mulberryshoots

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" ~ Mary Oliver

Category: Life & Spirit

March 21, 2011

“braintube”. . .

at cape ann photo, g. evans


I was in the sixth grade when my family moved to Virginia. A boy in the class befriended me for no reason that I could figure out. But I was glad. In those days during the McCarthy era, lots of people looked at anyone from China as a “communist.” The Red Scare was rampant and I felt lucky when I was the butt of racial slurs only once in awhile. For some reason, this boy named J. thought I was smart, even though he was obviously the brightest in the class before I came on the scene. He nicknamed me “braintube,” a salutation that he uses to this day when we write to each other by email, even though we are both grandparents by now. J. is one of the few people that I kept up with from that far back. He worked as a diplomat for the State Department and was posted in various countries, always coming back home with his wife Anne who accompanied him abroad.

In 2008, J. came to a luncheon at a Chinese dim sum restaurant which turned out to be my mother’s last supper with her friends. It occurred in September a few weeks after she had received a diagnosis of cancer in August. All of her friends came to gather one more time. The charm with which he greeted my mother, told us stories and put everyone at ease reminded me once again how much I enjoyed and valued J.’s friendship. My mother died shortly thereafter without pain in early November.

As I thought about that reunion, it occurred to me for the first time that his nicknaming me “braintube” in the sixth grade was akin to parting the Red Sea for me (no pun intended). He was very popular and well-liked when we were twelve years old. And his taking a shine to the new kid–a stranger who was a Chinese girl, no less–made it okay for the others to accept me as one of them. My social assimilation could not have been made easier by Moses! Sometimes it’s hard to tell what strife we might have endured when someone rescues us from potential doom. The thing is, he did it all on his own, maybe not even as consciously aware as I have given him credit for. Maybe it emanated from his southern manners or from his innate diplomatic nature. In any case, it made a big difference in my life! Thanks, J.!

Braintube

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March 20, 2011

getting to ‘there’. . .


I don’t know about you but I like to have things caught up before I embark on a project that I want to do for myself. The house has to be picked up and the refrigerator cleaned out. I’m not sure if guys feel the same way though. I read somewhere about the difference between guy and girl brains; something to do with the amygdala being different sizes or something. There might be clues in our DNA too. I don’t think guys feel like they have to wash the dishes before they go and tinker with the car, for example.

I’m not dissing guys, I’m talking about how self-critical we women can be about what we expect from ourselves. Last year, I spent weeks cleaning out the closets, taking things to Goodwill, lugging boxes to the consignment shop, changing cotton sheets to flannel before I could get to re-writing my novel. Maybe for me and other women, we’re good at putting off doing what we really want to do. I noticed that G. procrastinates when it’s something he doesn’t feel like doing.

The ‘there’ we want to get to today keeps moving so that it is still there waiting for us tomorrow. If we wait until we get ‘there,’ we might forget what matters most. I have days when I think the book is just not going to happen. There are other days, (like today) when I feel buoyed by its progress. The opening chapters are now headed in the right direction. In about six weeks, the book may finally be done–just in time for Mother’s Day!

So there!

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March 18, 2011

american masters. . .


Last night, G. and I watched a documentary on PBS called “American Masters” which featured Carole King, James Taylor and the ’70s music scene at Laurel Canyon. It was fun to hear the songs from Carole’s album, “Tapestry,” a recording I played often when the kids were growing up.

In the documentary, I was flabbergasted to learn that with Gary Goffin, she wrote the song, “Will You Still Love Me, Tomorrow?” at the age of EIGHTEEN!! On wikipedia, it states that Carole King “holds the record for the longest time for an album by a female to remain on the charts and the longest time for an album by a female to hold the #1 position, both for “Tapestry.”

After I downloaded “Tapestry” on I-Tunes, I decided to make a playlist for my daughters, one of whom I’m going to meet this afternoon. I started thinking back on the singers who have touched me as much as Carole King. Here’s my playlist of these American Masters.

Ladies singing folk/ballads and more:

the moon’s a harsh mistress (judy collins)
turn, turn, turn (judy collins)
send in the clowns (judy collins)
diamonds and rust (joan baez)
jesse (joan baez)
i am woman (helen reddy)
I feel the earth move (carole king)
home again (carole king)
you’ve got a friend (carole king)
will you still love me tomorrow? (roberta flack)
stoney end (barbra streisand)
if you could read my mind (barbra streisand)
I don’t know where I stand (barbra Streisand)
the rose (bette midler)
when a man loves a woman (bette midler)
ladies of the canyon (joni mitchell)
both sides now (then) (joni mitchell)
both sides now (now) (joni mitchell)

Who are some of your favorites?

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March 17, 2011

a tiny tiger. . .

"tiger, tiger burning bright"


Although G. and I live in a large house, it is split up into many uses. G.’s piano shop is on the first floor; there are over two dozen pianos, Steinways mostly, other ones, active and inactive down there. More pianos are in the barn. We live on the third floor where we watch the sun set while we have dinner. On the second floor are apartments that are rented out, often to grad students and post-docs at UMass Medical School which is nearby. Our current tenants have a two year old boy named Spencer.

One day last Fall, as I was washing the breakfast dishes, I heard a whirring noise out on the deck. As I wiped my hands and looked down at the deck that connects the barn to the house, I saw little Spence riding his three wheel bike. It wasn’t really a bike, it was one of those down to the ground vehicles that tots ride before they are old enough to get on a bicycle. Anyhow, Spencer was riding this thing, but he wasn’t just riding it, he was barrelling as fast as he could without a care in the world. I mean, he was careening around on the deck!

I wonder where that kind of joyful abandonment comes from, trusting that you can actually go at that speed in life without running into something or taking a fall. Even more exhilarating to see was the expression on his face, his eyes almost closed, shrieking with joy. Man, it was really something! His father quietly took photos of him, kneeling in one place as he recorded his kid running amok on the deck.

Are we all born with the potential for this kind of unbridled joy? I wonder.

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March 16, 2011

kindred spirits. . .


As a self-described loner, the number of friends I have can be counted on one hand. Most of them are loners too, a few even more reclusive than I am. They are all artists of one kind or another. Their eye, hand and spirit are usually mucking around in what they are making, the instruments they are playing or what they are reading and writing. It takes a lot to go it alone. They share an insistent curiosity that seeks out what sparks their interest, incapable of just letting it lie there.

G. said about me once, “the difference between you and other people is that you pull the trigger.” I guess he’s right. My father was like that too (“My father, myself“.) When he decided to make all of our living room furniture from scratch, he taught himself how to do it. One of our neighbors wrote to me when he died that she still remembers that about him and the simple maple furniture he made for our house. There was a wooden chair in the shape of a Mies van der Rohe chaise lounge that I wish one of us had saved.

During his African violet phase, our entire basement was suddenly filled with aisles of artificial growing lights and metal carts with layers of trays lined with potted flowers. It seemed like an odd choice of plant for him. Later, I remember that he also liked gloxinias and christmas cactus plants. When each “phase” was over, it clicked shut, just like that.

I wonder where these obsessive urges come from. I find myself doing the same thing sometimes. They feel like a binge to me. Whenever I come upon something that resonates with me, I feel it right away. It’s not just what appears on the surface but something else I feel a kinship with, an energy submerged within.

That’s the experience I had on Saturday night when G. and I watched a DVD about Margaret Leng Tan. Born in Singapore, she is a pianist living in Brooklyn who built a following through her performances playing John Cage’s compositions on pianos and on toy pianos. Her dedication to forging her own path and her sense of presence bowled me over. The energy of her performances, her large piano hands, her crisp haircut and the four dogs that kept her company stayed with me long after the documentary wound to a close.

The next day, I downloaded “The Art of the Toy Piano” on I-Tunes. I was glad to find the gorgeous blues-y Satie piece by Toby Twining played concurrently on piano and toy piano. I scrolled through twenty-four pages of toy pianos listed on eBay but didn’t see anything that compared favorably with her collection of eighteen toy pianos. I sat down at my piano and sightread the Beethoven sonata that Margaret adapted for Charles Schultz’s Peanuts character, Schroeder, that was featured in the film. I read about John Cage again. I took out “Wake Up and Cook”, a Buddhist cookbook which describes Cage’s preference for making brown rice the macrobiotic way with spring water that he drove miles to fetch in empty water jugs he brought from home.

I even wrote an e-letter to Margaret because I felt her life was so inspiring and poignant at the same time. Miraculously, she wrote back! She says she now has six dogs!

Take a look for yourself at http://margaretlengtan.com/.

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March 13, 2011

“red sparrow”. . .

 

skipping rope

When we lived in Berwyn, Maryland my family often gathered with other Chinese immigrant families. One of them was the Chang family who were related to us as second cousins or an aunt & uncle once removed or something like that. I was never quite sure what the connection was. We settled on being “cousins” with them. Judy (on the right of the photo) and I spent a lot of time together skipping rope at my house. We went to see Bob Steele and Hopalong Cassidy cowboy movies every weekend at the Greenbelt Theater. Afterwards we would walk up and down the aisles of the five-and-dime store, inspecting the plastic toys and candy that we would choose to blow the rest of our allowance on.

Judy was an only child and her parents were both physicians. Her mother worked at a hospital and was often away from home. Her father took care of Judy and did the housework at home in addition to being a doctor. Whenever I stayed over with Judy at her house on the weekends, Uncle Chang would buy us whatever we wanted to eat and let us do whatever we felt like.

One day when we were about nine years old, Judy and I sat on the living room rug of her house and demolished a gallon of peach ice cream together. We also ate a large bag of Fritos. We got so sick afterwards that I haven’t gone near peach ice cream or Fritos ever again.

Because both her parents worked, Judy stayed with us over the entire summer when school was out. She was very good at drawing, went to Swarthmore and afterwards became an architect. She also became a hippie of sorts. She met her husband, an American, on one of her treks in the Himalayas. Even though our lives went in different directions, I sought her out for a reunion of sorts when our children were young. We met at a restaurant with our then-husbands and families and then lost touch again. Her marriage ended at the 20 year mark. Mine ended at 26 years.

Much later, I invited her to visit us for Thanksgiving in 2002. By that time, Judy’s father had passed away and she spent her time in Philadelphia practicing architecture and visiting her mother in a nearby nursing home. Judy told me that she had made peace with her mother who was by now nearly a hundred years old.

We had a good, albeit awkward visit together that Thanksgiving at our home. She brought her drawings to show me; I showed her my writing efforts. We talked about how it wasn’t too late for women to reach out for what was still important to us. She told me she had always wanted to travel to Mongolia to take photographs and to sketch the landscapes there. In 2003 she won a SWIMPY (“Senior Women In their Most Productive Years”) grant from Flora Stone Mather College at Case Western Reserve University to sketch a restoration project in Mongolia. She said, “It was a spark I needed to begin a journey imagined a lifetime ago.”

When we skipped rope together, we moved in tandem. Each of us fiercely wanted a creative life. We found a belief system that worked for us: mine in Taoism and Judy in Buddhism.

We spoke again after she returned from Mongolia. Then, she became ill with cancer and died in 2006 with her sons by her side. In memoriam, they created a website to celebrate her life and her art. In the process, her sons discovered drawings that none of us had ever seen. They are posted on a website called “Red Sparrow.”

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March 11, 2011

a standstill gives way. . .

sunrise at thacher island, cape ann -- photo, a. dalton


There are periods of time when everything seems to come to a standstill. Last year was one of those times. From the autumn through the end of the year, family misunderstandings abounded. Then they took a turn for the worse. During that time, my three canaries went through their yearly moult. Silent as stones, they sat lethargically in their cages for weeks. Tiny feathers littered the floor and down floated in the air. I gave them egg food to supplement their diet; then gradually added back their usual song food. Often, it took awhile before the birds would sing again as their feathers grew back in. During this standstill, no sounds were heard at all, not even little peeps.

Two years ago, somebody gave us a good-luck money plant. It was about four inches high and sat on our kitchen windowsill. Since then, it’s had a couple of intense growth spurts. I repotted it twice and moved it into the other room as it got taller. In November, as I adjusted the support stake, the thin trunk doubled over and almost broke in half. We bandaged it with a splint taped around it, but the plant looked like it was not going to make it. Distraught, I started misting the wound where it had cracked open, four feet midway to the top, hoping that the added moisture would reach the tiny leaves above. The lower leaves began to discolor and fall off, one by one every other day.

The winter solstice arrived on December 22nd and the days began to lengthen and brighten up a little. As I cleaned the house in preparation for the holidays, I came across an old string of prayer beads made out of fossilized coral. Not knowing where to put it, I impulsively wound it around the old bronze Buddha which sat on the maple chest under the skylight. A day later, I found another string of prayer beads made of fossilized bone that I looped three times around a second Buddha, the silk tassel dangling like a pendant on the gilt statue’s chest.

One snowy day in January, I heard soft chirping noises. Short snippets of song followed. Soon, even the bird that hardly sang at all was joining the other two in song. After four months of eerie silence, a cacophony of canary song filled our rooms. Nothing had changed except the passage of time and the quality of light coming in the windows. The maidenhair fern made a comeback too. As for the money plant, we counted twelve new shoots appearing over the course of three days in the same week that the birds started singing again. As I watered the plants along the west side of the room, I also noticed that the Trader Joe orchid plants had branches of new growth with flower buds on every plant. We couldn’t believe all this was happening at once.

According to the I-Ching, a period of stagnation will eventually turn into its opposite. Change is the only thing that does not change according to this ancient book. Although I have had my share of ups and downs, it is still hard during a time of despair to have faith that things will improve again. It is human nature to worry that perhaps this time, the dark will stay forever, even though we know from experience that it is darkest before the dawn.

This dawn arrived, ushered in by a chorus of birdsong, a multitude of new leaflets on the money tree and a dozen orchid buds ready to open.

I am thankful and filled with awe. Hallelujah!

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March 9, 2011

commonplace journals. . .

 

my commonplace journals

Today is Wednesday (“why I love wednesday and thursday mornings“) and I just cut out a recipe for Japanese sake-steamed chicken from the NY Times Dining section. The description of a small chicken steamed gently over sake and water, rested, succulent slices covered with a sauce made of ginger, soy, garlic, lemon, orange and rice vinegar sounded like the perfect thing to make for dinner tonight.

A Japanese kabocha squash that has been languishing in the wooden bowl on the counter will be cut up into chunks and  simmered in a dashi broth with a little soy added. Bowls of white rice will accompany the chicken and the squash.

These recipes will be added to the current volume of scrapbooks that I have been creating for years. In them, I have assembled everything worth keeping that refreshes my spirit and stimulates my appetite for cooking, reading, writing, anything that I want to remember and think about more. For example, the article about the lady who put in plants with plumes that mimicked the exotic roosters is saved in one of these books(“why i love wednesday and thursday mornings”.)

Last year, as I was doing research about Ralph Waldo Emerson, I read about his habit of keeping what he called “Commonplace Journals.” He used them as a way to capture one’s thoughts and to collect and savor the things that appealed to him. He encouraged this practice because the journals were a tangible tool and handbook for trusting your own intuition and being self-reliant (“emerson and the heart“).

The photo above of my scrapbooks illustrates the kind of collage that I put together to represent where my head was at the time for that particular volume. Although there were many images of wishes and desires in these volumes, they represent much more than that. Their pages captured something intangible, an energy or a kind of longing that embodied my spirit as it hovered around in those days. It was a way of putting together a pastiche of where I wanted my life to be going, or perhaps end up, a way of awake dreaming for what my life could be.

I believe that making imagery visible makes what you hope for more tangible. At least that’s what these journals have been for me. Paging through them, some of them from twenty years ago, I can see the person I was back then. Somewhat dated, to be sure. But the spirit of who I was and what I wanted to realize still comes through loud and clear.

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March 9, 2011

stirring the pot. . .

cream of tomato soup

Although I sometimes think of myself as being quiet and solitary, (“a taoist hermit”), in my professional working life, I was anything but. Although I tried very hard each time I was the “newest kid on the block,” to keep my mouth shut and not challenge anybody, it was hard for me to do any of these things longer than for the first week or two. It’s actually amazing that I had a professional career at all, all things considered.

I was a late starter getting into the workforce because my first husband didn’t want me to work (“life is long”). When my kids were in high school, I talked my way into a project management job at one of the two premier biotechnology start-up companies in the U.S. at the time. In those days, cloning was an art, carried out by molecular biologists who were treated and paid like rock stars. Nowadays, there are machines that clone while people are on their coffee break. Before I was hired, I was asked to interview with the “Senior Scientists” of the start-up company. They were very nice and very distracted by this waste of their time. In other ways, they behaved like Knights of the Round Table, coming to work at 2 a.m. and leaving whenever, or vice-versa. They purposely didn’t want anyone with a Ph.D. in science to be a project manager, which is why they were interviewing me, a liberal arts history and music major. What they wanted, it seemed, was to hire a nice “nanny” to find their notes and to run meetings that they didn’t want to attend.

Long story short, I was hired and in two years was promoted over a young Harvard MBA to Director of Project Management. I hired and trained young MBAs from Wharton and other business schools because that’s what senior management said they wanted (even though I wasn’t one.) There were four divisions in the company at the time: pharmaceuticals, agriculture, diagnostics and biocatalysis. The project managers covered projects in all four groups; there were over 25 projects with global business partners in the pharmaceutical division alone. I also managed my own projects, the most important one being recombinant Erythropoietin (EPO). Simply put, it is a glycoprotein that stimulates production of erythrocytes (red blood cells).

I remember one company-wide meeting when the CEO said, “Our number one priority is EPO; our number two priority is EPO and our number three priority is EPO.” It was a crazy time. Once the VP of manufacturing and I flew to Frankfurt for an emergency meeting and met our business partners in the airport lounge after 8 hours in the air. We then turned around and flew back a day later without leaving the airport! When I boarded the American Airlines plane the crew recognized me from the flight two days earlier. It was right before Christmas and everyone was in a festive mood. The stewardess put me in First Class and served glasses of champagne on a tray with red roses. Then, I was offered (I’ll never forget this) an unopened jar of Sevruga cavier the size of a softball–just for me. There were perks that went with all the pressure and this one beat them all.

Back to the grind, I led a global development team with business partners who succeeded under great duress to obtain EPO regulatory approval in Germany and Japan. Amgen won the U.S. patent rights over the company I worked for and built its company from its early success with EPO. During the patent litigation phase, I travelled to New York for depositions and testified on behalf of my company’s claims. Today, you might recognize EPO under its marketed name,”Procrit.” Athletes are accused of using it to stimulate performance. To this day, it is still the single most successful product ever developed by recombinant technology, generating over a billion dollars of revenue a year.

Wow, you might say. . .how did you survive that? Well, I read huge textbooks about Molecular Biology and Protein Chemistry without understanding or at least retaining much of what I read. The first year, I walked around the garden and cried a lot on weekends. Understanding a research scientist’s mentality, having grown up with my father (“my father, myself”) gave me a leg up towards coaxing them to do what management needed them to do. It was a privilege to be on this ride in the early years of biotechnology. The work was exhilarating and very, very stressful. I virtually disappeared from my family. I told my first husband that from then on, he would have to go to all the school meetings for the kids and to carry on at home as though I had left the planet. Which is also how it felt sometimes.

Anyway, that’s how I started working. They thought they had hired someone they could ignore. I managed to stir the pot enough to get things done. It was a lot of fun working with such intelligent people for such a long time. After the bloom of biotech faded, it got a lot harder to raise money, it was a lot more stressful and a lot less fun. But I had a good run. I lucked out. I worked very hard. And I’m glad that a product like EPO made it across the finish line.

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March 8, 2011

serendipity and synchronicity. . .


I feel that serendipity and synchronicity have shaped my life to a large degree.

When my father decided at the last minute not to return to China right before the Cultural Revolution took hold, that was serendipitous. We had our shots, bags were packed, we were ready to go. Even though my grandfather accused him of being “disloyal” at the time and for years afterwards, my Dad made a life decision to stay in America and not to return to China. When I think about what my life would have been like, all I would have to do is look at my Chinese cousins’ lives, a generation whose future was stolen by the Red Guards. I might be wearing my hair in pigtails and growing cabbages. Or maybe I’d be online, writing a blog!

Without synchronicity, my lost dog wouldn’t have been found and my husband wouldn’t have found me (“life is long“). Seeing the first quartet of red cardinals was serendipity. Seeing a family of them in our rose arbor was synchronicity (“seeing red cardinals“).

Wikipedia (see links above) says that “serendipity” has been voted one of the ten hardest words to define. Maybe it’s one of those concepts where “you know it when you see it.”

How have serendipity and synchronicity touched your life?

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