My two pennies' worth ...

I don’t care. About getting up in the morning. About making a to.do list, let alone crossing it off.

I don’t want to think. About people. Things. Making a difference.

I don’t want to write emails. Sharing. Explaining why I do what I do. Why I think the way I do. Teaching. Making an impact.
Is this the beginning of depression? Does it creep on you or do you just wake up one morning and decide not to get up at all?

Depression. That brings to mind my stay in France after college. Nobody wanted to be my friend until they heard my English. Then I had no lack of friends-to-be. I wasn’t obnoxious or weird or anything. I was just someone my classmates couldn’t be bothered with. After two years, I did have three friends. I guess that’s a lot for the French. And I got to know the Asian community and we’d have lunches together. We’d go to someone’s small apartment and spend the afternoon cooking. Those who couldn’t cook, ahem, that was me, got shopping duty, which I didn’t mind. An Indonesian girl – was she Indonesian? – and I would go to the butcher’s and explain the cut of meat we wanted. The girl and I spoke English to each other and I remember the butcher saying, “You both look Asian but you obviously don’t come from the same place because you’re speaking English with each other.” It never hit me till then that the language we use speaks volumes about who we are and where we’re from. I mean, of course I know that. But at a butcher’s discussing cuts and quantities of meat?

Many years later, married to my French-Swiss husband, our 10-year-old son in tow, we walk into the local charcuterie and our son talks to me in English, asking for his favorite hot dog in puff pastry. I explain that it is almost lunchtime and it would be best not to have anything just then. There is a queue behind me of little old ladies and couples, all waiting patiently for our turn. Then it is our turn and I start ordering rillettes, boudin, saucisson à l’ail and I am slowly aware of a change in atmosphere. All eyes fixed on us 3. I realize that the people expected my husband to order, the brown-haired blue-eyed Frenchman instead of the Chinese woman who spoke English with her son.

I was proud then, that we were different, that we could change the way people looked at things, especially in the fin fond du Limousin, a forgotten corner of the world,  in a a hamlet of 16, in a town of 5000 people with no blacks, and I the only Asian, if I am not mistaken.

Now, they know me at the supermarket. The manager always says a friendly Hi. She goes to Switzerland regularly to see friends. The pharmacist and the Saturday market vendors all say, “Bonjour.” I’ve never felt discriminated against, even when we first moved here. But I’ve always known we were different. And I rejoiced to think that our presence alone made people think.

Now I couldn’t care less.

Now that we live in the countryside, I can see my irises in bloom. When we used to come here only for the summer, I only ever saw leaves, masses of leaves. So it is a real delight to see them blooming and since there are quite a few flowers, I cut some and arrange them. I take forever because I am clueless. The flowers seem to have a life of their own and  all bunch up on one side and leave a bald spot in front and when I try to take out one stem to move it, the rest follow, not just the irises but the honeysuckle or fern or whatever greenery I’ve managed to put in with them. So I start over. I cut off a bit of stem because it is too tall. Guess what? Then, it’s too short! I take out a shorter vase, play with the height of the irises, remembering my one Ikebana lesson. Three flowers representing heaven, man and earth, therefore of varying heights. Only mine start out looking like heaven, then when I want to trim the other two to represent man and earth, the whole bouquet looks more like just earth!

The teacher also said that I am the sun and the arrangement should face me and please me. That’s good because I make only one-sided bouquets anyway, meaning they only look good on one side. Hey, what do you know? I was doing Ikebana without knowing it! Ha!

I never look at my watch when I start arranging and I do it when I am in the best of moods, usually in the morning, with nothing on my calendar. It is something I like to do but struggle with. I stick the flowers one by one –irises or roses or brooms or camellias, whatever is blooming – I step back, I trim and when I’m happy, I stick the greenery and that’s when it’s touch and go. The greenery pushes the flowers to front, side or back and teasing the flowers back to where they were initially becomes an exasperating art. The art of patience. With myself. When I look at the flowers, I don’t have an arrangement in mind. I just want the flowers to look good. Not Ikebana or any other style. Just pleasing to my eye and that takes enormous time and effort.

I don’t know what I want. I just know that what I am seeing is not what I want. I guess that is a start. So I fiddle, I cut, I pull, I push, until there’s that one moment when my hand stops in mid-air and I barely take a breath because now, yes, at last, this is it!

So much like life. Start with flowers, your gifts, talents, what you’re good at. Greenery, your environment, whatever teaching, training needed to develop your talent. The vase, something solid inside of you to hold them all together. Water, nurturing from inside and outside. Now, have fun arranging.

It is the start of May. Someone said last week that a fourth of the year had already gone by. We all found that horrible! What have I to show for those past months? Not to others but to myself. I feel like I haven’t really done much. Traveled to and fro to Geneva, made meals, washed clothes, saw friends, weeded the herb garden.

Our lives are like a shadow, a flower that withers, a mist. All fleeting images, temporary, short, ethereal. And yet sometimes it feels soooo long, especially when you’re waiting for someone or something, news from the universities you applied to, results from the biopsy of that lump in your breast, money to pay the bills, your son’s return.

And you’re supposed to keep on going like nothing’s the matter. No, better yet, you’re supposed to keep giving your best. How do you do that? How do you make abstraction of everything that’s crying out in you to persevere in the day-to-day? Sometimes I wish God had made us robots, then we wouldn’t have trouble functioning, although I guess robots do malfunction or stop working altogether, too. But they don’t have feelings.

Feelings are messy. Have you ever done something which you regretted and even though you know God has forgiven you, you can’t forgive yourself? It just keeps coming back to your mind, like a bee droning and droning. How do murderers and pedophiles and rapists live with themselves? I’m not saying I’m better than them. There but for the grace of God go I. But if I can’t forgive myself, how can they? Or is that where compartmentalization and rationalization come in?

We are such complex beings and when something goes out of whack, the system, the body, the conscience, the heart, the whole being tries to adjust to the new experience, the new data. We come out either blasé, hard and cynical or we’re crushed and devastated.

56, I am 56 years old. 57 in September. Has my life counted? I am a steward of the time, talents and resources that have been given me. That includes my son. He is not mine, but God’s. How have I done? How am I doing? At 19 and away on his military service, he never stops being my son.

It is so easy to make him the be all and end all of my life. That is a trap. Since being a good mother is important and is respected, it is easy to think that everything I do for him is good and the line between caring and clinging becomes very fine. Too fine.

My husband, wise man that he is, said that I must let go. I know but I don’t know what that looks like. Yes, I know I shouldn’t do his laundry when he comes back from his military base, although my heart says, “Poor thing.” I’m doing better and so is he. He doesn’t bring them home to wash anymore. Just to dry, because he was running out of time. Hey, that counts! Every small step counts.

Well, the prompt for today’s 500 words was “Pick a fight.” Jeff Goins meant: “A short statement of purpose that represents what you believe in. This needs to be a hill worth dying on, something not everyone will agree with (but some hopefully will).”

I meant pick a fight, literally, verbally, that is.  Almost did. But I held my anger in check. It really does no good when one is angry. Decisions made in that state of mind usually lead to chaos and heartache, words said in a hurry with a lifetime to regret them by.

So thank God for email or letters, when one can take the distance needed to calm down, check one’s feelings, weigh one’s words, choose them carefully to make sure you give them the meaning you want and that they, hopefully, cannot be misunderstood.

A very good friend of mine thinks it is best to do these things face to face. That can come later; I prefer to write first. Just to sort out my thoughts, to know what it is I am feeling and then to try to communicate it, the non-aggressive way. I learned that you do not say, “You made me angry when you…” Instead say, “When you did this, I felt angry.” No one can make you angry. It is your feeling, not the other person’s. They may have done something to make you angry, and maybe rightly so, but you cannot blame them for your anger. The anger is not theirs; it is yours. You have to own it. Then you have to process it.

I’ve found this very helpful. It calms me down. And it makes me see things for what they are, sometimes shows up some things about myself I don’t really like but that is good, isn’t it? As long as I am blind to it, I can’t do anything about it but once it’s out in the light, then I can.

Someone said, “When you point a finger at someone, there are 3 that point at you.” Do it right now, literally, point to the wall and see where your third, fourth and little finger are pointing at. Your chest. So it starts with you. As long as I’m blaming someone else, I’ll see red.

Another friend asked me, “Ok, ok, she is wrong, horribly wrong, but for every relationship gone wrong, isn’t there at least 2% that’s yours? Can you not ask forgiveness for that 2%?”

I hate editing. It’s like going into labor. Pain. For a long time. Especially for perfectionists like me. I don’t want to put anything out there that doesn’t have the correct grammar or the perfect word or the right whatever. There is always something that needs revising, correcting, changing.

I’ve loved throwing words on paper without thinking, just getting it all down. Like throwing rose petals on the grass, like spattering paint on a canvas. Pollock’s work looks easy but I guess it took time, effort, study, too.

I’d like nothing more than to be spontaneous and not look back. That’s what I’ve been doing with these 500 words. I write what comes to mind and never reread what I write. Well, I sometimes go back and change a word or two but I usually just free write. As instructed. And I am having fun.

My husband, my greatest fan, has turned it into a blog. He thinks it’s worth reading. But of course, I won’t let him post it until I’ve edited it. I can’t stand the thought of people reading me and saying, “And she calls herself a writer? She doesn’t even know her prepositions!” Or some other failing or shortcoming. Because I do have them. So do you. That’s what being human is all about. Granted, it’s no excuse for sloppy writing! That’s why I edit!

Why should it matter what unknown people think of me? I guess it’s like being dressed properly. I don’t want people to see that my dress is old, faded and out of shape, that I’ve got horrible color combination or that my pants are too short and my blouse screaming psychedelic 70s. I don’t want to be noticed. Or at least not negatively. Or too positively. It goes to your head. It destroys you. Look at the so-called stars around you. They all go weird or die of an overdose. We weren’t made to be adulated, adored.

Writing is about saying “This is who I am.” Heck, what we say, do, write, how we dress, how we decorate our homes, the  car we drive, the jewelry we wear or don’t wear, they all make a statement. It all boils down to choice. And we want to like our choices, and others to like them too. To not look back and say, “I should have done that, gone there, ordered fish instead of chicken.” My husband asks me, “Why do you do that? Why do you always regret what you’ve ordered?  Enjoy what you’ve got.“

Wise words. Easier said than done and actually easier for things like food. Not so for choices that have hurt people. When we chose pride instead of humility. When we chose to walk away instead of staying and making it work. I don’t know. You fill in the blanks.

Writing says I did this. I chose this path, these words, this way of showing you me. I know in my head that not everyone can like me or what I write or my style of writing. It would be so boring if we all had the same taste and the same outlook and the same style. But each one of us needs to know we are at least valued, appreciated, if not loved. And even if I am loved, I’m still putting myself out there where you can either throw me roses or rotten eggs.

We’re leaving tomorrow and we’ve got to empty the fridge tonight. Decisions to be made as to what stays, gets thrown out and what gets eaten. You’re either a thrower or a keeper.  I’m a keeper. I’ve never gone hungry, thank God, but I don’t know why I hate throwing food away. I can hear my mom saying, “Waste not, want not.” And I will eat that last grain of rice if it kills me! Or freeze it, if I really am too full to finish it. I have been known to steam that tupperware of frozen rice 6 months later. No one else in the family will eat it! Rice is sacred.

I remember my mom scraping the bottom of the rice cooker, where the rice is brown and hard. This was in the pre-teflon days. And she would put it in a pot, add some water and heat it up and once it was hot, she’d spoon it into her bowl. She’d dig heartily into it, chopsticks clicking away! "Come have some!" and I invariably did. I relished those crunchy rice grains, that burnt taste. We’d sit beside each other at the wooden kitchen table, silence reigning, except for the sound of her chopsticks and my spoon and fork. I wasn’t that good at chopsticks then, except at the school fair when you had to pick up 10 peanuts in 30 seconds or something.

Now, did I relish the burnt rice grains because they really were delicious or was it because I was sharing something special with my mom? Or maybe it’s both. Food is such a sensual experience. It’s a total experience. The eyes, nose, taste buds, tongue, palate, they’re all in! There’s color, texture, taste. And memory, too. The first time you tried a dish. You loved it? Hated it?

My husband will never eat durian again. It’s a brown spiky fruit that stinks. The airlines actually forbid carrying it on board. That’s how lethal it is. But for those of us who grew up eating it, it’s absolutely delicious. People actually say it smells like hell but tastes like heaven. But for us it smells and tastes like heaven. I remember coming home for lunch when I was 14 or 15 and we had durian for dessert. I made sure I didn’t use soap when I washed my hands so that when I went back to school, I could put my fingers under my classmates’ noses and they would all inhale deeply and say, “Ahhhh, durian!”

Well, when my French-Swiss husband came to ask for my hand in marriage, he slept in the guest room, just above the kitchen where my mom had just put 10 or 12 ripe durians ready for dessert. She naturally wanted him to taste the local delicacy. So, the next day after lunch, ta da! My mom proudly brought in the durian and put a piece in her future son-in-law’s plate. My husband, most valiant of men, ate it and even convinced my mom he liked it, so much so that she was going to give him another serving. Until I kicked her under the table.

He hasn’t had it since but he can sit at the table with us, while we devour our durian, without blanching. Such is love.

My husband and I have just come back from watching a French movie, “Voyage en Chine.” A mother’s journey to the country and the people her only son loved. The son she was estranged from, she was too proud to reach out to. “I thought he should make the first move,” she said. Now it is too late.

My husband is like that son. He loved China, spoke Mandarin fluently, worked for the Chinese Foreign Language Press in Beijing and visited places where neither foreigner nor native had been allowed to go. This was 1970s post-Mao. He loved being in China.

I am like that son, too, only I fell in love, not with China, but with the sound of French. I majored in it in college, took classes  and never missed the monthly movie offering at the Alliance Française in Manila. I can still remember the thrill of actually understanding the French conversation around me at the French movie festival. There the similarity ends. I got depressed during my first year in France. Years later, when I worked for the French Embassy in Manila, I told my boss, “If I had met the French before I heard their language, I would never have studied it!”

Yet here I am, married to a Frenchman, but a Frenchman who loves China and the Chinese. I am Chinese, that is to say, the blood that runs through my veins is Chinese. But I was born and raised in the Philippines. There is a big Chinese community, made up mainly of people from Fujian, whose spoken language I do not understand because my parents are from Canton. Fookien and Cantonese are as different as German and French.

When I am in Hong Kong or Canton, I see how unChinese I am. And yet when I am in the Philippines, I am not a real Filipino-Chinese either. I do not speak Fookien, do not hang out with them or follow their traditions. Neither am I truly Filipino. How many times has my Filipina friend said, “Hay, Intsik ka talaga! How Chinese you are!”

Overseas Chinese were taken advantage of in Hong Kong and China. We did not get the smile (false or otherwise) given to foreigners for the top prices they paid but we weren’t given the local prices either. It was normal for a red-haired devil not to speak Chinese and when they did find one who did, he was much fêted. While we were looked down on for not knowing our own language and heritage. Shame on us!

So coming out of the movie tonight, my husband, who has refused to go back to China for fear of not finding the China he once knew among skyscrapers and McDonald’s, said, “I feel like going back there again.” And I, wondering if the kindness on screen was real.

He, exhilarated. I, jaded.

Why is it that one has to complain to be heard? My sister’s family is going to Paris in 3 weeks and we were looking forward to taking them to a 2-star Michelin restaurant. We had asked to be in the chic restaurant but were turned down because we were too big a group, 13. The maximum number they accept is 6. They suggested that we go to their regular restaurant and we agreed. They said we couldn’t order à la carte because the group was too big. They said they would suggest different menus but we must all have the same thing: same starter, same main dish, same dessert.

Chinese people are used to eating lots of different dishes at one meal. It is normal to have 3 or 4 dishes: a meat dish, a fish dish, a vegetable dish, a soup plus rice.  I am not saying that my Chinese family should expect as varied a choice in a French restaurant but surely 2 different menus to allow for each guest to daintily taste the other’s plate is feasible?

No. After 28 emails, the answer was still no. So my husband and I decided, “What the heck? They’re not the only restaurant in Paris!” So my husband wrote a polite but direct-to-the-point email and guess what? The Food and Beverage Manager himself wrote us a very nice apologetic email, telling us that yes, after all, they can accommodate our request.

So why is it that when you are nice, everybody takes you for granted? But when you show your claws, then people give in to you? It’s not just in nice restaurants. It’s everywhere. I was in the Philippines and had a few things repaired. It is so much easier and most of all, cheaper, to have pants hemmed, curtains made, clothes repaired. So I went to this lady and when she saw that I had ironed the folds of the curtains, meaning I don’t know a thing about sewing; that I didn’t know what the current prices were because I had asked her if her price included the purchase of the hooks; because I didn’t bargain, she charged me more and did a sloppy job to boot! I am kind to the driver and he tries to manipulate me so that he can have time off!

Here I am wanting to help people and willing to share what I’ve been blessed with and I find that I am taken for a ride, fleeced, had, conned!  Either that or people expect you to do it and to continue doing it because you happen to be a have and they, have-nots. Oh, you get the “Thank you. How kind and generous of you.” But what is not spoken is, “Till the next time.”  I pay a friend’s debt; he had borrowed money for his daughter’s tuition fees. I paid it into the lender’s account. A few months later, my friend sends me a copy of the email he sent to his friend asking to borrow the money again!

My mom had a very good policy. When someone wanted to borrow money from her, she would say, “I won’t lend you money because if you can’t pay, you will be ashamed and want to avoid me and I will lose your friendship. So here is something to help you.” She will not give the whole amount that the friend is asking for but she will give what she thinks is reasonable, what she can spare without resenting, what she does not mind not getting back.

Wise words.

My husband laughs when I pick up the tweezers and give a sigh of contentment. Yes, I’m unique that way. I love to tweeze my eyebrows! Why?

I see tiny black hairs here and there, some lying flat, others standing straight up, others just peeking out of pores. And Star Wars music please or trumpets and fanfare, if you prefer…. The silver streamlined tweezer hovers and grasps the hair and with a mighty pull, ta da! It is out! The silver bird continues its flight over the field of mean black shoots; it slowly descends, captures its prey! The field peppered with aliens cannot resist the onslaught of the plunging silver craft! The rebellion has been wiped out.

And now the patch, rough to the touch, has slowly found its original smoothness. No more unsightly, untidy black hairs going this way and that. See? It’s a war and the battle is waged and I am always sure to win! So whenever I feel like I’m stuck, writing for example, when nothing, absolutely nothing comes to mind, I grab my magnifying mirror and attack those stubborn black hairs! Well, some of them are white now and when I get them, by mistake, because I can’t really see them, I’m pleasantly surprised and doubly pleased! It’s like I’ve caught a spy! Ha! It thought it could hide itself and be spared but nothing escapes the swooping SWAT silver weapon!

And now a last, slow, stealthy hover over the clean field. Aha! A thin light-colored rebel. The weapon dives down, grasps and pulls. It comes up empty! Dive again! Empty again! A relentless attack now from different angles and finally, victory!

The silver bird flies back to base. Mission accomplished.

It’s that time of year. The rose bushes are finally looking like they are not dead brown sticks. Little green shoots are springing up and I can already see in my mind’s eye their different colors and varieties. I don’t know their names, just that this one is a huge yellow one, this one a climbing pick one, this other one has pink furls on the outside and a white heart.

And who comes round the corner with secateurs? That’s big scissors for those of you who don’t really garden. The only reason I know it is because I’ve had to use them when I choose roses for my coffee table, which I take ages, absolutely ages, to fix in a vase. Fix is the word because I want them to bow down to my will until I found out that the best thing is to go with the flow.

That’s another story. So here comes my pruning, shear-wielding husband ready to attack the first rose bush. Why must he cut them to make them grow? They’re growing already! Look at the tiny lovely shoots! Well, if he doesn’t cut them, we’ll still get flowers but we’ll get more if we prune them. And they’ll be healthier for it. Ouch! It’s going to hurt!

So do I stand in front of the rose bush, arms out, feet planted squarely and shout, “No, no, no!” Well, no. I smile and nod my head and go back into the house and leave him to cut off twigs and branches to his heart’s content. Only it is not random; it is executed with care. He asked advice from his brother, who is studying agriculture. He read a magazine on how to prune and where and when.

To someone who doesn’t know anything about gardening, he may seem heartless. I know better. He’s my husband. I know him; I know his heart.

I look at some of the stuff I’ve gone through, some of the truly hard stuff my friends are going through. And I wonder why. A good God, you say? A pruning, shear-wielding one with a malevolent grin, more like it. Can this really be for my good? I would not for the life of me want to go through the anguish of not knowing where my son was after he walked out in anger.  Nor would I wish it on my worst enemy. But did I come out of it a better person? I hope so. I can understand other parents who have wayward children just that little bit more. I’ve been humbled to see I don’t have it all together and that God, yes, He actually does. And most of all, I’ve had to seek this God. Because you see, just as I know my husband’s heart and can therefore let him loose on the rose bushes, so too, when I get a glimpse of God’s heart can I let Him loose on my life. And on the life of those whom I love the most.