What Nai Nai Left

The day before Nai Nai left America, she brought to me a handful of seventeen pennies and three dimes, many of them corroded or flattened and crushed around the edges.

"You found these on your creekwalks," I exclaimed.

She laughed and waved her hand. "They are no use to me," she said.

My mother-in-law has a keen eye. Once she found a dollar in the creek and once more in the parking lot at Costco. And once, when she saw the girls playing with a million dollar note of play money, she scolded them and brought the paper to me. She would walk the creek in the afternoons when the winter sun warmed her through the barren trees. Noticing my excitement over a rusty hinge she found on one walk, she began to bring me bits of metal and things she noticed in the dirt. The girls taught her to look for smooth and colorful rocks and embedded fossils. I don't know that she understood why these are important to us but she helped us look.

On one creekwalk, we met a grandmother from Korea. I got lost in translation when the grandmother tried to explain where she was from. My mother-in-law didn't know where Korea is. In Nai Nai's mind there exists China - the homeland, Japan - the old enemy, and America - the dreamland.

Most mornings she spent indoors by the window, reading Chinese poetry or tracts she got from church. I love this image of her most of all. She worked all her life in the fields and had only a second grade education. In our home she could be comfortable and spend her days in leisure.

"She wants to go home," Brad said.

Why?

She says she is bored and has nothing to do.

Sometimes she would mistake my limited Chinese language for fluency and begin to tell me stories of her life back home. I really wanted to hear her stories, but she only did this when my husband wasn't home. At first I tried calling him at work for a translation but that couldn't last long. Then I tried using a Chinese dictionary, but her dialect wasn't in the dictionary. I was stuck with listening for one or two words I could interpret and guessing at her subject. If I said I didn't understand, she talked louder and louder. Then I would nod and pretend to understand to make her feel better. Eventually I learned enough Chinese to become dangerous and we began to miscommunicate. She would get offended by what I said. Finally I began to ignore her attempts at conversation to prevent further disagreements.

"I never want to come back again," she said, the day before she left.

Why?

I am always too confused.

That day, she forgot my husband took the girls with him on an errand. She searched the creek and walked the grounds for two hours, vainly calling out for them. She thought they were lost.

In her suitcase she packed the new shoes and clothes we gave her, the photos from her stay, the jewelry she had asked for to "give her face" with her relatives. She asked her son if she could take some pebbles she found, but he said that the suitcase would be too heavy. She left them in a styrofoam cup on the bookshelf next to her little stack of Chinese books.

On Poetic Justice

"Li Po Chanting a Poem",
ink on paper, by Liang K'ai (13th century)

I glanced up as the plump, middle-aged, Chinese woman rounded the corner and strode through the church coffee bar, passing my husband and daughters, until she stood square in front of my chair holding a stapled essay. My husband looked perplexed. Clearly I had a sign on my forehead visible only to Chinese visitors who wish to have a blonde grammarian check their writing. I'd never met this woman and still don't know who she is for, without an introduction, she shoved the essay titled "The Consequences of Drunk Driving" in my lap and asked me to check the verbs. Her English was halting but with complete confidence that I could help her.

Three double-spaced pages detailed the devastating physical and emotional trauma caused by driving (and getting arrested) while drunk. Prison, guilt, loss of life, financial ruin, she named them all. The essay was chock full of cold facts and figures, but with few grammatical errors. Toward the end, the author referred to a previous blog post that explained details not relevant to her essay.

"Did you write this essay," I asked.

"Oh, yes," she said. "I write this essay."

"Can you tell me about this blog post?"

"What is blog post?"

"Well, I see nothing seriously wrong with this essay except you must be sure to credit all of your sources."

"I write this myself."

"I understand. You did a good job but if you do not tell every place where you found information, your teacher will give you a bad grade."

She nodded and seemed pleased there were no errors. She thanked me and she left. Why try to reinvent the wheel? And certainly, passing the class is far more important than losing face by exposing poor writing skills in a foreign language. Besides, the teacher wants information, not what I think. You see, in her mind, cobbling together a few sentences from esteemed sources constitutes good writing. The Eastern mindset venerates expert opinion and writing.

In Wuhan, China where I lived for three years, I often visited a site near the Number 1 Bridge over the Yangtze River. Built in 223 A.D., the Yellow Crane Tower has been destroyed and rebuilt several times, yet is one of the central landmarks and tourist spots in the city. With a 360 degree hilltop view of the tri-cities below, over the centuries, it has also captured the imagination of scores of poets. The most famous of the poems tells the lore of a man who, while visiting the tower, was carried away to the celestial city by a crane. Written by a renowned poet of the Tang Dynasty, it is considered one of Cui Hao's best poems.

But what captured my imagination during one visit with a translator, was that there was another, equally famous poet during the Tang dynasty who visited the Yellow Crane Tower and read Cui Hao's poem written on the tower wall. Struck by the greatness of the poem, Li Bai (Li Po) vowed he could do no better and would never write again. I was floored until I heard this sentiment repeated again and again during those three years: once greatness is achieved, there is no use going down that road again.

Li Bai does (thankfully) write again and, ironically, in an ensuing series of poems reminiscent of Salieri's frustration with Mozart, his obsessession over that poem on the wall results in some of his most enduring works.

Here is a translation of the poem that inspired so much.

The Yellow Crane Tower
Cui Hào 704-754
The ancient one
flew off on his yellow crane,
Now this place is empty
only Yellow Crane Tower remains.
The Yellow Crane
once gone never returns,
White clouds for a thousand years
empty and remote.
Boats and Hanyang trees
reflect in clear water,
Lush vegetation thrives
on Parrot Shoal.
At dusk I ask for news of home,
These mist shrouded waters
heavy on my heart.

Translator: Dongbo 東波

People who live in glass houses...

... apparently have very large carbon footprints. I smugly thought I was doing pretty good at conservation since I "don't get out much." Yet it appears my footprint is embarrassingly larger than the average consumer in this country. Not sure how except that if I get rid of our Mazda van, I could cut that figure in half. So what's the rest of the country doing that I'm not? Not sure, but at least the calculator gives ways to offset my greedy consumption (Really, I thought I was pretty conservative!!)

I've added a link in my bar so you can calculate your own footprint. Please don't tell me your number since it will only depress me further. Instead, make a resolution to offset some of your own bloat and save some dragonflies and butterflies for the future.

By the way, we found this fossilized print in the creek behind behind our home.

...shouldn't throw stones

"My mother thinks you are planning to build a house with all those rusty things you collect on your walks." There was a hint of a smile in Brad's eyes as he put his hands on my shoulders and I dissolved into laughter. It is hard enough for my husband to understand my love of rusty things. My children can barely grasp what I envision as art. But my mother-in-law. Well, she just thinks I am very thrifty. In her world of "never-enough", found trash is a great way of recycling - for money or for building a home.


In Nai Nai's defense, she comes from rural China which is tantamount to taking Laura Ingalls Wilder out of Kansas and plopping her in front of a computer. In rural China, hi-tech means having a phone line that runs to the village and scarcity is a way of life. The dishwasher, microwave, fridge, and stove aren't luxuries to her, they are alien. I'm just not sure why she thinks I would want to build a house with my found pieces, though I imagine all those rusty bits of re-bar, bolts, wire, and other thingies might surely be useful in constructing a new home. The thing is, how long would it take me to find enough materials? And what does she envision it would look like? Now there is some artful food for thought.

Year of the Ox

Chinese Dolls

It is New Year's Day for over one quarter of the world's population. My mother-in-law just couldn't understand why the girls went to school and her son had to work. There should have been fireworks and food and family from all over China. But this is America. Though we had fish last night and a feast with friends from church the night before, I know she misses the two weeks of festivities and friends. She'll want to burn paper money to honor her deceased mother, give red packets of money to her oldest granddaughter, eat vegetables from her garden, hope for a good planting season.

She is out of her element here in our home and she is not used to sitting indoors. I show her pictures of when I visited her home for Chinese New Year (ten years ago) and wonder if it will only make her sigh more deeply.

During the feast with friends we met a seventy-nine year old woman visiting from China. Her father was a Chinese minister before the revolution yet she went to Nanjing University in the early fifties. I asked her how she was able to survive the red guards during the sixties and her eyes welled up. It was too painful to discuss, she said in halting English. Her mother was a westerner from California, she said, as she hugged me and asked for my address. I hope she writes to me in this year of the ox.

Frozen out of Time

If you haven't noticed, our family is just a little gaga about rocks. The six and seven-year old girls think dirt and pebbles trump divas of pop so when we surprised them with a visit to an auction house in downtown Dallas for a peek at museum quality bones and gems for sale, they were ecstatic. We didn't make the dinosaur bone give-away (though they were promised one would come in the mail) but we got a whole month's worth of eye-candy in one hour. On the first floor were crystals, ores, and gemstones worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many of them were found in China, including the stunning silver formation called "The Dragon". Many were found on farms in the corn-belt or in the mountains of Utah. We couldn't stop staring and drooling but finally left as the crush of grade-schoolers standing in line for the giveaway began to press in. But several floors above was where the real treasures were kept.


Prehistoric fossils lined the walls and floors. Trilobites swarmed encrusted in silt. A fish nibbled on a tiny dinosaur.
Mastadon hair nestled near an aborted dinosaur egg. Psychodelic images, formed through aeons of pressure and mass, were now table-tops and wall-art. But oh, didn't I covet them for my home decor. There is no art more sublime than what God creates and then frames, frozen out of time.

What if...

The eyes clenched it. Peering up from the grainy Facebook photo of a young college student were my father's eyes. He had my last name, so rare, that a google search only turns up what I've posted on the web and a few odds and ends posts from family members or the cemetery plots of deceased grandparents.

I sent the guy a note and he added me to his list of friends: college girlfriends, drinking buddies, classmates, and me. I listed the names of his paternal ancestors and asked if they were his dad and his grandfather. Stunned, he wrote back, "Yeah, how'd you know??"


A long time ago my grandfather, groomed to be a priest, instead married your great-grandmother and if they'd stayed together, as good catholics should, I wouldn't be here, my children wouldn't be here, my entire family would still be dust.

George had two sons in Pennsylvania and neither knew the other existed until one day, on a baseball field, someone yelled out their last name and both boys yelled back, "What?" They never saw one another again, though years later my dad tried to make contact. And so we knew how the generations grew.

George was a drinking man of German stock. During the war he dropped a vowel in his name to avoid nasty associations with Hitler's Germany. He worked primarily in the tobacco industry and finished his career as a foreman for the Tampa Bay cigar factory. Retiring to a swampy, cypress-shrouded acre in Land-O-Lakes, he and Lois fished for Bass, killed water moccasins, and sat on the picnic table every evening with a six-pack of Budweiser.

I spent the summer of my senior year helping them take care of their one daughter, a mentally retarded adult, as they prepared for the inevitable. George and Lois died within one month of each other - one from bone cancer, the other from lung cancer.

I was at my grandfather's side minutes before he died when he confused me with one of his sisters. And I responded as though I was. Excommunicated from the church for his divorce, and told by the Baptists on his doorstep that Catholics were evil, he eschewed religion. When he learned he was dying of cancer, he gave me his rosary. On his death-bed, I gave it back.

My father had no sons and when he dies, this line of Miedrichs will desist. I look again at the eyes in that grainy photo. The future is now yours.

Eulogy for a Fish

There's not much you can say about a fish. But T-Maxx was our first pet and when I told the girls he had died, Bethany quietly said, "Mom, we were so happy the day we brought him home." True. We all had pet lust so bad last summer that we would go and visit the SPCA and the local pet stores just to hold the animals. We looked at turtles, rabbits, snakes, and birds yet in the end we agreed a fish was best. We bought a vivid red beta.

Theodore Maxwell, or T-Maxx to his family, loved listening to music. He swam in circles in his little round bowl on the bookshelf in the bedroom. Hannah pressed her nose against the glass and He looked her in the eye and flared his fin but he didn't swim away. He also loved the color yellow. The fact that his food came in a bright yellow box only increased his excitement at mealtime.

Pillow, the calico cat, came to live with us a month later and they bonded quickly - a little too quickly. So I changed the wide-mouth bowl to a tall narrow mouthed vase so she wouldn't wash her paws and scare T-Maxx. But he was always a gracious host and allowed the cat to hug him through the glass.




Nai Nai came to visit us in September and she wanted to know why T-Maxx wasn't growing and when he got big enough, would we feed him to the cat? Perhaps she fed him on the sly. Perhaps that is why the water fouled so quickly every week.

T-Maxx got a fungus. He rested on the bottom of the vase and wouldn't eat. I misdiagnosed his symptoms for the Ich and waited too long to treat his illness. He was a patient fish and not easily flustered. He minded his business, but got along well with the rest of the family. When I took him out of the water for his burial, Pillow seemed distressed. She looked for the bowl and nudged my elbow.

The girls have given him a Christian burial. They used masking tape to form a cross with two sticks. They were reverent and solemn.

My husband has forbidden me to get another. Perhaps he doesn't want the trauma of bonding with another fish so quickly after this one passed. Perhaps he thinks I'm silly to like a fish.

Galveston, Oh Galveston

The old year finished in the perfect place - a place in recovery, buffeted by calamity, yet hopeful. Galveston is a favorite retreat of ours, anchored by old friends from Houston. We mourned to see the wreckage of so many homes, the upending of so many boats; we rejoiced that our friends' home survived, though bruised. On the first day of the new year, we walked along the sea wall and I began collecting rusted rebar, flic-flac, and such things that no one else would want: pieces of our memories left on the jetty.





The kids joined in, filled their hands with fishing line and other bits, and a curious Russian stopped us with his thick accent and inquiries. "Why do you do this thing?" he said, standing on the seawall in front of our car. "I make things," I said, doing such injustice to all the times we'd spent there building sandcastles, watching dolphins, catching crabs and fist-sized dragonflies, while all around us the wounds from hurricane Ike lay exposed and in decay. Why do I do this? My Chinese mother-in-law struggles to understand why I pick up rusted trash on our walks at home but give away useful clothes and shoes. Why do I find such beauty in rust, and peeling paint, and heaps of discarded metal? Why does Wayne like cardboard and Allison like broken dolls? Why do my children love rocks and dirt?

Back at the house on Tiki Island, the other guests, a Chinese family attending seminary in St Louis, turns soft floury dough into thin discs for dumplings. They are from Beijing, where the people love to laugh and talk and the conversation is spirited and loud. I settle in the warmth of these friends new and old. Outside, the balmy breeze echoes distant sounds of reconstruction and a new year is born.





What the end of the jetty used to look like (03/07)

Oops we jumped the tracks

That slow train to Christmas turned into the Polar Express, got out of control and derailed. I scheduled minor surgery that turned into ten stitches and then my stepmother went into hospital (she's still there.) Since I work on Sunday nights, the candle and liturgy fell to the wayside and the notes in the advent house kind of, well, stopped. And even though we've managed to do a Christmas "event" every day, the girls are still wailing for the silly rhymes. In between school parties, dinner parties, and watching the Nutcracker Ballet (on television), for posterity, here is more evidence that we salvaged every day with Christmas spirit:

Nai Nai's first Christmas


bead ornaments for the teachers


cookies and chocolate


fuzzy snowman


nutcracker prince


glittery stockings


happy chilluns

The slow train to Christmas

Last night Brad made homemade noodles - from scratch - from flour and water and a rolling pin. This morning he made Wuhan morning Bread: a fried flat bread made with sausage and green onion. I think I smell a new tradition in the making! I prefer the slow approach to Christmas. So.
Today we bought the tree. Tomorrow we decorate - if Pillow doesn't interfere.

FYI

In case you forgot, I alternate posts between my two blogs. Check out Paper Trails.......

December 5, 1990. There was a time when I wouldn't "start Christmas" until after the fifth; it was a day of mourning. Today it is a day of remembrance. The girls got to pull out all the Christmas animals I've collected over the years - starting with Brittany's Christmas Monkey. Each year, a treasured but worn out "family member" is added. They bring back such sweet memories.

Bear Village

The Bears and all their friends finally got to see the light of day though it was well past the girls' bedtime before they put the finishing touches on the village trees. Pillow was enthralled and deep into the night performed her own mischief on the village. So we'll get to do it again tonight... and the next night... and the next....

Cows, corn, and cocoa

Maria invited the girls over for a play-date today. Her daughters are in the same classes as mine. We discovered this several weeks ago at "art night" and then learned we shared the same alma mater - University of Georgia. So over cookies and cocoa, we entered that first, awkward stage of a friendship: Who are you and where do you come from? Upstairs, our daughters squealed and tumbled, chased and hid.

Maria is from Bolivia. She arrived in America on a scholarship to a small midwestern women's college then, again on scholarship, got her Master's at Mizzou. She sought her PhD in Animal Nutrition Science at UGA but never finished. She specialized in Bovines because they smell less than other farm animals. She laughed that she was so used to lab work when her first child was born, she kept the baby on a strict schedule and measured out all the nutrients.

I visited Columbia, Missouri last summer and met a professor of corn sciences. Who knew so much could be distilled from the study of corn - or cows? It's a far trot from my major "Ancient Studies." I wanted to be a biblical archaeologist and so I studied things like Aramaic and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

People are as unique as snowflakes and there is hope in new friendships.

Hope Through a Window

Mittens, snowman, tree and bow; On the window they will go!

We may not have snow, but we can still see Frosty through the window pane. Windows are a great way to share happiness.

Advent One: Week of Hope

It is still November. Yet traditionally (unless you are German Lutheran) Advent begins on the Fourth Sunday out from Christmas. And the candles are violet (or blue if you're Swedish; red if you're Russian Orthodox.) And I chose a white fifth candle for Christmas eve. Once a season of fasting and penitence until the third Sunday (pink candle) of Joy, for our family it had been reduced to paper calendars with chocolate stuffed inside.

I'm kind of shooting from the hip on this. I have a little booklet with child-sized devotions and boxes and boxes of ideas, traditions, and hopes for each Christmas season. Yet I don't come from a liturgical background so I've cobbled together some research to keep us focused. The Sundays are the candle lighting days; the days we prepare for the week to come. The weekdays will focus on activities and traditions as we prepare for the King's birthday.

So tonight, as I stumbled through an explanation of the candles (and I forgot to mention the circle of green), my six year old Bethany leaned over and whispered in my ear, "Mom, I thought this was supposed to be fun." Be thankful we're not fasting, I thought as I wondered how to explain Hope, the first lighted candle. What does a child know of the world's need for Hope?

Outside, the wind blew hard, divesting all the trees of last year's leaves. I can see the blue sky now that the branches are naked, like my soul. How do I explain what I do not clearly understand? We will struggle this week to understand Hope: how to have it, how to give it. Journey with us.