Claiming Joy

January 31, 2015 XingfuMama Leave a comment

Life gets complicated, and often I see in the past the seeds of the bad stuff. I forget to see also the seeds of joy. Frankly, I had forgotten that my childhood was pretty happy. Today I spent several hours scanning my father’s slides to digital images, doing so I found myself confronting happiness. Mother with two children in swimming pool.

I come from a broken home and we have had our share of trials and tribulations, but before it broke, and even as it was breaking there was love and fun. Good things happened. People who wound up having difficulties and causing pain to one another were not always so.

Being analytic and having trained as an engineer, I am programmed to try to solve problems, to understand what is wrong and try to tweak things to make them better. That colors how I look at the past. I keep looking for what went wrong.

Seeing pictures of myself with my family having fun, the house I grew up with, and even my dad’s old blue pickup truck loaded down with lumber, sort of rubbed my nose in the happiness.
Going through the old pictures allows me to wallow for a bit in the joy, it belongs to me just as much as the other.

An old ford pickup truck loaded down with lumber. — The old, blue pickup.

Snapshots from a Happy Life

Which way?

January 28, 2015 XingfuMama 1 Comment

Road signs in Toulouse France, there are two sets of signs pointing in opposite directions with the same cities listed. — Which way?

This is a scan of an old negative and no great shakes as scenery, but fun. I took the picture in 2001 in Toulouse, France. We were headed for Carcassonne on foot.

Stories and Meditations

Verinbrunalis

January 28, 2015 XingfuMama Leave a comment

Not very clever: it is Latin for “spring in winter”. It’s happening right now in Seattle. The news is full of blizzards, and for some that is marvelous (see post by Karyn here), but here the air is full of the scent of daphne odora and “that plant that starts with an ‘s’, smells divine and blooms in January”.

two snowdrop flowers blooming in the moss. — Snowdrops in the moss.

The leaves and buds of bulbs are thrusting vigorously up through the mulch of partially decayed leaves…but winter is not necessarily over. This little party will end with a shift of the wind. In some ways that makes it all the more precious. For that reason it is also accompanied by a sense of urgency to get outside.

This differs from what we call the “pineapple express” which is warm but comes with a lot of rain.

Got to go and enjoy!

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Play Lexicographer.”

China, Snapshots from a Happy Life

Warm Welcome to Weifang

January 26, 2015 XingfuMama Leave a comment

Every so often you meet someone who makes your day. This man was so happy to have the four of us jammed into his taxi and wanted me to take his picture so we would remember him.

Chinese taxi driver flashing the peace sign and smiling broadly. — Happy taxi driver.

I smile every time I see this picture.

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Express Yourself“

China, Stories and Meditations

Modern Communications-Is it QQ* Translate…or Chinese itself?

January 24, 2015 XingfuMama 4 Comments

Being a mama means being there, even if you aren’t there. This morning I received this QQ* message from Emily, my son’s girl friend:

“mama,James, didn’t you call today, he felt a little worried. I told him, something the mama. If you have time, give him the phone number tomorrow.”

I am sure she typed it in cogent Chinese. It is the middle of the night in China right now so I have to cool my heels for several hours before I can get clarification.

This is not my first somewhat obscure message, I no longer panic that I cannot call right away. Instead I amuse myself during the waiting time by guessing what the message might mean.

The first message that comes through was unintentional on her part. When I tried to QQ and call James last night I didn’t get through. This message tells me clearly that James is fine (one time when I couldn’t get through he had been mugged and had his phone stolen).

The essence is that James was worried that I didn’t call yesterday. However, since he could have QQ’d me himself, Emily may be more worried than he is.

“I told him, something the mama” is a bit puzzling. Was she worried that something is wrong or comforting him that I was busy doing something?

When I tried to learn some Chinese I noticed that they put an emphasis on different aspects of language than we do in English: for example, they do not pluralize nouns or use verb tenses. So a sentence can have both ambiguity about what the subject is (is it a generalization about dogs, or a statement about a particular dog or group of dogs) and when in time the action occurred (is the dog running now, did it run in the past, or will it run in the future?). However, the Chinese seem to have more precision when they talk about emotions than we do. For example, they have about 20 words for happy, discerning between a general state of contentment, delight in the moment, and a feeling of being fortunate.

The words Emily typed in Chinese that came out as “something the mama” and “he was a little worried”, could have had much more precise meanings than what came though in translation. For example, the Chinese word she used that got translated as “something” could have been a word with either calming or alarming overtones. In English we would perhaps have used more words: “something came up”, like an invitation to have coffee with an old friend, or “something happened”, like the car broke down.

I wonder how much our language affects our thinking. Do we who speak English care more about whether it is a generalization about dogs or the behavior of a specific one because our language teaches us to do so?

I am pretty sure that “give him the phone number tomorrow” means give him a call.

A few more hours to kill.

*QQ is a Chinese Facebook-like communications program. It is by far the largest one used in the world. It is used by almost all Chinese people with cell phones and by people who want to communicate with them easily. I can send a QQ IM and will usually get a response in a few seconds.

Stories and Meditations

A Moment In Time-Goodbye Sweet Ginger

January 20, 2015 XingfuMama 4 Comments

It’s not my fault you have to go. You are not my dog; I don’t have a dog; I don’t even want a dog…but I will miss you. It has been fun having you with me: taking walks and chasing squirrels and wagging our tails together (it’s good for our waistlines).
It is hard to say goodbye.

Knowing that you, in your youthful exuberance, are a danger to her doesn’t help. Aging is hard, and watching it happen is just as hard.

I wish you weren’t going back to that. To someone who keeps a cane on the door to threaten you, because you get so excited and happy when she comes in that it scares her, who threatens you with a fly swatter when you want to play, and who yells at you for barking at things she can no longer hear. It makes me sad to see her that way.

And the sorrow about her makes it that much harder to say goodbye to you.

You are not my dog; I don’t have a dog; I don’t even want a dog. No, I don’t want to take you away from anyone…but I will miss you.

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “A Moment in Time.”

Africa, China, Picture Galleries, Stories and Meditations

What is Serenity?

January 19, 2015 XingfuMama 1 Comment

This was harder than I thought. I didn’t know what the word really meant and had to look it up. Going through my pictures I realized that I have some serene baggage.

My five elements of serenity:

It needs light, but also an edge of darkness.
It needs to have sky in it, but not perfectly clear.
It needs water in it, unruffled water.
It needs to have land in it.
It needs life in it.

A courtyard of the Forbidden City in China, It has stone paving, a basin holding water, a couple of trees and tile roofs. — Forbidden courtyard

I am not sure why I like my sky cloudy and my water smooth. But for every rule there is an exception:

Then of course there is his Serene Highness:

His Serene Highness.

Aren’t dictionaries great?

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Serenity.”

Stories and Meditations

Writing Sticks

January 17, 2015 XingfuMama Leave a comment

notes-sketches-outlines-doodles

I think differently with a pen or pencil in my hand. Even if I am not using it! There are synapses in my brain that only fire when my hand is holding a writing stick. I have been pondering how this came to be.

I learned to write, as most of us did, in primary school and, by the end, I wrote in a close to legible cursive. I liked to write in those days and turned out many pages of stories.

I learned to properly letter in drafting classes in middle school. I spent hours learning to print and make clear sketches. I think that is when the brain connections really started to form. From then on I always printed unless I was required to do otherwise.

When I was younger my printing was easier to read than type written. Now my hands are stiffer, especially when it is a bit chilly and my letters are more like italics, the letters tend to connect together and it takes effort to achieve a standard hand. This may be due to typing so much more, it takes different hand muscles.

I learned to type my freshman year of high school, 1976, on an IBM Selectric.The typing grade dragged down my GPA. They made me take it because I was a girl. They said you had to be able to type to get a job as a secretary. I passionately hated typing. I was the slowest in the class, the teacher gave me a pity grade of B for the second semester because I tried so hard. The thought of having to do anything with typing for the rest of my life was depressing.

I was much happier in drafting class and always got good grades on my lettering. I was even happier in physics where my clear sketches and printing and, believe it or not, thinking skills, were appreciated. I stopped writing stories.

In college an electric typewriter was a requirement, word processors were starting to peak over the horizon, but they were harder to use than some programming languages are today (does anyone remember Word Star?) and there was no computer access to speak of. I wrote everything out, turned it in printed if I could get away with it and painstakingly typed out if I couldn’t. But I was glad I had learned to type: I took a computer programming course and it made inputting programs much easier. Many of the guys hadn’t been forced to take typing and I had a bit of an advantage.

Slow forward to today: I still brainstorm, outline, sketch and doodle with a pen or pencil, even though I have a blazing peak typing speed of about 20 words a minute. I think that having a holistic idea of what I want to say scribbled on some bit of paper helps me to compose. That said absolutely nothing beats a computer for ease of editing.

So here I sit at the computer with a writing stick and pad by my right hand. Even if I don’t use it it helps me think.

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Pens and Pencils.”

Snapshots from a Happy Life, Travel Tale

Kuku Gifts

January 15, 2015 XingfuMama Leave a comment

In this photo my son’s puzzled look about how to handle a gift chicken is amusing an African man. The formal presentation of chickens was one of many new experiences for us.

On our first trip to Africa in 2012, as part of a very small NGO, we received many chickens.

At first it was puzzling, since we obviously were not going to take these souvenirs home with us. However, we eventually realized that the gifts were really a form of hospitality.

Snapshots from a Happy Life