clarahsu – Page 24

Another Holiday?

A string of holidays and birthdays since Thanksgiving and by this time of the year (which is only the beginning) I’ve had enough of celebration. Still, Chinese New Year is the next one up. Sefu Dino dropped by Clarion today with his two hefty students. He reminded me of lion dance, fire crackers, colorful flags and truckload of spears and sticks.

“We’re getting ready to make the rounds,” which means lion dancing for the businesses in Chinatown. It’s a tradition to bring luck and prosperity to the businesses and in turn receive money. It is the season for the martial arts studios to raise funds, much like the Nutcrackers production for the ballet companies. When my children were young they had a green lion outfit and went around with Sefu Dino. Afterward, the entire studio would go for a feast at a local restaurant.

“Cook!” He winked at me before quick walking up Sacramento Street. I wished I have half his energy.

Everybody Wants to be a Prima Donna

It doesn’t matter what it is. If it is important to us, we want to be the best/white knight/Queen bee/prima donna/favorite student/teacher’s pet. It only takes two to compete. Big brother vs. baby sister. The dog vs. the cat. At school, the lowliest of the students dreams of beating the odds to become the first in class. And when this actually happens the world (the class) is turned upside down, shocked and miserable that someone is “better” than them.

It’s all because we care. We care about the things that we considered as our image. When our identity is threatened we become angry and confrontational, or cold and unresponsive. Maybe it is better not to have an identity. Then there is nothing to compare with.

But we thrive on praise, like babies crying for attention. It is the wanting that makes us strike out.

The Secrets of Long Life

Diet. Exercise. An insatiable will to live. Curious and mindful of the body. Master over loneliness. Determination to be self-sufficient. Wake early. Eat raw vegetables. Open the windows for fresh air. Water the plants. Deep breathing. Massage head and face. Eat heartily (especially when friends come to visit, and especially when they bring fish porridge). Laugh. Take naps. Skype–the best invention for people who are housebound. Relax. Drink tea. Eat Moroccan food (easy for the teeth). Eat cake when it is being offered and blow out the candle if there’s one. Say thank you. Shake hands and take hugs. Go to bed.

My father turns 91 today.

The Sentinel

old-woman-toad — Old Woman and the Toad by Judy Somerville

My father’s neighbor Mr. Wong passed away recently. It was a quiet affair, as he was old and had been sick for a long time. I visited the Wongs briefly last year, to invite them to my father’s birthday party. He and his wife were cordial, said they could not go outside by themselves, not even next door.

Mrs. Wong used to be quite a beauty. She had some Spanish features on her face–big eyes and a tall nose. Since their confinement she wore a knitted cap to cover her grey hair and all her teeth were gone. Every time I pulled the car into my father’s driveway she pulled aside the curtain and waved at me. In fact, the once silky white curtain was dirty and torn where she pulled every time she saw a familiar face. That was her communication with the world.

The house has been dark since the death of Mr. Wong, and the curtain stayed still. She may have abandoned her post out of loneliness without realizing that she had been lonely.

Drawing the Line

O’Farrell seems to be the one street that draws the line. From there it is all downhill. Pigeons peck on orange cheetos shaken out of a bag by a man on the sidewalk. People loiter about and a queue on Turk Street snakes out of a community center serving meals. The area smells of urine. Someone’s belongings are piled high in a Safeway shopping cart.

This is where poverty meets art, where poets live in tiny compartments of residential hotels and scribble their thoughts on their beds. It is where the most evocative verse are written. But it is also doom. Most of these works will not see the light of day and likely to be lost in the turbulence of life.

Uptown glamour is only one street away, but the line is hard to cross.

Photo by Thor Swift/NYT

Candles in the Rain

Pining for rain in this mild winter evening, and think of Amsterdam. It was 2001 late autumn when we arrived, with the rain came before us. Periods of it, sometimes very hard and then not at all, wetting the bridges and cobblestones and hundreds of bicycles, all dressed in grey. We rushed into a cafe. From the outside we could see the candelabras—old fashioned, elaborate, dripping thick waxy icicles, and a roomful of tiny flames flickering. It was the kind of place for lovers to sit and hold hands.

Maybe it’s that kind of place that I’m really pining for, when romance is so real and part of every day life. Maybe all I need to do is to light a candle and turn off the light. The rain may not come for some time.

The Year Begins…

The feeling of not having to do something can be surreal. Not having the children at home to take care of, not having a mate, not having a business to run, not having a regular caffeine fix…now, not having to write a poem a day!

No one made me. The incentive came from producing very few poems for almost three years while I was concentrating on writing the memoir. I am, at the heart, a poet; and it was frustrating not to be writing poems. Jannie Dresser’s Poem-a-Day online class gave participants opportunity to post their poems. It was almost like handing in homework, something that I was programmed to do very well since primary school.

365+ poems later, I feel like I’ve graduated. Through this year-long exercise I have discovered my own capacity and know that it is time to move onto something else. This “something” is quite intangible at this time, but it must have space to allow it to manifest. The moment of liberation is surreal, until the path shows itself.

A Treat

Despite this being the last day of the year, all my piano students except one came for their lessons. They seemed happy, relaxed. Maybe because they were still on winter break. And practiced too, so that a few of them actually made some good musical progress. Most of the year they came to their lessons yawning or sick. Kids work so hard when they’re in school. Three or four tests a week, book reports, projects on top of everything else. I felt sorry for them, but they just shrugged their shoulders. They learned from a young age life is work.

As a teacher I demand the same thing—practice, practice. But piano often loses out when pitted against schoolwork and I find myself a lone caller in the wild. “It’s OK,” I tell myself, “so long as they don’t hate coming to their lessons I’ve done my job.” And look, we had fun today. What a great way to end the year!

The End of Things

If only we march toward the end of things with anticipation and joy, with Auld Lang Syne, with parties and dance and good cheer, and step into new beginnings like that of a new year, life would be quite all right.

The bells are never tolled for the old year. We can’t wait to get rid of it. Why can’t we do that with failed careers and relationships, bad decisions and botched dreams, but instead sink to a bottomless pit and sometimes never pull ourselves out of it?

Soon we’ll have a new ID number. Maybe that’s what we need when things go wrong: give ourselves a new ID, invent and reinvent.

Alive and Breathing

Van Gogh Sun Flower — Van Gogh's Sun Flower

Breathing and living are not the same thing. A person can breathe for a long time before he actually dies. We all know about the “living dead”, those who walk the earth without the feeling of aliveness.

Would a flower care about its aliveness? Science has proven that it does. Would an animal? Our cat Petey has congestive heart failure. But when the days are mild and the sun is out, he would go outside and disappear for half of the day. Aliveness is when the heart is glad. And the heart must be made glad continuously. The innocence of a small child is aliveness. love is aliveness. A smile, a warm embrace are assurances of aliveness. It needs to be every day, every moment. It is the primary purpose of living.

Sometimes when I breathe in the cold winter air it awakens me.