uncle’s home. There was a brightly colored blanket covering it. There were stacks and stacks of canned goods in pyramids around the coffin and out onto the sidewalk. These cans were gifts from relatives and business associates and friends of the maternal uncles. There were plastic flower (white and yellow) wreaths all along the street. In the center of each wreath there was a calligraphy condolence message. Streamers hung down from the wreaths with the names of the givers. The wreaths were set up on bamboo easels. Third Maternal Uncle had rented a large tent and put it over one lane of the road in front of his house. The tent was stuffed with more canned goods, flower wreaths, and banners hung down on white cloth with condolence messages.

A picture from Taiwanese-Secrets.com of a funeral tent with the stacks of cans. This funeral is also a "happy occasion" as can be noted from the pink streamers.

The maternal uncles and aunts were sitting with the coffin in the front room. As guests came to pay their respects, they would cry and wail. The guests would tell them to not be so sad because Grandma Chu had lived to a ripe old age. She had a great-great-grandnephew of the fifth generation on the Chu side of the family, so her funeral was considered a “happy” occasion. The uncles and aunts did not cry uncontrollably, but they did cry. Pa and the other sons-in-law were charged with seeing to the guests and writing down which gift came from which person. Yuni, as a maternal grandson, was drafted to help with this. All the wives of grandsons were at work in the kitchen producing copious amounts of food with which to feed the people coming to pay respects. There were a number of tables under the tent where people who came would sit and eat snacks. It was pretty chaotic. A funeral band (think Peking opera band on steroids) was grinding out very harsh music in one corner of the tent. At about 5 pm, a Taoist priest came to read Taoist rites of the dead. Third Maternal Uncle had hired both Buddhist monks and Taoist priests to come and read their death rites every evening that the coffin lay in state. When the Taoist priest began his rituals, the non-family members left. The rest of us just stood respectfully behind the priest as he did his thing. It was all done in Hakka, so I really didn’t understand much of it. Plus, I had to keep the three girls quiet and respectful at the back of the room. Fortunately, we were grandchildren from a daughter, and our place was in the back anyway.

When the rites were over, the grandsons’ wives brought out dinner for the family, and we all began to eat. Grandma Chu had a total of twelve children. There were several tables full of people eating. As we were eating, I learned that the cortege and burial would take place the following day. We did not return to Chungli. Instead, we stayed with Eldest Sister in Toufen. Before we left Third Maternal Uncle’s home, we tried on the funeral robes for the kids. They were to play the part of fifth generation boys since the nephew was too young to attend the funeral. Ma said that since it was just a nephew and since Grandma Chu was 80 when she passed away, the family was doing a “fake five generations funeral.” Ma said that she would explain the differences to me. Since we did not need to drive back to Chungli, we sat around with Third Maternal Uncle, while the entire family related the story of Grandma Chu’s passing. It was a story that legends are made of…. And the legend has been retold many, many times over the past eighteen years.

Ma started talking about how Grandma Chu had been so ill and had been in the hospital for weeks. Her stomach was distended and she was not able to eat. She knew her end was near, and she asked that Ma be one of the primary caregivers for her in the hospital because Ma was her favorite daughter. Pa had driven Ma down to Toufen and stayed for a day, but then he had to go back to work. In the hospital, Grandma Chu had been concerned because some of her gold jewelry had gone missing. She thought that one of her grandsons’ wives had taken it on a caretaking shift. She felt that Ma and her daughters would be more reliable. She also wanted to find out if she could get baptized as a Christian.

Grandma Chu had been seriously interested in being Christian since our trip to the US because we had undertaken the trip during the Taiwanese “ghost month,” and yet, nothing had happened to us. She was healthier when she got back than when she had started. Ma had taught her that she could pray to Jesus in a very informal way. She liked it that she didn’t need to worry about learning to read. One morning after our return from the US, Grandma Chu had gone walking alone in a park near her house. She fell and could not get up. First, she tried praying to Buddha, but that didn’t work. Then she tried some of the other deities in the traditional Chinese pantheon that are usually considered Taoist. She still couldn’t get up. Finally, she prayed to Jesus, and strength was restored to her legs. She had asked her sons to arrange a baptism for her, but they did not do this as her conversion at the matriarchal stage would entail a mass family conversion, and her sons felt that they needed to participate in rituals to the gods of money and luck in their business endeavors. Every major project that they took on with their businesses started with offerings to the gods; if they suddenly stopped doing those rituals, they felt that their workers and business associates would be uncomfortable working with them. So Grandma Chu stopped eating foods that had been offered to idols in such rituals and began praying to Jesus every day. Now that she was on her deathbed, she wanted to be baptized. Ma had Eldest Sister bring in a preacher to the hospital, but the doctors would not allow Grandma Chu to be baptized by immersion. The preacher had suggested a sprinkling ritual, but since Ma and all her children had been baptized by immersion, they felt that sprinkling might not work. In the end, the preacher prayed with Grandma Chu and confirmed that she was a genuine Christian.

A few days after this, Grandma Chu began to fail. The doctors notified her sons that they should bring her home for her final hours. Third Maternal Uncle brought her home and sent out the call for all the children and grandchildren to gather around her deathbed. Everyone had come, except for Pa. He had been working in a place without mobile phone signal, and one of his daughters had had to ride a motor scooter to notify him. He dropped everything and rushed down to Toufen. Grandma Chu kept holding on, her children were worried and didn’t know what she was waiting for. Finally, Pa crossed the threshold of the home and began running up to the bedroom calling (in Japanese): “Mother, Mother.” People around the bed told Grandma Chu that her favorite son-in-law had arrived. Upon hearing the news, she closed her eyes, and died. Pa was heartbroken that he had not been able to say good–bye, but he was also honored that he was the one she was holding on for. Grandma Chu’s youngest grandson, who was five at the time and about six months older than the twins, came running in shortly after she expired shouting that two men in white had taken his grandmother up to the skies. He had been playing with a ball in front of the house when Pa had arrived. He was tossing the ball up in the air and catching it. On one toss, he said he had seen two men in shining white robes taking his grandmother up to the skies. He dropped his ball and came running into the house to see why his grandmother was leaving him. He threw himself on her corpse crying. Grandma Chu was his principal babysitter in the family, and they had a very special bond. Everyone decided that 1) a five year old could not make up things like this because he did not have sufficient knowledge, 2) this proved that Grandma Chu had successfully converted to Christianity because angels had come to take her to heaven, and 3) the death was something of a miracle. The five-year old cousin was trotted out to testify again to what he had seen at the moment of Grandma Chu’s death. Yuni and I confirmed that according to the Bible, Grandma Chu’s conversion had been genuine despite her lack of baptism and that her death did seem to hold miraculous aspects.

Ma and her siblings were quite relieved to have their conclusions validated by the expert Christians in the family. They then moved on to discussing the funeral arrangements. Since Grandma Chu seemed to have died a Christian, her sons wanted some Christian element to the funeral. They themselves were not Christian, and they wanted all the other trappings of an elaborate traditional funeral to express their filial piety and to gain face for the family. But filial piety demanded that they also acknowledge their mother’s apparent belief in Christianity. Ma and her children were all baptized Christians, so when it was our time to pay our respects before the coffin at the ceremony before the cortege began, we would not burn incense like the rest. We would lay wreaths before the coffin and stand praying silently. Then Yuni, as Ma’s eldest son and first Christian of the family, would pray Christian prayers out loud in Hakka asking for Jesus to care for Grandma Chu’s soul and to bless the entire Chu family. The maternal uncles were so happy that we cared enough about the family to come back to Taiwan to help with the funeral. There had been arguments among Ma and her siblings as to whether or not a stripper should be hired to perform at the funeral. Ma and Third Maternal Uncle were against it, but a few of the younger Maternal Uncles thought it would help attract a good crowd and prove their filial piety. Our contribution of Christian prayers combined with the return of an entire family of an "outside" grandson with a Caucasian wife to participate meant that the funeral would be unique and did not need a stripper to up the ante. Ma was thoroughly relieved. In the end, the uncles decided that because so many family members were present, they would NOT hire any singers or professional mourners, either. The family was large and had true filial piety that could not be bought. This would gain them more face than just an expensive funeral with many hired mourners and performers.

Since all the plans were in place, we went back to Eldest Sister’s house to sleep a short while before the next day’s funeral rites, funeral procession, and burial. The next day was going to be a tiring day.

We Begin Homeschooling

2011-03-27T20:35:00.000-07:00

Well, I had thought I would be back to blogging sooner, but life happens. The grad student conference was an amazing experience for all involved. The magic happened, and everyone’s hard work paid off. It was better than our best case scenario. All the papers were as interesting as their abstracts had promised. All the discussants were well-prepared. There was way too much food, good coffee, and great teas. The discussions after the panels were lively and went on into the break room. And the DVDs were great. I highly recommend “The Persian Rite of Spring.” I also highly recommend the Chinese movie “Shower.” We were blessed at the end of the last panel by a performance of a traditional Thai dance of benediction, performed by one of the grad students in our English department. And she was really good!

Peace reading a book at Grandma R's apartment

So to get back to life when my kids were young…

After returning from Florida, we bought a guinea pig named Snuggles and a bunch of school books. We got the K4 curriculum for the twins and the 2 and 3 year old preschool books for Peace. The aunts sent preschool books from Taiwanese preschools and flashcards of the phonetic symbols that kids learn to help them learn to read.

I had read so much and learned so much from other homeschool mothers that I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do. I wanted to create a rich environment and give it a touch of structure just a few hours a day, but mainly I wanted to make life a learning experience. So every day around 10, we would “do school.” We would sing some songs in English and Chinese, do a few pages in each of the books, learn some Chinese, and read stories together. The twins took off scholastically. Love learned to read in the books with large type. She was quite happy.

After school, we would all do chores. The girls would dust with me, and we would take turns vacuuming and sweeping. It made things fun. They learned to care for Snuggles, and to clean up if she was out of the cage too long and made a mess. Soon we got a rabbit named Fluffy for free. He was an Angora, who had been turned in at a rabbit farm where we went for a family field trip after Yuni returned from Florida. Fluffy was an outdoor rabbit for the most part, but on rainy days, the girls would bring him into the family room.

We all rode the bus together and continued our habit of visiting the zoo, the aquarium, the Science Center, and the Children’s Museum at least once a month. These places had many wonderful classes for preschoolers, and we had many a great time doing art classes at the Children’s Museum and science classes at the other places. We hatched painted lady butterflies for one class. We made plaster casts of animal paw prints for another.

We began to do “school” in April and by September when the twins should have gone to kindergarten, they were already half way through the first grade books. They had done K4 and K5 in four short months. We did have a bit of a problem over the summer because when we got into the small print books, Love couldn’t read any more. One day on a trip to the park, we found an education fair at the local shopping mall. There were free eye tests. We found out that she had a lazy eye and needed glasses. Once she was fitted out with glasses, her reading abilities returned. The eye doctor was amazing and persuaded Love that she needed to do her eye exercises and wear her patch faithfully. Love solemnly began her quest for good vision. She would remind me if I forgot. Her patch had a pretty rainbow covering the good eye, so that the lazy eye would learn to see.

Peace was not terribly interested in school at first. She liked coloring in the books, and she loved listening to the stories, but she was much more interested in packing her books into her very pregnant backpack and carrying it around the house with her cowboy hat on her head. All her treasures were neatly stowed, and they went every place with her. It was a terribly heavy backpack for such a little girl, but she was very strong and sturdy. And she loved having her possessions on her back at all times.

I usually read chapter books to the girls because I had read that it was best for them to hear stories several grade levels ahead to improve their passive vocabularies. We went through the Little House books. They loved them, and frequently after “school” was over, they would play their own versions of the stories. They had a wagon that they pulled around the backyard as they trekked across our local “prairie.”

Some of the education experts I read stated that during the preschool and early elementary years, children process information by playing. It is good when they act out what they have heard in a story or when they line up their stuffed animals and teach them to color and read. We did not turn on the TV until after Yuni came home in the evening. The girls had to amuse themselves during the day. The three of them were always quite busy; they had picture books, toys, art supplies, and simple musical instruments to aid them in their play. And they played quite happily. Truth always refers to that time period as the happiest days of her childhood.

Why I've Been AWOL from Blogging

2011-03-06T19:29:00.000-08:00

February was the Student Research Competition

http://www.csulb.edu/divisions/aa/projects/grad/research/winners/

Now we're working on getting the finishing touches of our Asian Studies Grad Student Conference put together before 3/18.

http://www.csulb.edu/colleges/cla/departments/aaas/graduate/conference.html

http://www.csulb.edu/colleges/cla/departments/aaas/docs/program3.4.11.pdf

Then at the end of March and beginning of April, I will be in Hawaii for the Association of Asian Studies Conference, Session 418.

http://www.asian-studies.org/Conference/Program/Saturday.pdf

I just finished my first mid-term portfolio on Early Chinese Culture, including Confucianism, Daoism, and the evolution of civilization and government. Tuesday I have a mid-term presentation for the class entitled: "Is There a Confucian Revival in Contemporary China?"

Confucius now stands on Tiananmen Square next to Mao Zedong's mausoleum.

I have to present a different paper on 3/19 from the one I could present in Singapore, at the CSU research competition, and in Hawaii, because I co-authored that paper with one of my professors, who will be a discussant for our conference. So I am tweaking my final paper from the Asian Studies seminar last semester: "The Hot and Sensitive K-pop Hero: A Contemporary Re-mix of Ideal Neo-Confucian Masculinity?" I have done a lot of research on Neo-Confucian ideals for masculinity while working on my thesis. I am not so familiar with Korea and Korean pop culture, and I have been doing research beyond what we learned in the seminar last fall so that I will be able to answer questions after presenting the paper. I have also been working on my power point for that presentation.

Gotta love the always hot and very sensitive K-pop sensation Rain!!

Now I have to find a 10-15 page scholarly article in Chinese on Jin Yong, the martial arts novelist whose opus is the subject of my thesis. I have to translate 3 pages before May 1st and upload them with my application for a summer translation workshop in Shanghai, sponsored by the Confucius Institute. The problem so far is that all the articles I have found are either 4-6 pages or more than 40 pages. There just does not seem to be a happy medium in Chinese scholarly journals.

http://www.confucius.ucla.edu/languageprograms/translationworkshop.htm

I have the whole outline of my next post blocked out in my head. I just have not had the time to get it fully written. I had set aside time this weekend, but on Friday my professors sent me the link to the translation workshop and told me that I really needed to apply... And the best laid plans of mice, men, and Teresa went out the window as I spent hours searching for a 10-15 page Chinese article... I will do my best to make time during the week.

Family Road Trip

2011-02-20T22:58:00.001-08:00

My dad took the girls and me to the airport. For the first time, I took three little girls alone on the plane. We flew non-stop to Miami. Yuni was there at the airport to meet us. We stayed in the home of one of Yuni’s customers. It was all fixed up, but they were still in their alternate housing, so we had a whole house to ourselves. Even though we were in Miami six months after the hurricane, the streets were still piled high with debris. Some of the houses in the cul-de-sac were inhabited, some were partly repaired, and others were still completely ruined.

We spent a day or two in Miami meeting the people whose houses Yuni had helped repair and visiting the places he had scoped out during his time there. He had been working six days every week and had not really done any sightseeing, so he only knew how to take us to the beach. He had a van and we headed north on our first family road trip.

We visited friends in Orlando and took the kids to Disney World. Then we visited Lynne in Atlanta where we saw Stone Mountain and the Coca Cola bottling plant. We went to up to DC where we visited our friends from church, Cousin Brian’s family, and the pandas at the National Zoo. The twins turned five while we were in DC, and Cousin Brian took us all to Chuck E. Cheese’s for a party. It created a dangerous precedent.

From DC we went north to Philadelphia where we met my mother’s cousins. They had a parrot named DB (Dumb Bird) that had the run of the house. The kids were entranced. We also visited Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, but I think the parrot was more interesting to the children. From Philly we headed up to Connecticut to visit my brother Tom. He took us to Mystic Seaport. It is a living history museum with people in period costume working and doing the normal activities of people in a seaport around the time of the American Revolution. The girls thoroughly enjoyed it.

On the way back, we went to a number of other living history museums. There was one in Virginia with a number of different colonial farmhouses, each in the style of immigrants from different countries. We also went to Williamsburg. We stayed with friends of friends from church. They homeschooled their children, and their son played the piano and harpsichord. The night we arrived he was giving a harpsichord concert in one of the halls in Williamsburg. We all attended. It was fascinating. We spent another two days there, and every evening, I had long conversations with the mother about homeschooling. It seemed that it could be a feasible option, especially if there were resources in the community that gave the kids opportunities for enrichment. The second day we were touring Williamsburg, the daughter of our hosts was in a sewing circle in one of the mansions. The girls were so excited to be in on the secret.

When we got back down to Miami, we did more sightseeing based on my guide books. We went to Sea World and the Everglades. The highlight of the Everglades was an airboat ride where the guide fed marshmallows to the alligators. I expect that the alligators in the Everglades all have rotted teeth.

We were on the road a little more than a week. The girls and I went back to Seattle first, while Yuni finished up a job or two before coming back himself. Upon his return he began to set up his own business. Business was quite slow. The first month he had one half-day job and earned less than $100. Of course, we had spent what he thought was surplus on our great trip. I continued with my translation and took on more students. By the next month, more work came in and things got better and better, but we had a tense time of it for about six weeks.

Happy Year of the Metal Rabbit

2011-02-02T22:36:00.000-08:00

Today is Chinese New Year’s Eve. In less than two hours, it will be the Year of the Metal Rabbit. The Chinese horoscope says that the year of the rabbit is a welcome respite after the tribulations of last year’s Year of the Tiger. I have also read that because this year is a Metal Rabbit, it carries a little bit more of a kick than an ordinary year of the rabbit.

This lunar year begins tomorrow, February 3, and ends January 22, 2012. Since the new year falls before February 4, it is considered a lucky year for romance and marriage. It is also a good year for endurance and creativity. The rabbit energy likes comfort and serenity in its surroundings. The metal energy implies courage to face the changes in the world around you. And rabbit years are supposed to be good for healing. They are also supposed to be relaxed and more easy-going than other years. It may be a year to forget the rules!!

People who are born in the year of the rabbit are supposed to have temperaments like rabbits. They are serene and easy-going. They are peaceable, sensitive, and creative. They like to be around other people, but they do not like conflict. They love their homes, and their homes are usually well-kept and nicely decorated. My mother is a rabbit, and this description seems to fit her.

In Chinese mythology, the Rabbit is related to the moon. Some Chinese see a hare in the moon with the elixir of immortality in his hands. The moon represents the power of Yin, which is dark, secret, and passive. People born in the year of the rabbit tend to be lucky naturally. Their business deals tend to go well without much effort. Rabbit years are supposed to be lucky for pretty much everyone, as the luck of the moon and the rabbit rub off on all. So many Chinese horoscopes warn people not to get too lax in the year of the rabbit.

On New Year’s Eve, Chinese tradition says that each household should finish their spring cleaning before the evening meal. Everyone in the family puts on new clothes before dinner—preferably bright red clothes. They all eat together in the biggest family get-together of the year. Dinner consists of many special dishes like dried meat, sausages, different kinds of rice cakes, and always there is fish. Everyone eats a little of the fish, but there has to be fish left over at the end of the meal. This means that the family will be prosperous and will have abundance to spare at the end of the year. After dinner, unmarried people get red envelopes of money from the married people. Once you are married, you are expected to grow up and contribute. Before you are married, you can relax and enjoy the bounty of the family. After you get old and your children are married, they give you red envelopes, too.

And everyone says: 恭喜發財，紅包拿來! Then you get a red envelope like the one here.

Thoughts about Homeschooling and Tiger Mothers

2011-01-29T20:31:00.000-08:00

In my last episode of the story of our family, Yuni was in Miami, and I was babysitting, tutoring, and translating while running the household and caring for the kids in our new house in Bellevue.

About a year before we moved out of Seattle, Truth began spontaneously reading the captions under pictures in her coloring books. By the time we were in Bellevue, she could read quite well. Love got quite worried that something was wrong because she could not read like her twin; she began begging me to put her into school.

I started looking into preschool programs near us. I really liked a Montessori school, but it was a Cadillac plan with a Cadillac cost. There was no way we could afford to have one kid in school there, much less three. I checked into the Head’s Up preschools near us, but they were comparatively far away, and I did not want to put the kids into them unless I was forced to. After talking to my friends, I learned that many of them were not satisfied with the public schools near us, even though we were living in one of the best school districts in the country. A number of my Asian friends were spending hours after school giving their kids extra homework so that they would not be behind their cousins in Japan or Malaysia or Taiwan. So those children were going to school from 8:30 to 3; after they came home, their mothers had them do their 30 minutes of American homework, and then they did MORE homework. Some of the mothers got textbooks from their home countries and used them. Others ordered textbooks from a homeschool curriculum company and had their kids do the exercises in them in addition to what they were doing in their American elementary school classes.

One week, when Yuni called, I discussed the matter with him. He was concerned about the fact that the Asian mothers thought American schools were not on a par with the schooling in Asia because part of our master plan was to shuttle back and forth between the US and Asia. We were planning to take the kids back for upper-level elementary school and junior high in Taiwan. If they were behind in subjects like math and history, there was no way they would be able to handle the transition. Yuni told me to keep doing research.

One of the mothers using the homeschool curriculum lent me the product catalog. The content and methods seemed pretty good, and they had books for two and three year olds so that younger siblings could do school, too. But I could not see having my kids do six hours of school and then another three to four hours of extra work on top of their school day. I wanted my kids to have a great education, and I wanted them to be able to keep up with their cousins in Asia, but I also wanted them to have fun.

One of our weekly field trip destinations was the library’s preschool story time. We always checked out piles and piles of books. While the kids were getting their story books, I went to the non-fiction section and got some books on homeschooling. I read lots and lots of them. And the more I read, the more I thought that teaching the kids might really work for us. We could keep them bi-lingual, use a “Cadillac” curriculum package, and my kids would not have to spend nine or ten hours a day on schoolwork when they were just in elementary school. We could also take our vacations when plane fares were cheapest. With five fare-paying passengers to Taiwan, that was a huge consideration.

On the negative side, I would not be able to get a regular job. Yuni would have to support the family almost single-handedly. I would only be able to do my tutoring and translating and maybe a little babysitting. At that point, I didn’t order any text books, but I did get all the information together so Yuni and I could go over everything after he came home from Miami.

Then in the next phone call, Yuni dropped a bombshell… He had sent plane tickets for me and the girls. We would meet him in Miami; one of his customers worked at a rent-a-car company and would get us a great deal on a rental van. We would drive the van up the East Coast to see my brother in Connecticut and visit a number of friends and other relatives along the way. He said that he had made lots of money, and in addition to what he had deposited for me, he had amassed a pile of cash for our vacation. He was also sure there would be plenty left over so that he could start his own business when he got back. He had informed the boss of his old company that he would not be going back to work there. … So I began packing for our trip to the East Coast.

As I was drafting this post, I read Amy Chua’s article in the Wall Street Journal about Asian tiger mothers. It reminded me of my Asian friends who kept their kids going for hours and hours a day. I don’t know if my kids would consider me a tiger mother. I certainly had high expectations of them, but I think that the focus of her method is that the mother works through things with her kids until they arrive at the standard she has set for them. I certainly practiced that while my kids were growing up. I did, however, try to give them enough time for free play because all the books I read on cognitive development and learning stages said that preschool and early elementary school children learn through their play. The strength of the Montessori Method is that the children are in a “rich” environment with many attractive, educational toys, and the adults facilitate the learning aspects of their play. The children are also expected to pick up after themselves and handle the responsibilities appropriate for their ages.

I am adding the links to the WSJ article and Chua’s interview with Stephen Colbert. I read on a Chinese news blog that in China her book is being marketed as the work of an overseas Chinese. The Chinese title is something like “Parenting in America.” So the mainland Chinese, at least, are not embracing the idea of the tiger mothers. I can’t really make any more comments, as I have not read Chua’s book, and that won’t happen until summer break.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/372153/january-25-2011/the-battle-hymn-of-the-tiger-mother-controversy

Conference in Singapore

2011-01-21T11:26:00.000-08:00

My professor still hasn't forwarded me the pictures of the sightseeing we did, but she did write a letter to the deans and my department chair giving a report of our trip and thanking them for the funding. She attached a few photos. So today's post consists of excerpts from her letter and her photos. (I really have to get my own camera before I take another trip.)

Dear XXX, XXX, XXX, and XXX:

Amidst all of the enrollment/scheduling madness we’re in, I thought
I’d share some positive news.

I just returned from Singapore and Hong Kong with AAAS M.A. student
Teresa Zimmerman-Liu. It was an extremely stimulating and productive
trip, and we want to express our gratitude to the Dean’s office and
AAAS for the financial support that made our trip possible.

On January 8, we presented our co-authored paper, entitled “Making
Sense of China’s State-Society Relations: Protestant House Churches in
the Reform Era,” at a conference on “Christianity in Contemporary
China: Socio-Cultural Perspectives,” sponsored by Nanyang
Technological University in Singapore. It was an exclusive conference,
with about 20 participants in attendance, and roughly 20 invited
members in the audience. Participants included scholars from across
the globe, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, China, Taiwan,
England, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and the United
States. The keynote speakers were accomplished senior scholars
Richard Madsen (Chair and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at
UCSD) and Peter Tze Ming Ng (Director of the Centre for the Study of
Religion and Chinese Society at the Chinese University of Hong Kong).
The conference organizer, Francis Khek Gee Lim, plans to compile a
subset of the presented papers in an edited volume that he hopes will
be published within the next eighteen months or so. We are quite
hopeful that our paper will be included in the volume.

Following the conference, we traveled to Hong Kong, where we conducted
interviews that will further our research. Perhaps our most well-known
interview subject was Han Dongfang. Mr. Han was the most prominent
worker activist to assume a leadership role during the 1989 “Tiananmen
Square Movement.” After surviving prison following the June 4, 1989
massacre, Mr. Han returned to Hong Kong to continue his activism to
promote labor rights in China. Through his Hong Kong-based
organization, the China Labour Bulletin, Mr. Han hosts a weekly
call-in radio show that is broadcast into mainland China via Radio
Free Asia. He is known world-wide as China’s most influential labor
activist. Along with our interviews, while in Hong Kong we discussed
our current and future research with faculty at the Divinity School of
Chung Chi College at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

In case you’re interested, a few pictures are attached. They are: (1)
us with conference organizer Francis Khek Gee Lim (Associate
Professor, Department of Sociology, Nanyang Technological University);
(2) us with the other conference participants; (3) us with Han
Dongfang; (4) us with Lung-kwon Lo (Director) and Tobias Brandner
(Assistant Professor), Divinity School of Chung Chi College, Chinese
University of Hong Kong.

We deeply appreciate the support of the Dean’s Office and AAAS in this
endeavor. It was an incredibly enriching and rewarding experience.

Our next stop is the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian
Studies in early April, where we will be presenting a revised version
of our paper.

Hong Kong Holiday--2011

2011-01-14T20:28:00.000-08:00

I am back from my trip. It was fantastic. I spent a number of relaxing days in Hong Kong before and after my time at the academic conference in Singapore. Here are some of the pictures.

This is the Chi Lien Nunnery in Kowloon.
The wooden buildings are built in the style of the Tang Dynasty.

There is a tea house in the South Lotus Gardens across the street from the nunnery.
The tea is delicious. The tea house is also built in the style of the Tang Dynasty. It overlooks a koi pond; unfortunately, it was raining so hard the day I was there that I didn't spend time looking at fish.

The Star Ferry is still running between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island. The skyline on Hong Kong island is much changed. The ferries are the same. They may be discontinued next year in the name of progress.

There is a pagoda like those in the imperial palace in the South Lotus gardens. There is also an exhibit of the different ways Chinese builders join timbers without nails.

No trip to Hong Kong would be complete without a pilgrimage to see Pommes the Wonder Cat from the e-cuneiform blog. Here he is on his throne surveying the minions of his realm. He wanted me to post this picture for Miss Kitty. You will notice that he has lost much weight. He has been pining away for Miss Kitty and his other adoring fans while the scribe has been absent from the blogosphere.

I went with the scribe of e-cuneiform to the Hakka village of Tsuen Wan. The scribe was going to a Chinese doctor and requested my translation services. The doctor was quite competent. Her first response to his ailments was to warm his kidneys and the other parts of his anatomy connected to the kidneys in Chinese medicine (quite different from Western medicine). The scribe was so happy with all the warming that he took me out for dim sum.

Since the dim sum shop was in the Hakka village of Tsuen Wan out in the New Territories, there was sui banne, a delicious dish that my children used to eat regularly when they were toothless babies in Taiwan. It was presented more elegantly in the restaurant than it was on the cart from the peddler who sold it in Chungli, Taiwan, but the flavor was the same. I had ordered something from the menu that I did not recognize. Imagine my surprise at getting an old favorite!

If you plan to visit Chris, Regina, and Pommes in Hong Kong, you had better go prepared. Pommes is a true tyrant when it comes to exacting tribute from visiting artists. Since I do not paint or cook, and my viola was in the US, Pommes had the scribe shove a square of sticky, wet clay in front of me. A stylus was thrust into my hand, and I had to write a poem or two in payment for the privilege of petting his inky blackness. Fortunately for me, there are Chinese calligraphy forms that were used when characters were carved into bamboo or metal; I could use one of them to write somewhat legibly with stylus in clay.

Chinese Seal Script
From http://www.china-tour.cn/Chinese-Arts/Chinese-Calligraphy.htm

The poem I wrote follows in modern Chinese, as my computer does not have a seal script font.

偶詩

(With apologies to 孟浩然)

失眠，時差搞。

黑貓獵小鳥。

夜來，談談天。

笑話知多少。

Of course, I am no good at writing my own Chinese poetry, but in best Chinese fashion, I took part of a famous Tang Dynasty poem and adapted it to my purposes. When Pommes noted that I had cited the poet whose work I had adapted, he insisted that I copy out the original for his edification and enjoyment. He truly is a demanding cat...

春曉

by 孟浩然

春眠不覺曉，

處處聞啼鳥。

夜來風雨聲，

花落知多少。

I tried to do an original piece called "Doggerel to Scare the Cat," but English letters just do not work when writing in clay. The poem was smudged and blurred and illegible. It's probably just as well; Pommes has a reputation as a ferocious hunter. I wouldn't have wanted him to have scratched my eyes out for impertinence.

I am waiting for my professor to e-mail me the pictures that she took of our adventures in Singapore. When I get them, I will post about my first professional academic conference. The entire trip was totally awesome, and meeting Chris, Regina, and the formidable Pommes was one of its highlights.

A Beautiful Pearl

2010-12-28T18:19:00.000-08:00

Sorry to have gone so long without a post. I finished the semester and crashed for a week or so of much needed rest and relaxation. I will be leaving Saturday night for two weeks in Singapore and Hong Kong where a professor and I will be presenting a research paper at an academic conference and doing more research. I will see some friends along the way. The next time I post will be well into 2011. Here's wishing everyone a safe, happy, and prosperous new year!

While Yuni was away in Florida, and before he had sent me cash or figured out how to feed the ATM, I needed to find ways to get money for groceries. One of my friends from church had a daughter who was 45 days older than the twins. My friend is not Chinese, but in the interests of protecting the innocent, I am transliterating the girl’s name into Chinese—珍娜, and then retranslating it back as ‘Pearl’. My friend is a nurse, and she worked three or four days a week. Her older child was in school, and little Pearl needed child care. Our home was the perfect place.

And so I adopted my first of many foster daughters. Pearl would come very early in the morning on the days that her mother worked. Some days she was in her pajamas, and she would go into the girls’ room and wriggle into the bed with them. (They had a bunk bed with a full-sized bed on the bottom and a twin bed on top.) Three small three-year old girls fit quite easily on the full-sized bottom bunk. Pearl’s clothes and things were all in a back pack that her mom would drop off at the doorway as she dashed off to work.

Since the girls were sleeping, I would go into my computer to do translation work. Eventually, there would be sounds of giggling from the girls’ room. A door would creak; someone would dash out and grab Pearl’s pack. Then the door would slam, and they would be inside getting dressed. That would be my signal to get them breakfast. The five of us all sat around the kitchen table eating, talking, and laughing.

After breakfast the girls would play in the yard or in the toy room. If my translation schedule was not too heavy, we would take a field trip on the bus. Some days we went into Seattle to the aquarium or just to take a ferry ride. Other days we went to the doll museum in Bellevue or to the downtown park. I had gotten lots of strange looks with my three little girls all of an age, and now I was zipping around with four. The strange looks multiplied, but that was okay. We had lots of fun. We would come back by 3 in the afternoon because at 3:30 my ESL tutoring students would arrive.

When I had an ESL student, the girls were finally allowed to turn on the TV. Our house was blocked by hills, and as I was earning enough between babysitting and tutoring and translating, we got basic cable to mesmerize the giggling beasts. When Pearl was around, they watched a lot of Disney movies. When she wasn’t, they watched a lot of Animal Planet. They also did tumbling on the old couch in the TV room, build forts out of blocks and legos, and dressed up in costumes from a box of clothes my dad’s wife had given them. I usually tutored from 3:30 to 5:30 every afternoon. When my last student was gone, I rushed to make dinner.

Pearl’s mother worked 13 hour shifts; her father frequently traveled for his business. Many times Pearl stayed for dinner with us. After Yuni’s time in Miami, he would frequently arrive home while I was tutoring my last student. The girls would let him into the TV room through the sliding door, and he would play with them until dinner was ready. After the student left, he would take them into the back yard to play ball or build things. Because the table where I did tutoring overlooked the backyard, we found it necessary to keep my kids out of the yard so my students could focus on their work.

After dinner, Yuni was in charge of the remote. He and the girls and Fei watched TV, while I cleaned the kitchen and did my things. Sometimes I had other students to tutor, and at other times I had more translation work to do. Pearl usually left by 8; my kids went to bed around 8:30, and I would read to them until 9. If I had a translation job involving people in Asia, I would get on the phone and computer and work until midnight or 1 am. The next morning it would start all over again around 5:30 or 6. At that point in my life, I was reasonably healthy, and I was having a lot of fun. I thoroughly enjoyed all four of my daughters. The translation and tutoring gave me just enough adult contact to make being a housewife really fun.

True Philosophizing on the Road to Marrakesh

2010-12-04T21:44:00.000-08:00

I was going to post about how I started collecting non-biological daughters not long after we moved to Bellevue, and then Truth posted this amazing piece from Kilimanjaro International Airport. Anything that I could write would be anticlimactic. So I am giving you the link and allowing her thoughts to resonate undisturbed throughout the universe.

http://whenjoewenttoafricatohelpstopaids.blogspot.com/2010/12/reflection-from-kilimanjaro_01.html

Another Interruption: Public Service Announcement

2010-11-28T11:50:00.000-08:00

I had been planning to post another story of when the kids were little, but as I was reading through the New York Times online today, I came across Nicholas D. Kristof's op-ed column entitled "A Woman. A Slave. A Prostitute." In the article Kristof describes the story of Yumi Li, a young woman from China, who paid smugglers $50,000 to bring her to the US. Yumi is educated; she has a college education. She thought that she was coming to an accounting job in the US, but instead she was forced to work for three years as a sex slave in Manhattan, NYC.

The story is here for those who are interested: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/opinion/28kristof.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a212

I decided to post about this because over the course of my two decades among the Chinese-American community, I met a number of women who had used "snake heads" or people smugglers to come to the US. All of them had been in terror of being sold into sex slavery because they either personally knew women who had been sold as sex slaves or they knew people who knew women sold into the sex trade. Most of these women were willing to pay a premium to the smugglers of $25,000 to $35,000 (US dollars) to ensure that they would escape that fate. In addition, they usually worked out elaborate arrangements with male relatives or friends both in the US and China to be sure that the "snake heads" kept their part of the bargain.

This is a big problem of which most of us mainstream Americans (of all races) are not aware. And as the Congress takes up issues like illegal immigration, we need to keep these things in our collective consciousness in order to make good choices. Unfortunately, there is a market in America for women sex slaves. And also unfortunately, Chinese society has terrible income disparity. (See Accepting Authoritarianism: State-Society Relations in China's Reform Era by Dr. Teresa Wright for more on the income disparity problem.) Women are not privileged in Chinese families because they cannot carry on the family name. If a family is struggling, the young women are more apt to be sent abroad to work because it does not matter in the family ancestral hall if they are lost, and because girls tend to be more responsible than the spoiled boys of the one-child era. Despite their unprivileged position in the family, women do send money back to their struggling relatives in China.

I don't have a ready answer to this problem, but I agree with Kristof that it needs to be brought to the light of day and into public discussions on immigration here in America.

My "Almost-Passing" Answer to the Midterm Koan

2010-11-16T21:39:00.000-08:00

We got our midterms back. I did very well. The professor announced at the beginning of class that one person almost passed. So for your edification and enjoyment:

In their book Paths to Liberation, Robert Buswell and Robert Gimello posit that “the doctrine of emptiness [shunyata] [is] audible in any form of Buddhism if one but listens for it … and is still coursing through the Buddhist universe like a low-frequency basal pulse” (p. 375). In this essay I propose to answer all questions in one search through the five sutra texts for the basal pulse of emptiness [shunyata] noted by these modern American Buddhologists. I will being with a definition and description of the concept o femptiness and then examine the sutras in the order of 1, 3, 4, 2, 5 before reaching my conclusion about 6. If I am able to find the thread of emptiness in all five texts, the premise will have been proven for this subset of Buddhist texts.

Robinson defines “shunyata” in the Sutra Pitika as “an attribute of phenomena—stating that they are empty of self or anything pertaining to self—and as a mode of perception, in which phenomena are viewed simply in terms of what is absent or present to awareness, without adding or taking away anything … Nagarjuna later expanded these two meanings … phenomena had no “own-nature” [svabhava]; as a mode of perception, it meant the relinquishment of all views” (327-328).

In his explication, Robinson relates emptiness to the third realization in the Buddha Shakyamuni’s enlightenment experience. After passing through the four dhyanas (levels of meditative concentration), Shakyamuni first saw his lives and past lives and the causes of his rebirths. Then in his second insight, he saw the causes of rebirth for all the sentient beings in the cosmos. From there he was able to work out the concept of dependent co-arising [pratitya-samutpada], that nothing is permanent and that there is “no self” [anatman]. All things arise because of past actions, words, or thoughts with intention; all things pass away when the effect has run its course. Thus, there is no reason to cling to anything because everything is suffering in the constant cycle of samsara. With this vision of the emptiness of existence, Shakyamuni was able to extinguish the outflows [asravas] and be awakened. Because he found a pattern amid the chaos of samsara and identified the twelve steps from ignorance to death, rebirth, and suffering, he was able to teach people how to be free. Gethin notes that in Buddhist practice, practitioners work their way up the eight steps of mental concentration to see the same thing as Shakyamuni and thus free themselves from samsara. This insight can be considered the view of emptiness and success in the steps of mental cultivation can be called the practice of emptiness that is hinted in Robinson’s definition.

The first sutra text is the story of Channa being taught the middle way. Channa was a Buddhist practitioner after the parinirvana (death of Shakyamuni). He was with other monks at the Deer Park in Benares, and he was quite frustrated at his inability to go up the ladder of mental concentrations and see the emptiness of all things. Without this vision, he was unable to cut off the outflows [asravas] and be freed from samsara. The other monks told him to seek out Ananda, Shakyamuni’s former companion. Channa asked his question, and Ananda repeated the Buddha’s sermon to Katyayana (also transliterated Kaccana). In this sermon, the Buddha restated his doctrine of the Middle Way, which he had first posited as being the way between the extremes of indulgence in sensual pleasures and complete asceticism. This time the Buddha said that the extremes are existence and non-existence. The middle way is to see pratitya-samutpada or dependent co-arising. Things arise from past karma and then pass away. People change, but they are still connected to previous experiences. They do not, however, exist forever. Ananda then repeated the Buddha’s tracing back through the twelve steps of dependent co-arising to show how each factor causes the next, trapping sentient beings in the cycle of samsara. Ananda then said: “What arises is suffering; what ceases is suffering—one who knows this has no doubts, is not distracted.” Channa heard this and realized the dharma.

From this story, we see the importance of emptiness in the early mainstream sutras. Things are impermanent, but they do arise based on intentions, thoughts and actions that have gone before. So we find the seed of emptiness in Shakyamuni’s enlightenment, in his later teachings, and in the teachings of his closest disciple.

As time passed, Buddhist scholars attempted to categorize the components of what arose and passed away. Since Shakyamuni had found order and a pattern in the chaos of samsara, these scholars continued that pursuit. They were the Abhidharmists, and eventually they tried to systematize Buddhist thought in absolute terms. Other Buddhist scholars felt that because the Abhidharmists said that all components of being [dharmas] each had its own nature [svabhava], the Abhidharmists were falling into the error of eternalism. Anonymous Buddhist scholars wrote the Prajna-Paramita sutras to counter this tendency. The Prajna-Paramita Sutra of 8,000 lines, which according to Gethin was the first such sutra, says, “all dharmas are fabricated by thought construction, not born, not come forth, not come, not gone, that no dharma is ever produced or stopped in the past, future, or present.” It also says, “All dharmas are indeed unknowable and imperceptible because they are shunya [empty] and do not lean on anything.” The Abhidharmists of course responded that such an attitude was the other erroneous extreme of nihilism.

A famous Buddhist scholar from the 2nd Century BCE named Nagarjuna jumped into this argument with his text “Root Verses on the Middle Way.” Nagarjuna began each chapter with the objections of his abhidharmist opponents. Then he proceeded to deconstruct those arguments using the concept of emptiness as the middle way. Nagarjuna based his writings on the Buddha’s sermon to Katyayana and on the sutra text discussed above. In Chapter 24 “On the Four Noble Truths,” Nagarjuna repeated the passage in the Channa sutra that the Four Noble Truths involve the arising and passing away of suffering. He argued that if something is to arise and pass away, then it cannot have its own nature [svabhava]. To Nagarjuna the possession of a svabhava is eternalism and means that all beings are frozen and unchangeable. The only way that dependent co-arising [pratitya-samutpada] can exist is if all things are empty of “own nature” [svabhava]. Nagarjuna said, “Interdependent origination—that is what we call emptiness. That is a conventional designation. It is also the Middle Way. There can be found no element of reality [dharma] that is not interdependently originated; therefore, there can be found no element of reality whatsoever that is not empty. If everything were not empty, there could be no arising or passing away … How could suffering not be interdependently originated?” (v. 18-20)

Thus, Nagarjuna strongly emphasized and expanded the earlier idea that all things are impermanent and thus empty. He continued in Ch. 25 to discuss the concept of Nirvana and noted that even this is empty. He eventually concluded that “there is no distinction whatsoever between samasara and nirvana; and there is no distinction whatsoever between nirvana and samsara.” In the end, for Nagarjuna emptiness means that the distinction between the finite and the infinite is blurred. A gloss to the Chinese commentary on Nagarjuna Ch. 25 says, “The tathagatas [Buddhas] at no time and at no site for people preach that nirvana is a fixed/established characteristic.”

In addition to stretching the meaning of emptiness and its implications, Nagarjuna used a schema that became popular among Mahayana Buddhists. He said that there are a conventional knowledge and discourse and an ultimate knowledge and discourse. He felt that the Abhidharmists had gone wrong because they took the conventional notion of “own nature” [svabhava] and made it absolute.

As time went on, Mahayana scholars took Nagarjuna’s teachings to an extreme and taught nihilism. So the story of Sudhana was written to show that within emptiness there is fullness and that all things are interpenetrated. Sudhana traveled all over India seeking teachers. In the end, the bodhisattva Maitreya showed him a vision that within one pore of the bodhisattva Samantabhada there was a cosmos containing an infinite number of cosmoses. This works going infinitely small and out infinitely large. Only emptiness makes this work. This is how nirvana and samsara interpenetrate each other.

Escaping from samsara was no longer the most important thing to Mahayana Buddhists. They wanted awakening [bodhi] to transcend samsara and then in a state that straddled the divide, they wanted to cross over all sentient beings. To achieve this goal they required wisdom [prajna] and tactical skill [upaya]. Tactical skill gives a teacher the way to enlighten or awaken others or to at least awaken in them “bodhicitta” or a desire for awakening. The Mahayana Buddhists said that the Buddha gave his teaching in three stages: first he gave a lower way, then the way of emptiness, and finally the teaching of the conventional and the ultimate.

The Lotus Sutra is a Mahayana sutra that according to Tenabe embodies the concept of emptiness. The entire sutra is a long discourse of praise for a sutra that is about to be, but never actually is taught. Thus, we find emptiness at the core of the Lotus.

The story given from the Lotus Sutra is the story of the three carts and the burning house. This story represents a skillful means of awakening bodhicitta. The story talks about children playing in a burning house. The father coaxes them out with promises of dog carts, goat carts, and ox carts. When the children get out, the only cart given them is an ox cart. We all are symbolized by the children. The burning house symbolizes samsara. The father symbolizes a Buddha. The Buddha uses any means to save his children, but in the end, the only path is the Mahayana, the path of the bodhisattva.

The Vimalakirti Sutra is another sutra that uses skillful means to teach its readers the Middle Way. Vimalakirti is a pattern of a person who lives in emptiness. He straddles all things, but is attached to none. He eats and drinks, but delights in meditation. He goes to brothels to show the follies of lust. He is able to deconstruct the teachings of all the great bodhisattvas. And in the end, after all have given their views on how to enter the gate of oneness, Vimalakirti remains silent. This might mean that the others have spoken well, and Vimalakirti will not refute them. Or it means that he cannot, and his life is empty, too. Or perhaps it means what Manjusri just said, “When you can neither speak nor talk of any event, when you neither indicate nor know anything, when you pass beyond both questions and answers. This is to enter the gate of oneness.” So Vimalakirti takes the middle way of silence and enters that gate.

Thus, we see that sutras 1, 3, and 4 specifically speak of dependent co-arising or emptiness. Sutras 2 and 5 do not mention emptiness explicitly, but the concept is there. Thus, emptiness can be called the basal pulse of these Buddhist texts, at least, and the 6th quote can be considered proven.

Trips to Taiwan and Miami

2010-11-14T19:45:00.000-08:00

After Labor Day of our second year in America, we had enough money to take the kids back to Taiwan for a visit. Since we had been living abroad for two years, we were expected to bring back all kinds of gifts. Fortunately, shampoos that were cheap in America were considered to be expensive and of better quality than Taiwanese products. We went to K-Mart and bought out the shampoo and conditioner shelves for Yuni’s sisters and nieces. The older generation had discovered the benefits of Ben-Gay for sore muscles after Third Maternal Uncle had visited the US on a trip sponsored by the Lions Club. We bought out the super-sized tubes of Ben-Gay for all the aunts and uncles. Then we got bags of candy for the little kids.

Yuni only had a week’s vacation, so we left late Friday night and stayed until the following Sunday. Ma felt that it was not nearly enough time. I was inclined to agree with her because every night we visited different relatives or got invited out to dinner by someone in the clan. It was a whirlwind visit that was quite fun for all, but it was truly exhausting.

I did not realize it at the time, but later Ma told me that Yuni had discussed with his father our moving back to Taiwan since my grandfathers had both passed away, and my grandmothers were now stable and happy. That idea was soundly rebuffed to Ma’s great disappointment because Pa had been spreading face-saving tales among the family. He said that Yuni was about to buy his own house and start his own company, and that he would be getting his Master’s degree in architecture from an American university. After we returned to the US, I assumed that Yuni’s grumpiness stemmed from having to return immediately to work with a mega-case of jet lag.

A week or so after we had returned to the US, Yuni began to set the conditions for his return to Taiwan in motion. One of our friends from church was a wealthy Taiwanese businessman with factories in both Taiwan and China. He had been appalled at our neighborhood and had been looking for a house in Bellevue that he could buy and rent to us. Yuni had some discussions with him after church, and the upshot was that he would put up 50% down payment and we would get a loan for the other 50%, and we would buy a home for us together in Bellevue. We went to the bank and got preapproved for the loan. Then we used my grandmother’s lawyer and drew up the agreement. Next we started house hunting.

We found a place that was just perfect. It had a large backyard, rooms for our family and Fei, and it was close to the freeway to Yuni’s work and my grandmother’s as well as to my dad’s place. We made our offer and waited for the loan to close. 60 days later, the underwriter still had not decided. Fortunately, my aunt was a vice president in the bank, and she was able to get several reviews done because we had gotten a letter of pre-approval without any problem. Our measly little loan was decided by several vice presidents and a branch manager. Our earnest money was safe, and we moved into our first house in America.

A few weeks later, Hurricane Andrew tore through Florida, and the call went out at church for skilled masons and tile setters to help families rebuild. Yuni’s work was getting slow, and he arranged with his boss to take voluntary leave instead of getting laid off so that he could go to Florida to help rebuild the church hall and houses for church members. There was a huge problem in Florida of people having insurance money, but not being able to find a contractor to fix their houses. The congregation in Bellevue chipped in to buy Yuni’s ticket, and he set off alone on a plane for the first time in his life. He did not yet have a cell phone.

Yuni arrived in Florida without mishap, and he found a pay phone to call his contact in Miami for a pick up at the airport. The person asked him where he was, and all he could say was “Airport.” The driver said, “Which airline?” Yuni answered, “Airport.” Finally, I got a call from the church elders asking me for his flight information. Yuni waited at the airport for an hour before they found him and took him to the family with whom he was to be billeted. There were only two Chinese families in the church group there, and both their homes had been laid to waste. Yuni was staying with a Caucasian family who spoke no Chinese. It was time for him to put his English lessons to use.

The family lent him a bicycle, and he cycled around Miami laying tile, fixing boundary walls, and doing other projects for numerous families in the church there. He worked for three months and made quite a bit of money. The first time he decided to send me money for the mortgage, he got a long white envelope and stuffed it with $3000 in cash. Then he sent it by regular mail. I almost had a cow. He called home once a week from a pay phone to talk to me and the kids. I told him that he had an ATM card and should deposit the money directly into our bank account. He had never done that before because I had been doing all the books and things requiring English. We rehearsed the ATM prompts on several different phone calls, and the next time he got paid, Yuni deposited the funds himself. His time in Miami really gave him confidence that he could survive on his own in America. He learned to buy his own materials, to use the bank, to order his own meals, and to deal with English-speaking customers and insurance companies. It was a very profitable three months for him in many, many ways.

A Koan of a Midterm

2010-11-07T12:41:00.000-08:00

This week, I can only add a few sentences to my story of our family. With the addition of Fei to our household, things got better and better. Yuni got into advanced English classes at the community college. He began to learn how to mix the precast concrete and do other technical things. He got raises every time he came up for evaluation. My translation and tutoring businesses flourished. The kids grew like weeds. Peace began speaking all at once in full sentences (a common occurence among children in bilingual households). The girls and I continued with our regular excursions around Seattle, and a whole year went by in peace and prosperity.

I do not have time to write about our family's next set of adventures because it is mid-term season. I only have one class with a mid-term: Buddhism, but the professor has told us outright that the exam is impossible to pass. He spread it out over two 1 1/4 hour class periods. Last Thursday we had our Sanskrit vocabulary test. We got the essay portion of the test two weeks early. It will be an open book, open notes, open everything test. We can bring our outlines of the essays, but we must wait until the 1 1/4 hour period begins to write in our blue books. We have to write one-page explanations/interpretations/commentaries on each of five selections from translations of Buddhist sutras and then another one-page commentary on a quotation by an American Buddhologist.

I am listing the questions here for your edification and delight:

We have to comment on the story "Channa is Taught the Middle Way" from a mainstream sutra in Collection of Connected Discourses. For that question we need to focus on the anta-s and the madhya.

Then we need to comment on the "Story of the Burning House" in the Mahayana sutra Lotus of the True Dharma.

Then we need to comment on two chapters from Nagarjuna's Root Verses on the Middle Way--Chapter 24 "On the Four Noble Truths" and Chapter 25 "On Nirvana."

The fourth sutra text is "Sudhana's Vision of the Cosmos" from the Gandhavyuha Sutra.

And the fifth sutra text is a long exerpt from the Vimalakirti Sutra, but we particularly need to focus on Vimalakirti's thunderous silence in answer to Manjusri's question, "How [does] a bodhisattva [enter] the gate of oneness?"

Finally, we have to comment on the following quotation:

"[There is a] deep resonance of the doctrine of emptiness [shunyata] that is audible in any form of Buddhism if one but listens for it. The original Buddhist discovery of the emptiness of all things was a kind of doctrinal 'Big Bang,' the cognitive 'radiation' from which has always been and still is coursing through the Buddhist universe like a low-frequency basal pulse." (Buswell, Robert E. and Robert M. Gimello. Paths to Liberation. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1992)

I do not know how anyone can write all that needs to be written on these six questions in a mere 1 1/4 hours. I had an idea of a way to do it, and I asked the professor after class last week. He got a glint in his eye and said, "That is creative; I like creativity." And I responded, "Well, since you said that the exam is impossible to pass, and because the quote implies that all grades are emptiness, I thought I would try it this way." The other students around us were just scratching their heads. When I get my graded exam back, I'll tell you if I solved the koan or not. Tuesday will be exam day.

We do not have a mid-term in the seminar on Korean pop culture. I do, however, have some recommendations of movies and TV shows for you. We watched the movies The Host, Shiri, and Peppermint Candy in class. All are very good; Peppermint Candy is a little disturbing, but it is also very well done. As far as TV dramas go, I liked the period drama Jewel in the Palace best. And there is a great short film about K-pop fans in Hawaii that is an absolute riot: Ajumma! Are you Krazy? (http://iamkoream.com/ajumma-are-you-krazy/ Check out this review.) For our final project, we will be interviewing K-pop fans among our friends and writing a sociological analysis of our findings. It should be fun.

We have also sent out the call for papers for our grad student conference next spring. We're pretty excited because we got our first submission within 24 hours of our call for papers going out. Check out our websites. If you know grad students in Asian Studies, feel free to pass the links along.
http://www.csulb.edu/colleges/cla/departments/aaas/graduate/
http://www.csulb.edu/colleges/cla/departments/aaas/graduate/conference.html

And finally, my professor and I gave a practice presentation of our research paper on house churches in China at the Poli Sci Department's faculty colloquium on Wednesday. It went very well. We got lots of good feedback, and after my mid-term is over, we will be furiously rewriting to meet our December 2nd submission deadline for the Singapore conference.

No news from Truth this week.

Two Funerals, a Lay-off, and Fei

2010-10-31T16:31:00.000-07:00

Truth, Peace, and Love on the slide at the park after we have removed broken glass from the sand.

All of us, including Yuni, with Fei at my aunt's house for Christmas 1992

I am finally able to pick up the thread of my tale. I do have a killer mid-term for Buddhism over two class periods next week and the following week, but I think I have a little time to write, and I have been writing this in my head for so long that I need to get it down on paper.

If you remember, our family was living in Seattle above the International District on Beacon Hill. We were in the upper floor of an old house at the very top of the hill. Yuni was working in a pre-cast concrete company in Redmond, and I was doing translation, ESL tutoring, thesis editing, and other bilingual services in the Chinese community. Yuni had just had major surgery that had wiped out our savings, but with the good union health plan and financial help from his parents and people at church, we had made it through the crisis.

In October, though, my paternal grandfather suffered a stroke and passed away. My dad’s wife took me and the girls to buy new black mourning clothes (with flowers in the skirts so we could wear them to church after the funeral). My brother had moved to Connecticut and just started a new job there, but he took bereavement leave and flew out for the funeral. It was a nice service, and the girls handled themselves quite well in church. My maternal grandmother and aunt had come to the memorial service, and my grandmother asked Yuni and me to drive her to the nursing home where my maternal grandfather was battling cancer later that day. She said she wanted him to see my girls in their funeral finery. So after we had finished our familial duties with my dad’s family, we went and picked up Grandma to take her to the nursing home.

At the nursing home, my grandfather was catatonic. He had not ingested anything for over 24 hours, and his breathing was quite labored. The nurse kept asking my grandmother if they could give my grandfather morphine because he was having a “rough go.” Yuni took one look at my grandpa and told me in Chinese that he was dying. He said that he would leave me and Grandma there to be with him and would take the girls to get my aunt. I was just going to translate this to my Grandma when she sailed out of the room and marched to the car. She sat in the front seat and demanded to be taken home so she could call my uncle to consult with him about what medicines would wake up my grandpa. When she got home, my uncle was out, so she called my dad—a clinical chemist—and talked things over with him. Yuni and I used the pretext of the girls needing a nap to go to our home to call my aunt and give her a heads up. We found my brother Tom sitting on the doorstep waiting for us. We had forgotten that we had been planning to have dinner with him. Our call to my aunt went through, and she immediately got in touch with the nursing home. She called us right back to inform us that my grandfather had passed away 15 minutes earlier. She went and took my grandma back to the home while we grandchildren and great-grandchildren went out for a very somber dinner. Tom flew back to Connecticut the next morning to ask for another Friday of bereavement leave for the other grandfather’s funeral. (I think my aunt gave him a copy of the doctor’s death certificate as proof.)

One week later, the girls and I again wore our funeral finery. Tom flew out again, and my mom flew up from California. My uncle flew in from Wisconsin. It was another intense week of family. My mother’s grandmother had bought plots for her progeny. There was some confusion at the cemetery as to who could speak for family about which cremation urns could be buried on top of the family coffins. It appeared that my grandfather had been the person of record. My aunt and I went to the funeral home and got things straightened out. My great –aunt (who just celebrated her 100th birthday last month) was entered in as the last surviving child and spokesperson for the family. She pretty much registered any of us who wanted an urn slot because cemetery plots are getting more and more expensive. Yuni was quite touched at being invited to have a spot in the family crypt.

Our life went on. Weekends were spent visiting my grandmothers. Both of them were jolted by the loss of their long-time husbands, and it really cheered them up to spend time with their great-grandchildren. Saturdays we went to my maternal grandmother’s condo near the University of Washington. Sundays we went to church in Bellevue and then visited my paternal grandmother in her nursing home apartment. We frequently had lunch with my dad and then all went together to see Grammie. Doctors said that both the widows might die within eight months of losing their husbands and that it was important to keep them happy.

At the end of October, Yuni got laid off. When I told my maternal grandmother, she got very agitated and made us swear to her that we would not go on “the Dole.” We were not planning to go on welfare, but Yuni should have been eligible for unemployment insurance benefits. As we were discussing this with her, it became obvious that for her “the Dole” meant unemployment benefits, as well. At the time, I did not know how to describe unemployment benefits to her. I tried to explain that it was a payroll deduction and that his employer also made a payment to the State Unemployment Insurance entity so that he could collect benefits equal to half his pay. Grandma kept insisting that it would be a shame to the memory of my recently departed grandfathers for us to collect any money from the state. My parents and aunts and uncles were still traumatized by the loss of their fathers, and we decided not to bother them with this problem. Instead, Yuni decided to call his parents to find out what to do.

When Pa heard that one of my newly widowed grandmothers was making our collecting unemployment benefits into an issue of shaming a recently deceased grandfather, he told Yuni to find another way. He then pointed out that Taiwan had never had unemployment insurance, and yet he had still found a way to raise all seven of his children to adulthood. That pretty much killed the idea of collecting unemployment benefits. So Yuni went into depression. For nearly a whole week, he sat in the study room staring out the window at two people putting a roof onto the garage next door. He rarely ate. He did not always sleep in bed. He just sat in that chair with his feet on the window sill staring out into space. Finally, he got up and slipped outside to the car. He took off without me and the girls and drove around all afternoon. When he came back, he had paperwork for a temporary labor place and the possibility of a two-week job starting the next day. He worked for the temporary labor company for several weeks before his factory called him back to work in early December. He had been laid off for six weeks.

People from church heard about our situation, and many times our Chinese church friends would come over late at night after work. They noticed that there were prostitutes plying their trade at the bus stop across the street and drunks and drug addicts overrunning the park at night. I guess Ma had said something to the people from church about how we had to check the sand for glass before letting the kids play on the slide every day. They were quite concerned for us, but without a steady job, there was no way for us to move to a better neighborhood.

Just about the time Yuni went back to work, the people from church came through with more help. One woman found me a long-term translation client who was in a protracted divorce case involving English-speaking lawyers in New Jersey and Hong Kong. She needed someone to talk to her lawyers and relay the information to her. I would get up at 6:30 to talk to the lawyers in New Jersey, and then I would stay up until midnight to talk to the lawyers in Hong Kong, but since the time spent did not really affect my time with Yuni and the kids, it was perfect. One month I made several thousand dollars from her. Another couple introduced us to an overseas Chinese woman named Fei.

Fei worked in the garment district south of Seattle. She needed a cheap place to stay and felt safest living with a Chinese-speaking family. Fei began renting our study room. She became back-up babysitting so I could take more translation jobs. She ate with us and contributed money to groceries every month. She also would lend us money when things were tight. Fei lived with us from the winter of 1991 until a few months before we moved to California in January of 1995. She spoke Mandarin to the girls and became their third-language adult. Her presence in our household meant that things began to improve for us economically. We could even afford to get the kids their winter coats at the January sales at K-Mart the next year. Things were looking up.

But Yuni did not really see it that way. His experience being laid off was a huge shame to him. He had felt helpless in caring for his family. He had expected that my family would have chipped in to buy us food, but instead, my grandmother had prevented him from accepting the unemployment benefits to which he was entitled. He is proud; he would not beg. If FAMILY could not see how tight we were, then it must be because they looked down on him. He boycotted Christmas with my maternal relatives that year. He began to argue with me about finances all the time. He said that rich girls like me could never understand him. I kept trying to explain to him that my family did not know because he would not let me tell them. It didn’t matter. He was convinced that they looked down on him.

I have come to realize that there were two issues operating here. One was socio-economic, and the other was cultural. Socio-economically, my family was not in tune with how tight things were for us. They did not think that we might be so tight financially that food would be a problem. They helped a lot in buying warm clothes for all of us. They filled our house with educational toys so that the girls would have a leg up on life educationally, but you can’t eat scissors and books and puzzles. Yuni was from a socio-economic class and a family that had gone hungry many times in his lifetime. Educational things and even clothes were luxuries. If we had told my family we needed money for groceries, they would have given us loans or even gifts of money outright to tide us over the lay-off, but Yuni’s Asian male face could not take it. And he was also operating on a different definition of familial obligations. He assumed they could see but were choosing to be blind.

Then there was the issue of my newly widowed grandmother telling us that it would shame my grandfather’s memory for us to go on “the Dole.” That pretty much tied our hands with all kinds of chains of Confucian filial piety. During the first month after a person’s death, traditional Chinese believe that the spirit may or may not be at rest. If the surviving spouse says you will shame their memory doing something, it could mean that the departed does not cross over right. Chinese families have ceremonies to lay the family’s ghosts to rest at 7 day intervals for 49 days after the funeral. Although Yuni is a Christian, he did not convert until high school. Many of his gut reactions still revert to these traditional practices. By an unfortunate happenstance, my grandmother had chained his hands and thrown away the key. And I could not articulate to either side the logic of the other. I just felt squished in between.

I wanted to write this post today because there has been recent election rhetoric that people on unemployment are lazy and that unemployment benefits are not a pay-out from insurance but equal “the Dole.” This is a lie. Everyone who is not a sole proprietor pays insurance premiums as a payroll deduction. Some people never collect benefits, but the insurance is there, just like automobile insurance or home-owners insurance. It is a way for people to keep their dignity in a time of trouble. And dignity is quite important to most people in the world. No one likes to feel like a free-loader or a moocher, but there is a tide working to remove social institutions that allow people to maintain their livelihood with dignity. Based on my personal experience, I have to say that it is a dangerous tide for everyone because it breeds resentment and divisions among social groups, and it could have some tragic repercussions.

Check out the latest from grown-up Truth in Africa: http://whenjoewenttoafricatohelpstopaids.blogspot.com/2010/10/aids.html

Number One on the List of 20 Ways to Freak Out Your Mother

2010-10-24T15:09:00.000-07:00

Dear Blogger Buddies,

I finally had time this weekend. I was all psyched to pick up the thread of my narrative and write a new story for the blog. But I noticed a post by Truth in my Google Reader. And I read it... And I was history, as was my new-found zest for writing a blog post. My blood pressure is finally down. I am going about my business, now. But I will leave the link to this story and let you decide. (I now totally sympathize with my parents when I sent word back from Taiwan about smuggling Bibles into China and getting caught. Karma seems to have caught up with me.)

Teresa

http://whenjoewenttoafricatohelpstopaids.blogspot.com/2010/10/safari.html

Mid-October Madness

2010-10-16T17:21:00.000-07:00

The Chinese Film and Culture Festival is in full swing at Cal State Long Beach.

Thursday we kicked it off with an opening ceremony attended by the Lieutenant Governor of California, the Vice Minister of Culture from China, the Consul-General to LA from China, the CSU Board of Trustees (who came in a bus), the President and Provost of CSULB, the head of Disney Shanghai, and numerous other dignitaries. The show kicked off with an Ansai Drum performance. Then there were speeches. Next came a Sichuan Opera mask changing performance, and then there were promo clips about the festival and all the related activities.

The Asian Studies Graduate Society (of which I am president this year) provided parking lot and ushering services. I was stationed at the entrance to the parking lot to direct the Chinese speaking drivers to their reserved spaces (in Chinese). I had a few of my classmates near me to run to the other lane and signal the campus police that this car was a VIP. Then the appropriate welcoming committee of local Chinese dignitaries greeted the visiting dignitaries and some other of my classmates who were stationed by the spaces led the dignitaries and their entourages into the theater. (Our campus is very large and confusing for first-time visitors.) Inside the theater more of my classmates led people to their seats and kept the riff-raff (mere students and faculty) in the back section of the theater. One of my Taiwanese classmates guarded the mask changer while he put on his secret make-up and masks. He got lost between the freeway and the campus, so she also had to direct him in Chinese by cell phone to the parking lot behind the stage.

My classmates saw most of the performances, but I missed the drums because I was waiting to be sure there were no stragglers. I brought in the last group of honored guests by myself. The mask changer was terrific. The speeches were inspiring, and just as the promos were going, I was called upon to ride with the limos to another part of campus to pick up the dignitaries at the end of their tour of campus and viewing of the art exhibition part of the festival. Campus police had specified a certain area for the limos because they would not fit in the driveway to the parking lot behind the student union.

My classmates brought up the rear of the gaggle from the theater making sure that no one got lost on the campus. None of the high mucky-muckies from our school knew their way around the student union (where the art exhibition is set up) very well. When the time came for the Vice Minister to leave, I got a phone call to come in and lead him out. So I was the representative from the school who saw all the Chinese diplomatic dignitaries and their entourages into the limos. It was fun; we had a good conversation in Chinese. I shook hands with all of them and wished them a safe journey.

Friday we saw two films.

The first was "Eternally Enthralled" which stars Zhang Ziyi and was directed by Chen Kaige. The professor from the Beijing Film Academy who gave the post-screening discussion of the film had been Chen Kaige's teacher. He is considered to be the "Roger Ebert" of China. I had not intepreted for the Vice Minister because of the status issue: it looks bad for a student to interpret for such an important dignitary. I did the interpretation for the professor. It was quite fun. He did not pull any punches. All the currently famous Chinese directors were once his students, and he was quite critical of all of them. He told us that he felt the movie "Red Cliff" is an unmitigated failure. American professors in the audience disagreed with him, and there was a great discussion back and forth.

The second was "The Everlasting Flame: Beijing 2008." It is the official documentary of the Beijing Olympics. The lead director of that film was there for the first US screening last night. She was very nice and very tired, as she came straight from the airport to the festival. It was quite interesting to hear how she had made the film and how long it took them to get all the footage. She described how they took 400 hours of footage to get 1 1/2 hours of film.

Monday I will interpret for the associate dean of the Chinese School of Film and Animation Academy as he discusses a film called "Invisible Wings."

Beginning on Tuesday the Asian Studies grad students will lead cultural studies discussions of the afternoon films for the last three days of the festival.

And then there will be mid-terms...

One of the professors on my thesis committee sent back my third chapter with suggestions for major structural revisions. She likes my analyses, but she thinks I need to cut and paste. My thesis committee chair liked the idea so much that she wants me to go back and reapply it to the entire thesis. But because we are now intensively working on perfecting the research paper that we will present in Singapore and Hawaii (we got accepted there, too), I have a major time crunch. Long story short: I will take the time I need to do all things well. And I will not graduate in May 2011. That is actually a good thing because I was not sure how I was going to get all the writing and classwork done as well as retaking the GRE during mid-terms and applying for PhD programs during finals. Now I can take things just two or three at a time instead of seven or eight at a time.

There was a new post from Truth:

http://whenjoewenttoafricatohelpstopaids.blogspot.com/2010/10/tanzania.html

Updates

2010-10-04T23:34:00.000-07:00

UPDATES ON TERESA:

After a long hard month, I have most of all five chapters on my thesis written. Now I am starting in on major rewrites to please the wonderful professors on my thesis committee.

I am still the intern at the faculty association. We are in full swing with political activism for the upcoming election. Plus we are sponsoring activities to improve the quality of education.

UPCOMING ACTIVITIES

Oct. 8 , 10am. (Anatol Center or on-line): A Discussion with Charles Fadel on "Twenty-first Century Skills: Creativity and Innovation in Quality Higher Education"

Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel, "21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times." published by Jossey and Bass, 2009.

Oct 9, 10am-2pm UNITE FOR QUALITY PUBLIC EDUCTION PICNIC (music, food, and fun). Long BEACH, POV Park.

I am also president of the Asian Studies Graduate Society. We are planning a grad student scholarly conference next spring, and we are helping out with the Chinese Film and Culture Festival on campus next week. (http://www.ccpe.csulb.edu/ChineseFCF/index.htm)

One of my professors recommended me as a volunteer interpreter for the 25th Anniversary festivities of the Long Beach Qingdao Association celebrating 25 years of sister city relationship between the cities of Long Beach and Qingdao. It was pretty cool; the English-Chinese interpretation was done by me, and the Chinese-English interpretation was done by the interpreter from China. The program was broadcast simultaneously in China over the Internet so that the families of the cute Chinese dancers could watch the program, too. (See this link to a newspaper article with great pictures of the Chinese kids: http://www.contracostatimes.com/california/ci_16252631.)

I have two regular classes with papers and midterms and homework, and I am doing a research project with a professor in the Poli Sci department on underground churches in China. We will be presenting our findings at a conference in Singapore next January (and maybe in Hawaii next spring). (http://youthinfo.do.am/news/christianity_in_contemporary_china_socio_cultural_perspectives_7th_and_8th_january_2011_deadline_30_july_2010/2010-07-08-487)

UPDATE FROM TRUTH:
Truth has another post about her month kicking back in Taiwan. If you go back to earlier posts, she has great pictures up on the blog from her adventures in Mongolia. (http://whenjoewenttoafricatohelpstopaids.blogspot.com/2010/10/taiwan.html)

I do plan to write more for the blog. I will be re-taking the GRE this month and trying to get the first complete draft of my thesis written. After those things are out of the way, I should be able to pick up the thread of my saga. If any of you are in Long Beach, CA on Saturday, come to the park for some zydeco music and support quality public education. If you want to see really cool Chinese artisans or watch a few free Chinese films come to CSULB next week for the Chinese Film and Culture Festival. I will be running around at both events.

Thesis Writing Trumps Blogging

2010-08-22T10:59:00.000-07:00

Sorry for being AWOL so often this summer. I am writing my thesis, and when I have a break, I am less apt to want to write blog posts. As I get down to crunch time and fall semester starting, I think I will have less time for blogging.

Fortunately, my daughter Truth has a blog of her hobo journey around the world. She has a great post written from a train heading for Mongolia about her last three days in Beijing. If any of you experience withdrawal symptoms from our family's hijinks I suggest you try her blog:

http://whenjoewenttoafricatohelpstopaids.blogspot.com/

Chinese Women, Confucian Yin-Yang Theory, and Living out Virtue through the Female Body

2010-08-06T22:48:00.000-07:00

One nice thing about writing this blog while I am researching and writing my MA thesis is that things from the blog help me understand my writing, and theory for my thesis helps me understand my life as a Chinese daughter-in-law. Last post I mentioned that many of my female Chinese friends as well as female relatives in the Liu and Chu families were expected to do with less physically than the men and children. They got the worst food, they typically did not get medical care until after their children were grown, and they were expected to work from before dawn to after dark doing all the housework AND earning money to help the family.

I recently finished a chapter in my thesis that was a survey of the different Chinese concepts of what constitutes an ideal woman. After writing my last post, I did one more check of previous scholarship to be sure that I had not missed any key points. Well, lo and behold, that insight into my family life helped me catch a major theoretical point that is perhaps not readily realized by Westerners. I found it very interesting, so I thought I would share it here.

Some people may be surprised to see that there is a Confucian Yin-Yang theory as most people see yin and yang as being part of Daoism. It is true; the earliest discussions of yin and yang were in the texts and shamanistic religious traditions that eventually morphed into Daoism. In that tradition, yin and yang are complementary forces that always rotate in a cycle to keep the natural world alive and moving. Yang is bright, strong, outward, and moving. The character literally means the sunny side of a hill. Yin is dark, weak, inward, and still. The character for yin means the shady side of a hill. Yang is fiery and related to qi or spirit; yin is damp and related to blood or physical matter. All things are seen as having a yang aspect and a yin aspect. In relational pairs, one thing will be yang in the relationship while the other will be yin. But the person or thing that is yin in one relationship can also be yang in a different relationship. Thus, in Daoism and in Chinese medicine, women are powerful. They are connected to the earth and water; they represent fertility and life blood. The earliest Daoist goddesses actually hold the power of life and death. They are related to the early matriarchal social structure that I mentioned in earlier posts on this blog and that is described in Julia Kristeva’s book About Chinese Women.

The yin-yang cycle was not strictly Daoist at the outset. It was more the framework for the earliest Chinese science and philosophy. This is how it is used, even today, in Chinese medicine. Therefore, it was not until the first century BCE, in the middle of the Han Dynasty, that yin-yang theory was worked into both Daoism and Confucianism. By this time, Confucius was long dead. His philosophy was one of relational ethics. He did not say much about cosmology; he was interested in what rituals and forms of conduct would make all people in society civilized so that life would be good for the greatest number of people. He lived in a time of civil unrest and war at the end of the Zhou Dynasty (1027-221 BCE). He was mainly concerned with how to cause society to be at peace so that everyone could prosper. His teachings are principally about how to use the rituals and etiquette from the earliest Zhou dynasty court rule books to maintain order in society. He also advocated education as a means of promoting social order and prosperity.

Confucius described three foundational relationships for society: ruler—subject, father—son, and husband—wife. His teachings were based on the ancient classics such as the Book of Odes and the Book of Rites. Some of the rituals in the Book of Rites probably came from the Shang dynasty (1700-1027 BCE, think oracle bones) to the Zhou, and they represent part of China’s most ancient customs. In the early days, China developed an idea that inside China people were civilized because they were agrarian and worshipped their ancestors at family tombs near which they lived. The nomads roaming on the plains outside China were barbarians. The rituals related to ancestor worship were crucial to the practice of Chinese civilization. Chinese have always been pragmatic; their concept is more about doing than about being, and this is where they differ most from the West. Their ethics are worked out practically through the rituals related to their relationships.

In early Chinese antiquity, the ancients developed a gendered division of labor. Men worked in agriculture, and women worked in sericulture. Both occupations were considered crucial to the survival of society, and men and women participated equally in the worship of the ancestors with the products of their labor. During the transition time from a matriarchal society to a patriarchal society, there was a time when China had a dual-lineage society for ancestor worship. But by the time of Confucius, family blood-lines for ancestor worship were patriarchal. Women still engaged in sericulture, but their labor was done for the husband’s family. Thus, Confucius and his students, like Mencius, taught that for women the practice of civilization was a matter of obedience. Women had three major roles in their lives. First, they were daughters who needed to obey their fathers. Then they were wives, who needed to submit to their husbands. Finally, they were mothers, who needed to follow their grown sons. Fathers, husbands, and sons had responsibilities to care for and nurture their daughters, wives, and mothers. At the time of Confucius, women were still considered more complementary than inferior to men in the practice of Chinese civilization that was supposed to benefit the entire world when carried out properly.

In the first century BCE, Neo-Confucian scholars married yin-yang theory to this Confucian idea of obedience. The primary scholar to change Confucianism was called Dong Zhongshu. Dong Zhongshu moved women from their complementary position to an inferior position. He said that although yin and yang were complementary, because yin was dark and passive and weak, it was always inferior to yang. He even went so far as to say that the yin component of any relationship could not have any accomplishment in and of itself. Thus, if a woman had a success, it was solely because of and for the sake of her father or her husband or her son. Prior to Dong Zhongshu, women were not associated with yin, but afterwards, they were seen as belonging to the earth, belonging to the lower physical realm, belonging to dirty blood, belonging to the darkness, and being far inferior to men.

Over the centuries, each wave of Neo-Confucianism seems to have pushed women further and further down beneath men. During the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE), China implemented a civil service examination system, and the ideal for men changed. Prior to the Tang, an ideal man was adept at warfare and strong enough to till the fields. After the civil service exam became the way for any male in China to obtain an official post, the ideal man was literate and a good writer. Men proved their worth intellectually and spiritually by writing prose and poetry, composing and playing music, painting, excelling at chess, and showing prowess in other mental feats. Such talents fit in with the spiritual side of yang. By the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE) women began binding their feet as a way of proving their feminine yin virtue. Since men were excelling spiritually, women had to excel physically, not by being strong (because yin is weak), but by showing their ability and self-discipline in enduring pain. The earliest forms of foot-binding did not break the bones as thoroughly as later forms in the Ming and Qing dynasties, but they were still painful. But these two lines of gendered excellence continued to develop until the late imperial era in the 16th through 19th centuries. In this period, men were expected to express literary talent as a manifestation of their yang spirit. Women were expected to express their virtue as a manifestation of yin by enduring physical hardship through foot-binding, child-bearing, service to family, suicide in the face of rape, and not remarrying as widows. Although foot-binding has been abolished, the other expectations live on among many Chinese families.

Girls are taught from a very young age that they must endure physical deprivations. Women play one-upmanship with stories of how much pain they have borne or how many physical hardships they have suffered. Anthropologists interviewing some of the few remaining women with bound feet learned that these women took pride that their ability to endure pain was proven by their “tiny lotuses.” Many Chinese women today have a similar mindset concerning the trials they bear for the sake of their families. The ability to endure all pain and bravely soldier on is the highest form of virtue for these women. Ideas and expressions of the spirit belong to the realm of men; physical pain and material tribulations are the milieu of virtuous Chinese women.

Road Trip to the Olympic Peninsula

2010-07-31T22:13:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in the last post, the monetary gifts we got from Chinese friends at church gave us enough money to take Ma and Pa on a short road trip to the Olympic Peninsula before they left to return to Taiwan. Yuni was not really better, but he wanted to show his parents something in America that they hadn’t seen before. So we all piled into our huge station wagon. We had to put up the seats in the back cargo area, but there was still a little room for our overnight bags. Pa and one of the twins sat in the rear seats. Ma sat in the regular back seat with the other twin and Peace. Yuni and I were in front.

Yuni drove at the beginning. We went down to the Seattle waterfront and caught a ferry to Port Angeles. From there we went into the Olympic Mountains and took a short hike along an alpine meadow. The kids fed their snacks to the chipmunks. We could not go far because of my bad knee, Yuni’s health, and the kids’ young age, but we did have a lot of fun. When we came down from the mountains, we went to a wild animal park. It was similar to the one in Taiwan. You drove your car through, and the animals were just roaming. But all these animals were North American animals. There were bison, elk, and deer. The cougars and pumas were in cages that you walked past like a regular zoo. When you drove into the compound with the deer and bison, you were given a loaf of whole wheat bread to feed the animals. Pa and Love were in the back, and they kept throwing bits of bread out as we drove, until we were surrounded by a whole herd of bison, elk, and deer. One bison even stuck his head in the front window looking for more food. I quickly tried to put the window up, and I almost caught his black tongue as he was trying to lick the loaf of bread out of my lap. It was quite exciting. We were glad to have such a large, sturdy car.

We stayed in a motel along the Pacific Ocean. It was one of those old hotels from the forties or fifties. Each unit was a little cabin overlooking the beach. After unloading the car, we went and played on the beach for awhile. The next day we drove into the rain forest and took another short hike. Yuni had been doing all the driving, and of course, he had been walking along like nothing was wrong. After a day and a half of steady activity, pain hit. He could no longer drive, and we had to get back because Pa and Ma were leaving the next afternoon. Yuni slumped in the passenger side of the front seat, and I drove home down around the end of Puget Sound so that we could just keep moving. It was a two or three hour drive, and we made it home fine. But by the time we got everything upstairs from the car, my right knee (the one with bone scraping bone) was three times its usual size. I couldn’t put any weight on it. I had to sit on the living room couch with an ice bag, while Ma tried to figure out how to cook with an electric frying pan instead of a wok. I couldn’t walk for another two days. I missed seeing Pa and Ma off at the airport. Yuni took them, since it was late at night, and I stayed home with the girls. My knees were considered pre-existing conditions when we got our insurance, and so they would not be covered for another 21 months. We did not have enough money for me to see a doctor, so I just sat with my leg elevated, alternating hot and cold packs.

Later, a friend from church, who was mainland Chinese and doing post-doctoral studies at the University of Washington’s medical school, found me another mainland Chinese friend who was an orthopedist. I bartered editing services on the orthopedist’s research paper in return for a knee examination, but we couldn’t afford an x-ray. The doctor said that my bones must have scraped each other as I was pressing the accelerator and the brake, and after several hours, the nerves inside the bones had become inflamed. He offered me pain killers that he had brought from China. I did not take him up on that, but I did take a supply of sulfa antibiotics that I could use to self-medicate when my post-Peace infections flared up. I kept myself supplied with antibiotics from mainland China for several years as word went around among the mainland Chinese students that I would edit their papers for a combination of cash and barter, depending on our needs and their resources. It seemed like a good idea at the time because we didn’t need to worry about having Yuni miss work to get me to the doctor. We didn’t have to scrape together cash for the deductible, either. Later, I had a physical with a blood test, and the doctor told me that my liver function was low for a woman of my age. We went through the list of things I might have done to damage my liver, and I learned to my chagrin that there is a limit to how much sulfa you can take in your life time. Fortunately, my Chinese connections were able to recommend a good herbalist, who was also open to barter, so I began taking herbs for those complaints.

This is a very common pattern among working-class Chinese families. The husband and children go to the doctor whenever they get sick, but the mother is expected to make do with home remedies, especially when the children are small. Mothers are also expected to eat mainly leftovers and even partially spoiled food. Yet, the women work hard from dawn to well past dark doing both work for income and all the housework. My sisters-in-law and several of my friends all ruined their health this way. It didn’t work out too well for me, either.

Breadwinner Down

2010-07-21T22:29:00.000-07:00

Yuni had what we thought was a problem with kidney stones. He had had it in Taiwan; some mornings he would wake up with excruciating pain in his kidneys. He would roll around in agony, but then he would get up and walk downstairs, go to work, and by evening when he went to a clinic, the pain would be gone. He had scores of x-rays taken, but the doctors found nothing. They told him that he had probably formed and passed a kidney stone.

He had a few attacks after we arrived in the US, but they occurred on work days, and he didn’t feel that we could afford it if he missed the opportunity to make money. Fortunately, he was working in a union shop, and after three months, we had very good health insurance. It included free check-ups and immunizations for the girls, and we only had a $500 deductible. On Memorial Day weekend, Yuni had another attack. It was a Sunday morning, so he did not need to go to work. He just lay in bed screaming. Finally, I called some church friends to see if they would take the kids to Sunday school while I took Yuni to the emergency room. The hospital closest to our home was a teaching hospital called Harborview. As we lived in the poorer section of town, it was full to the bursting with sick babies on a Sunday morning. After Yuni got up and walked a little, his pain subsided. We waited and waited with him lying on a bed, and finally we were seen by a student doctor. At first, he was going to discharge us quickly because the x-ray again showed nothing, but while he was waiting for the supervising instructor to come sign the discharge form, Yuni went into an attack again. The instructor berated the student for wanting to charge a patient in so much pain and ordered Yuni to take an ultrasound.

The line for the ultrasound was not very long, and within a short time, the entire class of ultrasound technologists were crowded around the screen showing Yuni’s kidneys. They could not tell me what they were looking at, but they did say it might be serious. I was freaking out. Back in the emergency room, the supervising teacher saw the film and told me that Yuni’s left kidney was blown up like a balloon. He asked a number of pointed questions as to how long the pains had been occurring. After finding out that this was a ten-year ailment, he said that the left kidney might not have any function left at all. He actually called in the head of the urology department to consult as to whether or not Yuni needed to be hospitalized immediately. The answer was no, but we needed to see the urology team on Tuesday and have some more tests done all that next week.

I was able to find friends to take the girls, but it was a very nerve-wracking time. Tuesday came around, and the urologist with his band of students told us that Yuni would definitely need surgery. He might even need his kidney replaced. We went home to look at the bank account because we did not know what we were going to do. Yuni was not working, so there was no income. I needed to accompany him to the hospital to translate because Mandarin translators were not as common then as they are now. We had fulfilled our deductible, but we still had to reach a threshold of $3000 before we had 100% coverage, and we did not have enough savings to live on AND to pay the medical bills. Yuni called his parents and told them what was going on. They arrived the next week with some money and to take care of the kids.

We did get some good news. The kidney still had 90% of its function, so the urologists said things were hopeful. They thought Yuni had a congenitally small tube that made it difficult for the kidney to drain. They were planning to go in and put in a stint. So plans were made; we called Yuni’s work. They would keep his job, but since he had only been there for 8 months, he did not have enough sick days or paid vacation to cover all the time off he would need to take. Pa and Ma brought a lot of money for them, but they had no idea of the relative costs of living. It was enough to support the family including them for the month Yuni would be off work, but it was not going to be enough to cover the medical bills. Yuni did not want to ask my family because he thought it would be a huge loss of face for him and Pa. I was saying lots of fervent prayers.

The surgery took much longer than the surgeons had expected. Ma and Pa and the kids and I were all sitting in the waiting room outside the operating rooms. Finally, the head of the urology department came out to tell us what had happened. When they got Yuni opened up, they discovered that the problem was not a narrow ureter; instead, Yuni had an extra branch off his aorta that pushed the opening in the kidney shut when he lay in certain positions. When he got up and moved around, things would shift a little, and the kidney would drain. This was why he had so much kidney function left, and it was also why the doctors had never found any traces of crystal when they thought he had kidney stones. If the surgeons had even nicked the branches of the aorta going into his kidney, he could have bled out, so they had taken the time to proceed slowly and carefully. That condition is congenital, and it only occurs in one out of every one hundred thousand patients. Of course, the surgery was too exciting to miss, and all surgical students had been called in to observe the condition that most doctors only get to read about. The surgeon himself had never performed the procedure, so he had taken extra care to do it right in front of all the surgical students. This was a good thing for the medical school, the students, and Yuni, but they forgot to tell us it was going to take an extra hour or so. Ma and I were almost crazy with worry.

To fix the problem, the doctors had to carefully detach the tube from the kidney and reattach it at a lower point away from both branches of his aorta. Then they had to be sure that everything was stitched up tightly so that nothing would leak in his body. They also had to cut around to approach it from behind, so he wound up with a huge 9 inch scar across his mid-section. He remained in the hospital for a whole week while the doctors made sure that everything was healing properly.

Every day that week, I would make breakfast and then leave the kids with Ma and Pa. I drove the car to the hospital and rushed in to get there before the morning rounds. Yuni did not speak enough English to answer the doctors’ questions. Every day, he had the largest contingent of doctors looking at him. He was quite the celebrity. The hospital was a mile and a half from our house, so Ma and Pa would walk the kids down for visiting hours at 4 pm. They would stay and watch Yuni eat his dinner at 5, and then I would drive everyone home about 6:30 or 7 when visiting hours were over. When we got home, I made dinner and went to bed pretty early. That week went by very swiftly.

Yuni was not allowed to work for three weeks. He stayed home resting and chatting with Ma and Pa for about ten days before he was totally bored out of his skull. We did have lots of visitors from church, and even though I had not spoken with them about our need, their generosity was an answer to all my prayers. We were short $2000 for the medical bills plus the expenses we would have for the two weeks after Yuni went back to work and before he got his first check. People from church kept giving us gift cards with cash inside. One person gave us an envelope with $2000, just enough to pay off all the outstanding medical bills. The rest of the money added up to enough for our living and enough to take Pa and Ma on a weekend trip to the Olympic Peninsula and rain forest.

As I watch the news these days, I sometimes wonder what some of our lawmakers are thinking when they accuse the unemployed of laziness or when people get so upset about unions. I am so thankful Yuni had the union job with the union health insurance. We still didn’t have enough money by ourselves, but it was much easier to come up with just a few thousand dollars for medical expenses and groceries and rent than it would have been to have come up with the $100,000 that the surgery alone had cost, much less the tests. We were not extravagant; we were working class poor. We still needed help from the food bank most weeks, and with that help we were able to save a few hundred dollars here and there, but we had not had time to build up much savings. I was very disappointed this year when the health care bill was passed without a public option for low-income people. We were so lucky to have had that health insurance because later in the calendar year of Yuni’s surgery, Truth stepped on a wasp and her foot swelled up to the size of a football. Then Peace got an intestinal flu and needed to go to the emergency room three times for IVs to prevent dehydration. Because we had good health insurance, our family was able to get through those small emergencies without any problem. The union used economies of scale to negotiate directly with the insurance company to get good coverage that was great for its members and cheaper for the employers. A public option could do the same thing on a national level.

Favorite Field Trip #1: Woodland Park Zoo

2010-07-08T21:27:00.000-07:00

The girls were loaded down with loot that holiday season. They got cute designer dresses and toys and books and everything children could want and then some. My dad even bought them a tree-house slide for the playroom so they wouldn’t get bored on rainy days. That winter my family, Yuni and I began a running argument about the American tradition of giving presents. Chinese give gifts of money or solid gold jewelry to close relatives; the only non-valuable items they give are food items to more distant relatives and friends. My family wanted Christmas wish lists from all of us, and Yuni just asked for money. My family members wanted to give us something more “personal.” I kept trying to explain the cultural differences, but I was the daughter on one side and the wife on the other, so I was expected to whole-heartedly agree with both sides and convert the others. In the end, my family compromised by buying jigsaw puzzles or work shirts for Yuni to unwrap and then giving him gift certificates to hardware stores so he could purchase tools for his weekend jobs. After many years, my family understood the Chinese culture better and started giving us checks. By then, Yuni kind of liked opening presents and became nostalgic for having something to open. But that first year, he came home fuming that we had not gotten cash or anything to eat. I guess he felt that my family did not think him a close family member. I got sweatshirts and family passes to the zoo, the science center, the aquarium, and the children’s museum. The girls and I were all ready for spring.

Our apartment was right on the bus line. We went downstairs and walked a few yards to the bus stop. One adult fare took us all over. Ma Liu had made me an extra-long cloth carrier for the girls. When they were little, I took more wraps at the bottom; as they grew, they had less cloth holding them to me. The carrier was just a strip of checkered cloth that was several yards long. I looped it under the girl’s arms, swung her up on my back, crossed the ends in front with one short and one long, then I wrapped the long end around and around my waist under the girl’s rear making a sling for her to sit in. I tied off the ends in a knot, and she was secure. My grandma had given me a backpack for Christmas to take on our excursions. The carrier was always in the bottom of my pack, and whenever a girl got too tired to walk, I would put her on my back for a short nap. I couldn’t carry any one of them for too long because of my bad knee, but we managed.

One of our favorite places was the Woodland Park Zoo. It has natural-like habitats for its animals, and we would stand for hours in front of the cages watching the animals engaged in normal behaviors. The keepers there did their best to give the animals their food in ways that required them to forage like they would in the wild. The elephants had to walk through their pen to find bales of hay in the outside yard. The gorillas had to pick food off tree branches. On Thursdays, the keepers poured live fish in for the penguins, and they had to catch them. One of the perks of having membership cards was access to members-only classes. We got to go behind the scenes at the reptile house and the feline house. We learned about the elephants and different eco-zones. We also learned about raptors and alligators and many other exotic species.

The bus ride itself was an adventure. We would take the bus down into the International District and then transfer at Pioneer Square. Sometimes on the way back, if we had just missed the bus up the hill, we would walk around old town Seattle and visit the Klondike Gold Rush National Park Museum. (I think it’s the country’s smallest national park.) There is a trough in the museum where you can pan for gold and then put it back when you are done. The girls loved to play with it.

Many of Seattle’s homeless would congregate at the gazebo in Pioneer Square right near our bus stop. There I was with my three little racially mixed children, all of whom were under the age of three. A couple of times the panhandlers gave each of the kids money and said: “Listen to your mama. Stay in school. Don’t wind up on the streets like us.” They were all very nice to us. It was an interesting experience.

In general, our life was really fun. We didn’t have much money, but with the annual passes, we could go to interesting places several times a week for the cost of one adult bus fare. On the Saturdays that Yuni did not have work, he would drive us to one of our haunts, and the whole family would play.

The Joy of Great-Grandkids

2010-06-27T22:09:00.000-07:00

One of the best things for us in America was the fact that all four of my grandparents plus my dad, brother, aunt, and uncle were all living in the Seattle area, and we had the only little kids. Every weekend we would go to my maternal grandparents’ condo near the University of Washington. My grandfather had cancer, and they had in-home care. The helpers were co-opted into cooking and preparing for our visits. My grandmother’s cleaning lady/household assistant would take her shopping every week, and she always bought the stores out of the kids’ favorite foods: grapes and chocolate-covered marshmallow cookies. We usually had a large, hot lunch with my grandparents either Saturday at noon or Sunday after church.

My grandmother also bought the stores out of educational toys for the kids to play with at her house. We were not allowed to duplicate those toys at our house; they were only for trips to the condo. She bought a Thomas the Tank Engine train, building blocks in a wooden cart, and numerous other things. And she always had a stash of children’s books that she and my grandpa could read to the kids.

My grandparents were not really interested in talking to Yuni and me. They just wanted to watch the kids busily playing on the carpet in front of them. Yuni would frequently nap on the couch until it was time for our meal. When he was rested enough, he would get down on the floor and play with the kids’ toys, too, because, as he said, when he was growing up, his family had been too poor to have toys for the kids.

Every other Sunday we crossed the floating bridge from Seattle to Bellevue. We went to church near my dad’s condo and then visited him and his parents. We would eat at dad’s condo or have a picnic in a nearby park, and then we would go to the nursing home/apartment complex where Dad’s parents lived. Dad’s mother was in the apartment part, and her place was stuffed with toys for the kids, too. She bought the stores out of stuffed animals and dolls. She also specialized in Disney videos for the kids. They would watch Beauty and the Beast or Little Mermaid or Cinderella. The kids would sing and dance to their favorite songs. During visiting hours, we would go downstairs to the nursing home to see my dad’s father, who had suffered a stroke and was in a wheelchair. There were no toys on that floor, but the kids would sit on Gramps’s lap or turn somersaults on the floor. Their visits were a real highlight for him.

Birthdays and holidays were celebrated several times over with the two sets of grandparents and great-grandparents and aunts and uncles. The kids got loads of nice clothes and toys and gifts. They loved visiting the grandparents, and the grandparents loved interacting with them.

We had a number of adventures while visiting the old folks. The Sunday after the snowstorm, we were crossing the I-90 floating bridge on our regular visit to Bellevue. All of a sudden we noticed that the old floating bridge, which was undergoing repairs in its pontoons, was acting strangely. There had been lots of rain that had finally melted the snow, but for some reason the hatch covers of the pontoons under repair had been left open over the weekend. The chambers had filled with water, and the bridge was starting to sink. We watched as section after section began to settle to the bottom taking graders and tractors and cranes with it. The kids, of course, got very excited watching this from their car seats. Yuni was afraid that the currents of the sinking bridge would affect the new bridge that we were driving on. He hit the gas, and we sped out of there many miles over the speed limit. We got safely to the other side. At noon that day, we watched the whole thing again on the news while we were eating lunch at Dad’s place.

The floating bridge in 1940

Photo by Jet Lowe

HAER: Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Floating Bridge, Spanning Lake Washington at I-90, Seattle, King County, WA

The day after our trip to see the grandparents

Phil H. Webber/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Then we got to watch repairs from our kitchen window

www.djc.com/special/century/general.html

Another time, we were trying to get into my mother’s parents’ condo when all of Seattle seemed to be going to a Huskies football game. We were trying to turn left across two lanes of traffic without a light. The car in one lane waved us over, and there seemed to be no cars in the far right lane. We zipped across, but just as we were getting into the driveway, we got hit by a car speeding down the right lane, and our muffler got knocked off. No one was hurt, but we made an incident report to the police. In the end, it was our fault because we had been turning left. Yuni insisted that we go to traffic court and argue about it because he was sure that the other car was driving outside the lane on the shoulder. Unfortunately, we couldn’t prove anything and because we had been going uphill, the policeman found our muffler just inside the edge of the lane of traffic. It was a lesson for Yuni about how the US court system works. And I got my first taste of interpreting in court. We also learned the value of car seats for children.

Taking the kids to spend time with the great-grandparents was a big part of our lives for many, many years. Even after the great-grandfathers passed away, we continued making regular visits to the great-grandmothers. It seems like such a small thing, but I think it was very important. And I think it is an experience that many Americans miss because our culture does not like old. When I was growing up, I knew five of my eight great-grandparents. One of my great-grandmothers was the first white child born in O’Neill County, Nebraska. She had been conceived in Ireland and born here in the USA. One of her younger sisters was kidnapped by Indians. She was the eldest of 13 children, and she helped her father train horses. She and one of her sisters ran a boarding house for miners in Butte, Montana. Later, she was a seamstress and a cook at a health camp for children with tuberculosis. She lived to the age of 101 ½. She passed away when I was 16. She made complete formal wardrobes for all my dolls, taught me to bake bread, and encouraged me to learn songs in Gaelic from the nuns at school. My relationship with my great-grandparents and my grandparents was one of the best things in my life. I wanted that same blessing for my children.

Fortunately, my Chinese husband and father-in-law agreed with me that it was important for both the old folks and the young folks to forge that bond. Pa insisted that we come to America when he heard both my grandfathers were infirm. And once we were here, Yuni willingly drove us to spend time with the old folks every week. It was boring for him, but it was a value he agreed that the kids should have. It is hard to describe the benefits of being close to grandparents and great-grandparents. Every move a great-grandchild makes is a miracle to his or her great-grandparents. There is no judging, no pressure to perform, no anger at mistakes. The great-grandparents are simply filled with wonder that they have lived to see progeny of the fourth generation, and they are more than willing to wholly and absolutely dote on the children. Love once told me that the time spent with great-grandparents as a toddler and preschooler made her feel safe because she knew her family had a stable history. It also made her feel special, and it gave her an interest in history because she knew people who were old, and she wanted to know what life had been like when her great-grandparents were little kids.

I am not sure whose joy is greater in this relationship, that of the great-grandparents or that of the great-grandkids.

Congratulations Graduates!!

2010-06-12T21:44:00.000-07:00

This has been a big year for our family. Truth, Love, and Peace are all grown up and just graduated from college.

On May 14, 2010 at 11:00 am, Peace received a Bachelor's of Business Administration in Information Systems from USC's Marshall School of Business.

Then she had a luau party with a roasted pig and a bounce house in the backyard of the place where she has been living. She gleefully noted that this was a case of the last coming first and the first coming last. She will be visiting Europe before coming back to LA to start the orientation for her new job managing a kitchen for Houston's restaurant.

On May 22, 2010 at 12:15 pm Love received a Bachelor of Arts in English Language Studies from San Francisco State University.

She has long been a lover of penguins, so a friend in the Art Department painted a penguin on her cap. It showed up well on the huge TV. The entire student body at San Francisco State graduated in one long ceremony due to budget cuts. If you didn't have something on your mortar board, your family didn't really know which one you were. Love made sure that her family could see her clearly. She will be working with her dad and living at home for the rest of the summer before attending a two-year ministry training program in church service and Bible. After that she hopes to get a Master's in Education and teach high school English.

Afterwards, Love had a barbecue with her friends in the park near her house in San Francisco.

Truth bought silly string to get Peace, but it was confiscated at USC, so it reappeared in the park in San Francisco where everything goes...

On June 12, 2010 at 1:00 pm Truth received a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics (concentrations: Italian, Chinese, and a certificate in teaching ESL) from UCLA.

She graduated summa cum laude.

But her true ambition is to be a hobo. She will be taking a summer module in Architectural Design before leaving on a trip to Beijing. From there she will go to Mongolia with a friend to ride ponies. Then she will visit relatives in Taiwan and friends in New Zealand. Then she will go on to teach English for a few months to AIDS orphans in Tanzania. On the way home she will visit Morocco and some other African countries and then stop in Hawaii to see a friend. Her mortar board sported a packed suitcase:

Her cheering section was the loudest, so they had to go incognito.

And of course, the previously silly stringed got their revenge with interest...

Congratulations to my babies!!! I'm really proud of you!!

Love always, Mom

First Snow

2010-06-06T11:31:00.000-07:00

Love in a box in the toy room

It seems that my posts have been getting darker as time goes on, but I am trying to record as best I can what we were going through, not because we are anything special, but because we aren’t. I am unique in that I experienced being an immigrant to my own country, and I experienced things that most people of my race, class, and educational background do not experience. Moreover, because my grandmothers, in particular, were worried about my grandfathers’ prestige if we “went on the dole,” our family did this without any social services. Later, in my translation business, I helped newly arrived families with small children “go on the dole;” to be honest, they had a much easier time of it than we did even though they had NO family here. I want to put our experience out there as an example.

America today is in a time period when a certain sector of the populace wants to abolish all social services. Times are tough, and instead of uniting, we seem to be losing that American sense of uniting for the common good that we saw in the aftermath of 9/11 and at other times in our history. As resources get tighter, we are retreating into “tribalism” and trying to shut out all who are different. I feel that this is a huge mistake.

During the Great Depression, the farmers’ march on Washington and the veterans’ encampment on the Capitol Mall put our leaders into fear of riots by the masses. FDR enacted legislation that laid the foundation for our social safety net, and we began several decades of domestic policy designed to increase the percentage of households in the middle class. The wealthy were taxed progressively, and that money was spent to ensure that hunger would not be a problem. Because we are a diverse nation, “tribalism” is particularly dangerous. When the race riots erupted in the 1960’s, Lyndon Johnson launched his Great Society program to bring more minorities into the middle class. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs states it clearly: when people are hungry they do not have the wherewithal to be moral. Other countries that do not have our safety net (tattered as it has become by the past thirty years of political policy favoring the wealthy and increasing income disparity), are already seeing riots by hungry workers who acutely feel their exploitation when they see the wealthy on TV. Thailand comes to mind as an example, as does rural China where farmers and factory workers riot frequently, although the news does not get into the mainstream media. Last year, even chicken farmers in Arkansas, USA rioted because their livelihood was being destroyed by a large polluting corporation. They were put down forcibly by the National Guard.

The Moral Economy of the Peasant by James Scott discusses the mindset of people standing up to their economic necks in water and how they react when a swamping wave comes along. Fanshen by William Hinton describes the brutality of peasant life in China during the early twentieth century that led to revolution upon revolution. That brutality seems to be returning, not only to China, but to the rest of the world. Building a wall won’t keep people out; it’s too late. Globalization has already occurred. And so, part of the reason why I record Yuni’s frustrations and anger as we tried to get a toe-hold, is because he is one of many. Most of our immigrant friends felt the same way and experienced similar discouragements. By dismantling the middle class or by trying to restrict middle-class status to one race or group, we as a society are playing with fire. The lessons from history proving this fact are numerous.

Winter came early our first year in America. One day in mid-November, the skies were grey and it looked like rain. But the temperature dropped. By noon, the ground was covered with a dusting of snow. The snow began to fall thicker and faster, and around two, Yuni called from work to say that the owners were sending everyone home. He thought it might take a little bit longer than usual, but he was confident he would be home for dinner. He was quite excited because he had only seen light dustings of snow on the very tops of Taiwan’s highest peaks. There had not even been enough snow to make a snowman and now he was having snowball fights with his friends in the parking lot. I reminded him not to get wet and chilled.

Since he was coming home before the snow got too deep, I was not too worried. I thought that the freeways would be clear from all the traffic. I bundled the girls into their padded cotton suits with many layers underneath, and we went out into the yard to play. The snow was about three inches deep. The girls had lots of fun making snow angels and running in the cold white stuff. Their Chinese suits were not waterproof, so we could only stay out for about 20 minutes. I got them into a hot bath and then we had some hot cocoa and snacks. They went in to watch Sesame Street and draw pictures while I started dinner.

I thought that Yuni would probably be home by 5 at the latest; that would give him three hours to cover a 40 minute drive. I also thought that he would be cold, so I made a chicken soup and other warming foods—veggies stir-fried in bacon grease and another meat dish in addition to the chicken in the soup. Yuni had not taken his warmest coat with him. He thought it was too much trouble. I was very worried that he would get chilled, but at least he had gloves. He didn’t even have a warm hat, yet.

5:00 came and went. I kept the dishes warming on the stove and in the electric fry-pan. By 6 the girls were hungry, so I fed them. At 7, I ate myself. Now I was really worried. The snow was falling thicker and faster. We stopped watching children’s shows and turned to the news. Some areas already had a foot accumulation. At 8, I called the police to ask if there had been an accident involving a non-English-speaking Chinese man in a huge, brown Town-and-Country station wagon. They took my number and thirty minutes later called back to say that there had been several accidents, but none involving anyone answering that description. At 10, I put the girls to bed and wondered what to do. A little before midnight, I heard stomping on the stairs as Yuni came in. His nose was totally red, but he was sweating. He took a warm bath and got out of his wet clothes. Then he told me his story while he ate. When he was bathing, I went down to look for the car. It was not there. I was very worried, but he insisted on telling it like a folk tale and didn’t let me know what had happened to the car until the very end.

He said:

“I started out on Highway 520 to go across the new floating bridge, but there is a hill as you come out of Redmond into Bellevue. Several cars had spun out there. I braked too quickly, and I spun out, too. I was stuck. I couldn’t get the car to move in reverse. I was right near the on-ramp from Marymoor Park. The man in the car in front of me told me that my car was heavy enough. He helped me push my front around so the car was pointing down the on-ramp. Then I inched my way down, driving the wrong way. I got onto the road that goes by Lake Sammamish and went to get gas first. It was lucky that I did that. Then I remembered that when my parents were here, your dad took us by this lake and along to I-90, so I could get to the other floating bridge and come home. I thought it looked like the same road, but it was hard to see with all the snow. I drove along, and finally I found it. The on-ramp there to I-90 is all downhill. Once I got onto the freeway, the road was pretty clear, but there were so many cars. When I was almost across Lake Washington, and I could see our house on top of the hill, traffic stopped still. I stayed stuck in traffic from 6:00 to 10:30. Finally, traffic began to move. Fortunately, our car is big and heavy; many people with little cars could not get up hills, even with those funny things wrapped on their tires (chains). I took the long way around, so I did not have to go up any steep hills. When I got to that green bridge to come onto Beacon Hill, I saw that a house had burned down. It was still smoldering. The fire trucks had sprayed water all over the road. It was about 11, and the night air had turned the water to ice. My car started sliding down a side street, but I saw the entrance to a parking lot. I didn’t want to leave our only car on the road because cars were getting buried in snow and then hit by other cars. There is an old folks’ home there, you know? So I slid into their parking lot and found a place to park. I didn’t do a good job parking, but at least the car is not on the street. Then I started to walk. The sidewalk was all covered with ice from the water. I had to crawl across the bridge because I could not stand up. It was a little better when I got across until I came to the steep part right before our house. I would walk a few steps and then slide down. Then I’d walk a few more steps and slide back some. But I knew I had to get home. So I crawled when I couldn’t walk, and I made it. Now I’m really tired.”

Yuni’s company was closed again the next day. The whole family trooped down to the car, and then we went down to buy bags of sand and chains. We put the sand in the cargo carrier to weight it, and we put the chains on in the parking lot. Yuni had figured out how to drive in snow the night before. He was already quite good at navigating. We also went to K-Mart to shop for snowsuits for the kids. We couldn’t afford any, but after we got home my dad called to say that he was coming to see us. Lo and behold, he brought three snowsuits for the girls and a warm hat with earflaps for Yuni. I got a nice hat, too.

Life as a FOB

2010-05-31T00:04:00.000-07:00

“FOB” in the Chinese-American community means “fresh off the boat.” It refers to people who have just come from Taiwan or China and who still have not gotten the hang of American life. The kids dress like kids in Asia. They wear their hair differently. They do not usually speak any English. In short, they do not fit into American life outside of Chinatown.

That first winter we were really FOBs. Children’s clothes are cheap in Taiwan, so we had stocked up on summer and winter clothes in varying sizes for the next year or so. Taiwanese kids wore pajama-like outfits in summer and sweats in winter. They also wore lots of long underwear. Our kids were no exception. Fortunately, the kids were so young, so they were not faced with ridicule in school. We could not have afforded to buy the jeans and shirts they would have needed to fit in with American kids. Instead, they wore their Taiwanese outfits happily, oblivious to the fact that they looked like outsiders.

We did need to buy winter coats and boots for them because it rains and snows in Seattle. We did not really have enough money after buying the car and getting ourselves into the apartment. The first few months were really tight until after Yuni had his six-month performance review and got a raise to more than $9 per hour. Fortunately, my brother Tom knew how to shop at thrift stores. He taught us about red tag specials and which days were half price at Goodwill and Value Village and St. Vincent de Paul’s. We soon learned where all the thrift stores were and which ones had the best stuff. We got the kids’ coats and boots at the thrift stores for pretty cheap. We also found dishes to complete our kitchen and a desk. We found an old hide-a-bed couch for Yuni and me to sleep on. It was listed for $100 in the Pennysaver ads. We drove our monster station wagon down to purchase it. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.

We were living in the second story of an old house on Beacon Hill. The house had been divided into three apartments. There was a studio in the basement next to the laundry room. A family of Vietnamese-Chinese lived on the first floor. They had lived in California, but the husband was shot when he was collecting rent at the apartments he managed. He was permanently disabled and had a permanent pass to the food bank. The parents both spoke Mandarin, and they were quite a help to us. The first week were lived there, the husband took Yuni to the food bank. We were eligible for food there until he began earning $8.50 per hour. Then we didn’t have quite enough to make ends meet, but we were making too much to qualify for that assistance. Our neighbor would leave groceries on our porch twice a week because his wife and sons were working, and they were able to afford better food. The sons were students and only worked sporadically, so our neighbor went several times a week to maintain his eligibility at the food bank. When their family had money, his children wanted to eat fresh food, instead of the day-old fare that came from the food bank. We were just happy to have free food.

The wife downstairs took Yuni with her to the local high school to register for adult English classes. He went three nights a week at the high school for several quarters. Eventually, he got tired of studying with so many old Chinese-speaking women. They were in the school for socialization more than education. The teachers mainly taught vocabulary for going shopping or ordering food in a restaurant. Yuni was going to try to go back to school, so he wanted a more stringent course of study. After nine months, his teacher suggested that he transfer to the free English courses at the community college. They included reading and writing in the curriculum. He did another year of English at the community college and got pretty good with his English.

We planned to keep the children trilingual, so Yuni only spoke to them in Hakka. He and I only spoke Mandarin, and I only spoke to them in English. For the first six months or so, the children really resisted all the English in their environment. When we went to church, they refused to stay alone in the nursery without me. One time Yuni and I tried to go out with a friend to see about a better job for Yuni. We left the girls with my dad, but Love cried so hard for the entire time we were gone that she vomited grape juice all over Dad’s white carpet. They did not like being on the street in areas where there were mainly white people. They felt most comfortable in the parks near the international district with a diverse population of users.

The month at my dad’s place also taught us that Yuni got an upset stomach from too much American food. He could not digest too much meat, and raw salad made him sick. Since he was the only one working, we decided to keep to a Chinese diet with American food on the weekends when we went to visit my grandparents and father. But our stove was old and electric. It did not really get hot enough for stir-fry, and we could not afford to buy a wok. One of my parents’ friends gave us an electric frying pan. I learned to fake stir-fry in it. None of the vegetables that we could afford were quite the same as the ones in Taiwan. The markets in the international district sold imported Asian vegetables, but after buying diapers and formula for the kids, we could not afford designer veggies. Every night I made enough Chinese food and rice for dinner with leftovers for Yuni to take lunch and for the kids and me to eat for lunch. Fortunately, rice is cheap. Including diapers, formula, and cleaning supplies, our budget only allowed us to spend $80 per week for groceries. If Yuni got extra overtime hours, we could splurge and get a roasted duck when they were on special. Those were our favorite dinners.

My family was not familiar with the way social services worked. My dad had sponsored us and signed a form stating that no one in the family would become a charge on the state or Yuni might not be able to get citizenship. A number of my relatives were also concerned about how it would look for my grandfathers’ great-grandchildren to be on the dole. I was warned by several different people that we should not apply for public assistance. I didn’t realize that the girls and I were eligible no matter what because we were all US citizens. So I didn’t apply. We just made do with what we had. Yuni also insisted that we find some way to save a few hundred dollars every month. His goal was $500 per month into savings. He worked any overtime that he could get; he also did weekend jobs of concrete or tile for my relatives, their friends, and people from church. I began to get tutoring and translation clients who would come to our home. The kids played in one room while I worked in another.

Every Sunday, we would go to church in the morning, have lunch with my relatives at noon, and then go to one of Seattle’s many parks in the afternoon to play with the kids. As my tutoring and translation schedule became fixed, I would take the girls on the bus, and we would ride all over Seattle to free places like the Pike Place Market or the Waterfront Park or Pioneer Square. We usually went on excursions a couple of times a week. My family gave the kids lots of toys and books, so they had plenty to do when it was too rainy to go outside. Truth remembers this as her idyllic, happy childhood.

We did not have much in material possessions. Our upstairs apartment consisted of three bedrooms, a large hall, a fourth room that had been converted into a kitchen, and a bathroom with no shower. We used one bedroom as a study; it had our thrift store desk and a chair from my grandmother’s house. We put the love-seat hide-a-bed in the second bedroom with two old armchairs from my grandmother’s living room. That closet was full of toys, making that room the guest room and playroom. The largest room had a walk-in closet with a window and no curtain rod. We put an old chest of drawers from my grandmother in there and the kids slept on a blanket on the floor. Yuni and I had the hide-a-bed in the room next to the closet room plus an old mosaic table that my mom had made when I was a toddler with my brother’s old TV. By day we used the room as a bedroom, and at night Yuni and I slept there. That room adjoined the bathroom. The kitchen was across the hall from the toy room. It had a large picture window with a view of Lake Washington and the Mercer Island floating bridge. In the summers during Sea Fair, the Blue Angels would fly over the lake between heats of the hydroplane races, and they would make their turns right in front of our window. It was quite exciting. We put my grandmother’s old card table and five chairs at the window. Then there was a refrigerator, a stove, and cupboards with counter and sink on each of the remaining walls.

Despite the spartan existence, I have to agree with Truth that our life was really happy. We did a lot together as a family. We all pulled together for the common good, and we were so busy learning the ropes of our new life that we did not have time to be sad or upset or depressed. Even though we were tight, our bills were always paid on time, and we never went hungry thanks to our neighbor’s regular offerings from the food bank. And we did manage to save a little every month. It was a good feeling to owe no one and to be laying the foundation of a nest egg. But on some level, I think Yuni was hurt and disappointed that my family did not do more for us. I think he was expecting to be given a job or to be set up in business. But there are great differences between the American way of doing things and the Chinese way of doing them. I tried to explain, but the things I knew intuitively in English did not translate well at all into Chinese.

Moving to America

2010-05-23T22:50:00.000-07:00

Finally all things were ready, and it was time to go. The entire Liu clan saw us off at the airport. We had little backpacks with toys for the kids. We also had several huge suitcases with all our clothes. We left most things in Taiwan, since we were planning to return. I could walk, but I was not allowed to carry anything. Each girl had to carry her own backpack. Yuni had the diaper bag and two other carry-on bags with everything that we would need for the long trip. Since neither of us would have hands to pick up a wayward girl, a week or so before our departure, I began impressing upon them the need to stay close to us in the airport. Ma helped me. We told them in Hakka, Mandarin, and English that we would be traveling, and they had to stay right with us. If they got lost in the airport, they could be left behind. All three looked at us with wide, solemn eyes and nodded.

We left the relatives in the waiting room and went behind the glass partition to the exit station and gates of the Chiang Kai-Shek Airport. Ma and all the sisters and cousins were crying. The girls were happy and excited. I was sniveling myself. Yuni walked in front with the bags, the three girls followed behind him, and I brought up the rear. We made it to the gate without mishap. Soon the call went out for pre-boarding. We all trooped onto the plane and got settled into our seats. We took up one whole center row. Yuni and I each sat on an aisle, and the three girls were in between. They played with their toys or listened to stories or napped. On the whole, they were very good.

In those days, there were no direct flights from Taipei to Seattle. We were going to have to change planes in Seoul. It was two years after the Seoul Olympics, and there was a very large and very cute tiger in a glass case in the middle of the airport between our two gates. The three children were entranced. But we did not have time to gawk, as we only had 20 minutes between flights. Yuni told me to keep walking because I could not run. He let the girls stare for three minutes, before he told them to start moving. They ignored him. He began walking off, reminding them that they might get left behind in the airport. Love was the first one to pick up on the fact that I was no longer behind them. She pulled Truth’s sleeve, and told her in Hakka, “We will be left behind.” Truth and Peace both looked up and saw their parents disappearing down the corridor. Love took one of Peace’s hands and Truth took the other. The three of them came tearing after us. We made it to the gate just in time for pre-boarding. The girls never lagged behind us in a public place after that. They always made sure to be within grabbing range when we traveled or went to museums.

The flight from Seoul to Seattle was long, but uneventful. Unfortunately, we had to put the twins back into diapers. They were potty trained as long as they could get swiftly to their potty seats, but there was no guarantee that they would be free to use the restroom as needed on a crowded plane. They also went back on their bottles because it was easier for them to drink from bottles on the plane. Adjustment was hard for them in America without all the support of the extended family; potting training and drinking from cups went by the wayside. In the end, all three got out of diapers and off of bottles at the same time just before Peace turned three years old.

When we arrived in America, we went through immigration. The girls and I all had US passports, but Yuni had a sealed envelope from the American Institute in Taipei with the papers granting him immigrant status. We showed the envelope to the official at the desk and were immediately sent to a little room. Yuni and his envelope went inside. The girls and I sat outside. After what seemed like an eternity, Yuni emerged with a temporary resident visa stamped into his passport. His green card would be sent to us in the mail. Everyone else from the plane had left by the time we got to the baggage claim. We got our huge suitcases and stacked them on carts. Then we staggered out through the doors.

My dad and his wife had seen us from the observation windows. They came down to the doors when we got the carts loaded. It was so good to see them. They had brought two cars in order to take us to their home. They had also borrowed car seats from friends and relatives. We safely made it to Dad’s condo in the center of Bellevue, a suburb of Seattle. They had futons in their TV room for Yuni and me, and the girls slept on blankets on the floor. The five of us all went to sleep.

The next few days were spent visiting my grandparents and other relatives. We had dinners here and dinners there. We took the kids to the Woodland Park Zoo, the Seattle Science Center, and the aquarium. Then we all went for a ferry ride. My maternal grandfather had cancer and could not really leave his apartment, so we went to his place a lot. My other grandfather had been in a car accident not long before we arrived. He had had a stroke; no one knew if it was what had caused the accident or the result of the accident. He was in a nursing home where his wife could have an apartment on the tenth floor. We went with my dad to help clean out their condo. Dad let us take what we needed from Grammie’s kitchen. We also got some bookshelves and a hide-a-bed loveseat. My brother Tom had boxes of things that he no longer needed. He took us to his storage locker and let us forage. Other relatives gave us their unwanted furniture and household items. Soon we had enough stuff for an apartment, but we needed a place to live and jobs.

We came with just a few hundred dollars because we had left so much money in Taiwan to pay the mortgage for Ma’s peace of mind. I had several thousand in a US bank account from before I had gone to Taiwan. My dad added a couple of thousand, but there was so much that we needed to buy. We had to get a car, and we had to pay first and last month’s rent. Diapers were expensive, as was formula. We were not used to American prices. Everything was so much more expensive than in Taiwan. We finally found a station wagon that Yuni could use for carrying construction materials. The owner gave us a break on the price when he saw us appearing en masse as a family. It cost us $2000 plus tax and licensing.

Yuni had been expecting a job as a full-time mason. But in between the time that my dad had sent us newspapers showing lots of work for masons and the time we arrived in the US, Seattle had entered the 1989 recession. The rest of the country was improving, but Seattle was just going down. My dad had a contact at the mason’s union, and the three of us went for the interview. The man was very nice. He looked politely at Yuni’s licenses and award certificates. Then he told us that Taiwanese standards and US standards were too different. Yuni could start as an apprentice and learn again from the ground up. He would be a hod carrier and earn $8.50 per hour. There was not much work, so he would only be guaranteed twenty hours work per week until business picked up. After two years, he could take the exam to be a journeyman mason. If he joined the union, he could not take non-union jobs. We walked out crushed. Yuni thought my family looked down on him since they had not come through with what he felt had been promises for a job. The Taiwanese news had not said much about the US recession; so as far as he was concerned, the recession did not exist. There was one company advertising in the want ads for a person to do precast concrete. The pay would be $7.10 during the probationary period. We were not desperate enough yet for him to take that job.

I sent out my resume looking for work as an assistant coordinator in the office of international students at a local community college. I was among the top three applicants, and I got called back for a couple of interviews, but in the end, I was told that going abroad for two or three years after college is good, but staying for eight years becomes a liability. While I understood the Taiwanese system, I no longer understood America. Several other places also refused me. We didn’t know what to do. We could not stay at my dad’s place for more than thirty days because it was a “no children” condo. After thirty days we lost our status as guests. Without jobs, we did not know how we could afford an apartment. Finally, we found a place near the international district that would let us in for first month/last month plus a security deposit with my dad as a co-signer. We took it before we had work. Everyone in my family was helping us look, but they were professionals and didn’t have an in with masons and construction workers.

We moved into the apartment and bought a newspaper. That job with the precast concrete was still there. Yuni had been to so many places looking for work, but his experience in Taiwan was discounted and his lack of English was a liability. Moreover, there was not much work for anyone. Finally, we had no choice; all the money was just about gone. All five of us piled into the station wagon and drove to the precast concrete company. Yuni went upstairs to get the application and brought it down to the car so I could fill it out. Then he went back up for the interview. About fifteen minutes later, he came down to the car and brought me and the kids back up to translate. The company was family-owned. When I went up with the three girls in tow, the boss’s wife gave her husband a look. In less than ten minutes, Yuni had a provisional job for the next month. He would make $7.10 per hour until he could prove that his lack of English would not hinder him from finishing concrete. By the second day, they had raised his wages to $8.35 per hour and made him a permanent employee. It was a lower hourly wage than the union was paying, but most weeks they had over-time hours available. The foreman was a very nice man who took it upon himself to teach Yuni English. Every day Yuni would come home with a list of English words from the foreman. I would give him the Chinese, and he would spend hours and hours memorizing them.

We had an apartment, one income, and a car; we were well and truly arrived.

Preparing to Immigrate

2010-05-16T12:13:00.000-07:00

Yuni and the twins at Window on China

I suppose I should explain after my last post, that I finally figured those insights out in just the past few months. The differences in shame versus guilt and in views on gender values have always been conundrums to me, and they are two areas where we have experienced certain glitches along the way. For the most part, things were good, and we were quite happy. When I called my family to tell them that we would be immigrating to the US, my grandparents were quite pleased. One of my grandfathers had been diagnosed with a return of cancer, and he was not expected to live for very much longer. I was his only married grandchild, and he wanted to spend time with his only great-grandchildren while he was still alive.

So we decided to head for the Seattle area. My dad and his wife were there as were both sets of grandparents and my aunt and uncle and a couple of great-aunts. My family tree is something like an inverted pyramid, and to this day, I am the only one in my generation on either side of the family who is married with children. My dad sent us information about the market for masons, and it looked like Yuni would be able to get work as a mason and earn a very good wage, if he could get into the union. While we were waiting for his paperwork from the Immigration Department to come through, we went to all his schools getting certified English transcripts. We also got notarized English translations of his various construction trade licenses from Taiwan and his awards from both the Taiwan National Skill Olympics and the International Skill Olympics.

We continued working, and of course, there were family obligations, too. Both of my two unmarried sisters-in-law got engaged that summer before we left. In the Chinese system, the engagement party is done by the family of the bride, and the wedding is done by the groom’s family. So Yuni and I were there to play our roles as elder brother and sister-in-law in the ceremonies. They were traditional with gifts of gold and trays of money for the bride price. Since I had not required a bride price, Pa decided that he would no longer “sell” off his daughters, as his way of thanking the girls for helping him out of bankruptcy. He did take the money from the grooms’ families, but he put it into a secret bank account for each daughter as her own private nest egg.

Just before I got off my crutches, Yuntian had a grand mal epileptic seizure on his first major sea voyage with the navy. He was unconscious for 24 hours on the ship because they had to sedate him to stop the convulsions. Pa, Ma, and Yuni were completely distraught at the thought that Yuntian’s ailments were back. They decided that it would be too dangerous for them to drive in their hysteria, but they wanted me to go talk to the doctors, as I had gotten information on epilepsy from my clinical chemist father and veterinarian uncle. Besides, all medical records in Taiwan are written in English. The seven of us (including the babies) took the train to the southernmost part of the island to the Navy base where Yuntian’s ship was stationed. There is a large hospital in the middle of that base. Pa and Yuni were sure that we would have no trouble getting a taxi. But when we got there, the police were sweeping the taxi stands at the train station for taxis that took more than 4 passengers. We had to walk (or crutch) half a mile out to the regular streets before we could all get into one car with the kids on grown-ups’ laps in the back seat. Then, when we got to the Navy base, the taxi could not go inside. We had to crutch and walk another half mile or more to the hospital. We got to see Yuntian, and I was able to talk to his doctor. The doctor wanted to discharge Yuntian from the Navy immediately, but Yuntian wanted to stay and try to finish out his term of duty. He wanted to get transferred to a land unit in the Navy.

That night we stayed with the family I had lived with during my first year in Taiwan. The husband was Air Force and taught at a military college not far from the Navy base. While we were eating dinner with them, I asked him what we should do. He immediately got on the phone. First, he called a friend from church who was a doctor at the Navy hospital. The next day that friend drove us in a van up to the hospital door, so I didn’t need to crutch around. Then my friend called his uncle, who was the second in command of the entire Navy for all of Taiwan. (I really did not know that I had such powerful friends.) The uncle worked things out, and after two days we were able to bring Yuntian home for a months’ leave. When he returned to the base, he would be put into the shore patrol unit as a staff sergeant. We took Yuntian to the hospital where I had had my surgeries and got him tested and put onto anticonvulsants. By the time he went back, he was doing fine, and he was tagged as a friend of the second-in-command, so things went well for him. He stayed in the Navy for another few years before he was discharged.

The trip to the South reminded Yuni and me that we needed to show the girls Taiwan before we left. So we took trips every other weekend. We drove on several of the cross-island highways. We went to the Taroko Gorge, and we went to the wild animal park near Window on China. As far as the kids were concerned, the wild animal park was the best. It was the typical Taiwanese, unsafe and insane kind. You drove your family car through along a road with wild animals just roaming in open cages that you were driving inside. The lions crossed the road in front of you. The baboons would jump onto the cars and pull off the windshield wipers. It was all very exciting. At the end, there was a petting zoo with real farm animals. We stayed there for quite awhile as Ma caught ducks and geese and held them so her granddaughters could safely pet them. I’m not sure the animals were quite sure what to do with the Liu family visits. The kids liked it so much that we went several times.

I also went back for my final exam on the bone graft. The doctor said it had taken wonderfully, and I had exercised my leg well, so I could walk without any problems. Then I asked him why my right knee, which had been injured in high school, was hurting so badly after six months of putting all my weight on it. Dr. Hsu was perplexed. He ordered an immediate MRI and learned that at the age of 16 I had had ALL the cartilage in it removed during a procedure in which the surgeon should have left a small pad of cartilage. He questioned me further about what was done, and I learned that I had memorized only part of the name of the procedure. Dr. Hsu had assumed that because I could spell “minesectomy,” I knew what it meant and had the correct medical definition of the procedure. Because I had no cartilage, the bones in my knee had shifted over the six months that I was on crutches; hence, I was in great pain. He suggested that I lie on the couch until I was in my 60s when I could get a knee replacement surgery and that I lose the 15 pounds that I had gained from all Ma’s calcium-laden bone soups during my recovery. I thought, “I am 28, I have three kids under the age of three, I am moving to America without my mother-in-law in just a few months, I have to work, and there is no way I will lose any weight just lying on the couch.” But of course, I smiled politely and thanked the doctor. (I was already very Chinese.)

As soon as I got home, I went to the old Chinese doctor whose shop was by the big clock in the center of Chungli. I asked him what I should do. He gave me an herbal prescription to help with the pain, and then he said that I needed to keep moving. He said that my body would find its own equilibrium if I moved slowly and gently and paid attention to my breathing. So I began doing qi gong exercises and some tai chi exercises that I had learned while I was still single. And the Chinese doctor was right; I would never run again, but I have done pretty much everything I have wanted to do since then. The breathing really helps. It’s amazing. So does listening to my body.

Yuni passed his immigration physical at the 7th Day Adventist Hospital in Taipei. We got our plane reservations. We packed up clothes and things. Ma spent the summer trying to convince us to leave the kids with her. But I wanted to keep them bilingual, and there was no way they would get any English without me in the household. We did leave enough of our savings in Taiwan to pay the mortgage on the family’s home for three and a half years. We planned to be in the US just until the twins were elementary school age. Then we would return to Taiwan until they were in high school and come back to the US for high school and college. Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men…

But like the millions of immigrants who have come to the US, we had stars in our eyes about life in America, the international land of promise. I knew that it would not be as rosy as Yuni was dreaming; however, I did not know how to explain it to him. I knew that he would have culture shock and that I would have re-entry shock and that the kids would have to transition to a life without doting grandparents and aunts in the same household. But even I was not prepared for the reality that hit when we arrived in the US in the middle of a recession.

Face, Shame, and Teapot Spouts: What Chinese Babies Learn from their Mamas

2010-05-09T21:42:00.000-07:00

I mentioned last week that the Chinese have a culture of shame. And as I have been working on projects for school while reflecting on my experiences in Taiwan with the Liu family, I concluded that the concepts of “face” and “shame” are gender-based. The Liu family is rural and working class, so I thought that some of the attitudes would be slightly different among urban, upper-class, highly-educated elite, but after reading “Two Sisters” by Yu Lihua, I realized that the attitudes seem to be pretty much the same in every class. These concepts have a several-thousand-year history in China, and they are very prevalent. Mao attempted to change things, but since his death, even urban elite and Party members in China are going back to the old gender-stereotyped ways.

So what are those ways?

I think the best way to describe it is to post a few You Tube clips from the Wu Tianming’s movie “The King of Masks.” This movie is about an elderly street performer in China during the 1930’s. He performs Sichuan opera mask-changing, and he is one of the best. Unfortunately, his wife abandoned him and their infant son because she could not stand their hard life. He did his best to raise his son, but the boy got sick and died in childhood. Now he needs a male heir to carry on his name and to learn the family’s art. So he goes to a child market where starving families, who lost their homes in a flood in the next county, are selling unwanted children. Most of the children for sale at the market are girls, but his family tradition states that he can only pass his art down to a boy of his family. He has to adopt a grandson. He is about to give up in despair when he sees a little boy. Unfortunately, after he and the child, Doggie, have bonded, he learns that “Doggie” is a girl. He tries to get rid of her, but she has been sold seven times by child slavers. Each time they try to pass her off as a boy, and when the family learns she is a girl, they throw her out on the street. The old man takes her on as a servant because he knows that the slavers beat her, and he treats his monkey better than they treated her. Since she is a girl, he can only teach her acrobatics and make her into a servant. She can no longer call him “Grandpa;” she has to call him "Boss." Together they pole his houseboat up and down the Yangtze River, going from town to town doing shows in the market place. One day, they watch the old man’s friend, a famous castrati opera star, perform the story of Guanyin, a woman who attains Nirvana. Doggie gets interesting ideas. But she does not have a tea-pot spout. Later in the film, Doggie accidently sets the houseboat on fire, and she runs away from shame. She is kidnapped again and kept to care for the little boy the kidnappers caught. Doggie uses her acrobatic skills to escape with the boy and discovers that he has a teapot spout. Since the boy is too young to know his family name or address, she delivers the boy to the King of Masks, so he can have the grandson he desires. I won’t tell you any more of the movie. It is well worth the cost of joining Netflix or sitting through 10 ten-minute segments on You Tube.

"You don't have a little teapot spout."

"Guanyin has breasts, so why do you worship her?"

Here we see a real "teapot spout."

Watching the movie and the close-up of the little boy’s “teapot spout” reminded me of the Liu family rules. Boy toddlers could run around in the summer without pants to prevent diaper rash (and to show off their genuine spouts to the neighbors), but girl babies were taught from day one that their privates were shameful. They had to keep them hidden. No matter how painful the diaper rash, a girl baby could not run around bare-bottomed. The source of shame was not the exposing; it was the lack of a teapot spout. When boy toddlers were bad, the worst threat was that their spouts would be cut off and they would be just like a girl. So before the child can talk, it is indoctrinated that people with “spouts” are somehow superior to people without.

Throughout their lives, boys are privileged. They are not expected to help with chores. They can order their mother and sisters around to some extent. They do not have to control their tempers. All they have to do is get good grades in school and learn how to earn money. Earning money and bringing glory to the family is the way a man gains face. His gender is NOT a source of shame. Even in his worst failure, he can comfort himself that his “teapot spout” sets him that many inches higher than any woman alive, no matter how successful she may seem.

Women do not gain face in and of themselves. The only way for a woman to gain face is for her to bear a son and to nag that son into becoming a successful adult. That is a woman’s true face. In the Hakka language, sons are called “children,” and daughters are daughters. So Ma would say to people, I have two children and five daughters. This does not mean that Ma hates her daughters. She loves them very much and worries about them and frets about them, but linguistically her sons have always been privileged, and that shaped family attitudes towards the boys. A woman only gets individual face when she is a widow living with her grown, wealthy son, and he treats her with honor and respect as his mother.

Before a woman attains that blissful state of widowed motherhood, she gains face by having a rich husband and acting as a fashion mannequin for his wealth. Her face comes from her husband. And so can her shame. If her husband does not earn as much money as her brothers, a woman feels that she cannot hold her head up. If her husband has a failure in business, a woman might be too embarrassed to visit her relatives for many years. For most of their lives, women live with vicarious shame and vicarious face. Everything depends on their husbands. While women do not have individual face, they might have individual shame beyond the “original shame” of their sex. If a woman fails to keep house, she is shamed. If a woman squanders the family’s hard-earned money, she is shamed. If a woman fails to bear sons, she is shamed. If a woman contradicts her husband, she is shamed. People shun her and then whisper behind her back and point at her.

For truly touching portrayals of women in Chinese families, I recommend two films by Zhang Yimou (also on Netflix): “Raise the Red Lantern” and “Ju Dou.” Both are brutal and NOT for family movie night, but they hauntingly portray the tragedy of women in traditional Chinese families.

I was apart from this face/shame paradigm because I was an American. I do not have that innate sense of shame. It never occurred to me that my lack of a “spout” made me a second-class citizen. I was given leeway because I am an American, and because in everything I did, I was a cheerful contributor to the family. But I was too successful outside the home, and then I got injured and sick from the botched surgery. It was a very sticky situation, and the most expedient way for a man to live down shame is to go away and come back after having done something so “face-making” that all previous shame is wiped away from the collective memory.

I mentioned last week that face is a matter for the family. That is true; an individual’s loss of face reflects on the entire clan. It also determines a man’s worth within the clan. If a man has much face, his words are weighty and everyone listens to him. If a man loses face, people turn their backs on him and ignore his suggestions without even bothering to listen. It is a very painful and traumatic situation, especially for someone who has been pampered all his life as a privileged boy among many women and girls.

Bonus clips:

What happens when the King of Masks learns that Doggies is a girl.

The Sichuan Opera about the story of Guanyin

Real Sichuan Mask-changers (and they breathe fire, too!)

Recovering from Five Hours under the Knife

2010-05-02T21:45:00.000-07:00

The day of my surgery, I was taken down to the OR very early. The anesthesiologist Dr. Ma did his thing, and I was feeling no pain. Eventually, I came to in the recovery room, and finally they wheeled me up to my room. It was late afternoon before I got to my room. My teeth were chattering and I was shivering. The nurses had to bring hot water bottles, hot towels, and heating pads and pack me in them to get me warm. I had been in surgery for a little more than five hours. The OR is kept cool to slow blood loss, and I was just very, very cold.

Dr. Hsu came to see me later when he made his evening rounds. He told me that it was a very good thing I had been breastfeeding Peace regularly during the two months between my accident and the surgery. He said that all the calcium in my body had gone to producing milk, and the break in my bones was very fresh. He warned me NOT to breastfeed after I got out of the hospital, or the bone graft would not take. My leg was immobilized on a kind of half cast, and there were some pins sticking out of my knee. But my incision was neat, and the stitches were the kind that dissolves automatically. The woman in the bed next to me was not a cash-paying American. She had had the same procedure, but they used black nylon thread on her. She had what looked like a centipede growing up her leg. She also had a rack of metal pins holding her leg in place. When I asked Dr. Hsu about the difference, he said that the woman was using the national health insurance which paid the hospital less than 60% of its costs. I was paying cash, so I got what I paid for. And another thing… I was American, and one day my scar would be inspected by doctors in America. It was a matter of national pride that Taiwan get it right on my leg, especially after the debacle with Peace.

The twenty-one days in the hospital went pretty quickly. My mom made friends all over the place as she went to get food or dump the bed pan or do all the myriad chores that family members do in Taiwanese hospitals. My incision healed well. I was taught to do leg lifts for physical therapy, and soon I was sent home to finish off my five and a quarter months of not putting weight on my left knee. Pa had called all his unmarried daughters to come home and help. Yuni and I slept downstairs in Yuntian’s bedroom for the first month or so because I was so sore, I could barely move even on crutches. The bone for the bone graft had been taken from my right hip, so I was sore on both sides. Pa and Ma each took one of the twins to care for. Pa took Truth and Ma took Love. Fourth Sister took Peace, and Second Sister did the laundry, cooking, and other housework. When Pa and Yuni were at work, Second Sister helped with Love and me.

Soon I was able to crutch around the ground floor and sit on the couch with my leg up. My dad and his wife came for a visit around Christmas time. We still had the fake tree that he had sent the year before, so they set it up, and we had gifts and a “Yule log” cake. The Liu family loved it. Peace spent much of the day in a walker chasing after her sisters. She was teething, and during the festivities, she noticed my toes hanging out of my cast. Her gums were particularly itchy, so she trundled on over and started gnawing on them. It tickled, but I couldn’t bend the leg or move it because of the heavy cast and the angle at which I was sitting. I started screaming, and everyone began laughing. Instead of rescuing me from my vampire baby, they ran for the video camera and made a tape of it. Everyone had a great time laughing. Unfortunately, we taped over that scene before we learned about the show America’s Funniest Home Videos. We probably could have won at least $5,000.

Within three months, my cast came off. I had to wear a soft splint and walk on crutches, but I was pretty mobile. I went back to work as a trainer of teachers at the Gloria English School, and I went back to teaching my university classes. At home, I would put Peace on my back in the carrier and crutch up three flights of stairs with the twins running up ahead of me. When we came down, the twins would hold onto part of the crutch as I hopped down. Somehow we all made it without tumbling down the stairs. I was quite happy, and I enjoyed going back to work. I was blithely unaware of currents among the Liu and Chu family clans that were only voiced in Hakka.

My Chinese literature professor this semester started several of her lectures with the statement: “America is a guilt-based society, but China is a shame-based society. You must understand this principle to understand what motivates the characters in Chinese literature.” This statement means that in America, we have a very legalistic view of things. When something goes wrong, we can assign blame for the mishap to various people based on their percentage of culpability. We also look at intent, and if a person caused a mishap unintentionally, we give them a lot of leeway. So when I look at the motorcycle accident, the most I will say is that Yuni was guilty of laziness. He did not cause the accident, and to my mind he is barely at fault for my mishap. In a shame-based society, it is all a matter of appearances. Everything is determined by what other people think about you. If something happens to someone related to you, and you had the slightest possibility of preventing the mishap, then you will be shamed for life, sometimes for not living up to your familial obligations.

After three years of marriage, I was very popular in both the Liu and Chu clans. My presence brought the family much face. My injury was a loss of face to the entire clan because it appeared to society at large that they could not take care of me properly. And since Yuni could have prevented this loss of face by rising early and driving me that day, the whispers began to shame him. The whispering did not bother me because I did not understand Hakka. When I was informed of the whispering, it didn’t matter to me because I did not think he was at fault. But then, I had not been brought up with his set of values. I had noticed that Ma’s worst threat to the children was: “Everyone will say you are bad. You will never be able to hold your head up. Shame, shame, shame.” I did not understand the repercussions of this threat.

Ma later told me that the whispering had reached a crescendo that neither Pa nor Yuni could tolerate. Yuni informed me that we would be moving to America, and I needed to apply for his green card. I asked if we could wait a year until I had healed more. The adamant answer was, “No!” Something in his tone of voice expressed almost panicked desperation, so I asked some of my American colleagues with foreign spouses about the procedures for making spousal green card applications. They told me horror stories about the interviews. One woman had been asked if her husband wore boxers or briefs, the size of his underwear, and the measurements of what was under the boxers. One man had almost failed because he did not know his wife’s bra size. I was told that we would be separated and asked questions about the most personal aspects of our lives, and if we gave different answers, the petition would fail. One man told me that it would be best if we took the children, so based on that advice, the five of us piled into the van and headed for Taipei.

I filled out the paperwork and asked for a same day interview due to my leg. The people at American Institute in Taiwan were quite accommodating. We were told to go out for lunch and return at 1 pm. When we got back, I was called to a window behind a screen. There were people at windows on either side of me conducting their business at AIT. The examiner went over the names, dates of birth, and other personal information. Then he turned beet red. He said that he had to ask us about our life together as husband and wife. His first question was how many times a week we had sex. Before I could open my mouth to answer, Love came running in calling, “Mommy, mommy, mommy.” I picked her up and began to answer. The examiner stopped me before I could embarrass myself. He asked, “Do you have children?” I said, “Yes, three.” So we brought the children and stood as a family before the window. I showed the examiner their birth certificates to prove that the twins were just barely two. The examiner asked them to point to Mommy. Both twins solemnly pointed at me. Then the examiner asked me if they called Yuni “Daddy” or “Baba.” As soon as they heard the word “Baba,” Truth and Love started pointing at Yuni and screaming “Baba, Baba.” The examiner wiped his hand across his forehead and then asked me to take Peace from Yuni and hold her. After she responded to me familiarly, he wrote on the application: “Two year old mixed race twins identified applicant and respondent as Mommy and Baba, mixed race baby was comfortable in both parents’ arms. This is obviously a true marriage. No further questions were needed. Application approved.” He then told me it would take about six months for all the paperwork to be processed, and then we could move to the United States of America.

Dr. Hsu

2010-04-18T14:08:00.000-07:00

Peace on the wall near the lake at Chang Geng Memorial Hospital in Linkou, Taiwan

I had my first appointment with the orthopedic department of Chang Geng Memorial Hospital about two weeks after my accident. The first appointment we could get was with their back specialist. Yuni had gone back to the Taoyuan Provincial Hospital and gotten a copy of my original x-ray. We showed it to the doctor, and he just snorted. He ordered a set of x-rays and put me in a splint. He didn’t try to set anything because he was not a knee specialist. He got me an appointment with their top knee surgeon, Dr. Hsu, but the first available appointment was not for two weeks. I would go back the following week for the series of x-rays, and I would see Dr. Hsu about a month after my accident. I was offered pain medication, but since I was still nursing Peace, I did not take it.

The next week, we went for the x-ray series. The technician was quite nice, but he had to manipulate my poor leg into many angles that made me tear up or scream. I was still in a lot of pain. One angle in particular was very hard for me to hold, and it took three tries and several pillows before we got that x-ray. Apparently, though, it was the most important one.

I went home and cuddled Peace for comfort. She nursed a little, and I felt better from the endorphins. All during this time period that I couldn’t work and I was in pain, little Peace enjoyed coming over and “snacking” whenever she wanted to. It was comforting, and the act of nursing did relieve the pain. Later, I would learn that this frequent nursing actually saved my knee, but all I was doing at the time was comforting myself with my baby.

Two weeks crept by, and it was time to see Dr. Hsu. He was Taiwanese, and he had practiced medicine for five years in the US and for three years in Australia. He understood, read, and wrote English quite well. He also spoke English, but his accent was so heavy that I really did not know what he was saying. I tried to get him to speak to me in Chinese, but whenever he saw my American face, he switched into his English channel. He looked at the set of x-rays and pointed to a faint shadow on the film that had taken us so many tries to take. He said: “Tibia plateau fracture, you need a bow new garaff two.” I did not know what the tibia plateau was, and I had no idea what a bow new garaff two was. I kept asking him to speak Chinese. Finally, he turned to Yuni and explained the situation to HIM in Chinese. Then I figured out that a bow new garaff two was a bone graft. That took me by surprise. I asked why the emergency room had only found a slight crack in the tibia. He said that they had not taken the x-ray at the right angle, probably due to inexperience. He said that when my motorcycle caught my leg and slammed it to the ground, it smashed the knee at just the right angle so that the rounded top of the tibia where it met the femur had been shattered. He said that the only way to prove it was with an MRI, but he was willing to bet money that the top of my tibia was not only shattered but also indented. That was why I had had so much trouble in the “walking cast” from the emergency room.

He was one of the top two knee surgeons in Taiwan, and when we communicated in writing, it was obvious that he had spent time in the US and Australia. He just had not had to polish his pronunciation. He said that since surgeries were piled up, he would schedule the MRI and the surgery immediately. He said that we would get an MRI appointment in two weeks, but it would take at least a month to get an OR for the length of time needed to complete a bow new graff two. He was worried that because I was not yet thirty, my bone was growing back and he would have to re-break or shave off the surfaces of the knee so that the graft would take. The surgery could take up to seven hours if he needed to do that. I told him what had happened with Peace and mentioned that I was very sensitive to anesthesia. He promised to consult with the anesthesiologist who had handled my case with the twins. Apparently, they knew each other well.

I went home and continued my nursing routine. I was getting bored without being able to teach or take the babies for their walk, so I began to rememorize the Three Character Classic. I learned it both orally and written. Dr. Hsu said that I would not be able to put weight on my left knee for a full six months after the surgery. By the end of the seven months, I could write the entire text from memory. The Three Character Classic is an elementary school text that began floating around in the Song Dynasty (1100s to 1200s CE). Other people updated it with each new dynasty, and I had a version from the early years of the Republic of China when a classical Chinese education was still popular. It covers all of China’s history, basic philosophy, and important works of literature in three character phrases. It really gave me a good basis for understanding Chinese culture more deeply.

When I went to get the results of the MRI one week before the surgery was scheduled, it was obvious that Dr. Hsu had known his stuff. The outer top “ball” of my tibia was completely gone, and there was indeed a hollow depression. Dr. Hsu explained that he would take bone from my right pelvis, from the part that stuck out. He said that it was easiest place to take bone on a woman. He would use that bone to rebuild the top of my left tibia. He also assured me that Dr. Ma would be my anesthesiologist again. The two of them were working out a strategy to allow me to undergo a lengthy surgery without causing me any problems. They were planning to use light general anesthesia and tons of Novocain around my knee and hip. It sounded good to me.

Of course, I had called the US to inform my relatives of the situation, and my mother was able to take time off work to come stay with me in the hospital. That way Yuni and Pa could continue to work to pay the mortgage while Ma and the unmarried sisters handled the three babies. They were not looking forward to when Peace would have to go cold turkey on the nursing, but they also knew that there was no other way. At least, she was already able to eat rice and vegetables and other solid foods (like candy from her grandpa).

And so, all the arrangements were made. During the first week of December, a full two months after my motorcycle accident, I was admitted to the hospital with my American mother in tow. We were at the branch hospital in Linkou, not far from the mountain where Yuni and I had met. The facility had beautiful grounds and a little lake. It was set up as a surgery and convalescent center. I was to be in the hospital for at least 21 days to be sure that everything was healing okay and that the bone graft “took” without infection. There was a huge food court down in the basement with all kinds of different styles of cuisine: Japanese, Chinese, American, noodles, etc. Mom learned to buy food there very quickly. She made many friends in the hospital.

Motorcycle Accident

2010-04-11T17:39:00.000-07:00

The day after we got back from Japan, I had to be at the university bright and early to teach my 8:00 class. Of course, I woke up a little late, and I asked Yuni if he could drive me over. He was still half-asleep and wanting to roll over and go back to sleep, so he just chided me for being too cheap to pay a substitute and take the day off. But I was paying 2/3 of all the expenses for a household of 13, and I couldn’t afford to do that. Since his discharge from the army, 20 months prior to this, Yuni had been tired and surly. His dad had tried to get him to shoulder a married man’s responsibility in the household, but he claimed he was not yet ready. So I had continued doing what I had done while he was in the army and was contributing for both of us.

I hurried downstairs and got out my motorcycle. It was surprisingly light. I shook it. There was the sound of liquid sloshing, which did not bode well for me. I opened the gas tank. There was about 1/8th of an inch of gasoline covering the deep sides of the bottom. The raised center was bone dry. There was just enough for me to get to class but not back. Or I could rush to the gas station and be a few minutes late to class. Since I was not looking forward to pushing the motorcycle all the way to the gas station after class, I hopped on and zoomed off. I filled up and went speeding along the road through the rice paddies to get to the university. The rice was just about ready for harvesting, and there were huge clumps of pampas grass at the corner of each paddy. The roads criss-crossed between the paddies, and there was no visibility at any of the corners. I made a left turn onto a narrow road just as a car coming from the other direction made a left turn onto that same road from the next street parallel to the one I had turned off of. Neither of us could see the other because of the clusters of tall grass surrounding each intersection. There was a little old man on a decrepit moped chugging along down the opposite side of the road from me. The car saw him and turned directly into my lane to pass him. The car was moving very quickly. I had a split second to decide if I was going to become a pancake or hit the sweet old man. I quickly swerved out of my lane, squeezed my brakes so hard both cables broke and aimed for the old man’s back tire so I wouldn’t injure him. My motorcycle and I bounced back from hitting the old man, slammed against the rear passenger door of the speeding car and then fell to the ground. As I was trying to jump clear of my bike so I didn’t bash my helmetless head, my knee got caught up in the motorcycle and smashed against the pavement. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t put any weight on my leg. So I sat there in the middle of the road with my motorcycle pressing on my leg.

A number of people were at the Earth God’s Temple a block up the road. They came out when they heard me slam against the car door, but when they saw I was white, they were afraid to come over. When I didn’t get up, two men came over and pulled my motorcycle off me. Then they waited for me to get up as they scolded me for sitting in the puddle of leaked gasoline. I told them that my leg would not work. When they heard that I spoke Chinese, they were relieved. They called to one of the women to run home and get a little washing stool for me. The two men half-dragged me to the side of the road and set me on the stool beside my motorcycle. I gave them our home phone number, and asked them to call to have someone come get me. I also asked them to have my husband call the university and tell them I would not be coming to class that day.

And then I settled down to wait. I was less than ten minutes from home, but an hour later, when the last worshipper was ready to leave the Earth God’s temple, I was still sitting beside the road. He went to his house and came back with a car. We left the motorcycle at the Earth God’s temple so it would not get stolen, and my Good Samaritan drove me home. I got home just as Yuni was pulling in. He had been searching for me at all the Earth God’s temples on the other side of the university. The man told him that he had clearly stated the street name. Yuni just looked miserable and said that he had been too nervous to hear clearly. Pa and the man bundled me from the man’s car to the back of the van, and Yuni rushed me off to the closest hospital.

I arrived at the same time as two ambulances. One held a dying woman and the other held a man whose hand had been almost completely severed in a factory machine. Based on triage, I came last. Two and a half hours later, two interns came over and told me that they were going to put a cast on my leg because all the doctors were working on the man with the severed hand. They said the x-ray showed a slight fracture just below the knee. Then they wrapped the cast from the knee down my leg and sent me home. They worked quickly because the emergency room had to clear cases within three hours according to that hospital’s policy. They gave me a follow up visit the next day in the hospital’s orthopedic out-patient clinic.

Yuni bought some crutches at the hospital supply store next door to the hospital, and I went home. Whenever I put my foot down, my toes turned black, and the cast was very tight. I went to the clinic the next day, and the doctor gave me diuretics. The following day was Wednesday, and I had three classes at the Gloria English School. I went to teach them, and my toes got really swollen and black. One of my American colleagues had a sports med-tech degree. He asked a lot of questions and then told me that the cast had been wrapped backwards and was cutting off circulation. He told the school’s owners that if I didn’t get the cast cut off, I could lose my leg. The owners found a substitute, and I had Pa and Yuni come pick me up. They took me home and cut off the cast with a tile saw.

That evening Pa made several phone calls. He found the best Chinese medicine martial arts specialist in Chungli and pleaded until he got me an emergency appointment that night. The doctor felt my leg and manipulated it. I told him that the x-ray had shown just a slight fracture. He said that in his opinion the entire joint was damaged on the inside. He gave us two names of the top knee surgeons in Taiwan. One was at the same hospital where I had had my children. Despite the problems giving birth to Peace, I thought that they did have my records, and if the surgery was planned liked the twins’ birth had been, I would do all right there. First thing the next morning we made an appointment with the hospital. That surgeon was booked for the next month, but the department told us to come and get the MRI and other tests ordered. If the test results were severe enough, the surgeon would make room for me. So I took the first appointment available, which was the following week. Then I settled down to embrace the pain of an unsupported broken leg and knee.

Three Generations with Frequent Flyer Miles

2010-04-04T19:44:00.000-07:00

Towards the end of summer, Ma got a call from Grandma Chu. When we went to the US the previous summer, we had all signed up for frequent flyer miles. The airlines kept sending notices in English to Grandma Chu’s house, and she wanted to know what they were all about. So later in the week, she had one of the uncles drive her up to Chungli with her letters safely wrapped in a plastic baggie in her purse. She sat around in our living room waiting for me to come home from class. As soon as I saw the letters, I told her that we all had free airline tickets to any place within Asia and back.

I was tired, so I went up to bed. Grandma Chu had already sent the uncle home and was spending the night with Ma. The next morning they accosted me as I was taking the kids out for their morning constitutional. Could we use those airline tickets over the Confucius’ birthday holiday at the end of September? Grandma Chu wanted to prove to the uncles that she could travel anywhere so they would take her along when they went to Southeast Asia with the Lion’s Club tour group. The uncles told her that the only reason she had done so well in America was because I had family there. They really did not want their mother along to spoil their fun. How could I say no to such a sweet old lady? (or to spoiling a selfish uncle's fun?)

And so another flurry of planning took place. Since the Lion’s Club always went to Southeast Asia, we decided not to go there. Grandma Chu wanted to go someplace that her sons had never been before. We decided against Hong Kong because Pa had been there in his youth. In the end, Ma, Pa, and Grandma Chu all wanted to go to Japan. I was fine with that because I had an uncle there who could help with hotel recommendations in Tokyo. My uncle did better than that. He worked with his company’s hospitality department to get us 50% off two rooms in the New Otani Hotel. It was a five-star hotel in the center of Tokyo. We had a two room suite. Each room had two king-size beds and a lovely wooden crib. Ma and Grandma Chu shared a bed in one room, and Pa had a bed to himself. Truth slept in the crib next to Pa’s bed. Peace and I shared a bed because I was still breast-feeding her at night, Yuni had the other bed to himself, and Love had the crib in our room.

Fortunately, I had taken that business trip to Tokyo five years previously, so I had some idea of what to see in the city. We went to the Tokyo Tower, the Imperial Palace gardens, and the electronics markets in Akibara. The old folks were not interested in the zoo, but Pa wanted to take the girls to Disneyland Tokyo. It was very new in 1989. The nice thing about five-star hotels is that you can get just about anything you need at the concierge’s desk, including the directions to Disneyland Tokyo. So another day of our vacation was spent at Disneyland. The following day we took a bus to Mt. Fuji where we hiked around. We did not go all the way to the top because of the grandma and babies, but we got pretty far up the mountain. We had a great view. After coming down, we took the bullet train back to Tokyo. On our last day, we took a day tour out to some Shinto temples in the outlying areas around Tokyo. We got back in time to go to dinner at my uncle’s house and let my first cousins play with my kids. (My brother and I were deprived as children. Our oldest first cousin is seventeen years younger than I am, so we had no one to play with growing up. But my cousins all had a great time with my kids.)

We had a great time in Tokyo. I had taken two years of Japanese in college, and I could speak enough of the very formal style Japanese with all the honorifics to get us what we needed. Unfortunately, I could not understand the answers because they were given in more colloquial Japanese. But Pa and Ma and Grandma Chu grew up in Taiwan when it was under Japanese rule. Pa had even attended three years of Japanese elementary school, so they could understand pretty much everything, but they could not string a proper sentence together. When we wanted to buy something, Pa and I would go to the counter. I would politely ask how much. The proprietor would answer in rapid, colloquial Japanese. Pa would fish in his pocket and pull out the money. If Pa had anything to say, he would tell me in Chinese, and I would then put it into my schoolgirl Japanese. Because Tokyo street signs have both characters and Romanized spellings, we could figure out street names and directions. I think it gave Pa, Ma, and Grandma Chu a great sense of power to be able to get around a foreign city and understand a fair amount of what was going on.

Of course, the Confucius birthday holiday was just the Friday of a three-day weekend, but we spent five days in Japan. I took off a few days from school earlier in the week, and we returned to Taiwan on the Sunday at the end of the holiday. Everyone was tired and happy. It had been a good trip. The maternal uncles all greeted us at the airport to pick up Grandma Chu and take her back to Toufen. They were quite relieved to find her none the worse for the wear.

That winter, when the Lion’s Club took its annual vacation trip to Southeast Asia, Grandma Chu went along to visit Thailand and Malaysia. She was a trooper, and she certainly kept up with the tour group, although when she got back and visited Ma, she told us that tour groups couldn’t hold a candle to the trips that I planned. She did, however, enjoy visiting the khatuey shows in Thailand. (Khatuey are the Thai third sex, the males who dress like beautiful females. Khatuey shows seem to be a must-see event for all Chinese and Taiwanese tour groups to Thailand.)

A Large Family Has Too Many Stories (2)

2010-03-28T17:51:00.000-07:00

Hello blogging buddies,

I am alive and well. My paper presentation at UCLA went very well. But I have had some health problems and got some test results back and needed to move unexpectedly to a better location for my health. I am improving now in my new place and able to get back to writing. Thanks for your comments of encouragement on my last post. I am now going to show you a picture of me at my UCLA panel. This was after we had given our presentations and were answering questions.

And now for today's blog post. Here is a picture of my kids and their cousins when we were all living together in a household of 13 in Taiwan. Peace is still little and is not pictured.

A Large Family Has Too Many Stories (2)

大家庭的故事太多了

Not long after Peace was born trouble struck another of my sisters-in-law. This one had dreams of being a singer, and she had been accepted into a cultural dance group touring Japan to demonstrate the Taiwanese aborigines’ songs and dances. She went for about six weeks, made good money, and had a fantastic time. Later, she was contacted by someone who claimed to have seen her perform. He wanted to give her a six-month contract performing in various venues in Japan. The first time she went, another of the sisters and I had vetted the company pretty thoroughly to be sure it was legitimate. This time we were busy with babies and weddings, and we just assumed that she was with the same company. A few days before she was to leave, I learned that it was an entirely different organization, but by then it was too late. I did purchase $100 US dollars from the boss at the Gloria English School and gave it to her with instructions to hide it well and use it in an emergency. I had a bad feeling about the whole thing, but her ticket had been purchased, and it was too late. Five weeks after she left, Ma got a phone call from Japan. This new company was a front for selling girls into sex slavery. She had managed to bribe someone with the $100 and made a phone call. The person who was helping her gave me an address. Fortunately, my uncle from America was working in Japan for an international accounting firm. He notified the proper authorities, and we got my sister-in-law. Later, we had to change our phone number because the boss of that company was disgruntled and gave our home phone out to Japanese businessmen as the number of a call girl center. But in the end, that was a small price to pay. From then on, that sister worked in the family construction business.

While the singing sister was still in Japan, one of the married sisters and her husband had a huge fight with her parents-in-law. The father-in-law threw a hot iron for pressing leather at the husband, and their family was forced to flee. They came to our house with their two children in tow. Yuntian was in the south attending military high school, so their family slept in his room downstairs off the kitchen. Now our household was up to 13. Ma and I had five babies and toddlers to care for. In the mornings before school, while Ma was doing the laundry, I would take all the toddlers out in the indestructible, metal stroller with the baby in a carrier on my back. We would walk around the neighborhood looking at the duck farm and the huge pigs that people were raising for sacrifice during “ghost month.” When we got home the kids would play, and Ma and I would feed them. Then Ma would put them all down for a nap while I went off to teach. In the evening, all the adults would care for the kids.

This went on for several months while Pa and the men negotiated with the other family. But their own son was still mad that his father had thrown something so dangerous in a room with babies. So eventually, they decided to move into their own place. But they did not have much money, and they had no furniture. Pa put up money for chairs and a bed for them, but then needed a refrigerator and stuff for the kitchen. Yuni offered them all my wedding presents. I got home from class one night to find Ma awake and greatly agitated. She was afraid I would walk out because my husband was giving away my trousseau. I was not terribly thrilled, but I also thought that it would be nice to go back down to just 9 members in the household, so I agreed to sell them my things for a nominal sum. I never saw the money because the men handled it, but I did agree to part with the items.

About two months later, they reconciled with the husband’s family. It turned out that his mother liked to gamble. She played the lottery and mahjong, and she always lost. She used to take the money for groceries and even the babies’ milk from my sister-in-law, and then blame the shortage on the daughter-in-law (everything can usually be pinned on a daughter-in-law in large Chinese families). My sister-in-law got upset and stopped handling any money. Then her husband caught on to Mama’s gambling addiction. Next, Mama tried to pin things on her son, but he naturally could argue back. His father threw the iron for pressing leather pieces for shoes at him because the father refused to believe anything bad about his wife. After both my sister-in-law and her husband were out of the house, the family was still always short of cash, and Mama’s secret addiction was revealed. Apologies were made, gifts were purchased. My sister-in-law was given the entire third floor of their house for her family, and the father of that family came and begged Pa to exhort them to go home. Without their income the family was having trouble making ends meet. Since his daughter and son-in-law were amenable, they moved back. Most of my wedding gifts were just abandoned in their apartment for the next tenant. Mama did not want them bringing home any reminders of their sojourn away from home. And of course, unspoken rules of largesse said that we couldn’t go scavenge after they had moved.

And so I began to learn how little input women have in these large, traditional Chinese families. I have since learned that these attitudes are not uncommon in other Asian cultures, too, especially among rural and working class families. Part of the problem was that it involved another household. The Liu women can say a great deal when it only affects their own family, but when outsiders are involved, everything is done by the men, and “women’s talk” is less than unimportant.

Conference Break

2010-03-08T21:17:00.000-08:00

Sorry for not posting so regularly this spring. I was writing a paper for publication and presentation. And finally, next weekend, I will be presenting the paper at a graduate student conference at UCLA (see the following link). Of course, due to budget cuts, probably, they have not updated the website with the correct spelling of my name or the correct title of my paper. I have posted the first slide of my presentation, so you can see the correct title. (Jin Yong is the most popular Chinese author of 20th century martial arts fiction. For my master's thesis, I am analyzing his works and their effect on Chinese identity. He is my favorite author, and I love kung fu novels, movies, and tv shows. One of my advisors told me that for a thesis you have to write about what you love... My kids still think I'm cheating.)

The conference is free and put on by the Comparitive Lit department of UCLA. It seems that anyone interested can attend if there are seats.

My family is big on academics. So of course my mom and aunt had to give me a make-over (that was last weekend). I hope to be back with regular blog posts by March 20th.

http://s1.webstarts.com/portsofcall/index.html

A Large Family Has Too Many Stories (1) 大家庭的故事太多了

2010-02-28T20:57:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Ma presided over her daughters and daughters-in-law. As the eldest daughter-in-law, I was her chief assistant. A big concern was matrimony. First, there was the worry about what would happen if Eldest Sister’s fifth child was not a boy. Our prayers were answered, which was a good thing because I don’t think anyone could have done anything otherwise. Then, one of the unmarried sisters had an inappropriate boyfriend. Ma became very distressed and did everything in her power to find a proper match.

At this time, Pa was working with two young men who had had their own contracting company. They had many contacts and lots of energy, but they didn’t know too much about bidding or doing skilled construction labor. So Pa and his family joined forces with these two young men. It was a win-win situation. Ma was eager for this alliance to continue, and she felt the best thing to do would be to marry the elder brother to one of her three unmarried daughters. Since one daughter was about to be ruined with a bad boyfriend, Ma persuaded Pa that they should go to work cajoling her into cementing the family fortunes.

Every time the poor woman came home, the two brothers would be invited to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at our house. And after they had finally gone home, Ma would regale her daughters on the benefits of building alliances through marriage. Then she would go into filial duty to one’s parents. And she would finish off with a good dose of shame about the inappropriateness of the boyfriend. Fortunately, my Hakka was not so good, so all I had to do was smile and nod and then excuse myself. I did not really have any heart for this kind of pressuring.

In the end, that daughter moved out for awhile and rarely came home. Ma was left without a prospect for her matchmaking. Another one of the sisters who was quite obedient and docile had taken all the rhetoric to heart and decided to marry the man. She was working her way through night high school, but to cement her father’s business alliance, she got married before she was finished. Her wedding was about two weeks before Peace was born. Because I was pregnant, I was only allowed to attend the feast and to sit outside under the awning. I was not allowed into the house except for to use the bathroom. Yuni and the twins were allowed to run all over.

Not long after the marriage, the younger brother joined a gang and began using drugs. My sister-in-law and her husband worked long and hard, but the mother-in-law took their hard-earned money and slipped it to her younger son whenever she got the chance. By this time he was an addict, so he spent it on drugs and frequently wound up in jail. My sister-in-law and her husband argued and argued with his mother, but she refused to apply tough love. In the end, it created many problems in their marriage, and the great business alliance was not so great after all.

Three Thousand Pieces of Gold

2010-02-21T13:19:00.000-08:00

The family when Peace is a week old.

Peace in the hospital.

Truth feeding Peace.

Peace at six months.

And so the days passed in caring for the twins, teaching English, helping my mother-in-law, and waiting for the baby to grow. We had an ultrasound and knew it was going to be another girl. I was not bothered by this. It seemed to make life easier since the babies were so close together (one minute and then fourteen months apart). Of course, this did not bode well for the Liu family’s dynastic aspirations. They needed a grandson. My mother-in-law earnestly told me that they needed me to bear a son. They now knew that the gender of the baby was determined by the father, so no one was blaming me, but I would need to try again in a few years after taking some herbal concoctions to help make my body more alkaline. According to the Hakka old wives’ tales, if the wife is alkaline and the husband is acidic, they will produce many males. Because I had grown up in meat-eating America, my body was far too acidic for having sons in Taiwan. Because it was so important that I have a son, they wanted me to do my best to have this child by natural child birth instead of c-section. I discussed this with my obstetrician. He said that if it were anyone else, he would not allow it. My stomach muscles had not grown back fully after the twins, and he did not think I would be able to have the baby naturally. But he trusted me to follow his instructions and to know when I needed to get to the hospital if it was turning into a medical emergency. The biggest thing I had to watch out for was a reddening of the scar from having the twins and sharp sticking pains along the length of the scar. He monitored my progress carefully, and we headed for the due date.

Eldest Sister was also pregnant with her fifth child. Our due dates were almost the same. Mine was slightly before hers, but I had never had a child naturally, and she had already had four. Her baby was finally a boy. The entire family was rejoicing over her good fortune because her husband had been threatening to replace her if she failed to bear him a son.

I kept teaching right up until my due date because I wanted as much exercise as possible to help with the birth. And right on my due date both Eldest Sister and I began to have contractions. She had her baby in a matter of hours, but my baby just would not come. For five days, I had on-again, off-again contractions, but they never got stronger or harder. Finally, in the middle of the night on the day before my own birthday, the incision began to get red and hurt tremendously. I told Yuni, but he felt my stomach and said it wasn’t time. He rolled over and went back to sleep. I was in so much pain I was moaning, and this woke up my in-laws. They insisted that Yuni take me to the hospital, so we dashed off in the wee hours of the morning. At the hospital, they put me on a monitor and said that the baby was distressed. They also began prepping me for surgery while we waited for the doctor to get out of another emergency c-section. He came and was very curt with Yuni. He told him that if he wanted more babies, he needed to protect his wife and this one. He said that as long as I rested for 5 years before getting pregnant again, I could have another pregnancy even after two c-sections. So I was trundled into the operating room.

My file had not yet arrived when the anesthesiologist came in. I told him that I had drug sensitivities which the head of the anesthesiology department had checked out. I begged him to wait for my file. He said that I was his fifth surgery of the night, and he knew what he was doing. He gave me the shot and began chatting with the nurses. I kept watching my heart rate on the monitor because I have an irregular heart beat that is worsened by certain medications. My heart rate went way up and the irregular beats were coming two and three in a row. I knew that this was a dangerous pattern, but I had an oxygen mask on my face, and I was tied to the table. The nurse and anesthesiologist were chatting and not paying any attention to the monitors. I began thrashing my head back and forth to get their attention. A nurse finally came over and asked if I needed to vomit. I said: “Look at my heart rate!” The nurse looked up, yelped, and grabbed the anesthesiologist from his conversation with the other nurse. At that moment, my file arrived, and he was able to see the error of his ways. Unfortunately, the only thing he could do was to give me the antidote to the wrong medication that he had given me, but he couldn’t give me the right stuff.

The surgeon came in and began work removing the baby. Her head was so big that it didn’t fit any of the clamps. They had to stretch my stomach wide to pull her out. Then it took forever for them to get her breathing. Finally, they brought her over and showed her to me. The doctor kept me open while helping revive the baby. Then he came up by my head and begged me to have my tubes tied. He said that the baby and I had almost died. He told me that he could do a reversible tubal ligation that would keep me from getting pregnant for five years. Then if the Lius still wanted me to have a son, we could cut through the ties, and I could get pregnant again. The proceedings that night had scared me sufficiently that I was more than happy to sign for the tubal ligation. Since we did not have a son, Yuni had to agree to the procedure. The nurse took the form out, and we waited. Then the nurse came back in and called the doctor to the door. The doctor left my vision for five minutes or more. I think he may have stepped out of the operating room because I did not hear what they were saying.

When the doctor came back, he said a little too brightly, “Well, we have that settled.” He tied off the tubes, and then he said to me in English, “Now we have to pack your uterus because you won’t be using it for many years.” He began working down low in the center of my abdomen. After the baby was out, the anesthesiologist had asked me if I wanted a general anesthetic for the rest of the operation. I had refused, and he had left to go off duty. By this time, then, after the antidote shot, the anesthesia from the epidural was wearing off. I began to have quite a bit of feeling. The doctor worked for quite some time. I kept breathing deeply and silently praying that I would not move and wreck things. Finally, I began chatting with him, asking him how much longer it would take, how many layers he had to sew up, etc. He told the nurses that this was the difference between American patients and Chinese patients. The Americans were proactive about their health. After what felt like hours of battling against the pain, the surgeon left. The nurses were short and small; they didn’t know how they were going to get me onto the gurney to wheel me into the recovery room. I said, “That’s okay. The anesthesia wore off a long time ago.” I hitched my rear up and stretched a leg out onto the gurney. Both nurses gasped. I told them that American patients were not really that interested in being proactive, but talking to the doctor had distracted me from the pain. They helped me the rest of the way onto the gurney and got me into the recovery room.

And then the pain set in. For the next 36 hours, I was in ever-intensifying pain. My baby was cute. She could smile before she was 24 hours old. Even though she had been a blue baby, she scored a 10 on the APGAR test. Feeding her was a joy, but the rest of the time was sheer torture. Taiwanese hospitals did not allow morphine or other narcotics, and I get violently sick from Demoral, the only pain drug they could offer me. Finally, the doctor prescribed Valium to help me sleep. It didn’t really work. I just breathed and embraced the pain. Eventually, it began to subside.

Something went horribly wrong during that surgery. Ever since then I have had all kinds of problems with my female health. But I have to say that the baby I bore was and is magnificent. The grandparents had the twins, so in some ways she was my firstborn. She was the first one that I got to raise more or less my way. She never really slept, not even as a newborn. She wound up with some slight learning disabilities due to her birth trauma, probably, but she has worked very hard and has pretty much overcome them all. I am so glad I did not take the advice to have an abortion, and I truly believe she is worth every bit of pain that I had bearing her. I guess the pain from that one birth made up for the painless and easy birth of the twins. I certainly had enough pain for three children in that botched surgery. I named her Yung-an, which means Eternal Peace, but the character that I used for peace can also mean rest and safety. I was so grateful that we both came through all right, and we were at peace and safe. The name is like a boy’s name, but it was too meaningful for me to care about trivial things like that.

We went home, and I began my confinement. I got much more rest this time around because the family took the twins downstairs and played with them all day, so Peace and I stayed upstairs resting and relaxing. My mom came from America and would come up and talk to me, and I did get a few visitors, but many times the visitors didn’t make it upstairs because the twins’ antics downstairs were so entertaining. I now had “San Qian Jin” or three thousand pieces of gold, which is a polite way to say three daughters. The third daughter is not so remarked upon or celebrated in Chinese households. But to me, all my daughters are worth more than their weight in gold.

Happy Chinese New Year

2010-02-14T18:39:00.000-08:00

The Chinese Zodiac

Today is the first day of the Chinese New Year. 2010 is the Year of the Tiger. The picture above shows all the signs of the zodiac and the years associated with them. There are 12 signs of the zodiac, and they run in a cycle of 60 years because each year is also affiliated with one of the five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, or water. The element associated with the year slightly changes the horoscope characteristics of persons born in that year.

There is a story about how the order of the animals was determined: The Buddha decided to preach to all sentient beings and called the animals to come listen to him. He provided some snacks to ensure that they came. The rat smelled the snacks and ran the fastest, so the rat is the first in the Chinese zodiac. The pig wanted to get there faster, but it was too clumsy and heavy, so it came last after all the animals. The cat was too disdainful. It turned up its nose at the snack, swished its tail, and went the other way, so there is no cat in the Chinese zodiac.

I have read that the theory of karma states that people are born at the exact time and hour to give them the horoscope that best matches their karma for this life. Perhaps this is why the Buddha is involved in the zodiac story.

As I said, 2010 is the Year of the Tiger. Here is a picture of a pretty tiger:

The Year of the Tiger (http://www.sinopaperart.com/images/chinese-zodiac-2-tiger-sign.jpg)

A good website to check out Chinese horoscopes is

http://www.usbridalguide.com/special/chinesehoroscopes/Tiger.htm

This is some of its general information about people born in the Year of the Tiger:

"The Tiger is said to be lucky vivid, lively and engaging. Another attribute of the Tiger is his incredible bravery, evidenced in his willingness to engage in battle or his undying courage. Maybe he’s so brave because he is so lucky. But the Chinese say a Tiger having a Tiger in the house is the very best protection against the evils of fire, burglary."

There is a lot more information on the website, so I would check it out if you are interested. 2010 is the year of the Metal Tiger. Metal Tigers are different from Water Tigers, but you will have to do that research for yourselves.

(My brother is a Water Tiger, and my father is an Earth Tiger.)

Because it is the Chinese New Year, we can only talk about happy, lucky things. I will have to pick up the thread of my blog story next week when a little bit of suspense and danger won't be a jinx, so you'll have to come back again...

And now I leave you with the words that every child repeats over and over on Chinese New Year:

恭喜發財, 紅包拿來! (Gong Xi Fa Cai, Hong Bao Na Lai--Congratulations, Best Wishes for Prosperity, Give me my red envelope!)

May the Year of the Tiger be happy, healthy and prosperous for all of you!

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity | Video on TED.com

2010-01-31T14:59:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity Video on TED.com

Inspiring Video

2010-01-31T11:13:00.000-08:00

My aunt has been in town for the past week. I have been busy with the first week of school and spending time catching up with one of my favorite people. So I did not get a post written as I had wished. But a friend from high school shared this video. Its sentiments resonated, and I offer it to my readers for their reflection and consideration.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jk_rowling_the_fringe_benefits_of_failure.html

Alone in a Crowd

2010-01-24T21:29:00.000-08:00

Warning: Depressing reality post to balance the fairy tale bubble impressions I may have given... Every rose has some thorns.

By the time of their first birthday Truth and Love were beginning to talk. They had learned to walk just around 11 months, and Truth was babbling out words even before then. We had decided to make them trilingual, so I doggedly spoke to them in English. Their grandparents and father spoke to them in Hakka, and their aunts and uncles spoke to them in Mandarin. Most of the neighbors spoke Hakka, and that is the language they began to speak. The first word for both of them was “Po” or “Grandmother” in Hakka. From there they went to “mam” or “eat,” “ap” or “duck,” and any number of Hakka words for the myriad things discussed in Ma’s steady patter with them. Truth would react when I spoke to her in English, but she did not speak. Love took English as an excuse to blithely continue doing whatever it was that she wanted to do.

It is one thing to read in books that the children will speak one language faster but by the age of three will be fluent in all of them, and it is another thing to live through the experience of losing that connection with your children. Some days I was ready to quit, but I also knew that in the long run of their lives, speaking English would be more useful to them than speaking Hakka, so I persevered. I did not want them to feel I was angry at something they could not help, so I released the sorrow and the frustration and chose to rejoice that they were intelligent, articulate, and growing up in a loving environment with lots of adult attention.

With the constant use of Hakka in the home, Yuni’s return from the army, and the newness of my being American wearing off, there was a subtle shift in the family dynamics. Of course, the presence of babies also changed the family’s focus. Most rural Chinese families automatically center in on the youngest members. Everyone nurtures, pets, and plays with them. But also, since Yuni was home from the army, Pa no longer felt entirely responsible for me. I was, after all, his son’s wife. Since Pa had insisted that Ma learn Mandarin to accommodate me, Yuni decided that I needed to learn Hakka with the children to accommodate her. This meant that no one in the family would translate for me any more when they were speaking in Hakka. And this is the way that multi-generational families survive. Couples are given psychic space to work things out between themselves. People keep their opinions to themselves and take things at face value. Because I worked nights, it was easy to forget me. I was out when the family would sit in the living room chatting, so on the evenings that I was home, it was easiest for them to continue in their usual pattern, a pattern that had been established long before I was part of the household. The only conversations I had were “women’s talk” in the kitchen or while changing the babies. When we were away from the men, Ma and the sisters still spoke to me in Mandarin. And I began to learn the family’s women’s stories. Now political discussions were only held in Hakka between Yuni and Pa. So were the discussions of the family business and family fortunes.

I was hurt and puzzled, but when I asked Yuni, he got offended and said that this was the way they always did things. And so I cared for the babies in the morning, went off to work in the afternoons and evenings, earned more than the rest of the family put together every month, paid about two thirds of the combined household expenses plus all my personal expenses and those of my children, and as eldest daughter-in-law, I was my mother-in-law’s right hand in the women’s court. Any time my sisters-in-law had a problem, I would help my mother-in-law solve it before the men could be involved. We handled unwanted pregnancies, a daughter who got tricked and was being held against her will working as a hostess in a nightclub in Japan, minor marital disputes, and health problems. The only times things were taken out of our hands were when a daughter and son-in-law needed to move in with us temporarily because the son-in-law was fighting with his parents over the division of family property and when one of the sisters got married, and the men had to negotiate the marriage.

Last semester I took a course in Asian women’s history, and I learned that this pattern is very common among rural families all over China. Over winter break I read two books recommended by a professor that helped me understand the situation even better. I highly recommend them to anyone who wants to understand what it feels like to be a woman in such a household. The first book is On Chinese Women by Julia Kristeva, and the second is Organizing Silence by Robin Patric Clair.

In the first chapter of On Chinese Women, Julia Kristeva describes how in Chinese peasant families there are vestiges of a pre-Confucian family system. It is so deep that it is almost in the blood. Before the Common Era, and especially in pre-historic times, most Asian family structures were probably matriarchal. This can be seen in the Shang Dynasty tombs where they found the oracle bones. There is a large tomb honoring a warrior queen who ruled jointly with her husband and led the armies into battle. In the very ancient family structure, marriages were still negotiated, but the woman kept her dowry property and lived in her husband’s home almost as an adversary. If she divorced, she got her brothers to help her and she took her dowry back with her, so she could remarry. Relations between husband and wife were necessarily strained, and women and their sons allied to undermine the husband/father’s patriarchal authority. Until a woman had a son, she was an alien in the man’s home, and even when the baby was born, she had to mold him into her ally. Yuni had been molded this way by his mother, and he had unwittingly inherited this kind of attitude towards marriage from her influence. The fact that I was so successful came across as a threat to him, and he spontaneously responded by attempting to isolate me from all but the most mundane of conversations, which as a male, he did not even know existed.

In this primitive system, a woman’s greatest protection against predation by her husband’s family is support from her natal family. I did not know about this. The Neo-Confucians in the Han Dynasty were the first to try to eradicate this support for women and make men the total lords and masters of the homes. But among the illiterate and the rural families, this prehistoric dynamic lives on like a coelacanth. Pa, Ma, and Yuni spend much time and energy keeping the married daughters of the family in a good position in their husband’s households. I helped them in these endeavors without understanding that I also needed to enlist my mother, father, and brother to play these kinds of games for me. Instead, I just gave in to their oftentimes unreasonable requests. For example, my wedding gifts went in their original sealed boxes to my various sisters-in-law. Pa would try to protest, but Ma and Yuni would override his objections, and I just wanted to keep the family in harmony. They always used the excuse that I had grown up rich in America, and they had known such great privation, so I should let the sisters enjoy my nice things. To me, good relationships are ever so much more important than mere things, so I always agreed to the requests. And to this day, I have great relationships with my sisters-in-law. Those relationships are much more important than a brand new rice cooker or a small refrigerator for the bedroom or a hot plate or whatever.

The second book, Organizing Silence, does not speak of Chinese women, but it does summarize women’s studies theorists from a wide range of disciplines to show how patriarchal societies organize their structures to silence women and ignore them. When I read the book, it was like a light bulb exploding in my brain as to why Yuni knew none of the details of his birth without a midwife or of how his mother had had to beg the doctor to treat her children when the family was short of cash. Those were women’s stories, and even if a man was in hearing range, the content of a woman’s speaking did not register on his radar.

I began discussing my revelations with a close Chinese friend of mine, who is highly educated and just a few years older than I. She agreed with my assessment. She also told me that Chinese men of our generation mark the beginning of what Chinese social scientists are calling the “yinification” of males. Both China and Taiwan promoted family planning in their attempts to raise standards of living. The result was that family-sizes were reduced drastically, and males became scarcer and scarcer. Chinese tradition demands that each generation produce at least one son. In families with only one or two sons, the boys were traditionally coddled and spoiled and never forced to take responsibility for their actions, lest they die young. With smaller families, most men today grew up in such an atmosphere, and the result is that as adults they are unable to stand being contradicted, they are petty, they are lazy, they take the easy way out, and they cannot stand to be shown up by women. If a wife outshines such a husband, she can expect that her excellence will be taken as a sign of aggression in the battle between husband and wife, and the husband will retaliate. My friend told me that there is a real problem now in China because many spoiled men would rather have the two die together than suffer the ignominy of having his highly competent wife succeed outside the home. Unfortunately, all across Asia education and modernization have produced many highly competent women, who are succeeding in all professions.

None of this really happens consciously. The families with these problems are usually not highly educated. They take these behaviors for granted and do not know any other way. After all, who has time for psychology when you are trying to make ends meet?

So what is a woman to do? I have observed a number of different strategies: 1) fight, scream, kick, punch, pull hair, cry, and live in a nearly constant state of open warfare; 2) go along with things on the surface, but then use devious underhanded strategies involving one’s children and natal family to keep the upper hand in the war between husband and wife; 3) give in and give in and give in until the strain and stress of going against her nature causes illness, and the woman either becomes a chronic invalid or dies prematurely young. Very few women voluntarily leave. They stay with their husbands for the sake of their children. Divorced women are highly stigmatized in this stratum of the population, and it is hard for them to hold their head up at family gatherings or even to make a living. Most of these women have a junior high education or less, so they have difficulty finding jobs that pay enough for even one person to live on.

The Only Pictures I Could Upload

2010-01-17T13:28:00.000-08:00

Twins' first Chinese New Year

Twins and mom

Potty Training Peasant-style

2010-01-10T14:11:00.001-08:00

Note: My computer is still acting up and unable to post pictures. I should get my new computer on 1/25, and I will then post a photo collage with the pictures I have wanted to include with these posts.

In previous posts I described a few of the differences between my American concepts about child-raising and my Chinese peasant in-law’s practices. One of the biggest differences that I noticed was in the matter of potty training. In America, it often seems to be a big horrendous ordeal for both mother and child. When I was in Taipei, some families seemed to have an easier time of it, and others had their struggles. The Liu family was expert at it.

I think their success came from a number of different outlooks on life. First of all, they are more relationship oriented, and they seemed to expect that the babies were communicating with them by body language long before they could talk. They responded with words and actions to meet the babies’ expressed needs. Second, bodily functions are normal and natural to them. (One American stereotype is that Chinese manners insist the guests belch at the end of a banquet. I don’t think that is the case, so much as any kind of passing gas is considered natural and is not remarked upon. After you stuff yourself at a twenty-course feast, the natural response is to belch, so they do, very loudly.) Because bodily functions are normal, there is much less fuss about potty training and the inevitable mistakes children make on their way to being trained. Third, most rural families have a higher tolerance for dirt. Houses frequently have tiled floors. There are drains in the middle of the kitchen and bathroom floors, and it is much easier to deal with any kind of mess. And finally, there is a slower rhythm of time for grandparents at home with the grandchildren. No one is rushing off to work; no one is worried about being late for anything. So the children are freer to live and learn.

Having said all that, the hot, humid weather in Taiwan gave most babies horrific heat and diaper rashes during the summer months from mid-March to mid-November. The houses were not heated, so cold, wet diapers in the winter created other problems. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, air conditioning was not as prevalent as it is now, and the weather was a huge impetus for early potty training. Most families of my acquaintance began potty training as soon as the babies could sit up around the age of four months. My friends in Taipei who had to get to work or rush off to scheduled appointments would try to get their children on a schedule and would put them on little potty seats at the door of the kitchen either while the mother was making breakfast or while she was making dinner. Because a schedule was involved, this method of potty training was not much happier for either parent or child than the American version.

My mother-in-law was home with the grandkids all day, and they were her career. She looked for body language to determine if they needed to go. Babies usually cross their eyes or grimace or do something when their intestines start moving. If Ma and the babies were at home, she would immediately grab the baby making the face, whip off her shorts and hold her firmly in her arms over the toilet while making encouraging noises. When the girl had finished, she was praised for going in the toilet like a big girl, and the diaper and shorts were put back on. If they were on a walk, of course, nothing would be said at this point in the process. Soon the girls would fuss briefly when they felt an urge, and they were whisked off to be held over the toilet.

At about six months, they were big enough to sit on potty seats, and sometimes I would come downstairs to find Ma and the twins in the bathroom. Ma would be perched on the edge of the bathtub, and the twins would be facing her in a row on their potty seats. They would all be talking and singing and laughing. Potty time was fun. At this point, Ma was able to catch things about 80% of the time. September and October are particularly hot in Taiwan, and the girls did not need to wear diapers when they were at home. If they made a mess, it was easy to wash the tile floor, and they were told that they would do better next time. The girls sometimes got more upset than their grandmother.

By the time they were walking, things got a bit more difficult because the girls would not always want to stop their playing to go in to the bathroom. But their views were respected. The Lius had no problem spreading out newspaper on the living room floor and holding the child right beside her toys or where she could continue watching TV, so that her bodily needs and her psychological needs could be taken care of. I used to joke that they were paper training my kids like puppies, but I think it was really a good way to handle it. The children were not allowed to soil their pants, but there was a compromise that kept them near their projects. They learned a little about negotiation and holding their own in a relationship. And the newspaper was very easy to clean up. In any event, the twins were pretty much potty (or paper) trained before the age of two without any huge scenes or crying or fuss or muss. To me it was an amazing feat after all the scare stories I had heard from my American friends and relatives.

Home for the Holidays

2010-01-03T14:00:00.000-08:00

I have pictures to go with this post, but my internet connection is not cooperating. Maybe tomorrow or in the still of the night...

Not long after I learned that I had a joyous flu, little Love got really sick. She had the real flu, and it was the first of many. The pediatrician said that it was common with twins that one would have a weaker immune system than the other. So Love caught every cold and flu that came around at least once. And when she got sick, she would get a high fever with convulsions and basically scare the living daylights out of all the adults in the household. About once every six weeks or so, we made late night visits to the emergency room because her fevers always seemed to spike the highest around 3 or 4 in the morning.

Taiwanese hospitals outside Taipei were not bad, considering that Taiwan was till a developing country, but they lacked a lot of amenities. Despite her frequent illnesses, Love was “well-nourished” with muscles like her dad’s. The doctors and nurses could not find veins to insert the IV needles any place except into the top of her forehead. So they would put the two of us into a chair. I would hold Love on my lap while the magic medicine trickled into her system through the IV needle. We were not curtained off, and neither were any of the other patients. As her fever came down, she became interested in the world. We watched a person getting his hand reattached. We watched several people die and their families start wailing and mourning. We watched people coming in covered with blood from being in motorcycle accidents. And to this day, we both have a healthy fear of hospitals and doctors in white coats. Usually the fever would break around 6, and we would go home with a raft of medicines for Ma to give Love throughout the day. Yuni and I would just go on to work. By the time we got home in the evening, Love would be fine.

And so summer turned to autumn, and autumn turned to winter. It was Christmas in America. By this time, many people in Taipei celebrated Christmas, and department stores would put up Christmas decorations. But in the Liu family’s circle of acquaintances, Christmas was not a big thing. My dad did not want the girls to miss out on the American side of their heritage, so he sent a huge box containing Christmas. It had a little 18 inch fake tree, ornaments, presents, and even boxed and canned food for a Christmas feast. Christmas Day was a holiday because it was the day that Sun Yat-sen’s constitution went into effect in 1911. So we set up the tree on the living room cabinets beside the TV, and I made the dishes from the boxes and things. I couldn’t always find exactly the right ingredients to put with the boxed things. For example, at that time in Taiwan, the butter outside the “foreigners’ district” in Taipei was usually sweetened with sugar and used only on toast. Both our boxes of mashed potatoes and of stuffing called for butter or margarine. I could not find margarine anywhere in Chungli, and the only butter to be had was sweetened. So we ate very sweet mashed potatoes and stuffing. I couldn’t get a turkey, so I bought a roasted duck, but as it was a family favorite, no one objected. There was also a canned ham, and we stir-fried up local vegetables. Everyone felt the dinner was delicious, although Pa proclaimed that Americans had a terrible sweet tooth since even the potatoes were sweet. He has a sweet-tooth himself, so he was gobbling them down, and I didn’t disabuse him of his notions. After dinner we opened presents and took pictures to send back to my family. Pa had bought a big bag of candy because to his mind, you can’t celebrate a holiday without candy. So we had a quasi-American style Christmas.

Of course, the family’s big focus was Chinese New Year. Two weeks before the Chinese New Year, Love got a chest cold. We did the usual emergency room run, but this time she didn’t get better as fast. Several days later, her temperature was up again, and she was having convulsions. This time the doctors said it was pneumonia and checked us directly into the hospital. We were put in the pediatric ward. Yuni went home to work and to tell the English school to find a substitute for my classes. Fortunately, the university was already on winter break. He returned at night to spend the night in the hospital with us. In Taiwan, each patient’s bed has a cot or a couch under it or beside it for a family member to spend the night. A baby had died in the crib next to Love’s, and no one wanted to put their baby in that crib or use its cot in case the bad luck rubbed off on them. We were not so superstitious, and we each took a cot.

Love was seriously ill and almost comatose for three days. Finally, the doctors changed her medicine, and she began standing up in the crib and moving around. Now my life was really difficult. She did not like being hampered by the tube in her head, so she would pull out her IV every chance she got. She would even pull it out in her sleep. It was nice to see her with energy, but it was a definite challenge. Some one had to hold her hands pretty much every minute of the day. I was already five months pregnant, but at night I would climb into the crib with her and sleep with her hands held firmly in mine. She slept very well; I slept very little. Three or four times a day, I had to take her to the special room where they gave her medicine through an atomizer. Then I had to pound her back for ten minutes and let the nurse suck the fluids out of her lungs. Ma and Pa would bring Truth to visit almost every day after Love’s fever broke. They were very worried that the family would not be all together on the twins’ first Chinese New Year. We spoke with the doctor, but he refused to promise anything because Love had been so sick when they checked her in.

Finally, at one in the afternoon of Chinese New Year’s eve, the doctor determined that Love’s lungs were clear enough and that she could go home for the traditional New Year’s Eve family dinner. We went home with packets and packets of medicines and instructions to bring her to the emergency room if her fever went back up or if her chest sounded congested. Ma did not allow the twins to go out on any of the family trips that vacation, but they had their grandchildren home for the family celebrations. Everyone had a good time.

After the holiday, Ma and Pa asked around to find the best pediatric Chinese medicine doctor. We started taking Love to get medicine to boost her immune system. It was nasty, bitter stuff, and even after boiling and straining it, there were still bits of bark in it that she was supposed to ingest. It usually took three or four adults to get it down her, but Pa and Ma were determined that she would not go back to the hospital again. We persevered with the regimen, and her fevers decreased. When she did get sick, she did not need to go to the emergency room. A couple of Panadol or Tylenol were usually enough to break her fevers.

A "Joyous" Flu

2009-12-20T08:35:00.000-08:00

The last part of our trip with Grandma Chu, my in-laws, and the twin babies was an extended stay in the Seattle area so that all the great-grandparents could bond with the babies. From Montana, we drove across Idaho and Washington and went straight to my mom’s family’s summer cabin on Camano Island in Puget Sound. All that side of the family was there. It was lots of fun. My in-laws really enjoyed being out on the woods and walking on the beach. My uncle and brother took Pa and Yuni clam digging on Grandpa Ryder’s beach at low low tide, and we had a feast of butter clams. Uncle Wally also taught Yuni the finer points of cribbage. He was fine with the addition in Chinese, but it was hard for him to do mental arithmetic and then call the numbers in English. But he is pretty competitive, as are my uncles and brother, so by the end of our time there, he was holding his own. What he lost at the cribbage board, he more than made up for at the badminton field. He also learned the joys of pitching horse shoes.

Pa Liu just could not get over the idea of a vacation home. He thoroughly enjoyed himself, but he was really having a hard time wrapping his mind around an acre of land devoted to nothing but family pleasure. My grandmother had flowers planted in a small garden near the cabin, but most of the land was just naturally wooded. There was the grassy driveway, and then a clearing for the cabin on the bluff above the beach. To one side of the cabin there was the volleyball/badminton/croquet field and the barbecue area. When Grandpa was in politics, he used to use have his Hawaiian secretary fly in the ingredients and hold genuine luaus complete with whole roast pig and poi that cooked underground in the sandy soil at the edge of the barbecue pit. We didn’t do anything that fancy just for family.

After several days at “The Island,” we all went back into Seattle to spend time with the Zimmerman relatives and get ready for Grammie Zimmerman’s 80th birthday party. Grammie had purchased fancy pink dresses for the girls. They looked kind of funny with their little bald heads, but they were one of the main attractions of the party. My experience of the party was very different from what my life used to be before children. I don’t remember much of what went on because I was always changing this one or feeding that one or getting a spare wipe from the diaper bag. I did manage to get into the family picture, but I’m not quite sure how that happened. I heard from all my relatives who could pay attention that the party was a huge success. I think I even managed to eat a piece of birthday cake.

One of the most interesting things to me, my mom, and my American grandmothers was how well Ma Liu and Grandma Chu could communicate without words. The doting grandmas and great-grandmas would whisk the babies off and play and laugh and get along famously, so that I could translate for Pa and Yuni and the men. Ma Liu and Grandma Chu were able to use body language to obtain water for formula, changing tables, towels, and pretty much anything else that the babies needed. They did not feel as much need for translation, and the Chinese “sisterhood” of the bedroom extended into the American family. When I had finished translating for the men, Ma would pull me aside and ask me to interpret several hours’ worth of stored up comments, if there was time. But they really communicated quite well without my services. By the end of our stay, Ma and Grandma Chu could both say “thank you” and “water.”

Our month of vacation soon ended. We took our seats in business class, and headed back to Taiwan. School was starting, and I had new classes to teach at the Gloria English School. I was also starting in my new position as Director of the Business School English conversation program at Chung Yuan University. I had been made English Secretary to the President of the University the previous semester. Pa and Yuni had a number of construction jobs, and the family business was flourishing. All the uncles were surprised at how well Grandma Chu had managed to adapt to life in America. She had learned to drink fresh skim milk. She had also learned how to use a knife and fork. And she could speak a couple of words of English. Her favorite picture from the trip was the one of her and Ma standing by the side of the road in Yellowstone with the flaming trees in the background and a helicopter flying in with a bucket of water. I think the entire town of Toufen eventually heard the story of her adventures in the forest fire and about what she had learned at the smoke jumper’s school.

And just as life was settling into a comfortable routine, I began throwing up every morning. I did not have a fever or any other symptoms, and at first I thought I had eaten something spoiled. But when I couldn’t keep food down for several days in a row, I went to the doctor because I was worried about passing germs to the babies. The doctor examined me, and then he laughed and gave me a cup. He told me to go into the bathroom and produce a specimen. When I emerged, the nurse was waiting with a little paper strip. After a few minutes, she and the doctor came into the examination room with big smiles on their faces, proclaiming: “You have joy!” I had a hard time believing the diagnosis, so I went to the ob-gyn. He confirmed that my “flu” was a joyous one. He was a bit less sanguine than the general practitioner had been because he knew that I had five month old twins. He suggested an abortion. That night I went home and discussed the diagnosis with the family. Ma, in particular, was quite distressed at the idea of killing a potential grandchild. Pa promised to call all the unmarried daughters home to help. Yuni wanted the child, but he said the decision was mine. I couldn’t bear the thought of killing my own child, either. So against the advice of the ob-gyn, we decided to go through with having the baby. It is a decision that I have never regretted. Fortunately, since it was not another set of twins, the morning sickness ended fairly quickly.

Four Generations Touring the US

2009-12-13T13:25:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the delay in posting. Final papers this semester have been trickier than expected. The professors are making us turn in the drafts and rewrite extensively. None of the old turn in the paper and pray for an A that I am used to. I am down to 4 more days of school with one project, one presentation, and one final left to go.

When the twins were about three months old, my father called us and asked if we could bring them to the US for my grandmother’s eightieth birthday party. At first Yuni and I thought the four of us would go by ourselves, but as we considered the long trans-Pacific plane ride, we thought it might be better if we had some help. We asked my in-laws, and they were both quite happy to accompany us to America to meet my family.

The first order of business was to get the visas. The girls and I were US citizens, and my parents-in-law were old enough that they qualified for express visa service. But Yuni was a problem; the American Institute in Taipei could not fathom that we would want to live in Taiwan instead of in America. They wanted Yuni to wait until he had his green card. At the time, we had no plans to live in the US. Finally, after showing them proof of property in Taiwan plus letters from MY employers and the association of building contractors vouching for the family business, he was given a one-time entry visa to the US. We started looking for plane reservations.

Ma and Pa went to Toufen to visit the relatives in Central Taiwan and let them know about our proposed adventure. They came home, and Ma was rather agitated that day as we were cooking together. Finally, it came out that Grandma Chu wanted to tag along to see the world. She had not even been to Taipei before our wedding, so taking her on a plane to another country was going to be something else. Grandma Chu had diabetes and needed frequent snacks with protein. She was also afraid of the Taiwanese “ghost month,” which was right about the time we were traveling in mid-summer. It is the 7th month of the lunar calendar and falls in July or August. My mother-in-law assured her that since Yuni and I were Christians, Jesus would protect her, and nothing would go wrong. The maternal uncles were in a quandary. None of them dared take their mother on a trip abroad in case something happened and the rest of the family blamed them for sending their mother to an early grave. A couple of them were not so sure that I would be any better protection. Finally, Youngest Maternal Uncle put up the money so that all of us could travel business class on the airplane. He said that he would take full blame if anything happened. I also had him buy Grandma Chu an international health insurance policy.

We got Grandma’s passport and visa very quickly. The next step was finding business class seats for a group of seven. Since we were going to America with Grandma in tow, my father-in-law and the uncles said that we should take them sightseeing to several places in America. Washington, DC, Yellowstone Park, and the Grand Canyon were mentioned. I contacted my friends and relatives, and we laid out an itinerary. We were able to purchase an extra “travel America” ticket for just $50 each that took us to two extra stops in the US. We decided to arrive early and do our traveling so that the babies would be adjusted to the time change before the big birthday party at the end of August.

It was actually pretty nice in the airports between the business class tickets, the elderly lady, and the four-month old babies. Our first stop was Seattle, where we stayed for a day and met the family. My dad took the babies, so we could sleep for a day to recover from the long plane ride. The next day we headed off to visit Cousin Brian in Washington, DC. We also visited my friends from college and church that were still in the area. We went to the Smithsonian and the National Zoo and we saw the Capitol. One of my Grandpa’s friends was in the Senate, so we all had our pictures taken with a US Senator. The people from church held a potluck dinner in our honor, and one of my friends crocheted bootie sandals for the tropical babies. Grandma Chu and the babies held up amazingly well.

From DC we flew to Denver where my mom was living. We stayed with her for a few days and went sightseeing in Denver. Estes Park was particularly nice. Mom rented a large fifteen passenger van to drive with us from Denver to Seattle by way of Yellowstone National Park. Mom had the routes picked out with the help of Triple A, but she didn’t know what things would be interesting to my relatives who spoke no English. On the first day out, we stopped at an old gold mine and went panning for gold. Mom and I took care of the babies while Yuni, his parents, and grandmother all squatted next to the stream for an hour or so. They got enough for two full bottles of gold flakes, and Pa Liu bought chains so that Ma and Grandma Chu each had a new necklace.

Outside of Yellowstone we stopped at a motel that had flyers for a rodeo. Mom and I left the others resting in the hotel, while we went to scope it out. It looked like something they might enjoy, so we bought our tickets. That was one of the high points of the trip for Grandma Chu and Ma. They just loved the crazy people trying to ride the bulls. Pa told us stories of how he had herded and ridden the family’s water buffalo when he was a boy. He could not understand why American bulls were so ornery. We explained to him about the hooks in the stomach cinch. He was not too happy about that. But he did like the clowns, and the fact that the bulls took every opportunity to get revenge when the cowboys went down.

The drive through Yellowstone was particularly memorable. We were there in the middle of a huge forest fire. The helicopters went back and forth overhead scooping water out of the river to dump on the flames. At one point the trees across the road were on fire. Traffic was stopped until the fire fighters had gotten the flames extinguished. Ma and Grandma Chu took the opportunity to jump out of the car for a photo op. Grandma Chu wanted her sons to see that she was hardy enough to drive through a forest fire. (This was propaganda to get them to take her on their next trip to Southeast Asia. It was quite successful.) We were able to see Old Faithful and some of the hot springs, but the best fun for my relatives was driving through the forest fire and watching the helicopters douse the flames.

When we got out of Yellowstone, we were in remote areas of the country. The old folks couldn’t believe how long we would travel without seeing a house or anything. There were not too many Chinese restaurants in that part of the country, and Grandma Chu learned to adapt to traditional American cooking. She did quite well at controlling her diabetes. We went to a smoke jumper school in Montana, which was quite interesting after our experiences in Yellowstone. Another high point in Montana was the tour of a silver mine near the Montana-Idaho border. (to be continued…)

Photo Collage: Four Generations on a Road Trip

2009-11-29T15:23:00.000-08:00

When the twins were three months old, we got an invitation to bring them to my Grammie Zimmerman's 80th birthday party at the end of August. My parents-in-law and Yuni's grandmother Chu also came along for the ride. We visited family all over the US, including Cousin Brian and Cousin Jill who were living in northern Virginia just outside of Washington, D.C. I got lazy this weekend with too much holiday and no real homework, and I did not write the post I had been planning. There are tons of pictures from the trip, so enjoy the preview!

Four generations of Zimmerman descendants

Truth and Love with the Zimmerman cousins

At the US Capitol

At the Ryder summer place on Camano Island

At Carnation Farms in Washington State

Cousin Jill and Cousin Amy with the twins

With Cousin Brian's family in Dulles Airport

At the hotel in Bellevue, WA the first night in the US. My dad is so proud to be a grandpa!

East Meets West

Eldest Sister's Tragedy (1)

An American Funeral

A Hakka Funeral, Part 3: The Seventh Seven

Summer in Shanghai

Another View of Tiger Mothering

A Traditional Funeral--Hakka Style: Part Two, the Funeral Cortege

Aloha from Waikiki

A Traditional Funeral--Hakka Style: Part One, the Pre-Cortege Proceedings

We Begin Homeschooling

Why I've Been AWOL from Blogging

Family Road Trip

Happy Year of the Metal Rabbit

Thoughts about Homeschooling and Tiger Mothers

Conference in Singapore

Hong Kong Holiday--2011

A Beautiful Pearl

True Philosophizing on the Road to Marrakesh

Another Interruption: Public Service Announcement

My "Almost-Passing" Answer to the Midterm Koan

Trips to Taiwan and Miami

A Koan of a Midterm

Two Funerals, a Lay-off, and Fei

Number One on the List of 20 Ways to Freak Out Your Mother

Mid-October Madness

Updates

More Links to Truth's Blog About Adventures in Mongolia

Thesis Writing Trumps Blogging

Chinese Women, Confucian Yin-Yang Theory, and Living out Virtue through the Female Body

Road Trip to the Olympic Peninsula

Breadwinner Down

Favorite Field Trip #1: Woodland Park Zoo

The Joy of Great-Grandkids

Congratulations Graduates!!

First Snow

Life as a FOB

Moving to America

Preparing to Immigrate

Face, Shame, and Teapot Spouts: What Chinese Babies Learn from their Mamas

Recovering from Five Hours under the Knife

Dr. Hsu

Motorcycle Accident

Three Generations with Frequent Flyer Miles

A Large Family Has Too Many Stories (2)

Conference Break

A Large Family Has Too Many Stories (1) 大家庭的故事太多了

Three Thousand Pieces of Gold

Happy Chinese New Year

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity | Video on TED.com

Inspiring Video

Alone in a Crowd

The Only Pictures I Could Upload

Potty Training Peasant-style

Home for the Holidays

A "Joyous" Flu

Four Generations Touring the US

Photo Collage: Four Generations on a Road Trip