Tag Archives: Chinese

Finnegan’s wake without the whiskey

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I’d make a terrible anthropologist, I think. Rather than finding the unique and reportable, my thesis would be “people, right, yeah, pretty much the same.”

As the crow, or maybe a toucan or something tropical flies, I’m sitting just under 10,000 miles from my birthplace. All of the funerals I’ve attended have been in New England. The magic has been brought mostly by courtesy of your Roman Catholic holy and apostolic traditions, with the occasional Protestant mass for flavor.

This time around on another continent I was a newly minted family member, daughter-in-law and wife of the elder son. Just as with every service I’ve ever been, it all started with the family convergence, phone calls, the bustle of professional death handlers, friends, neighbors and relations. And in the ensuing afternoons and evenings, something like a party.

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I’m not James Joyce. And, I don’t speak Hokkien, Hainanese, Cantonese, Bahasa Malay or any other tongue piping up among the crowd. So I don’t have any stories to tell.

A bottle of whiskey wasn’t in the coffin. Nor was it stolen and sent around the crowd. No one evilly plotted a cannibal meal. And, no spare whiskey and beer were passed among the crowd.

Still and all, among the chaos, the scene was familiar. Old friends and extended family wandering in and out. Reminiscing about who was where when and what ever happened and how did everyone get so old. It was a wake, just the same as “visiting hours” in the U.S. Like in a not so distance past in my old neighborhood the guest of honor lay quietly among candles and prayers inside the house. And catered food and handshakes stayed up on the porch.

Travel log: Malaysia

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I used to live with a guy named Al. Al in many ways was a total freak. The stand out sign of his freakishness was giant bowls of Maypo with frozen blueberries stirred into the otherwise gruel-like meal. It was a meal that could occur at any of the 24 hours in a day and would often leave a blueish gray cast of spills and crusted tableware all over the apartment.

Al also called himself a writer. He would watch and look and examine and write in his imagined grotto. One day I came home to him transfixed by a can opener, which he was twirling to view at every angle and at every gradation of open and closed.

Caught in his study, he explained as a writer one must at all times carefully observe everything, even minutia to a minute detail. All was fodder for greatness.

I think his plan was to be as Melville was to whaling, but his passion would be kitchen utensils.

Al puzzled me.

His contention, his philosophy was that all writing is at its core was observation. He was a watcher. He existed in the square rooms of our apartment never venturing beyond the journeys he concocted between his temples and behind his forehead.

At the same time, I was studying journalism, writing that by its very nature stepped back to observe and report. Aloof from the messiness of human existence, we were taught to remain factual and by extension allowing the story to create its own structure remaining neutral in the telling. I suppose this training had me thinking Al was onto something.

But, my favorite journalists just might be Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. They, in the sense of Neal Cassady, Ken Kesey and The Electric KoolAid Acid Test, got ON the bus.

Many years later, I found my own tribe of writers and storytellers. Not quite out there in the wilderness of the 1960s and 70s, they did not ascribe to stories coming from afar, cool observation. Nope, stories came from going balls in and doing something.

Which, in all apologies, brings us to today. Holy fuckballs (as I like to say in countries where the locals are unlikely to be able to translate, I did take a long-winded path to today.

Today, I had round two sparring with the kung fu master who bloviated that he is one of 10 elite in the ‘hood called Malaysia who can tap out impurities and do something good to your chi or qi or chee (definitely not chia). My qi has positively been beaten into submission.

For a couple of bucks, I succumbed to a type of massage that literally involves a long series of backhand slaps to my areas of arthritic pain. By the way, I grew up hearing the word arthritis and thought of diseases and treatment. In these modern days, it’s medical shorthand for the fact of my cartilage deteriorating and my bones rubbing together, nothing more interesting.

In the spirit of travel, adventure, story telling, sucking the marrow from existence, I figured the investment was worthwhile on two scores.

First, I have back and leg pain and it sucks and I exercise and try to work out the kinks and strengthen my core and it persists and it sucks. Anything that could remove the suck would be fine indeed.

Second is just the awesomeness. I have a story to tell and pictures to show.

I have these:

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I also have this one of my knee. Grace and good sense preclude me from posting the worse bruising on my ass.

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Best of all, we get too bring home magical and mystical and therapeutical bottles of oily elixir of mystery.

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My back and leg are sore as I type this missive. But, if all goes well, in 2 days time I shall be healed. He promised me that soon I could do things with my legs I couldn’t before. I’m hoping that means ballet.

Of all of it, it’s a traveler’s dream of “authenticity.” The master’s rap was solid, peppered with references to the Chinese, qi, cultural superiority and my yin mixing with my yang. Westerners like me, we can’t take pain of treatment like the Chinese can.

The promises were wonderfully rich with self-promotion and mystery. He had skills and powers and training that few possess and to which he wouldn’t give a name.

I can’t decide which experience I like more–His burning my back, literally, with the heated ember of a block of incense, the visible bruising or the manifestations of health represented by the color and texture changes of my beaten flesh. Perhaps it’s the sum of it all.

So I wait, and I’ll report back if I can plie and jete like nobody’s business as the bruises subside and the oil seeps into my wounds.

Phone writing

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I have been unbelievablely not writing. Part lazy, sheer, ugly bone lazy. Part ennui or something like it. Any thought to write has dribbled into lack of action then nothing.

But, I was reading Tony’s Blog Emporium. He’s writing more or trying and so should I. He’s like a champion role model, only of the comedic variety.

Meanwhile, WordPress.org released software for the old Droid telephone I be using. So there’s that.

On the creative brightside, I haven’t totally given up or killed my soul. After taking 36 million pictures or so on our last trip I felt crafty inspired. Awhile back on an impulse buying whim, M. had thrown a giant frame with a mat full of windows suitable for throwing up a collage of memories into our shopping cart. It has haunted me.

Haunting became the right word, when I finally felt resolve to do something with it. Back in the way, way east (or the east that white cartographers decided was east) there’s a nifty little tradition based in Taoism. Because ancestral spirits like to keep an eye on things, and venerating the dead is an important pasttime, you’re likely to find some great old family pictures on a Chinese family’s wall. I don’t know from burnt offerings or lighting joss sticks next to a homemade altar heavy with tangerines and whatnot, but I like cool photos. M.’s mom has great ones. I’ve taken a few pictures of her pictures.

Stepping back, one thing M. and I have in common is families that have clocked some years each generation. I think his grandfather on his mom’s side would have been about 10 years younger than my mom’s dad. This grandfather is the adventurer who headed off of China’s Hainan Islands and found his fortune in Malaysia.

We each grew up with images from early last century, sepia and gray-toned history. Like my grandfather’s wide-brimmed hat and gaiters, a young doughboy headed out to fight the Kaiser’s army.

That and our tremendous egos and equally tremendous cache of photos of each other and ourselves and ourselves together provide the nugget and the expansion if the craft project. A collage of us and of family.

When all is settled, I’ll probably figure out a web version or maybe just post something here with the rejects. A little bit of honoring the ancestors and a little bit of self worship.

Better than monkeys?

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So far, I have seen the paltry, slight vision of one monkey, off in the distance ambling near the highway ditch, from a speeding, “almost as good as first class” coach.

However, last night was the New Year’s Eve reunion dinner. The first event of a series of eating events, as the family home-for-the-holidays gathering commences. The crowd is indeed a crowd, although it is slightly reduced from what was anticipated because of some sick kids in a family branch.

Dinner was amazing, a huge variety of different dishes for which I don’t know what the names, except for curry chicken, because I know those two words. There was homemade sausage, vegetables, various bowls of Asian-y stew-type things, oh, fried prawns, I recognized those too. There are great cooks in M.’s family.

His uncle joked with me that it was Thanksgiving.

After dinner, as I cradled an icy cold can of Tiger beer, in the combined living room/dining room where all of the furniture had been pushed back and card tables set up to accommodate all of the clan and the huge amount of food, out came the karaoke.

I cannot adequately set the scene. First, imagine any large gathering of family. Now, because a huge percentage of the tiny number of readers of this sad little blog are of the caucasian pallet, imagine that same family gathering with Chinese faces with all the same differences in age from babies to 90+ year olds. And, then there was me, as M.’s aunt called me, Gwailo, essentially “whitey.”

And then, karaoke. I did not sing, despite the admonitions and calls for “American Idol,” which would be me, the American. Singing, I cannot do.

(As a total aside, M.’s family has a spectrum of skin tones from the warmer side of the pallet. Lovely tones suited to the neighborhood and the climate, light browns and tans and such.

I am fair-skinned. When it is hot as a mother-fucker, which it certainly was last night, steamy, fucking hot, and I’ve spent the day in the sun, and I’m eating curries, and I’m drinking beer, I become the classic red-faced and splotchy tones of my potato-eating people. I am Ted Kennedy on a bender with tones of pink, white and red. It is my natural state.

It was hard to convince the folks that I wasn’t about to succumb to tropical heat and perish. Alas. Poor gwailo.)

Perhaps the highlight of the evening just for pure surreal — Was I really thousands of miles from home? — had to be M.’s cousin’s rendition of that Billy Ray Cyrus classic, Achey Breaky Heart. In the background, two of the aunts provided backup with an impromptu Electric Slide. I fear I will not leave this island until Aunt #6 successfully teaches me to line dance.