notageek

My parents came to visit me in September of last year; they took me and the BH grocery shopping, then to Goodwill, then to dim sum, and then because the restaurant didn’t have egg tarts (an taat, yes) through the International District until we found a bakery that did. My parents do not mess around in Seattle, unless you count the sequence of events by which they produced me last time they lived here.

While finding the bakery, we crossed paths with a local martial-arts school doing a lion dance/fundraiser down the street. We followed them for several blocks, watching the lions wind up cramped stairways to bring luck to the upstairs office suites, through parking lots to ceremonally eat lettuce in front of restaurants, and back and forth across the street itself to the beat of the gong, cymbals and drum. My mom couldn’t get enough of it, and only when my husband mutinied and grumped back to the car did we tear ourselves away.

“I like your parents”, he said later, “but I didn’t like that annoying banging thing we kept following.” Which goes to prove, I suppose, that if context is not everything, it’s at least a lot.

As I think on it now, my mom may have been enticed by the feeling of childhood as it should have been, with the knowledge of what the dance symbolised and what its elements represented. Our perennial familial complaint is “Nobody tells me anything!”, and it started well before I was born, with my mom trying to fulfill her filial obligations. Nobody explained the elements of her culture to her; she was expected to know.

“My parents tried, but they didn’t know how to be parents”, she told me once. Her parents beat their children, threw them down the stairs, locked them in closets as punishment. It was the status quo at the time, but my mother refused to forget that pain and carried it until I was old enough to understand when she said she tried to be a good parent. My lucky blessed childhood is also the childhood my mother should have had, which breaks my fucking heart.

As a high-school student applying to universities, I picked two state schools in the northwest, and two in California. I got into them all, and planned to go to UC Davis until it became glaringly obvious that financial considerations placed me firmly at the local U. I wanted UCD because the physics department had taken a shine to me, and the land was flat and wide with the sun arcing over it, and the trees were broad-leaved, and because Davis is very very close to Sacramento, where I did a fair bit of growing up.

I know it was trivial; I knew it was trivial. But it’s difficult to come to terms with the idea that there is no home to go back to.

My recent Kitchen Adventures: Ancestral Cuisine Edition brought me to this realisation again. I can learn all the Cantonese I want, even try and winnow it down to my ancestral Toisanese; I can cook the pants off my husband and impress all my classmates and have a lot of fun. But I cannot go back and become the woman I wish I had grown up as; I have to start here, where I am.

I cannot go home. I have to make home myself.

Consider water as an element; it gives rise to wood and subdues fire. It transmits heat and acts as an intermediary to living organisms.

Consider water as a biological resource; it is habitat both internal and external; it contains all that we are.

Consider water as a chemical entity its dipole bridges the positive and negative; the unity, duality and trinity. It adapts and solvates, showing each compound its preferred face. It lurks in salts ancient and modern as waters of hydration. It self-ionises in arcs of jumping ions, a sea of hydrogen and hydroxides all associating and dissociating.

A sea, indeed.

Consider water as an entity in the planetary weather patterns; in arid deserts its direction is up. In the Pacific Northwest its direction is down; the air is rain-washed, close and humid.

Consider water as a metaphor for the human condition. We can drown our sorrows, sail, tread water, or any number of stretched analogies. Ideas can flow, fall, spatter. Clarity blurs like a windshield in the Pacific Northwest.

Oh, for perspective. Consider the human: a creature of water, drowning in a human environment.