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A few updates

I’m coming up on the first-year anniversary of this blog, so I’ve got a few things planned, including a site redesign. In other related news:

• I had a lovely time speaking to the middle schoolers. I’ll write about it in an upcoming post.

• I submitted a piece of writing to a literary magazine, my first submission to a literary magazine since high school. Submitting something for publication must be part of an MFA, right?

• I have also thought a bit about small ethnic markets, such as this one. There will be a post ventolin generic name coming up about this topic, too.

• I wrote more about my yoga practice for my yoga studio’s newsletter. I’m not exactly sure why this makes me happy, but it does. Maybe because I do not look like the stereotypical yogi, and I like the idea that maybe it will encourage other atypical yogis to try it out.

• I was asked to read a manuscript in progress, by a writer I admire. It was an honor and a pleasure.

More to come—there’s a lot going on here. Thanks for checking in.

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Assignment #4: How I eat (A letter to E)

Dear E,
How do you eat? you asked in an e-mail message last week. How do you establish a form for this part of your life?

I have written versions and drafts of this to you in my head, upon waking in the middle of the night, on the mat at yoga class, during my run along the grassy median in my neighborhood. Places where spring’s starting to poke out of the ground in crocuses, swell the budding tips of branches, blossom in the cherry and plum trees. And I have written it at my laptop, which is usually next to the kitchen.

I have to begin, I think, with our neighborhood grocery store. It’s less than a mile up the road from our house, and it is our version of Cheers: everybody knows our names, or at least our faces. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that we go there almost every day. We get our double iced Americanos and caramel macchiatos there, our daughters have had birthday serenades and we’ve eaten family cups of gelato there. We’ve made friends there. So it is partly a place where we find community.

Sometimes we do plan our meals for the week, but more often it’s a day or two in advance. Partly because of the store, and because of its proximity, planning what we’re going to have for dinner is one of my everyday pleasures. It is where most of our disposable income goes. We don’t go out to movies very often anymore, we don’t even go to bookstores and music stores very often. But we do allow ourselves the pleasure of our grocery store. And, though we don’t have a year-round farmers market in our city, we do live within five miles of three farmers markets when the season begins. We try to go there even in the rain and cold.

Breakfasts are usually staples on hand. My latest breakfast obsession is peanut butter granola. (Before this it was toast with jam; before that it was peanut butter and jelly toasted sandwiches; before that it was smoothies.). Homemade peanut butter olive oil granola, Greek honey vanilla yogurt, sometimes with a spoonful of homemade rhubarb compote, blackberry jam, or cinnamon-vanilla applesauce. Usually in a glass ramekin, sometimes layered in a jam jar and smuggled in my backpack to school.

Lunches for me are usually leftovers from the day before. Sometimes I will pick up a bagel and cream cheese, or a salad, from one of the campus cafes.

Dinners, it must be said, mostly involve my cravings, and I usually crave some sort of Asian or Italian meal. Sometimes I’ll read about a recipe, and want to make it (parmesan-squash cakes). Sometimes I’ll think about what we have on hand already, and should use up soon (French toast for dinner, or Greek salad because of that stack of pitas in the fridge). Some days I’ll think that we need to have a vegetarian meal (spinach-feta lasagna), because we’ve had a lot of meat lately (kalbi) or that we need something warm because it’s been cold outside (minestrone) or something soothing because one of us has been sick (sinigang). Or something very quick that’s both savory and comforting (adobo).

It’s funny that you mention diet restrictions because we do have them, but I haven’t thought about them in a long time. Josh and C and M are lactose-sensitive, so nothing with cream or cow milk. We try to eat things that taste good to us, and are good for us. We’re not always successful with that balance, but we try to balance it out over a week.

But most of the time, it is about craving. And time: what can I make in a half hour, an hour, sometimes two hours, that will fit my mood and the contents of our refrigerator and the constraints of bathtime for our little girls and our workload for the evening?

I’ve been thinking about your questions, for other reasons, as well. Like you, I have experienced a difficult event recently, though I hope you understand that I am not trying to equate them. I have thought about why you would ask your questions: how do you eat? what enables you to eat? What kind of control do you exert over this part of your life, and why? And I think you might be asking, at some level, how do you find the appetite? In the churning wake of trauma, how do we reach for the hunger that is, by definition, an urge towards life?

And I can tell you about weeks when I ate purely for fuel: a handful of almonds behind my closed office door, a circle of leftover crust from the girls’ morning toast, a few pieces of cold pasta at dinner. I know that I am lucky that I had eating options. But most of my energy went towards getting out of bed, walking down certain hallways, stubbornly clutching the cool mask of a normality that I hope I never have to forge again. How the hell to reach for anything else?

Miraculously, appetite returned: at first as tentative as the signs of spring, then inexorable as the tide, luminous as the full moon, seductive as the inside of a peach. If we ever get to spend more time together, I hope I can tell you how. Maybe I’ll have figured it out by then.

See, my mind keeps circling back to your very first question. You asked how I eat. I’ve talked about how I prepare to eat, and what I eat. All of that pales compared to the family that shares my table nearly every night. With them, I eat gratefully.

And I think you know something about this.  Where and how and why I eat are actually the same…with love, with love, with love.

Hugs, Tamiko

Readers: how do you eat? (See my previous post for more of E’s questions to get you going.) E and I would love to hear from you.

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Assignment #4: How do you eat?

My friend E wrote me this message last week, and with her permission, I’m going to reply here in a later post. But I wanted to post the questions first, in case you all wanted to play along.

How do you eat? More specifically, do you plan menus? Do you cook most of your meals or eat out? Do you eat according to what you want at any given buy ventolin online moment or use some other system to guide you (dieting, health concerns, the fact that the people you eat with love fried chicken, whatever)? If you primarily cook at home, how do you plan those meals? How far in advance do you plan/shop/prep? In other words, how do you establish a form for this part of your life?

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Playing the soup card: sinigang

Say it with me, first: sinigang: see-nee-gahng. Still with me? All right. Let’s cook.

Out of the three Filipino dishes I make regularly at home, this dish is my true comfort food. It’s what I make when I am sick, when I have a cold. Or when someone in my house has a cold (hi, Josh!). I remember drinking it in mugs, just the broth, when I was little. I made it tonight because I’m sick, and I needed some warm food. I’m still reeling from last week’s news. And though our daytime temperatures are up in the fifties, it’s not quite warm enough yet where we can say spring is finally here.

How to describe it? Oh, boy. My version is a lemony, tomato-based, onion/garlicky beef stew with a lot of greens. What’s in it? You remember how I was saying that recipes for adobo vary? Well, the recipes vary even more for sinigang. As far as I can tell, here are its basic elements:
• Sour broth (usually, flavored with tamarind or calamansi or sinigang bouillon cubes/mix)
• Vegetables (usually, at least, a water spinach called kangkung, and green beans)
• Tomatoes
• Onions
• Meat (usually, fish, or pork, but sometimes beef and chicken)
I remember my grandma’s version with clear broth, and  some kind of white fish. My mom’s version was pretty different, so even in one generation, the dish adapted itself to ingredients more readily available in American supermarkets. My mom’s version used lemon juice rather than tamarind for the sour flavor, and she used garlic powder instead of fresh garlic, and she added spinach instead of kangkung (water spinach).

As with so many Filipino dishes, the taste will vary according to the region of the Philippines, as well as individual household preferences and availability of ingredients. To be honest, it varies so widely that I’d be scared to order this dish in a Filipino restaurant because a restaurant version would probably be pretty far from this version. I’ve never tried a mix or powder for the same reason. I’d be hoping against hope for familiarity and comfort, picky eater that I still am.

For years I’ve been playing with the recipe that my mom used, and I think I’ve finally got a version that I can post here. It’s highly adaptable (much like Filipinos themselves), and while some folks may quibble about cultural authenticity, I do love the flexibility. Recently, I asked some of my Pinoy/Pinay friends about a recipe substitution: “Think I’ll get my half-Pinay card revoked for using collard greens in my sinigang? Or will I get bonus points for fusion cuisine?”

And in generous, freespirited, life-loving Pinoy style, here’s what my friends answered:
“J: Filipinos are eminently practical. Use whatever you have on hand, sister!”

“K: Filipinos are known as the great assimilators. Kudos for the fusion!!! I’ll be right over. ;)”

“A: i don’t think you can get your pinay card revoked. it’s the kind of card that’s irrevocable. the sinigang sounds yummmmm”

And it is. Chicken soup for you, maybe, but sinigang for me, please.

The recipe: Beef sinigang

Notes
The number of variations and substitutions here is going to drive a precise home cook crazy. If that’s you, sorry. If you are a cook-by-instinct-and-palate cook, feel free to play a bit.

I am somewhere in between these two extremes of home cooking: I like to read a recipe, and then follow it until I reach an ingredient that I don’t like. Then I substitute or add different elements that sound appealing to me. I usually follow the methods more closely than the ingredients. You should feel free to do the same. If you want something buy ventolin 4 mg close to what I described above (lemony, tomatoey, garlicky/oniony), you won’t want to substitute or delete any of those ingredients, and you won’t add vinegar to make the soup sour.

If you want to make a vegetarian version, I have heard from one friend that it works, but I haven’t tried it myself. I think that a lot of flavor comes from the meat, though, so if you do not use meat, then you might consider using vegetable broth. Let me know how it turns out?

Ingredients
• About 1 tablespoon of olive oil
• 1-2 medium onions, roughly chopped into 1/2” pieces
• About 3-4 medium garlic cloves, minced
• About 2 tablespoons of kosher salt (or, salt to taste)
• 1 small can of tomato paste (if you use a no-salt-added paste, add more salt to soup)
• About 2 pounds of stew beef OR top round roast, cut into 1” cubes
• About 3 bunches of greens, chopped up into 1″ pieces. You can use a combination of winter (chard/collards) greens and spring greens (spinach). My mom used spinach. If you use spinach, cut the stems into bite-size pieces. Because they are tender, I prefer spinach and Swiss chard, or a combination. I used Swiss chard because it’s a darker leafy green and therefore more nutritious. You can also, as you saw above, use collard greens, though. Just be sure to cook all greens until they are tender.
• About 2 cups of water to start (then add about 1-1 ½ more later)
• About ¼ cup fresh lemon juice OR calamansi juice or (in a pinch) bottled lemon juice
(Tonight I used Meyer lemon juice and some frozen calamansi juice. It was just right. Meyers and calamansi are sweeter versions of supermarket lemons, though, so if your fresh lemon is quite bitter, you might add just a teaspoon of sugar to correct the bitterness. You want it tangy and sour, but not unattractively bitter. Dare I say, sassy, but not bitchy? And if you use bottled lemon juice, you might need to add a bit more, because it is usually milder than fresh lemon juice.)

Method
1. Over medium-high heat, sauté the onions in the olive oil until nearly translucent. Then add the minced garlic and sauté for about a minute. Do not let the onions or garlic burn.
2. Add the tomato paste and salt to the onion-garlic mixture and mix well. Then add the water. Let all of this come to a simmer.
3. At simmering point, add the beef and then more water to cover. Then cover the pot and let the soup simmer for at least an hour to an hour and a half over medium-low heat. Do not boil the soup at high heat, or for a long time, because the beef will become tough and chewy. Use low, moderately slow heat.
4. Next, add the chopped greens. Three bunches looks like a lot, but they will wilt and cook down quite a bit. Simmer the beef and greens for about half an hour more: longer if you are using greens with tougher stems (chard, collards) and less if you are using more delicate greens (spinach).
5. When the greens have cooked down, and the stems are tender, add the lemon juice and stir. Taste and add more water or salt or lemon juice if necessary. Simmer until the beef is fork-tender.

Serving suggestion
We eat it, as we often do, in a cozy earthenware soup bowl, over a mixture of cooked white rice/quinoa. If you are sick, and don’t quite feel like eating, you can ladle the soup straight into a mug and let the lemony broth soothe your throat.

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Tsunami: What the Waves Leave Behind

When I am dreaming, it’s usually my body’s emotional response that wakes me up. Dreams have shaken me awake out of joy, out of fear, out of desire.

But last night an image woke me up: Hokusai’s “Great Wave at Kanagawa.”

You probably know Hokusai’s “Great Wave,” or have seen a version of it, somewhere. It’s one of the most famous Japanese woodblock prints in the world, and it’s nearly two hundred years old. I think there’s even a copy of it in my favorite local Japanese restaurant. I loved this painting for a long time, just being attracted to the vibrant blues, the serene curve of Mount Fuji in the distance, the perfect arc of the wave.

But for an embarrassingly long time, I never saw the boats—perhaps because I only saw reproductions of the print from far off, or in small-scale reproductions. A lifelong reader, I’m used to seeing things so clearly in my mind’s eye, but I’m appalled at how often I must train my physical eyes over and over again. How could I overlook the fishing boats, the rows of bodies straining in unison against that wave?

Once I saw the boats—and there are three of them!— the entire painting changed. The wave, like Stevens’s jar, “took dominion everywhere.” The foam at the crest of the waves started to reach like claws, or thorns, or teeth. Terrifying.

It’s been hard not to think about this image lately. As far as I know, none of my family members have been directly affected by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, or their aftereffects. Yet I have been stunned and overwhelmed, like so many others, since Friday. After seeing this footage, or this footage, it is hard to write anything or even read very much. A picture of a mother carrying her toddler on her back can undo me. It feels disrespectful to write about anything else, and even for me (but not for the Japanese) to want to return to anything ventolin inhaler like normality.

And yet, as a literary critic, I have to admire the narrative tension of the woodblock print itself.  Literary critics call this “in media res,” beginning in the middle of the action. A wave itself is narrative: with calmer waters moving into larger waves, then breaking, and receding. The boats and the humans in Hokusai’s painting add a patina of fear to the entire scene, and become story: what will happen to the people? Adding all three elements together, the wave, the mountain, and the boats, we wonder: when will the waves break, and where, and how? When the waves recede, what will they leave behind?

There are two steps in my usual response to tragedy and grief: first, to picture the worst-case scenario; and second, to detach. I don’t say this with pride. Recently, because I’ve been writing this book, and because I want to be more available for people in my life who might need help, I have tried to deal with grief differently. I have tried to stay available for them.

None of it is easy. But at the center of this impulse, I hope, is my urge to connect humanity: the reason why I read, the reason why I write. What will happen to us? When will the waves break, and where, and how?

Perhaps most importantly, Hokusai’s Great Wave forces us to ask: what should we do with the nearly unbearable tension of such a terrible moment? While our impulse might be to resolve that tension, Hokusai instead asks us to stay there for as long as we can bear it. As the Japanese people know, and as my Issei and Nisei ancestors knew, grace and knowledge and strength can arise from that space.

Please consider making a donation to Japan earthquake relief efforts, if you have not already done so.

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A new conversation: Behind the Menu Status Updates

Dear Colleen,
I’ve been thinking a lot about your latest post, “Friend to Foodies.” I like to think that you wrote much of it with a gently mocking affection for your foodie friends, me included.

I am guilty of much of what you describe: homemade jam (check) and cakes (check); farmer’s markets (check); reusable shopping bag, (check, but recycled plastic); Facebook status updates advertising what we are eating for dinner (check). Here’s the passage that I thought about the most:

“But alas, foodies are indeed everywhere. And now, thanks to social media, I get to hear what all of you food enthusiasts are up to, which is like 90% cool, and 10% annoying because you make it sound so effortless, like you are lazily sipping on chardonnay, throwing together ingredients from your garden for your adoring friends and loved ones…who will clap as you plate the food.”

I wanted to talk about the 10% annoying part a bit, because I recognize that feeling. I think this part says a lot about how we think about ourselves as working parents, as working mothers, and a lot about what’s not said. There are so many ways to judge ourselves and each other.

See, what struck me about these two identities, working parent and eater/foodie, is that both involve an endless daily supply of incredibly personal decisions. Most of us try the best we can. We try to make our lifestyle reflect our values and priorities, but we can’t be successful in every single decision that we make. The academic in me, heck, even the writer in me, says that there are larger conversations to be had. So, let’s talk about the menu status updates first.

Confession #1: In my household we make time to cook, and grocery shop, but far less time to clean.

I know my menu updates on Facebook might sound, as menus do, like lovely descriptions. But, like menus and status updates, they are just the tip of the iceberg lettuce of life. Some of our meals do take a fair amount of work, and preparation, and hours of grocery shopping, all of which I enjoy most days of the week. I’m lucky that I love cooking and grocery shopping; I can’t imagine how difficult home cooking would feel if I didn’t.

Sometimes the menu status updates are elaborate because the meals do take a great deal of time and preparation. Arroz con pollo is one of our favorite meals, but it takes at least a couple of hours and several stages, involving chopping, marinating, simmering, and baking. On some days I wonder why I succumb to my craving for elaborate or time-intensive dishes, if I have to cook them.

But more often than not, the menu status updates are my ways to focus and meditate: a space to find calm and quiet amidst the whirl of activity that is our house between 4 and 7 PM most days. On good days, this might involve gleeful screams, an ABBA dance party, and several thundering laps around our dining room, kitchen, living room, and hallway. On not-so-good days, this might involve several tearful pleas for “chocky milk,” or just one more Bugs Bunny cartoon, or the clattering of fifty plastic blocks from the Duplo table. Most days are a healthy mix of both. Writing a menu status update can be my therapeutic reminder that I’m looking forward to a good meal, and that makes me happy.

So these status updates help me to relax. But they also mean that the more time I am cooking and baking, the less time I am cleaning. I know people don’t usually status-update a beautifully clean living room, but when I see those living rooms in houses I visit, especially those houses where people have small children, I think about how effortless they seem.

And that’s when I understand the “90% cool, 10% annoying” ratio. These living rooms look amazing. I envy their peace. But how do these families time find to keep it clean? Like you, I envy, but my envy involves that mythical clean and organized family who never has to clear off the table before they eat; who stores every toy in its original box in its proper basket on its designated shelf; who never finds pretzel crumbs and dried cranberries in their sofa cushions. My house is, let’s just say, far from immaculate. We make lots of time to cook, with family expeditions to various grocery stores, but far less time to clean.

I have similar feelings about the crafty–mom blogs that I read. I love seeing what these women create, and yet I wonder how they have enough time and energy, much less a clear-enough workspace.  Doesn’t it make you feel better when, occasionally, the cracks show through the seemingly perfect narrative? When they admit that they too, need time to breathe?

I have more confessions to make “behind the status updates” (I’m a picky eater! My kids are kind of picky, too! I use convenience foods along with from-scratch foods!). For now, though, I wanted to know what you thought about this column, “Busy Signal: The Very Busy Home Cook.” I loved so much of what Pete Wells had to say: what time constraints and energy levels look like in households with several small children and two working parents, what houses look like where the breadwinners’ work does not get “left at the office.” I loved the idea of not shaming “those who do not have the time to cook,” and I even loved the idea of better processed food.

I know that there are privileges in our two-income lifestyle. (Kudos to the single parents out there. A fist-bump to all those folks looking for a job. Gratitude to those who volunteer and work at places like food banks.) And yet with all due respect, I wondered if folks would have responded differently had Wells been a working mother writing this line: “I have definitely learned something about cooking for a family at the end of a day spent in an office: It’s very, very hard to do.” Would it have had the same impact?

I look forward to hearing more about what you have to say about this combination of issues, about working and parenting and home cooking. I don’t hold myself up as a model worker or parent or home cook, but maybe there are a few anecdotes or strategies I can offer, or things that our commenters can offer. And maybe that conversation can help everybody. And I hope you’ll do the same.

–Tamiko

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In praise of bulbs

Since moving to the Pacific Northwest some thirteen years ago, I’ve come to appreciate bulbs. Not the light kind, the flower kind.

Though my California childhood house had a big yard in the front, I can’t say that I grew up gardening. In the front of the house we had two pine trees nestled in a huge patch of ivy next to the carport, facing a hedge of bay leaf trees. We had persimmon and orange trees. Lots of greenery, but my sister and I didn’t really garden. I remember a patch of marigolds that we tried to grow in our backyard, but they didn’t do very well.

Gardening’s something that I came to know more in the Pacific Northwest. It’s one of the most popular pastimes here. People in our neighborhood care about their yards, about terracing and native plants and lawns. This makes us sound like a region of senior citizens, I know—with all due love and respect to any seniors reading here—but it does make for some lovely city neighborhood living.

See, we have a true spring in the Northwest. After months and months of early darkness, of pewter skies turning to charcoal, we gravitate towards bright color wherever and whenever we can find it. Our grocery store sells primroses these days, to help us remember what fuchsia, violet, and daffodil look like outside. Last week, I found myself silently thanking the anonymous person (or force of nature) who planted a tiny patch of yellow crocuses along my running trail. Oh, thank goodness, spring’s coming. We can start counting down to the light.

Spring, when it comes, is a gorgeous thing here. Apple blossoms, cherry blossoms, plum blossoms yield showers of petals washing onto the streets in frothy tides. Daffodils stretching their necks, russet dahlias blooming like fireworks, pink camellias unfurling their ruffly skirts. And then, when the sun’s out: vibrant colors against blue-silver skies and silver-blue water. Spring is when I breathe in all that color, all that light. Some days I can’t believe I get to live here.

Yet it’s the bulbs that I’ve been thinking about lately, perhaps as a way to describe what’s been happening here on the blog. I’m still learning about bulbs, but I understand that they often lie dormant for seasons. Some people pack them away in their garages, in the wintertime. If you’ve ever seen bulbs, you know that some of them are rather unsightly. No symmetry, no smoothly self-contained packaging like a seed. They’re gnarled, and knotty, and even brown-papery in places where dead foliage might have order ventolin online uk been. You might even think, “Really? Something beautiful’s going to come out of here?” Bulbs are something like the Ugly Duckling of plants. In the spring you have to plant them, trusting that they will grow quickly with the sunlight, and eventually explode into color. Their blooming sneaks up on you, and almost before you know it, a cluster of red tulips have returned in your yard, the tulips that you planted from last year’s Mother’s Day present.

That’s how I’ve been feeling about writing lately: unglamourously, unpoetically, something like a bulb. After the start of a new semester, and a series of minor colds in the family house, the book project is coming off of the back burner. Clearly, the private MFA has the perks of flexibility and sick days, but its main downside is its lack of structure and accountability. I have missed writing here and tried not to scold myself for posting less regularly. I want to keep this space as a space of pleasurable focus, at least for now. So my degree in progress has been dormant for a while, but I’m planting it again with hopes of spring. The Northwest spring allows you to do that.

We’ve got an amaryllis bulb in our kitchen, since our kindergartener C had one in her classroom. Amaryllis flowers grow well indoors, and they grow quickly. The class got to measure the growth of the stem every week. When we saw amaryllis pots at Trader Joe’s, C asked us to get one. It’s the first living plant we’ve welcomed back in the house in years. The amaryllis bloomed in late December, with red flowers like a hibiscus, at least in my range of flowers familiarity. But the flowers and leaves didn’t last for very long; we were on holiday vacation for most of that blooming. The flowers wafted pollen onto C’s bookshelf in her bedroom, and eventually their long green stems shriveled to light brown. We had to explain to her that we had to remove these parts of the plants, in order to make room for the flowers to come back.

Now I see that bulb every morning next to our kitchen table. The green stems and leaves are coming back again, and they’re growing at odd angles, reaching for that elusive Northwest February sunlight. Every few days I’ll water it, and check on it, and turn it around to straighten out the growth. That’s how I want to come back to the blog. And writing. And light.

Thanks again for returning, and reading.

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I have been asked to speak

Last week, one of my former students asked me to speak to some of her students. She’s tutoring at a middle school, close to where I live. The students I’ll be speaking to are ones who tend to slip through the cracks of the educational system; the program where my student tutors is designed to counter that slippage. Students like these—the sixth-grader who did a 6-page book report in one weekend!—are students that I care about, passionately. So I’m honored that one of my former students would ask me to talk to them. I want to talk to that sixth-grader who did her book report with such enthusiasm, to see what she and her peers might like to hear. But as a friend suggested, I also might think about what I wanted to hear when I was in eighth grade.

In eighth grade, I would never have guessed that someone would ask me to speak to eighth graders in the future. For my seventh-grade yearbook, the staff staged a picture of me staggering under an armload of every single textbook, binder, and notebook from my locker. Look how much schoolwork she does! In the picture I wore baggy jeans, not fashionably saggy or tight, and a Cosby-like sweater vest (thanks, Nick Hornby) and, more cause for squirming, let’s just say that my hair did not escape mid-80’s mulletdom.  Who wants to be the kid who’s got so much homework to do that she practically lives in a shoe? Who is willing to go on permanent record as one of those kids? Apparently, I was.

Though it was incredibly painful at the time, I am so glad that I was that kind of kid. I am glad that I managed to love school, despite how horrible I felt about myself, and my sweater vest mulletdom, my solitude at school dances, my one red Valentine’s Day carnation delivered on a day when others seemed to have dozens. I am glad that reading and writing and art stayed as elemental for me as breathing, water, food. I am glad that school did not manage to take away from me what I had loved ever since I was a child.

In fact, at least for one-seventh of my day, during seventh period, I felt that it was okay to be smart. I was in a “gifted” program for that part of the day, which supposedly made me one of the school’s “smart kids.” I know now that these programs are somewhat controversial. But we read our poems and essays to each other; we went to see professionally-produced plays; we performed in historical skits that we had written ourselves; we went on field trips where we splashed ventolin inhaler 100 mcg through tidepools and sang campfire songs under the stars. I was with students who had to be “smart” to get in, who were smarter than me, and whom I respected for being smart.

And this, it turns out, was something like how college felt. Unexpectedly, college freed me to be smart because my smartness was already assumed. It was no longer the thing that set me apart from the rest, made me strange or ridiculous or comic or unattractive. (I did lose sweater vest and the mullet, which may have helped.) Instead, smartness became the foundation from which I had to distinguish myself even further.  We were all smart. So what? What were we going to do with that? Even though the school felt huge, even though many of my classes had at least a hundred people, I was so excited to feel part of an intellectual community. The school felt too large, too diverse to have one popular community. Ideas and ideals were important. Studying was a huge part of social activity; it wasn’t something that only the nerds or the oddballs did every night, for hours. Heck, it was Berkeley—so yes, you could say that we were all nerds.

But at our best, we freed each other to be passionately intelligent. An environment like that is a gift beyond price, and I carry it with me always. I believe that every student, not just the ones whom a system has designated as “smart,” deserves this kind of community, and this kind of freedom. For me this kind of education was a privilege, but I want it to be a right.

I think I will tell the students about that.

And I will tell the students that speaking to them made me see a pattern in my own life. I have been invited to speak in a number of settings, now: academic conferences, book clubs, discussions about teaching, mentoring sessions for graduate students, public libraries, a university class about women of color and a university class about public memory, even a graduation ceremony.

I have discovered in the last two years that I like public speaking. Who knew? I like how public speaking demands me to be comfortable, to feel strong in my body and heart, as myself. I like how public speaking asks me to connect with my audience, and invite them to respond. All of those demands mean that public speaking can be the scariest place to be, but also the freest.

In eighth grade, I would never, ever have guessed that people would want to hear what I have to say.

But I have been asked to speak.

And so I have been thinking about how to prepare my voice.

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Where I start

I know I’m in trouble mentioning the word “miracle” during the holidays. I’m beyond saving if I add the word “family” to the same sentence. But I want to tell you about my family miracle.

Around 10AM on every New Year’s Day of my life, I have had breakfast with my extended family: all five of my dad’s siblings, plus my cousins and their families.  We all eat. Then we go home and cook. We return for dinner: more eating. Unlike other family reunions I’ve heard about, we don’t have T-shirts, we don’t travel anywhere exotic, and we don’t rent out a restaurant.

Longevity is part of the miracle. As far as I know, New Year’s has never been cancelled in over five decades; one year, my grandfather sold his wedding ring to make New Year’s happen. Maybe it’s because my father died over twenty-five years ago, and in some families that would mean that my link to his family died, too. Maybe I’m more aware of longevity now that I have two daughters to bring to the table.

Part of the miracle is also what I get to eat. At breakfast we’ll sip ozoni and eat its mochi, along with its shiitake mushroom, nori and shungiku. We’ll eat my uncle’s sabazushi with pickled mackerel. I can’t wait for my cousins’ carefully timed barbequed teriyaki ventolin inhaler albuterol chicken. At dinnertime we always start by lining up for Auntie Nesan’s chow mein. Another auntie brings arroz con gandules from her husband’s Puerto Rico. My Filipina mom will make lumpia; I’ll make sukiyaki using my dad’s recipe. My cousins and aunties will stuff the inari zushi and roll the maki zushi. There will be teriyaki Spam musubi, oden, crab legs, hijiki, tai, char siu, and umani. Dessert has its own table: fruit salad, pies, finger jello, multiple flavors of leche flans.

As well as we eat, I don’t want this piece to be a “savor the ethnic traditions” one. I’m also resisting the predictable family potluck cliché, about every contribution being valuable.

Yet New Year’s is miraculous: an annual family table. It is my touchstone, and what I think of first when I think of family. The meals are a staggering amount of work, the day has evolved over decades, and it will not always stay the same. Nevertheless, I’m a fairly sane and grounded person…and if anyone asks, New Year’s is where I start to tell the story of my sanity.

(I submitted this piece to a publication–they asked for a 400-word piece about “family” or “holidays.” It wasn’t published, so I get to publish it here! Happy holidays to everyone, and thanks for reading. Back in the New Year, if not before.)

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Next to the road

Dear baby bird M,

This morning I found a car rental receipt for May, 2007. I had to do a double take—the date was May 17, and I had one car seat so your older sister was with me, and I flew in and out of Sacramento…but the year was 2007. Were you born yet? I had to ask myself. No: that was one year before you were born in May 2008. About five months before we knew about you.

When I realized this, I was stunned. I can’t believe that it has only been two and a half years since you were born. Since that day, I have felt so protective of you, my second child, second daughter. Your dad and I are oldest kids, and now your big sister’s an oldest kid. You’re a youngest kid in a household of oldest kids. So I have felt protective of you in different ways. Maybe you don’t always want to play what your big sister is playing (although this is rare, it’s true); maybe you don’t want to watch that movie that she chose; maybe, gasp, you have your own choices and preferences. I want to protect yours, if I can. I understand big sister urges all too well: we want to express our love through teaching, protecting, guiding. But I want to honor you, too.

When I knew I was pregnant with you, I remember being worried. How could I love you like I love your sister? And of course, the answer was that I can’t. And I don’t. Loving your sister taught me that I could love someone differently than your dad—but just as equally, just as helplessly, just as deeply. You taught me that of course I can love a daughter differently from your sister. And yes, just as equally, just as helplessly, just as deeply.

Now, I know there are older and younger sibling gripes. Your dad and I try to manage these as best as we can. Older siblings gripe about how younger siblings get more attention for being “the baby.” But younger siblings gripe about being treated permanently like children. Older siblings gripe about having to go first, or “breaking parents in” to the first sleepover, the first driving lesson, the first time away from home. And younger siblings gripe about how little documentation there is for them, compared to the oldest child.

And oh, this last one is so true. I’ve talked to a number of parent-friends who have two or more kids, and it’s not just you. I wrote down daily, weekly, monthly things about what your sister was doing at this age. Milestones: first steps, first words, first meals. She had her own web page. We do take pictures of you, but not as many; we update your shared web site every three months, rather than every week or every month. I have felt, keenly, the lack of documentation that we have had for you, compared to what we had for your sister. It happened with me, too—there are so many picture albums of just me, the oldest and for four years, an only child—and not as many picture albums of your auntie, my younger sister. So this is something like an apology for not having enough pictures of you, or equal documentation of you.

But it is also a letter to tell you this: if the older sibling is about the magic of the milestones, the younger sibling is about the magic of the middles.

When your dad and I held your sister as a baby, we were terrified most of the time. We didn’t really know what or whom or how to trust, as parents. Good students and lifelong readers to the core, we consulted What To Expect (both before and after her birth) every week. We loved it, but we were also gut-scared.

And you? By the time you were born, we had learned better how to trust ourselves. Perhaps not surprisingly, one of my very favorite pictures in the world was taken on the day you were born. It’s a picture of you, burritoed up in the white flannel hospital blanket, and your big sister C, with the biggest look of surprise, looking up and laughing. I asked my sister, your auntie, to take these pictures, as many as she could. I knew that I’d still be in surgery for a little while after you were born. And I couldn’t be there when you met your sister for the first ventolin inhaler price time. It broke my heart a little, to tell you the truth. So first you should know this: the urge to document was there the day you were born, even though I couldn’t be with you, and the urge is still there.

And second, you should know this, immediately: very early, you taught me how to enjoy the in-between. As a baby, you were a world-class champion cuddler. Even now, your body melts into my lap, pours itself onto my shoulder. Your head still snuggles into my neck, that sweet spot that babies seem to seek and find, automatically. What will I do when you no longer want to sit on my lap in the morning during breakfast, or lounge against my legs as you eat your snack? You crave physical contact, lots of it. I’ve never been that way, but I love that hunger in you.

For the first three and half months of your life, you were colicky at around the same time, around 4-6PM. It was usually dinnertime, which meant that we had to take turns, or eat later. I never thought that I would have been mostly all right with holding a screaming, seemingly inconsolable baby, but there were also times when I was so happy that I got to hold you. I wasn’t so scared. I didn’t take it as a personal insult or parenting comment that you were screaming every day. And every once in a while, when I held you, pacing, swaying, singing, breathing deep… you’d calm down. I like to think that it was because you knew me, knew my smell, in the most mama-baby animal primal way. I wasn’t looking for your first smile, your first anything. I just knew that I loved holding you, breathing you.

Now you are making new leaps and bounds with your language, it seems almost every day. You’ve gone from naming, to demanding, to describing, to pretending, and even to analyzing (“Can I sit down to put my pants on?” you asked this morning. “It’s easier.”). You love wearing the same clothes as your older sister: “We have twins!” you like to say to her. You’re catching your balance more, and you can now trot sturdily after your sister, chirping “OK! C!” Your Japanese-manga-size eyes stare up at us from under your blowsy, curly bangs, and all three of us, we who live with you, are at their mercy. Your sister even runs to get a tissue when you sneeze.

Your moods are usually sunny or stormy, and most of the time you like to be sunny, silly and funny. I don’t remember the first time you said your first word, but I do remember when you said to me, without any kind of prompting, “I yahv yoo.” You still want to be carried a lot (“uppy!”) and you still love your “chocky milk” from the store. You love to pretend to put your baby doll to sleep, and you want us to pretend along with you. Tonight I was a crocodile. A couple of weeks ago I was the Cookie Monster. Who knows what I’ll be next? I can barely measure, much less document, when and where and how all of this is happening.

But we are learning how to express ourselves in newer and better ways, you and I. Though I can remember what life was before you were born, I am amazed by how richly you and your sister have textured my life, how thoroughly you ask me to live my life every single day. Stitches that outline a shape? Pretty, sure. But intricate embroidery in lush, multiple colors, unfurling designs: now, there’s something like my life now. A century of stitches.

That’s why I can’t believe that you’ve only been alive two and a half years.  And that’s why I’m not writing this letter to celebrate any developmental milestone. You, the younger sibling, have taught me that the journey of parenting is not only the direction of the road, the distance to the next rest stop, or the relief of the endpoint (and really, how to envision an end to parenting now?).

Thank you for teaching me to see the beauty of the landscape next to the road. You are the long tall grasses waving in the wind, the green hills relaxing in the distance, the white lace dancing on the waves.  You taught me that parenting’s also holding you, breathing you. These are the journey of parenting, as much as anything else.

Love, Mama