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What is it about the water buffalo? Every night I ride my bike along the Nandu River. Partly it's because I love the river at sunset. A wind is blowing in from the sea. The waters turn amber in the dying light. But mostly I love the water buffalo that lounge near the bridge. A whole herd of them. Languid. Charismatic. Because the water buffalo does have charisma. They have attitude and style. They lounge in the mud flats, their massive heads just showing above the water.
If a water buffalo were a singer, he would sing the blues.
I'm prejudiced against vegetarians. And the strange thing is, I think they're right! I wouldn't say I'm a strict vegetarian but I do try to avoid meat. I think a vegetarian diet is the healthiest. And I think if everyone, once in their lives, had to kill, skin, clean and cook an animal, there would be a lot more vegetarians in the world. It makes sense with the population growing and our shrinking natural resources to embrace a vegetarian diet.
Yet I find so many vegetarians to be a pain in the ass. They embrace it like a religion. Rather than make it part of their lifestyle, it is their lifestyle. Within five minutes of meeting them, you know they don't eat meat and that they consider themselves morally superior to anyone who does.
Recently, a family member came to visit me in China. We went to visit a friend of mine and his family in a small village. It was a holiday and the family, being kind and hospitable, went out of their way to prepare vegetarian dishes that she could eat. The guest still picked through every dish with her chopsticks, sniffing and inspecting to make sure no stray pieces of meat had gotten in. It didn't end there. Everywhere we went, she made a point of letting us all know how repulsed she was by meat, criticizing anyone who had views even slightly different from her own. She was the morally superior being, separating herself from the savages. My son hit it closest when he said, "You're like a born again vegetarian."
I try to avoid meat but I make exceptions. If someone welcomes me into their home and invites me to break bread, I break it, even if that means cutting a chicken or a cow. If I wanted to be rigid about it, I would bring my own food. I find that less offensive than expecting someone to accommodate my taste.
Food. It's such a basic need. We have so many hangups about it. The dinner table can be a place to share or a place to separate yourself. Living in China, I see food as a way to intimately experience a new culture. In
I understand that for reasons of health or philosophy, people may need to restrict their diets. But can't it be done with respect? The ascetic and the flamboyant both have their place in this crazy mixed up world. Bring on the tea! Bring on the wine! Eat chocolate or meat. But eat it with joy.
I've been gone from this blog too long. The winter rains are subsiding and the days in Hainan are turning hot and humid. I'm back to night life. Long naps during the hottest part of the afternoon give way to sultry evenings with an ocean breeze. At night the streets look different. They sound different. They smell different. Spicy Sichuan food and good, old bland Hainan stuff blend with sidewalk charcoal barbeque to make a heady aroma.
I don't know if I can live in the US again. Sometimes when you walk away from something, there is just no going back. When I came here I planned to stay for a year. Now that year is turning to two and moving into the third. I can't stay in China forever either, but it's a big world out there. I want to see more of it.
Gods of the Modern World Wear Running Shoes
Alongside a lonely high desert highway in northern
No one knows how it got there or exactly when it became The Shoe Tree. Some claim that a newlywed bride tossed her heels into the branches in a moment of ecstasy. Others say it was a truckload of drunken migrants on their way back from a party.
Whatever the reason, The Shoe Tree has found a place in the local lore of the small desert community where it resides. Legends grew up around it. Travelers late at night sometimes claimed to see the ghost of a young woman killed in a traffic accident just around the bend reclining against the base. Others claimed that jewels or money could be found stuffed in some of the toes of the footwear.
Most people treated the tree with affection and humor. Some, like my mother-in-law, found it ridiculous in the extreme. A few shunned it, claiming it was akin to the worship of Baal.
Maybe they had a point.
The Shoe Tree did exude a certain reverential presence. Majestic and gnarled, The Shoe Tree was a deity among trees. Impossible to ignore, the tree with its ever increasing number of canvas fruit commanded attention. Every so often the highway department would come along and clear out the shoes, but within days they would show up again. Cowboy boots and dance shoes. Expensive Nikes and casual slippers. High heels. Birkenstocks. Even mukluks and diving flippers occasionally made their appearance. Once I saw a false leg dangling like a giant pod from the branches.
Then one Friday morning The Shoe Tree lay on its side in the turnout it had inhabited for years. Someone had cut it down.
The demise of The Shoe Tree made front page news in Susanville, about 50 miles away. Accusations flew. Some blamed the highway department. Others an escaped convict from the nearby penitentiary. One resident tried to pass it off as the work of aliens from outer space who took it to study the earth’s culture. Most believed it to be the work of an angry, alienated teenager with a chip on his shoulder.
Overnight a small shrine grew up in the place where The Shoe Tree once stood. Bouquets of flowers in old boots adorned the stump. Poems, pictures, and lots of old shoes formed an altar.
Then, new shoe trees began appearing throughout the area. One on the road to
Someday, far in the future, archeologists may discover these trees. What will they conclude? That we worshiped the shoe? Or we were a people with a foot fetish? Maybe they will presume that we were a restless folk who loved travel, always in search of new horizons. Maybe they would be right.
I’ve been in China long enough now that not much surprises me. So when my husband and I went to Guantang Fuhai Hotspring Resort over Christmas weekend and the brochure told us to “Come On In and Enjoy our Drug Pool!” we figured, sure, why not? After all, the brochure also told us that we could “cultivate spirit and free from vulgarity here.”
The land smells like old coins,
like rust and sulphur
I came here
middle-aged and ungraceful
to grieve
to live again
and I found myself on an old bus
on a road that dipped
and rose through the
We passed a village.
An old woman
in a white dress
sat on the dividing line
of the highway
a bouquet of lilies
clutched to her breast
her head thrown back to
the cloudless sky
screaming
My Mother’s Typhoon
On the second anniversary of my mother’s death a typhoon hit
Dorothy’s big regret is that she wasn’t born in Victorian England where she could drink tea, eat crumpets and swoon anytime something unpleasant happened. She would have been a natural for smelling salts. Instead she was born just before the Great Depression, became a war bride, divorced when the war ended, remarried and raised one daughter through the conservative fifties, her son during the hippie era, and her youngest in the seventies. I was the youngest. Since she died two years ago, I’ve been trying to reconstruct her life in a way that I was never able to do while she was alive.
Like most mothers and daughters, our relationship was messy. Her passiveness, actually, the passiveness of both my parents, drove me crazy. Leisurely drives in the country usually culminated with my mother peering over her dark-rimmed glasses at my father and asking, “Honey, should we stop for lunch?”
To which he would reply, “Okay, where do you want to stop?”
“Oh, I don’t care. Anyplace is fine.”
“Well, you tell me. I don’t care.”
“I don’t care either. Wherever you want.”
“No, you decide,” until, I, or my brother or sister, would point at the next restaurant we passed and shout, “There! Stop there!”
Our one or two visits a year often ended with me feeling frustrated to the point of a final blowup. Then the guilt would set in and obsess me long after one of us had boarded the flight home. Guilt from her, rage from my father, I had inherited a mixture of traits that fought against each other like monkeys and lions.
Since coming to
Who knows where dreams come from? Maybe it’s just my subconscious working through grief. Maybe something of her spirit remains and is trying to comfort me. Who knows what happens after we die? I know I don’t believe in anything that religion teaches and, yet, I believe in something. I believe that even nothing is something.
On the first anniversary of my mother’s death I bought flowers and incense. One of my students came along with me. “Are you sure you want to do this,” she asked.
“Of course. Why not?” I answered.
“She died in
I took my chances, even though she did have a terrible sense of direction.
That night she appeared in my dream as a very old woman, so bent over that she had to crawl. She said, “I feel so sad when I look at these children to know that they, too, will have to grow old. How good it would be to die today. Then I could be with him.”
Some say that the symbiotic bond between mother and daughter is the most intense in a person’s life. Maybe it’s true. I’ve spent my life trying to escape being like my mother yet, I look just like her. And the similarities don’t stop there. I also want to please, please, please. I want everyone to like me. Yet, unlike her, I can be a colossal bitch with an erratic temper. I speak my mind. I’m stronger than my mother and certainly, more adventurous. I love torrential storms.
My mother had always been afraid of storms. As a child, I remember her flinching at every clap of thunder during one of the frequent
In some ways Dorothy was an adventurous woman for her generation. She traveled internationally without my father, although always with a group or as part of a tour. She had secrets. Once she loved a man other than my father. She told me this several years after he had died but I remembered the time. I was a teenager and my mother went to the library several nights a week, often returning home up to an hour after it closed. She believed my father never knew and I never told her that during those years he often paced the living room, staring out the windows, muttering about why wasn’t my mother home yet? When the car finally turned into the driveway, he would retire to the bedroom and read as though he hadn’t even noticed her absence.
I was unprepared for my mother’s death. I still hadn’t quite processed losing my father two years earlier, and now she was gone as well. I grieved and, yet, I felt other emotions too. Neither of my parents had lived to 80. Now I would never have to be responsible for caring for either of them during an infirm old age.
Something broke loose in me during that first year after she died. I came to and took a job at a small college. Sometimes late at night after the land had cooled from the humid afternoon heat, I would walk along the canal past the tall weeds. Bats darted around my head. In the black sky dangled a misshapen moon.
During the typhoon, on the second anniversary of my mother’s death, I walked outside through the dark campus. Trees lay uprooted along the sidewalk. Shattered glass from windows in The Foreign Languages Building sprinkled the sidewalk. Wind raged and nearly blew me off my feet. The typhoon brought a histrionic closure to my second year of mourning. I still dream about my mother; I will always dream about her. I still miss her. But the clichéd sayings that are meaningless in the first year of grief begin to make sense. Time does heal. Loss does become more bearable.
The Field
After English corner
the students come up for tea.
It’s late
and the night has turned damp.
Outside the wind
raps its chilly fingers
against the window.
We talk of ghosts.
One of the girls tells me
about a field she passed
every day on her way to school.
Sometimes there were babies there.
Always girls.
There might be
a small basket
or a pile of clothes.
Sometimes the dogs were snarling
over the bodies.
The smell, she said,
was terrible.
Outside the gate of the college where I teach in
My favorite of these restaurants is The Old Place. I get the bonus of practicing my Chinese while eating an extraordinary meal for about $3. During my first year in
Unfortunately, a lot of local
‘Yezi’—coconut is one of the first Chinese words I learned to say along with ‘Hello,’ ‘I’m sorry,’ and ‘too expensive.’ Coconut milk is high up there on my list of things I love about living in
My main disappoints have been with beverages, not counting coconut milk. One night at a bar I saw a bottle of decent Cabernet on the shelves and ordered it. When the waitress took it back to the kitchen, I assumed she was opening it. However, she brought it to the table in a pitcher mixed with ice and Sprite.
Much to my surprise, makes some great cappuccinos. But only at night. Unless you carry your coffee supplies with you, it is nearly impossible to get a cup of coffee before 10 a.m. at the earliest. Often, you are lucky if you can find a coffee shop open in the daytime at all. On campus, the best coffee shops don’t open until 6 p.m.
During Spring Festival, I traveled around the country and tried a number of regional dishes. I learned to make dumplings with the grandmother of one of my students, an austere old lady with iron gray hair who still wore the dark blue Mao uniform of the Cultural Revolution. At the home of another student, Tu Liang Jun, we made egg dumplings. We held a spoon with hot oil over the fire, added the beaten eggs, then a small bit of sausage. Just when the egg was finished, we folded it over into a triangle and pinched the ends together. I learned to make Ming Shong Shu, steamed fish, and ma po tofu, a spicy hot dish with garlic, red peppers and tofu. Afterwards, I visited another student, Lu Tian Xi, in
There are exceptions, of course. Stinky tofu, for instance. It smells like—there is no other word to describe it—shit. When I first moved into the college and walked out the gates in the evenings I truly thought that people were defecating in the field. Everyone agrees that it smells really bad. Stinky tofu is a literal translation from the Chinese. Yet, it’s a favorite street food and is sold all over the city from small vendors. I did try it and while I guess it wasn’t all that bad, I simply couldn’t get past the smell. Scent, after all, is a big part of dining.
In
Ever since my mother died, I have been grappling even more with issues of faith, about what happens to us after we die. I admire people who believe in something with absolute certainty, whether it’s reincarnation or heaven, or even a belief in unbelief—that this life is all there is. We are like plants, organic. When we die we go back to the earth and wind, and that’s all there is to immortality. I want to believe that there is life after death but I’ve never been able to get out of my mind enough to not analyze and worry a question until its mystery is reduced to an incoherent babble.
Bob believes he’s lived before. Even though he has blond hair and blue eyes, he claims his ancestors once lived in Mongolian territory. At a temple in
Maybe that’s what reincarnation is: the bit of DNA that’s carried through each generation. Who can guarantee that even the fairest person is not descended from a Mongolian warrior or a Mayan priestess. Who knows where the ancients traveled? Warriors. Slaves. The history of the world is the mixing of the gene pool. I’ve felt connected to no where and to everywhere. Maybe I have a bit of Gypsy blood in my veins. I love every place while I live the re, then when I leave, I carry it with me.
The search for faith brought me to .
One of my favorite places in downtown
The Mermaid Pond seems like it would be equally at home in front of a shopping mall in
The Shiva Altar, although flashy in its own right, feels less out of place. In fact, it has a subtle power. In an ornate canopy on top of a carved pillar decorated with bright scarves and garlands of flowers, Durga, with her eighteen arms, brandishing swords, torches and a conch shell, sits cross-legged with a tiger at her feet. Green plants grow prolifically around the base and full vases of flowers are set around the circumference. Large incense burners placed at each of the four directions are always full of burning sticks. Usually offerings of food are arranged around the platform. One time there were hundreds of serving-size bags of potato chips. There is no doubt this is a woman’s altar. Around the circle stand other goddesses. Two European Venus nudes hold aloft a golden globe. Two Hindu goddesses stand next to two regal elephants.
I like to watch the girls from the fabric shops and beauty salons come out and pay homage to this magnificent feminine shrine. There is a quiet grace to them as hey circle the altar and stop at each pot of incense. Bow three times. Pray. Stick the incense in the sand next to a hundred other sticks. Bow three times again. On some days there is also a small offering of incense and food at the base of the tree.
I want to pray at this shrine but I’ve yet to take the first step. If any faith does appeal to me it’s a ritual based on earth and nature, spirituality and creativity. It’s bowing to the elements and listening to wind and water, fire and rock.
Although is technically a communist country, it’s impossible to separate people from their need for the gods. Most people, especially the elders, follow some combination of Tao, Hindu and Buddha. But religion here is more individualized. Many homes have ancestor shrines. Generations of a single family may be buried just a few feet from a person’s front door. When your worship includes someone whose bones may be fertilizing your crops, religion becomes personal. Talking to ghosts doesn’t seem so far-fetched.
I can understand ancestor worship; the call of the ancestors has always been strong inside me. Sinew and cell, blood and bone, I do wonder what traits I’m carrying that might have come down generation after generation. Sometimes I wonder if in the deepest part of me is the memory of a woman who looked like me, who stood on the shores of some distant sea or in the midst of a primeval forest and looked out and the world and paused, for just a moment, at the wonder of it all.
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