H. Hsu Word Salad

To memorialize the passing of loved ones, I send donations in their honor.
Typically to the Southern Poverty Legal Center which combats racism and intolerance with a tenacity toward justice that is beautifully fierce.   
Somehow this evolved as my tradition for grieving friends - rather than subject them to my casseroles or more flowers whose beauty they are in no state of mind to enjoy, I honor their loved ones name among the compassionate and righteous.

But lately, I have been sending far too many such donations out. 
The money is not the issue, but the frequency of need for such memorials, has been staggering.
Yeah kids, we’re not in Kansas anymore, and we are well on way to being the new members of the sandwich generation, stuck between caring for children and caring for aging parents.  I actually don’t consider my folks "aged" but I know that our time together is unwritten.  They could go unfairly young, as both my grandfathers did, or they could live unpleasantly too long, as both my completely disabled grandmothers now are. 

Grandma Yang was still drinking shots, playing MahJohng, and getting her hair done in salons into her very, very late 80’s.  One needed only to glance at the old lady to still see how beautiful she had been, and still was. 
I’m grateful she had time to meet P before our wedding. 
She drank beer with us, saw me try on my Chinese wedding gown, and laughed and laughed at P passed out "like a litle Pig" on the couch- jet-lagged & stuffed to the gills with all the food they had foisted onto him.
But past 90 was brutal, and now her memories are fog 85% of the time, her legs pain her too much to walk, and each day requires professional monitoring and tending.  In a bed across Taipei town, Grandma Hsu lies uncomprehendingly in an even denser fog. 
I wish we had had time, had had the foresight to ask them if they wanted extreme measures to preserve their technical lives.  I know Grandma Yang always believed she’d meet her husband again in another life, I was told stories about how his spirit had visited her before he left. 

It pains me to see the grandmas intubated, and we all struggle with the questions about what they would have wanted or not.
Having no such answers, my family spares no effort nor expense to keep them in this world.  I have seen filial piety and devotion on a scale that humbles me, and that I pray one day to measure up to.

I prefer to cultivate memories of  walking to the bakery or department store with one of the Grandmas.  About how neither one really wore make up, but were exceedingly and amusingly particular about their hair.
I will choose to remember the Grandmas who ran giddily off into the snow & would sneak chocolates, rather than their curent limbo status.

And for that matter, on Memorial day, unlike most, I recall deeply in my bones what it stands for.  This current war fiasco has gone every single bit as badly as many of us had feared, draining worldwide goodwill & US finances…

As the sister of a Gulf War veteran-I do know some piece of what War really means in modern times.  Its everyone carrying on their merry lives untouched by any actual sacrifice, while your family stews in anxiety about their only son.
It’s the war being "over". 

Yet your brother, sister, mother, father not coming home for 10 or more months longer…to none of the fanfare they deserve.

It is knowing that those who go off to battle are almost never the same upon return.
Civilian life isn’t always comfortable anymore to those who fought for their lives in a clusterfuck ostensibly for democracy, but truly for oil.   There are no yellow ribbons and  assistance as they try to pull their lives back together- broken love affairs and families, PTSD, job skills such as "firearms". 

I am not a soldier.
Not USMC like my brother (thought quite seriously about joining, but realized I’ve an oppositional streak 10 miles wide that simply can’t take orders under any circumstances). 

But I have worked closely with survivors of war, and their children-the next generation who still suffer from the impact of battles long, long, past; and I have felt the grip of terror in my home. 

My parents grimly watched the news each night for signs of where the Marines are in Iraq, lying to my then-cognitively-sound grandmothers about his being on active duty.  One night his ship hit a torpedo or mine, my parents said almost nothing. On duty their whereabout are classified, vague.  The terseness and anguish that prevailed before we got word that he was actually not on the ship at the time- are etched permanently in my heart.

Ben & I used to think my mom was so emo and weird.

We’d be watching something on TV like the "Zulu" movie, a cowboy flick, or a cartoon like Starship Troopers - and she’d cry sometimes during the battle scenes.
"Mom..it’s a CARTOON." Puzzled frowns and eye rolls.
She’d look onscreen at the dramatic scenes of clashing waves of warriors streaming at one another.
"I can’t help but think of each one of those boys, how it takes 20 years for a mother to raise a child into a man and it can all go away just like that."

Well, 20 years later, I have an inkling of what she meant in her empathy for those fictitious soldiers’ families.

I have seen & felt in my bones what wars really do to families, and so I hope all can take a moment to memorialize not only the warriors, but their loved ones, families and loved ones on both sides of all battles.

Sometimes I assign my clients homework.  One of the simplest anti-depression homeworks is to make a short list each night of either things they appreciate, no matter how big or teeny, or of daily highlights.  I find that so many of us, especially pessimistic  over-analytical types, those with control issues or Asian-parent-syndrome, tend to ruminate on the cruddy events of the day but gloss over the little perks.
So one needs to re-program our heads to ruminate more on the ups…

Here’s mine:

In the morn, was told that I am loved, as I am each day of my married life.

Accomplished my new daily aspirational goal to eat 1,
preferably 2 or 3 vegetarian meals per day. 

Ate Falafel at lunch & smilingly thought of my best friend & our many meals together at Vivi’s Falafels.

Bought books (always a pleasure!),
was checked out by a lovely African American elder wearing beautiful shades of purple, who kept calling me "baby girl" which was somehow simultaneously screamingly funny (I am feeling creaky & decrepit lately) & endearingly sweet.

Was told to "Have a magnificent day, baby Girl."

exchanged music, past lives, and travel e-mails with my workaholic soul mate in L.A.

Had the privilege to sit for some hours with several very extraordinary girls and  young women, and help them to structure their own resilience, begin to glimpse their own beauties.

Sang badly & gladly at the top of my lungs to and from Richmond-in 3 languages and across clashing musical genres.

Read Walt Whitman-
"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to anyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and the crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people,  take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the Mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richese fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

When the masses of civilized post-post modern society has electronic devices imbedded into their brains, I will be the old fogey still irrationally attached to good ‘ol paper and pencil, journal and hardback;
who still refuses to answer her clunky cell phone 90% of the time, and travels with 12 lbs. of reading material in her industrial size backpack (see the lady with the killer patent leather boots and snazzy outfit yet a horrific colour clashing government-issue/military pack?? That would be me).
My quaintness and advancing uncoolness descends swiftly these days. 
No point getting all bent outta shape about such things.  I am already resigned to my future as a bona fide relic/antique.

Heck, take today for example.
I am utterly miffed about the postage rate increases. When I gripe, my colleagues look at me blankly.
"I haven’t sent a letter or card in….I don’t know how long ago…"
"I don’t pay bills with mail anymore anyways."
‘Who writes letters?"
Well, SOME of us still harbor extensive stationary collections & enjoy finding an expressive bit of thought from afar amidst the beseeching fundraiser appeal mails & bank statements.
Call me quaint, but as much as an e-mail or e-card is sweet,
it can never hold a candle to the postcard from a foreign land, or greeting card, or wrinkly note on binder paper that someone selected & personalized for me alone.

Often I complain that the academically rigorous, creativity soul-sucking process of writing a doctoral dissertation left me with post traumatic stress….and worse yet, a devastated ability to write creatively. 
All attempts to assert my inner author were bashed in by the American Psychological Association Nazi Style guide (and they revise the damned thing every few years so one must purchase updates). 
No original thoughts were allowed-any opinion one dared to express necessitated a slew of citations and references. 
Amazing that I have any authentic ideation to speak of after all that.

"Higher" education, legal matrimony, taxpayer ID…such are the institutions we shackle ourselves to for the sake of a sane and reasonably functioning  society.

Yet at the end of ‘06, sudden bursts of writing began to consume me.
Eavesdropping on BART, ruminating during my runs, meditating on farmer’s market produce, visiting existentialism-suddenly everything was fodder to fill 3 simultaneous notebooks and countless showers of multi-colored post its. 
All of this, vida y muerte, was my muse.
That repressed artiste was waking up with a vengeance -  in the midst of a Bipolar Mania the likes of which hadn’t appeared since 1992.

Futzing around on Craigslist in the midst of all this, I came across an offer to take free writing classes in exchange for volunteer work. Hmmm. What kinda chintzy classes are these…?
I e-mailed the dude, and it turned out that I was soon hooked up with the empire of
www.mediabistro.com

The classes have been great, from a hardcore  3 hour analysis of proper grammar from an actual professional editor (unlike my own rather opinionated self taught work) to children’s books, magazine article writing, personal essays, socially conscious stories, and everyone’s fave: travel writing.  (although next month I have a class scheduled for the best of ALL things: Food Writing for the Traveler!)

Even better than the courses are the hours I spend hanging out with people who are absolutely NOT in my dayjob line of work.   Just sitting and chatting in those classes I come up with reams of ideas for future reference to file away. 
It’s explosively, obscenely fertile in comparison to my lonely, antsy bouts facing the putty colored monitor (which faces in the less auspicious direction for me according to our Feng Shui friend. My spouse, unimpressed, will not switch our respective sides of the office. c’est la vie.)

In 2001 I told my single male friend Steve, that if he wanted to meet women he should take classes.  The year I took salsa, Thai cooking, and kickboxing, I met enough people to occupy me for years.  Not terribly useful as an engaged person, but tons of fun, good meals and friends came out of it.

At the mediabistro classes I have met all sorts of writers, copyeditors, authors, journalists, PR and other media folks, and a few refugees like me from other fields (disgruntled former attorneys seem rampant). If any of y’all readers want to attend monthly travel writers happy hour in Sf give me a holler…

At last Thursdays class I befriended a journalist from the Merc.
Hey, that’s our paper!  I’m partial to the Mercury since I used to be a true South Bay-er, but also because the Oakland and Sf papers have become so wretched.
Anyways, as a multimedia analyst and music writer, she has what one of my friends termed "a dream job."

Her piece from this past Sunday:

http://www.mercurynews.com/hiphop/ci_5869850?nclick_check=1

See? I am out of date already! Earlier this year our AYPAL youth group printed event flyers that said amongst other things: "Get Hyphy with it."  Those of us who serve youth in Oak-town and Richmond were finally getting a little hyphy and now Marian tells us it’s already "done"?!

I gave her a lift to her car, which is the least any petite woman who’s a long way from home at 10 pm can offer to any even more petite nice young woman who is even further from home.  She kindly offered to reciprocate , telling me "if you ever want to get into any shows/concerts…"
As I mulled over that nice, if throughly unnecessary offer, it occurred to me that the only 2 upcoming shows I am currently thinking about are:
"True Colors" featuring Cyndi Lauper/Erasure
and taking my mother to see "Jersey Boys" at the Curran theatre (Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons). 
So apparently my head is situated somewhere in the 80’s or early 60’s.

The day we played hooky from work to hit Santa Cruz, new red bikini purchased and all, was the day it RAINED.
Sort of like on our wedding day.
C’est La Vie. We spent a museum & pasta day instead… which was lovely in a different manner.  But I was pretty grumbly about spending yet another day encased in a sweater.

Now it’s 80 degrees and climbing, everyone is sweating like a pig and trying to adjust. I suppose no matter what the weather  –  we complain.  I take my work, a monumental dissertation I am editing for an organizational psych student, and hide in the cave of Cafe Ophelia, and wait to meet my amiga for dinner.

Taiwanese Cafe Ophelia is a total decor scream. If "what not to wear" had a home decor version, this would be it.
It’s half country cottage a la Polo wannabe, half faux euro gold gilt complete with statuettes of people in knickers and goofy hats in mid pirouette or drawing the bow of a violin, and a giant print of 2 Greco-figures huge faces staring at one another in a loving caress. Eeesh. meanwhile the chairs are pale yellow or seafoam green leather and everyone in here speaks Mandarin.  It’s all so awful it’s cool, you know?  A multi-culti confusion. And they do keep it clean and inviting in it’s odd way.

I’m a stranger in the homeland, in this tiny facade of a piece of Taipei.  I can’t read the specials offered only to those literate in Chinese.  I can "pass", ask for my seat and my entree in Chinese, but I am most un-smooth & out of date with both the slang names and the formal names of, oh, pretty much everything.
I sit and wait for my amiga whom we introduced to Cafe Ophelia because the food is tasty and also because her darling daughter happens to be named Ophelia.

While reading about organizational change management studies,
and wielding the editor’s pen of doom, I am distracted to realize that a musical rendition of "Sunrise, sunset" is playing amidst the Chinese chatter.   They’re playing Fiddler on the Roof at Ophelia? Oy vey.
My head fills in the lyrics I have known by heart from my piano sheet music….
"is this the little girl I carried…is this the little boy at play?"
Lyrics that had me all choked up as I played those keys, back in 4th grade - though I’d never seen the movie and could not quite comprehend what it was that made the music so melancholy.
"Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly flow the days
Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers
Blossoming even as we gaze

Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly fly the years
One season following another
Laden with happiness and tears."

Wow.
I am apparently turning into some kind of softy in my advanced age…if I am this easily verklempt over the very thought of the circles of life. I REALLY won’t have the emotional stamina to hack being a parental unit myself…
Good lord, I have a hard enough time sometimes just being a daughter.

Now here’s the foodie bit. For reasons I am unable to communicate, I am extremely partial to grass jelly.  For y’all non-Asians, I don’t mean "grass" the illegal vegetation either.
I’m talking about the black, dark, firm, jell-o from herbal grasses which admittedly doesn’t really taste like anything at all, and is served with sugar water syrup.  When we were kids mom would buy a can and the smooth, slippery, dark cylinder  would slide out, ridged with can marks.  We’d hack it into diagonal slabs with our spoons as she cooked up the sugar water, and we’d go mad waiting for the water and grass jelly to chill in the fridge to the perfect, tasty, cooling treat. 

Even my Asian friends don’t know why I like it all that much when there are oh so many much tastier treats to be had rather than this bland, sometimes Chinese medicine-y tasting jiggly goop. Although any chinese medicine doc can tell you it will "cool" the body (alkaline ash) and that I of all people need that!

My first time at Ophelia was for a work meeting.  My colleagues, all Taiwanese or HK immigrants a decade or two wiser than I, ordered Hot grass jelly as it was a wintry day.  Hot? Wouldn’t the jelly melt into sludge?  Curious, I ordered one too.  It came not in a drink glass as expected, but in what resembled a tiny white crock pot with a teeny lid.  I dug in the big ceramic spoon into the dark blob, and came up with….Muesli? 
European cereal/granola? Alas, it was barley, peanuts, red beans, other hearty treats. So. for future reference, when they say  "Burnt/simmered grass jelly", they don’t just mean a heated up grass jelly drink, they mean a whole hearty dessert-ish thing that is practically a meal. Probably all your daily fiber allowance to boot.

Today, I asked for a grass jelly, iced.
Assuming I’d get a drink with floating floes of jelly in it such as from Sweetheart cafe.  I was delivered a heaping plate of shaved ice, with chopped black jelly drizzled with syrup splayed all over the snowy peak.  I pondered how this Himalaya was going to ruin my dinner…and of course ate it anyways.  For future reference. If you say the words "ice" and "grass jelly" in the same sentence they may interpret you as requesting a platter of ice and jello large and dark and endless enough to remind one of a sort of gustatory black hole…

So it is that instead of doing my work, I find myself ruminating an inspired treatise on grass jellies of the world and cultural fusion.

Happy Monday to all-

Here’s a fun website U can visit in a minute, to put life into perspective for all of us currently residing in the so-called 1st world (pretty unbelievable unless indeed U have been strolling around the third world lately:

http://globalrichlist.com

My parents still tell stories about how, when I was very young, like pre-Kindergarten-ish, I informed them that I was actually a cat.

"Oh really," they said.
"A black and white flowered cat." was the clarification. (flowered being the Chinese term for mottled or spotted.)

"Ok." was their response.

Mom was happy to have a small black and white cat pacing on her back as a cheap, at-home version of a spa massage.
Dad contributed to my rather fragile grasp of reality by indulging me with adorable fuzzy jackets and hats featuring leopard spots or little ears on top.
Of course, this only lasted until adolescence hit and I was scowling around the house in black leather poser motorcycle
clothes-fuzzy/cutesy be damned.

In high school my greekguitar friend laughingly informed me that they’d concluded the song "Man eater" by Hall & Oates was about me.
"Of course," I said.  "Tigers are maneaters."

My community college boyfriend created a persona named "Oh Hell Kitty".
To this day I can’t figure out if she was flattering or insulting somehow.  He proudly showed me my anti-Sanrio personification: he gave her long, dark, hair and fishnets, and made the kitty eyes slightly slanty.
WTF?!

At the dorm at UCLA, my roomie Angela and I opened up one of my Dad care packages. Amongst the many treats, there was a full adult sized jumpsuit, of a black and white cat, with a hood and ears, and a black tail, accessorized with the included cloth yellow fish.  We laughed ourselves into tears, and for the life of me, I still don’t know where he bought that costume it was so cute and random and bizarre.  Of course we took photos.

I had a friend once who was studiously into astrology.  Complex readings mixing Eastern and Western approaches, charts, etc. 
At one point he thought "an Aquarius Tiger" would be his ideal match.  I pointed out the illogic of such conclusions.
He pointed out that  he was still interested, despite the "fact" that such an Aquatiger would be characteristically unable to commit in relationships. Thanks a lot.

When P and I decided to marry, I was asked with great scrutiny about my exact time of birth.  I already knew his folks would want to know my birthdate so their astrological feng shui whomever could recommend auspicious wedding days.
"No, we need to know what TIME of day." said future MIL (MIL = mother in law for those of you who have never been on The KNot website).
I was later informed that "it’s Ok."
"Whaddya mean it’s OK,?" I demanded.
Mom explains that it’s acceptable, since I was born in the morning, and although Tigers are maneaters, they only eat at night.
Riiiight.

Has no one noticed that I eat incessantly both morning and night?

A few weeks ago P and I were at Global Exchange. The best gift shop for miles around as everything in that store is purportedly scot-free from worker or environmental abuse.  There was a bin full of fur hats with cat ears. 
"If my Dad were here he’d buy me one." I say to P,
who patiently reminds me that a few years ago Dad did buy me a spotted, feline, fur hat, the one featuring poofy balls on the ends of strings, that came from the Hat shop in Berkeley, and that I wore the damned thing in Argentina where small children meowed at us (me) in the street.

When mom is in Taiwan tending to grandma, P and I have to go feed Mimi every day for a month.  It’s taken him years to become friends with her.  When we first brought her home from the shelter it felt like introducing 2 new alien species.
"Does it actually know its name?!", he asked.
"Of course!" , we said.
Not quite buying it, he starts calling out: "Susan! George!" She ignores him.
"Mimi!", draws an immediate look from those pretty eyes.
Now she loves P’s shoes & rubs, and he knows her sad, baleful looks when we are leaving her alone, and the little motor of purr when she’s in his lap.

B humors me on our running dates as we have world-ranging conversations as I gasp for air & still can’t shut up.  Running at our lake neccesitates a constant dodging of Dogs and birds.  I told B about how I fell in love, how I pathetically frequent the store to flirt with the little parrots, stroke their necks - mooning over them like a lovesick swan.  This leads to a discussion of why P & I can not own a parrot nor dog.
"They would die of loneliness and boredom. Dogs and birds are pack animals.  But a cat is not. A cat enjoys attention but is perfectly capable of entertaining herself." 

before Sensei died I had been trying to convince him to get a feline friend. 
They may act aloof, but in spite of themselves, when a cat falls in love with you, they will love and remember you to the end of their 9 lives.

I want a cat. Dad is offering us his beautiful, perfectly white Bipolar cat.  She is crazy as all get out, but I love her and missed her soft fluff sleeping and pawing on my head when I left Taiwan last July.  She was so seductively beautiful one would choose to sleep with the long haired ball despite the humidity and heat, and despite her rapid cycling mood disorder.

P has enough problems being wed to an occasional feline, (is there such a thing as a were-feline as opposed to a werewolf?!) & enough troubles already with one sentient creature in the home that scratches, dings, and shreds household items.

For the rest of this current life I visit Mimi when we can, and Dad’s three model-perfect white Taiwan cats (those 3 literally have a feature magazine spread of their pretty selves in Taiwan cat mag) too.

Meanwhile, there’s a calico in the backyard, she and I sit on opposite sides of my little yard.  We both stare at the finches and sparrows on the feeders, and chase squirrels.