Costume weekends

I've become one of those crazy people who dress up their animals for photographs. Simon's being a pretty good sport though although this is seconds before he clawed off my new Fake Bans. Unfortunately for him and luckily for my Fake Bans, I had trimmed his nails that day. Claw fail. Sunglasses cat photo success.

summer mom hiatus part two

NEXT STOP: DAN YANG
My mother's side of the family, the Chen clan of Xuzhou, was always a neat and compact group consisting of one aunt, one uncle, one cousin, one grandfather and (up until a few years ago) one grandmother.

My father's side of the family however, the Ouyang clan hailing from Danyang, are a much harder group to pin down. With my grandfather, my step grandmother, my three uncles, my four aunts, my multiple cousins, my cousin's new son, my cousin's wife, her relatives, other step relatives and, finally on top of all that, good family friends who are like relatives, the exact family members I hear/see/find out about on any one trip to Dan Yang always felt like a nebulous, amoeba-like number, constantly in flux.

Since the Chen clan numbers are so diminutive (my cousin has since moved to Beijing and my uncle often goes away on business trips), family activities in Xuzhou consist primarily of slightly staid, intimately small gatherings. Each time I leave Xuzhou, my memories are filled with Polaroid-like pictures of one-on-one interactions - my grandfather showing me how words are conjugated in his latest dictionary, my aunt and my mom sitting together drinking tea, a simple, home cooked meal.

My times in Danyang are infinitely different. A far cry from the quiet snapshot memories from Xuzhou, my Danyang memories flow in a crazy raucous reel of gluttonous feasting and drinking amid an endless stream of rapid chatter in Danyang-tinged Mandarin. Meals melt into conversations melt into family members popping in melt into family members popping out melting into familiar faces melting into soon-to-be familiar faces. The weekend passes in a fast and frenetic and by the time it comes to leave, I'm enveloped in more or less a perpetual food daze and a good ten pounds heavier.

At one of our last family banquets this visit, my Danyang grandfather was asked to make a toast. A slender man with an angular jaw and dramatically heavy eyes, my Danyang grandfather is the polar visual opposite of my soft, jellybean Xuzhou grandfather. Standing up from his chair, Danyang grandfather is pushing 6 foot, tall by Chinese standards. He raises his glass, filled with a blindingly strong homemade wine,and announces with gravity, "I am very happy tonight. I am happy because we are all together, under one roof. There are four generations here and there will be more to come. I feel lucky to be able to see this day. We have been through much but working together we've made it through them. This is the true fortune of having a family. We are together. We are one." The table top shakes as glasses clink on and above it.

Growing up in the States meant that I saw very little of my relatives from either Xuzhou or Danyang. In the decades I spent in another country, I had visited China only a handful of times and most of my communications those relatives were exchanged by way of my parents. During my visits, I couldn't help but always feel a disconnect between me and the rest of my China family. Sure we were related but in terms of how well we knew each other, we might as well have been strangers.

That night, after my grandfather's speech, I looked around the room and felt a new warmth spread through my body. In the smiling faces, I saw my parents, I saw myself, I saw where I came from - the past generations, the new generation and me. And all those years of my parent's telling me about how family is the most important thing you have in your life finally clicked. I felt something that night that ran deeper than just familial obligation. I felt a connection in that room that ran beyond the erasing grasp of time or distance. I felt the connection of of blood.

summer mom hiatus part one

Sometime mid-April, Mom came to visit, staying with me in my cramped, studio apartment. For the next three weeks we bickered and made up and bickered again as Chinese mothers and daughters are wont to do (especially when they share small confined spaces). Amidst the emotional explosions and home cooked meals, we also took two weekend journeys along the eastern China coast to visit both sides of my extended family.

FIRST STOP: XUZHOU
My mother's side of the family lives in Xuzhou. When I tell people this, they often say, "Suzhou? That must be nice." and then I have to explain that I'm in fact not going to SUzhou but XUzhou.

For those who don't know, Suzhou is filled with sprawling Chinese gardens and ponds covered with lush, platter-sized water lilies, Xuzhou is filled with dirty buildings and coal smog. In the past Suzhou served a favored vacationing spot for the Imperial Court. Xuzhou served as a favored relocation spot for the Chinese Government seeking to punish people they deemed counter-revolutionaries. "You have some thoughts on what the Chinese government might be doing wrong do you? Why don't you and your entire family think about them in this extremely shitty town where you'll have to live forever."

I've included a link for pictures of Suzhou and wanted to do the same for Xuzhou when I came to this site that calls Xuzhou the "City of Joy." A dubbing that would be more apt would be perhaps Xuzhou, City of Coal Producing Factories or maybe Xuzhou, City of Hoteliers who try to rip you off when they see your US passport, or even Xuzhou, City where I always come down with stomach ailments that last through my stay and then some. As if unsure the moniker, "City of Joy," could adequately sell the city to potential tourists unfamiliar with the Xuzhou's charms, the site also has a variety of obviously doctored snapshots of the city

When I was little, Mom bought me a box of Trix. The box promised that the inside contents yielded not just corn syrup enriched sugar pellets but also A MAGICAL COLOR CHANGING SPOON!! An ordinary spoon when dry, this magical wonder would turn a vivid shade of neon pink when immersed in milk (and apparently according to the drawing on the box, it might also emit a bright sunlike halo of light).

I fidgeted impatiently on the entire ride home and even before my mom had taken the key out of the car ignition, I had leaped out of the car, dashing for the kitchen with my prize. I ripped open the box and lo and behold, there it was, AN ORDINARY SPOON. I grabbed milk out of the fridge, sloshed it into a bowl and stuck my spoon in. Nothing happened. I stirred it around and looked...hard. The tip of the spoon had darkened slightly to a sickly orange hue. I dipped the spoon in the milk for a third time. The orange hue spread slightly. Needless to say, it didn't emit a bright sunlike halo of light. A near-euphoric high of expectation was replaced by the heavy depression of disappointment. Tricked by Trix.

Unless you have an awesome grandfather who lives in Xuzhou like I do, going to there armed with only the images and information garnered from Xuzhou, City of Joy website will yield you much the same experience as my Trix spoon fail. That being said, I DO have a lovely grandfather and an aunt who enjoys giving me presents there. These two factors change Xuzhou from a city that I would never, ever, ever, ever want to visit to a city that I don't mind (and actually kind of look forward to) going to...once in awhile (usually when I forget how bad the stomach issues were during the last trip).

My grandmother passed away a few years ago. After that happened, Grandfather moved out of his apartment to live with my aunt and uncle. Never a slim man in his youth, my grandfather has gotten decidedly more vertically compact and jelly bean shaped in his old age. I know I may be a little biased but my Xuzhou grandfather might just be the most adorable grandfather ever. I mean let's just look at the facts - deep baritone voice, shuffling gate, a santa clause belly, twinkly eyes, an insatiable sweet tooth and a strange fondness for giving me old dictionaries and odd promotional pamphlets that other people would just throw away but he keeps = extreme adorability.

And so that weekend, after Mom and I visited my grandmother's grave, I spent quite a bit of time sitting with my grandfather in his room, leafing through a pamphlet on the benefits of bee pollen that he had been saving just for this particular occasion and eating M+M's, one by one.