The end of a blog and the beginning of the next chapter

It’s my birthday soon. Faster – so much faster than I had believed possible – my 48th year ends and the next year begins. This is my 48th post, and the end of this blog.

A year ago, I was toying with the idea of writing a blog – a year’s worth of posts to celebrate each of my 48 years. I craved structure, but I also wanted to celebrate this odd age, this in-between 45- and not yet 50-age. Every one of the posts had to centre around gratitude and be no longer than 1200 words. Additionally, they had to be true, and so I gave up naming names, most especially my own. Not everyone around a writer wants to find himself in print. I think I might have envisioned some (dull but erudite) essays on the nature of friendship, and some hopefully less dull ones complimenting my friends. It didn’t quite turn out that way.

At first, the subjects were easy and obvious. There was the one about my car, and the one about my cat. It’s quite easy to be grateful over things that give you pleasure. For a while, I thought I might be writing a food & travel blog, so often did I rhapsodize about it. It would have been very easy to write about sex the same way (but more complex for obvious reasons). What wasn’t possible was to stay on the surface of gratitude, to write solely of uncomplicated pleasures.

For me this blog became a forum for tackling some tough issues. After scraping the surface of easy gratitude, what comes next? What else in life deserves gratitude? What if all facets of life deserved at least a little? What if you could find gratitude in some of the painful and ugly parts? I am a person who has a vast storeroom of nightmares in her trunk in the corner of the attic. Could all of them be reexamined for gratitude?

I’ve got a copy of Margaret Visser’s The Gift of Thanks on my bedside table. It’s a good book: tightly researched, filled with anecdotes to keep things lively and with a strong dose of philosophical argument. It may have been more along the lines of what I was setting out to write when I first began this project. But what I’ve learned is that when I sit down to think about gratitude in an philosophical way, I end up writing about gratitude in a deeply personal way. The story doesn’t always go where you tell it to go.

If I’m to write with candour and honesty, I have to work with the material I’ve got. If I wanted to write like Elizabeth Gilbert, I’d have to be Elizabeth Gilbert, and that spot’s already taken. But I can write like me. Hell, my next step might be writing as me. That’ll be scary enough, although I’m not sure if it’ll be scarier for me or for the people around me. There are many stories hiding under the bed. Which ones want to come out to play? More importantly, which ones can’t be prevented from coming out to play? What else is under there? I won’t know until I have the courage to look.

What I didn’t expect, as the weeks and essays progressed, was how much lighter, freer, and yes – grateful – I felt. Turning over every story looking for gratitude has re-framed my whole perspective on life. As well, I’m much more careful about what I read, in  marked contrast to my years as a newshound & glossy magazine junkie, the reading equivalent of mainlining a steady drip of morbidity and insecurity. But insecurity feeds insecurity, and fear begets fear. It’s too easy to focus on fear. Focusing on gratitude and appreciation brings a basket of other gifts – among them patience, calmness, stillness, happiness – which reduces stress  and all of stress’s greedy children: heart disease, stroke, obesity, migraines, depression. My inner Type A stress case can only be allowed the reins for so long.

I owe each of you, my wonderful readers, a huge hug of appreciation. Your support, comments and feedback have been invaluable to me. Writers write in isolation, but our well-known dirty secret is that we crave attention. Can I tell you that I think I’m going to pursue this writing thing, and see where it takes me? Even if whatever I write turns out to be unreadable. In the magnificently cynical words of Christopher Hitchens, Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.

My inner book is waiting. Maybe you have one too. 

And so I’ll end my 48th year with a goal for my 49th: join a writer’s group and write a manuscript. If I’d like to be a writer, maybe I should meet a few more. Why don’t you join me?

The Alexandra Writers Centre Society: http://www.alexandrawriters.org/

The Imaginative Fiction Writers Association: http://ifwa.wordpress.com/

The Writer’s Guild of Alberta: http://www.writersguild.ab.ca/Critiquing-Groups.asp

Sisterhood

This past weekend I attended a book launch – actually, two book launches – with a quartet of authors. Although both books were noteworthy, it’s the anthology I’m thinking about, because the trio of authors shared a kinship, a sisterhood, built of the bonds of common experience.

If you’ve never attended a reading, you’ve probably still got the gist of it: a bookstore, some chairs, an author promoting her book and, hopefully, a large audience of would-be book buyers. That would be right, and it would also be so wrong as to miss the point entirely. Because what I saw in that room was a warm, supportive group of writers, moms, readers and readees. The topic was ancient – motherhood – but the perspective was modern. Step-moms, moms-who-didn’t-know-if-they-wanted-to-be-moms moms, moms-who-were-having-a-much-harder-time-than-they-ever-envisioned moms. As they each read their passages, their words rang with the kind of emotion that can only be experienced, but echoes of that feeling pulsed over the audience. Motherhood makes sisters of us all, even those who have tried and failed to be moms.

Especially those.

And so I wonder, what makes a woman feel a special kinship with her sistahs?

Is it physiological? I think so. If I’m having a particularly bad day, a day Holly Golightly called “the mean reds,” I go to my closest friends for sympathy. Ever tried to explain to your husband or boyfriend what it’s like to be having your uterus perform double axels while you’re giving a presentation? I have, and even the most well-meaning and supportive man really doesn’t want to use his imagination to go there. But cramps and menses are just the beginning of what being in a female body means to women. I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve spent with my girls talking about sex. When I was single, girls nights were my nights out, and the stories that came out of those nights enlivened many more girls nights. A woman can hit a conversational home run if she just asks the question of her all-female party, Why can’t men find it? (I’ve often wondered just who designed it to go there and why nearly every man needed a map. This is one area, at least, where a man will take directions.) The area of physiology has an unending range of topics women prefer to discuss with other women. There’s breasts, fertility, pregnancy, miscarriage, motherhood, menopause and infertility. Not to say that I can’t, or won’t, discuss any and all of that with my husband, but for the real down-and-dirty discussions, I save it for my girls. My sisters.

Is it sociological? Yes, in part. You might have had it differently, but when I was going to school, I was expected to be quiet, polite and follow the rules. It’s humiliating but I’m still that girl who raises her hand in groups to ask permission while men belt out their questions loudly and boldly, stomping all over my polite attempts to get an answer. And don’t tell me to just belt out my questions like the boys do – that’s being the mouthy chick who won’t shut up even though women do far less of the talking when men and women get together. I’m not going to bombard you with stats, but if you’re looking for evidence, look up Janet Holmes’ “Women Talk Too Much.” Sometimes I’m the mouthy bitch, sometimes I’m the mouse, but either way it’s my sisters I turn to when I want to talk about it.

Is it professional? Damn straight. Can we agree that women are paid less than men for the same work without me having to pull out the stats? And can I say that this is shameful and painful and all those words ending in “-ful” and the only ones who can truly understand are your sisters? I’ve already talked about what it was like for me getting a job in a non-traditional area in “Welcome to Production Land” (http://wp.me/p3u3Fz-27). What I haven’t said is that throughout my working life, I’ve had a support group, a gang of women so important to my mental health and continuance in the workforce that I’d have long since quit without their guidance, advice, sympathy and endless glasses of wine. This isn’t mentorship, which is becoming a bit of a dirty word and a dead end, but rather a support group of women who have been there, who are there, and who get where you’re coming from.

So sisterhood is physiological, sociological and professional. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, it’s family too.

I have a sister. There’s only one of her so I have to cherish her more because I don’t have any backups, no Prince Harrys waiting in the wings just in case. She’s equal parts just like me and nothing like me. She’s one of the few people in this world who really gets my sense of humour. (Shut up, I do too have a sense of humour.) There have been times we’ve laughed over (completely, utterly, horrifyingly inappropriate) jokes that have left us so out of breath that I want to vomit. You know, in a good way. My sister can see me with clarity that’d be terrifying if she didn’t love me. She knows so much about me that I really ought to be careful about keeping her happy. And in terms of family, I don’t ever have to explain what I’m talking about, because she’s already anticipated my thoughts and leaped ahead to answer them. She gets it all, and she still loves me.

Each of my sistahs and my sister hold a piece of me with them, that piece being the piece that best matches them. With all of them, I am my many facets, as true with each, although with each different. Sisterhood is the gift of being seen, being understood, being known and yet still being treasured. Sisterhood is support, sure, but it’s as likely to be a kick in the ass. Sisters know when to apply the kick and when to apply the hug, when to listen and when to advise.

Sisterhood is a gift not to be taken lightly. This post is a celebration of my sister and my sistahs – both those I’ve known a lifetime and those I’ve yet to meet.

 

Nightmare

“But don’t you understand? You chose these parents and this childhood.”

She floored me with her remark, and in one comment, turned my whole life’s perspective on its head.

But maybe I should explain.

That night, I was hanging out with my friends, again. In the recent past I’d gotten fed up with my life and more immediately, gotten dumped by my boyfriend. My life was lacking a bit of – how shall I put it – direction,  and I was looking for answers. My friend had a gift for fortune-telling and she had the Tarot cards laid out on the floor between us. We’d been talking about the twists and turns in my life that had brought me to this miserable place, and I was asking what next? But often, before you can ask where should I go, you must first answer the question where have I been? And that’s where we were – talking about the long-distant past. More specifically, we were talking about my mother.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about her. She used to be one of the people I couldn’t stop thinking about, because she baffled me. I have a hard time accepting things on faith, and so much of my relationship with my mother was just that – faith. My faith in her role as a mother, or my faith in my role as a daughter. A mother’s love to keep me safe. That faith always seemed the safest course to take and the safest course to believe because the reality was extremely treacherous. Nothing was ever as it seemed. Nothing was ever as it was explained. Things that happened never happened and things that never happened, I was told, happened. For many years I doubted my own sanity. Certainly, I believed that no matter what, it was always my fault.

Years later, I’m sitting on the floor of a self-described mystic and she’s telling me that my fucked-up childhood was my choice.

Well, there are different ways to take this sort of information. You can go with the way she meant it; that we are reincarnated souls who choose our parents to create the conditions to make us the adults we wish to become; or you can step around the reincarnation bit and take comfort in the idea that the gifts you now hold dear are the hard-won fruits of having survived some seriously messed up shit. It would be another six years before I could finally identify the missing puzzle piece that explained my mother’s erratic, bizarre and often violent behaviour.

It was mental illness.

We all shy away from naming the demon of mental illness. We’re afraid of it, as though it’s contagious. We make jokes about it because we’re afraid, and if, god forbid, we suffer from anything like it ourselves, our first reaction is to deny it. Loudly. Strongly. What if someone thinks we’re the sick one? It’s truly the last great taboo. Movie stars goes on television and readily confess to heroin addiction before they’ll admit to mental illness. But the two go hand in hand.

My father often used to exhort my sister and I to be good. We were all afraid. Perhaps he truly thought the black mood swings and outsized punishments meted out by my mother were provoked by our behaviour, or in other words, were our fault. Certainly my mother said so. She was the queen of our household and ruled capriciously. A voracious reader, she would often take on the characters of the books she read, and unfortunately her reading list was more darkly grotesque than it was sweetness and light. She loved biographies, and Mommie Dearest was a particular favourite. Thanks to her, I could describe the Egyptian embalming techniques at the age of eight. In her queenly moods, she’d invent bizarre household chores for me, such as evenings spent refolding all the folded towels in a particular pattern, ironing all the shirts in her closet, or hand-washing her dainties in cold water. I used to read Mommie Dearest just to find out what I’d be doing for the night.

To this day, laundry isn’t my favourite household chore.

We were afraid of the rages. They would come from nowhere, as fast as summer lightning. One moment we’d be planning a rare summer beach outing or a birthday, the next we’d be grounded and doing chores. She preferred tears over laughter and we learned to stifle happiness and hide presents from others. As a teenager, unable to predict the next rage, I soon grew fed up trying to anticipate them and began to provoke them. Having accepted that there was going to be a beating, I wanted it over with in order to get on with my day. It wasn’t a very good game plan but I had been dealt some bad cards.

I used to have this recurring nightmare. I had it nightly, sometimes waking in a sweat only to fall back asleep and to have it start up again. In my dreams, this terrifying entity was coming for me. I had done something to provoke its wrath, or I had forgotten to be afraid of it, or I had done nothing at all, but suddenly the colours would drain away into a vortex of black, swirling hell and from the depths of that hell would erupt the demon. Sometimes the nightmare would break into my other dreams, like a commercial you can’t escape. In my dreams, my friends tried to shield me but the demon was stronger. Over the years, I tried every possible way to escape the demon but it was implacable. Sometimes it would catch me, only to let me go and chase me again. Sometimes it caught me and I died a painful death. I didn’t stop having the nightmare until long after I’d left the house.

The day I was kicked out was bittersweet.

I had the nightmare again. It began the same way as all the other times, but mid-stream as though I’d tuned in late. I was running through a black forest, my legs heavy as lead, the foetid breath of the demon on my neck. I came to the wall at the end of the forest, that sheer wall of black ice, and decided that I would finally stop trying to escape. Turning to face the demon, I was prepared to fight for my life. But it was gone. The night melted into day and I found the steps in the wall which led into sunshine.

That was the last time I had the dream.

It took a long, long time to put my childhood into perspective. My mother doesn’t remember any of it, so there is no possibility of redress. My father is long since gone. Even if my mother could remember, her shame and self-loathing would tear her apart. Denial is survival. She didn’t choose her illness and suffers greatly because of it. Now, there is only distance, and letting go. I’m not angry anymore.

Did I choose this life? Perhaps not quite in the literal sense, but since gaining control of my life I know that it’s mine to live. Mine to control. There are many sweet fruits that have come from such a bitter tree and one of the best ways I can acknowledge that small child who lived those terrors is to use and appreciate the gifts I’ve been granted.

Like this. By writing.

The Other

When I was a child, I was blissfully ignorant of everything important. My worries centred around getting enough candy and having enough play time. I hated naps as much as I hated peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches. I thought rain was the worst weather possible and that TV shows didn’t get any better than Bugs Bunny. A good day was one that had ice cream in it and a bad day was a day without ice cream. Everything important seemed both simple and understandable. Good was obviously good, and bad was just as obviously bad. Ice cream? Good. Rain? Bad.

Now I’m an adult and there are very few things that are as clearly good or clearly bad as there were when I was small. Ice cream? Good, except I’m allergic to it and it’s a powerhouse of sugar, fat and cholesterol. Rain? Bad, except I now live in Calgary, where we’d kill for rain to replace the snow. What’s worse is that most of the things I thought I had clearly put to rest and categorized as good or bad as a child have now switched places. Candy? Bad. Naps? Good.

You’ll note that nearly all of the listed items above are things. Today, I would say that while the world of things is not without debate on goodness/badness (e.g., to list a few: salt, carbs, soft drinks, coconut oil, apple-cider vinegar), in my mind it’s been swamped with the world of ideas for sheer controversy. Ideas are pretty slippery – they can come into being without any warning and then swarm through the population messing with everyone’s minds. As I write, some of the current ideas being debated are i) vaccines do/don’t cause autism; ii) people should/should not have to show ID showing a current address in order to vote; iii) a university education should/should not get you a job; iv) recycling is important/a waste of taxpayer monies. They’re just ideas, but they’re big, powerful ideas where each of our individual decisions will make a difference to us, our circles, our families and the societies in which we live. Being grown-up is a complicated mess.

For this blog, I’m going to focus on just one idea: the idea of The Other.

As noted in an earlier post, I’m a 4th. gen. Chinese-Canadian. I’d say my experiences as a Canadian are as typical as any Canadian visible minority, i.e., that I straddle the borders of otherness. Some Chinese see me as Canadian, while some Canadians see me as Chinese. Most Canadians who have had experience growing up with any hyphenated visible minority accept me for what I am: a hybrid of both cultures, a culture unto my own, neither this nor that. This might explain why I feel an instantaneous kinship with all 2nd, 3rd, 4th (and so on) gen. Chinese-Canadians. We are our own subculture.

And I think about what it may have been like for my forbears – the ones who settled in this country before me – those 1st-, 2nd- and 3rd-gens. Being young and stupid, I assumed it was hard and thought I knew it all. Even if they were talking – and they weren’t – I doubt I’d have understood. I didn’t want to understand.

How hard was it? Well, to begin with, the government didn’t think Chinese people were actually… people. (True, the government didn’t think any Asians, or Aboriginals for that matter, were people either, but for the sake of keeping things simpler in this blog post, I’m going to focus on Chinese people.) They were the Others.

At any moment when the Legislature of Canada chooses, it can shut down the gate and say, no more immigrants shall come here from China; and then no more immigrants will come, and those in the country at the time will rapidly disappear … and therefore there is no fear of a permanent degradation of the country by a mongrel race.

 – PM John A. Macdonald, House of Commons, April 30, 1883

But perhaps Sir John A. was pandering to the political climate of the times. British Columbia had only agreed to join Confederation 12 years earlier, and as one of its first Acts, moved quickly to disenfranchise (that is, take away the vote from) Chinese and Aboriginals, in 1872. Chinese people wouldn’t regain the vote until 1947, Aboriginals in 1960.

Doesn’t that blow your mind? But it was only the beginning. For the next 56 years, BC’s legislature would entertain 89 bills and 49 resolutions designed to place restrictions on labour; employment; and economic, social and voting rights for Orientals. By the time they were done tweaking the laws, my forbears were restricted from living anywhere but Chinatown, leaving Chinatown after sundown, consorting with Caucasians, sitting anywhere but at the backs of movie theatres, eating in restaurants, or attending public schools. Vancouver’s Crystal pool opened in 1928, but not for “negroes and orientals.” Even going to university got political, as you could only go if you were able to vote, thus neatly dividing whites from non-whites. Parliament passed The Chinese Immigration Act, 1923, which effectively closed Canada’s doors to immigrants from China. Those doors wouldn’t be opened again until 1967, an axe dividing mothers and children from fathers for decades.

And the climate on the street was none too friendly either. It’s no wonder my great-aunties and great-uncles don’t want to talk about it. It’s too much. There was the Asiatic Exclusion League and the Native Sons of British Columbia (among them BC Premiers Tolmie and Johnson), BC’s answer to the KKK, whipping the political climate into a frenzy of fear-mongering against the Other, should the topic of enfranchisement arise.

Yet, today, we have some of our own people , advocating what must be considered only as a most dangerous expedient—the enfranchisement of Orientals: Urging, counselling and assisting the endeavors of peoples whose fundamental ideals, whose outlook on life, whose traditions and whose economic concept s are antagonistic to our own appreciation of a democratic state. This is no time to even consider such an enlargement of our most sacred privilege as free citizens of the Dominion of Canada. Native Sons of British Columbia are unequivocally opposed to extending the franchise to the Asiatic races and they call upon every thinking Canadian to join with them in impressing the Dominion Government and the Parliament of Canada the terrible risk such enlargement of citizenship would mean.

– Native Sons of British Columbia, 1930

I look at Canada’s sad history and I am reminded of the power of disenfranchisement. To abstain from the political process is to take away your voice, your vision of society, your ideas of democracy and freedoms and rights. To vote is to eliminate The Other, because you are one of Us when you participate in the political process. Among Chinese-Canadians today, only 6 of 10 eligible voters bother to vote. It’s only been 67 years for some of us to take something which gives us everything denied our forbears and throw it away. I just can’t do it. I can’t disengage. As maddening as our political system is, as helpless as I often feel about making even a small difference, still I owe it to my forbears to try. It’s the least I can do to honour them.

 

Spring Wedding

Crystal tears slid out of gorgeous, sapphire eyes and I thought I’d rarely witnessed anything so poignant.

Yesterday, I had the honour of being the matron of honour/ witness/ person of the bride, and it was an unexpectedly emotional time. The mother of the bride cried freely. I fought back the impulse to cry. Even the groom’s eyes were extra-bright. There’s nothing like a wedding to bring out the tears.

Yesterday’s wedding was a quirky, intimate, highly individualized expression of two peoples’ dreams. In many ways, it was the type of wedding I would have wanted had we decided to marry in Canada. The wedding itself was intimately arranged in the grand foyer of the bride’s family home. Guests were arranged to right and left, up the stairs and on the second floor halls overlooking the foyer. The best man and I were arranged to the right and left of the merry Justice of the Peace, all three of us facing the bride, the groom and the assembled congregation.

Which is to explain why, at the most heart-tugging part of the ceremony, I had an unobstructed view of the bride’s eyes.

Few people cry well. I personally cry very badly. My eyes get bloodshot, my eyelids swell and my nose runs – I could model for a hay fever ad. The bride cried beautifully, without even a single smudge to her mascara. It had been a wonderful wedding.

Later, guests reconvened at the groom’s family barn, south of the city. It was a raucous affair, complete with live band, hay bale seating, photo booth, candy bar, liquor bar and appetizer tables. There were cupcakes in lieu of a wedding cake. There was a tee pee rigged out with disco lights, and later, there were fireworks. The whole affair was a thoughtful blend of city and country, reflecting the disparate roots of both bride’s and groom’s sides. The band played country, swing, blues and jive. My husband and I had a blast. Being swing & jive dance aficionados, we relish any opportunity to get out on the dance floor. Dads danced with daughters and sons with mothers. Dancing and marrying just seem to go hand in hand, so much so that we had been giving impromptu dance lessons that afternoon.

I’m not sure why, but I haven’t attended too many weddings, unlike one of my friends. She confessed that one year, her entire summer was filled with weddings, as one by one, each of her friends got married in succession. She was going broke with the parties, presents and travel  but took it all in stride. Maybe it’s because many of my friends are choosing destination weddings, or because lots of friends chose not to get married, or maybe it’s because couples are trying to keep the guest lists tight, but it’s been a long time since I looked seriously at pastel green or pastel pink or beige chiffon as a fashion choice.

I think that weddings – and marriage – have been ideas I’ve struggled with. While I’m far too cynical to believe that a fairy-tale wedding will guarantee a happy marriage, when I see a fairy-tale wedding, I want to believe in the happy ever after. I’ve run across them from time to time, a bridal fantasy straight from the pages of Wedding Bells: the no-expense-spared wedding at the Fairmont Banff Springs, the bride’s three-metre train held up by three bridesmaids; or the Scottish fantasy in Scotland, complete with kilts and an authentic castle in the background. I think it begins with The Dress. Some dresses are pure princess fantasy, with layers of silk the colour of heavy whipping cream; some dresses are more Vegas, with plunging decolleté and diamanté; while some are pure cream puff tulle and satin. Any little-girl dress-up fantasy can be fulfilled. When I was looking for a dress for my own wedding, I started out in the local bridal salon shops, accompanied by a trusted friend. Friends don’t let friends look like cream puffs I reminded her as we were quickly buried in thousands of yards of fabric by enthusiastic salesgirls. For one afternoon, I tried on dresses that cost more than laser eye surgery, like a grown-up version of Barbie. In the end, I found my dress on Ebay. Perhaps not being hog-tied by a dress that required its own suitcase helped allow us the freedom to dream of a carefree wedding on the beach, and everything else fell into place. So too with yesterday’s event – the bride’s cocktail-length gown looked as lovely in the afternoon when she wore it with a floral tiara as it did later that evening, grounded in serious boots with wicked spurs.

I think that most brides-to-be fantasize about being princess for a day. And if I had so many millions that blowing a quarter of one of them on a one-day event seemed like a feasible expense, then maybe I’d indulge in a wedding straight out a wedding magazine.

Or maybe I’d buy property. Damn that practical streak.

Like yesterday’s couple, I think a happy ever after is more likely when your heads are fully of starry-eyed dreams but your feet are firmly planted on the ground. Congratulations, A & J!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Excuse me, do you have Tourette’s?

It’s happening more often. I’ll be sitting on the bus or train or in a restaurant. Nearby, a person will be twitching and flinching continuously. Their ability to concentrate on a topic will be 3 seconds or less. This week, we were on the train, Mr. Tourette’s and me. The new trains being carefully optimized for seating, each of us is forced to sit closer than we’d like, with our shoulders pressed together. Usually in this situation I try to be a typically polite Canadian and sit as still as possible for the entire 15″ ride. I read small books or my phone, as there’s minimal movement involved with either choice. Most seasoned train-riders are similarly attentive.

Not that day, though. The guy beside me was reading his iPad. Normally, this isn’t a cause for undue drama or a blog post, but he twitched so often I thought he had ants. Or Tourette’s. On his iPad, the screens flashed by, each one no longer than three seconds. Count it: one-two-three. That must be an eternity for some people. And with each screen flash, he’d twitch and bump me. At first, I was annoyed, but then on reflection was glad he was there.

He reminded me of someone else I used to know. I’ll call him Mr. Twitchy. Mr. Twitchy had a Blackberry, like so many do, but in reality the Blackberry had him. No matter the time of day or occasion, he checked its tiny, pulsing screen about every 60 seconds. He checked it as soon as he awoke, on the train, while walking to work, read it in the elevator, walking from the elevator to his office, and right up until he could sign into his computer. He took it to the toilet. He took it to lunch, coffee, dinner and meetings. He took it to social outings. He read it while talking on the phone. His fingers twitched when he wasn’t holding it. He was, no doubt, one of the one in five adults who used it during sex (Psychology Today, July 2013). He returned emails during every holiday break and once won the (informal) contest of first responder during Christmas dinner. Leaving aside for a moment the idea that some Christmas dinners are duller than others, he showed all the signs of a full-on Crackberry addiction. For people though, his attention span was about 10 seconds and he was known for his searing impatience.

In Hong Kong, I spotted about every tenth person walking with their phone in front of them. Most of the time, they were safely walking on any of the innumerable pedestrian walkways and therefore out of serious harm’s way. They could run into walls, doorways or other people, but were otherwise relatively safe. In Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto, however, I’ve seen acts of  stupidity as people jaywalk while checking their phones. In Alberta, our self-control is so untrustworthy that we’ve had to enact laws to prevent ourselves from texting while driving. We still do, of course, but sneakily while the lights are changing. Yeah, lady, nobody knows what you’re doing staring at your crotch, and by the way, the light was green a minute ago. We’re not the only jurisdiction who’s had to enact laws.

And I wonder, do we have too much of a good thing? Or is it that we have to learn how to play with our toys?

I bought my first smartphone last year. If you’re counting, Blackberry’s been popular since roughly 2003 and the iPhone’s been around since 2007, so I’m practically a Luddite.

I like my phone. Occasionally, it’s handy for finding an address when I’m trying to find a restaurant but my GPS wins the fight to help me actually locate the place. It’s very handy when I’m meeting people for lunch: where are you? Its full potential for meeting people is really seen when I’m finding friends in a bar, but since my friends tend not to hang out overmuch in bars these days (because I’m old, not because they’re not fun), I don’t get to use my phone too often for this purpose. It’s handy for when I’m doing important tasks and need to stay on top of my email.

But there’s a big difference between important and distracting.

When my grandmother was gravely ill, my phone was important because it was my conduit to my family. We’d update each other frequently. I slept with my phone by my head, and the night she was admitted to hospital, I checked my phone while watching a play in a theatre. It’s good that people generally don’t carry guns in Canada, else I’d likely have been shot that night. All that weekend and throughout the following week, my phone acted like my mini-computer since I was in a different city and fielding countless calls, texts and emails. It was the first time I’d had a smartphone while dealing with such a serious family event, and it was essential.

But let’s face it. Most of the time, we are not dealing with life or death events. The guy beside me on the train was watching videos, checking aggregate video sites, and then obsessively signing into and out of several email applications. I tried not to watch – sure, for privacy – but also because he was flipping so fast that if I’d been watching closely I’d have been seasick. And I thought: at least he was sitting safely on the train. 

Most of the time, that text isn’t important enough to read while crossing the street. I can’t think of a text so important that it’s worth jaywalking but maybe there’s a situation out there that would warrant it. No text is so important that you need to write it while driving. But apparently lots of people do. One in four of car-related accidents are now caused by fooling around with a cellphone while driving. That’s 1,600,000 accidents/year in the US (National Safety Council). For teenagers, 93% of whom admit to using a cell phone while driving, the stats are staggering – 11 teenaged deaths/day (US Institute for Highway Safety). Many teens have grown up with a cell phone like another – beloved – appendage. Why would they give it up just because they’re driving a car? Most recently, a Quebec woman died when she rear-ended a truck while texting her lover and another woman died when she fell between the subway and the platform while reading her cell phone. Some of our toys really do not mix well with others.

Those are sober thoughts for any driver, and any pedestrian. We might not be texting while driving, but chances are good that someone else is.

And so I say to you, Mr. Tourette’s, well done on choosing the train. A car might not be your friend.

 

 

Goodbye little bookshop

It’s a grey, snowy weekend afternoon – the perfect day to spend with a good book.

On Friday I read in the news of another little bookstore closing its doors for good. I’d never heard of it before or seen it on the street, but I went to visit yesterday. Inside was a little slice of chaos. The crowded, dusty aisles were full of bargain-hunters. Books lay in piles on every conceivable surface, and boxes of uncrated books filled two backrooms and spilled out into the aisles. The shelves having long since been picked over, I spent much of my time in the backrooms, surrounded by precarious towers of boxes of books and empty cardboard boxes. There, wedged between one pile of boxes and another, consciously avoiding thoughts of the  fire hazard I was in, I methodically opened one box after another, finally deciding that the best way to dig through was to find an empty box and fill it with the books as I went. Out in the hallway, the odd intrepid bookhunter poked their head in, but seeing the cramped and risky conditions, wisely left me to it.

Bargain bookhunters are a varied group of people. There were goths and schoolteachers, kids and seniors, artists and booksellers. Some were there to save 70% on anything. Some were shopping for gifts for others. I soon gave up looking for specific titles and started looking for oddities. About every quarter-hour, someone would ask the overwhelmed clerk for an title, author or genre – got any manga? – as though they were genuinely unaware of the circumstances of the sale. The clerk, who would be unemployed come Monday, seemed almost gleeful in his response that yes, they once had that title/author/genre but that they were gone now.

I started digging through the boxes. After a while, I began to see patterns in them. This box – these books probably belonged to someone doing university English courses. This one belonged to an avid cook. This box’s previous owner was most likely male, with all of its Louis L’Amour and other westerns. One box made me laugh – tucked in with respectable white leather tomes on Christianity and Bible studies was a copy of The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, by A.N. Roquelaure, a.k.a. Anne Rice, an altogether un-Christian tale of hardcore B&D.

And since I was guessing about the lives of these books’ former owners, I wondered, if I were to keep a copy of every book I’d ever read, what my collection would say about me? Would there be more fiction or non-fiction? I’ve always turned to books first to learn anything new, so the collection would have its fair share of how-tos: how to cook, how to garden, how to take better pictures, how to have better sex. Some categories I’ve been following for a lifetime, and so Cooking and Travel would have their own bookshelves. When I was first starting out in the kitchen, cooking – despite being the daughter and granddaughter of two great cooks – was very far from a sure thing and so the reference manual The Joy of Cooking was necessarily nearby. Similarly with travel, my needs have changed from the purely practical (where is the closest laundromat?) to the more esoteric (who are the most influential local artists?). And so it goes, from art & photography, politics to philosophy, from finance to physics. There would be collections of the photographers Adams, Newton, Leibovitz and Mapplethorpe and the artists Dali, Mondrian, Monet, Manet and Hockney. There would be a big shelf for Canadian authors, among them Robertson Davies, Stephen Leacock and Terry Fallis. There’s be another for the Americans such as Michael Lewis, Elizabeth Gilbert and David Sedaris. Yet another for the Brits, with their mordant wit: Salman Rushdie, Evelyn Waugh and Oscar Wilde. There would be a library of sci-fi & fantasy; J.R.R. Tolkien, Frank Herbert, Larry Niven, Harlan Ellison, Neal Stephenson. Another for mysteries: Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle and Dick Francis. But not everything would be highfalutin literature. There would be a much-loved place for escapist fiction, from Jilly Cooper and Judith Krantz to Penny Vincenzi. Sadly, the categories for Music & Drama or Sports would be paltry to nonexistent. Sitting on the shelf under Sports would be one book on playing better golf, and a few on biking. I prefer to play or ride than read about it.

And if I was actually imagining a library of everything I’ve read, there would be a large children’s and young adults section. I remember sitting on the floor of my elementary school library surrounded by Dr. Seuss, the adventures of Madeline and the tales of Babar, the royal elephant. A few years later, I was entranced by Asterix & Obelix, the Hardy Boys and the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

I used to collect books like a magpie. I’ve been attracted to paper products all my life. I bought books new and used wherever they were offered, be it book store or garage sale. I had a library of my own in the basement, the walls lined with bookshelves. There was something soothing about being there, amongst those shelves, getting lost in everything from back issues of Heavy Metal to the inevitable National Geographic. When I moved, weaning that collection down to a more manageable size was very, very hard. Today, our house has six sets of bookshelves. I still buy books, but am more conscious of the issues of storage and collecting. Is this a book I want to keep? is a question I ask before automatically whipping out my credit card. I might be rebuilding a library again, but I want it to be a good library, with books that have been chosen with care. Today, I even have a growing collection of books I don’t intend to read, as they’re too old and fragile for that purpose. For example, I have a 1963 first edition of Never Cry Wolf, by Farley Mowat, but unfortunately missing the original dust jacket. My copy has the reissued dust jacket, but it’s a small slice of Canadiana I prize nonetheless.

So far I’ve resisted e-readers, as I don’t get the pleasure of reading without the physical act of holding a book and turning the pages. I just can’t cozy up to a Kobo. Also, I am distrustful of a product where I don’t have the rights of ownership. When I buy a copy of 1984 by George Orwell, for example, it can sit on my bookshelf for years until I find the time to reread it. Not so with e-books. In 2010, Amazon got into trouble with copyright issues for 1984 and deleted it without warning from people’s Kindles. In 2012, a woman in Norway lost her e-reader account and the roughly 40 books she’d bought when Amazon closed her account, again without benefit of warning or explanation. That’s what Amazon means when it says Kindle content is licensed, not sold.

That’s why I like having a library.

As I said earlier, it’s a grey, snowy weekend. It’s time to cozy up to one of my new books and raise a warm cup of tea in memory of the independent book store from where it came.

 

 

 

A Home of Our Own

When we stepped into our house for the first time, I knew it was the one I wanted. Never mind the bad paint job and the odd smell, the house had warm oak floors, wooden beams overhead, and a large kitchen. The 1.5 bedrooms could be opened up to make one large bedroom, and the upstairs bathroom had already been modernized. We moved in, but not before undergoing a saga worthy of mythology.

Here’s the story.

We had been thinking about buying a house for months. We lived in a rental, and although it was a good house, in a good neighbourhood and our landlords were our friends, it wasn’t our house. After two years, we pined for a house of our own. But the housing market wasn’t cooperating. The city was in a boom, and houses down the street from us were asking and receiving prices way out of our reach. Our neighbourhood, with its large trees and close proximity to shopping, schools, public tennis courts, a library, a pool and an ice rink – and all within 10 kms of the city – was a highly desirable place to live. We despaired, worried that we’d missed the opportunity to buy. And then, just for a couple of months, the real estate market fell slightly. The pool of buyers disappeared and suddenly, houses were within our price range.

We met with a new realtor and soon began looking. Our price range meant that we were looking at apartments, duplexes and houses in a range of neighbourhoods. My husband made a list of our must-haves and would-likes, and I calculated transit routes to various city areas. It’s enlightening, the things you learn when you buy a house the first time with your husband. Immediately, his dreams and mine met, mixed and sometimes clashed. He dreamt of a house in the country. I dreamt of a condo downtown. He dreamt of solar- and wind-arrays, while I dreamt of walking to coffee shops and bookstores. All the while, we toured listings, gradually growing more discouraged. On weekends, we’d drive around our preferred neighbourhoods, counting blocks to bus stops and shopping. It wasn’t fun but it was a learning experience. One of the houses we could afford had no kitchen appliances. Another had a ladder from the second-floor patio doors to the ground, instead of a deck. After each outing, we’d come home and try to move another must-have to the column marked would-like.

And then one day I saw a sign for a house just down the street from where we were renting. It was a 60s bungalow, with enormous pine trees in the front yard. It was located on a fairly busy road, served by public transit, which is a drawback for anyone who doesn’t have to take transit to work. We take transit to work. I called our realtor in excitement.

The asking price was slightly out of our price range, but we felt we could work with it. Almost immediately, though, we found it hard to work with the other realtor. I’ll call him Mr. Bully. He would balk at mundane requests, like asking for a showing or for utility bills. It seemed the owners kept several large dogs, and a viewing meant the dogs had to be corralled in the garage.  He gave no reason for refusing to supply the bills. Despite it all – the strange decorating, the suspect stains and lingering smell and the increasingly odd behaviour of Mr. Bully – we put in an offer. After a brief flurry of counter-offers, it was accepted, and it was within our price range. It was early April, and I thought the hardest part was over.

I love this house and this neighbourhood, but in retrospect I’m not sure I would have offered if I’d had any idea what the next few months would hold for us. Exacerbating the problem was our lawyer, who came recommended on the basis he was cheap. I’ll call him Mr. Incompetent.

The first problem was the possession date. We’d asked for a date two months hence, or early June. Mr. Bully counter-argued an early possession – just 4 weeks away. We didn’t like it but we agreed. We gave notice to our landlord, and then began the huge task list of to dos that are involved in moving. Mr. Bully then informed us there would be no walk-through prior to taking possession, and the house would not be cleaned by the possession date, but it might be cleaned the day after. A day before the possession date, Mr. Incompetent paid over the monies. Then we got a call from Mr. Bully – the sellers, he informed us, could not comply with the date. There ensued a unprofessional, threatening episode where our realtor was treated to three days of harassing calls as Mr. Bully attempted to harangue her into agreeing. Mr. Incompetent eventually advised us to allow them to stay, but charge them rent, as we now effectively owned the house (thanks to him). They vacated a week later, leaving behind an assortment of keys which didn’t fit any locks, but at least they were gone. We had a house. I had a locksmith make new keys and we prepared to move into the house we owned.

Or did we? It turned out that we didn’t own the house quite yet. Our insurance company explained that we didn’t have clear title because only one of the two sellers had signed. They couldn’t insure a house we didn’t own. Our lawyer should have noticed the missing signature. The other seller, we discovered, was travelling and therefore unreachable. We returned the keys to our long-suffering realtor to hold, on the advice of our would-be insurers, as possession of keys to a house we didn’t own exposed us to property risk. We couldn’t so much as store a toothbrush there. Until a week later when a judge finally declared our title clear by fiat, meaning that the sellers intended to sell the house, we were reduced to visiting our house with our lawnmover to tackle the knee-high weeds. We eventually moved in June. It had been quite an ordeal.

We were lucky to find this house when we did, avoiding both condo fees and the risk of crazy condo neighbours. Our neighbours are wonderful people, always ready to trade house keys and keep an eye on things. Our house, once we removed the video cameras and piles of dog hair, is a lovely home. The kitchen, under a fresh coat of paint, is warm and inviting. The bedroom now features a chaise lounge and our oak armoire fits its surroundings perfectly.

As for the other characters in this story… Our realtor is still in touch. I’d definitely recommend her, not only for outstanding professionalism, but also grace under pressure.

Mr. Bully is still actively selling houses in the district. I’ve almost lost the desire to vandalize the bus bench ads with his name on them. I don’t recommend him.

Mr. Incompetent has been disbarred for nine counts of legal failure, among them the failure to properly advise clients and failure to comply with trust conditions. He’s now safely sidelined.

Telling Tales

When I was a kid, telling tales meant telling tall tales. See Liar, Liar: http://wp.me/p3u3Fz-b1.

Now that I’m grown up, telling tales means something different and very much scarier: storytelling. On Friday, I’m going to tell a story I wrote. In public. Like, in front of people. Holy shit. What the hell have I gotten myself into?

It all started quite innocuously. I was on a Jane’s Walk in a funky local neighbourhood, in a group of about 30 people. (Aside – if you’ve never done a Jane’s Walk, try it. It’s free, it’s fun and it’s catching on around the world: http://www.janeswalk.org/.) During those two hours, we wandered the area like locals, here an indie coffee shop, there a community garden, and we got to know not only a lot more about the place, but we also learned a little bit more about ourselves.

I’ll tell you a secret about myself: I don’t get out much. I mean, I get out, but I don’t really break away from the places and people I know and like. It’s one of the benefits of being an adult and having your own space – you can pick and choose, to a large extent, where you go and with whom you do it. For me, that means home and work and the yoga studio, with frequent outings to nice restaurants and slightly-less frequent outings to plays and movies. It means Sunday blueberry pancake brunches with my husband, or Sunday brunch line-ups with friends at Cora’s. It means drinks with coworkers, and weekend shopping at the farmers markets. It’s a good life, and I enjoy it, but I don’t tend to meet too many different types of people.

So, on the Jane’s Walk I met a storyteller. And this kind of blew me away, because not only is she a storyteller, but she is paid to tell stories – she’s a professional storyteller. I’ll call her The Icelander. First of all, I’d no idea such an art form existed and that people who like telling stories get together from time to time just to tell stories and hone their craft. And it follows that since I was completely ignorant of the art of storytelling, I was also oblivious to the fact that people who are good at telling stories may get paid to tell them.

As an aspiring writer – as if that wasn’t obvious – storytelling appeals to me on so many levels. The act of writing is also the act of telling my stories, but not to a visible audience. The act of writing is so removed, in fact, that I can actually pretend that I’m not writing for an audience at all (and then obsessively check my stats later for the happy news that someone, somewhere, read my work). But the act of storytelling assumes an audience. (I tried it last weekend with a gang of stuffed animals, and it’s really not the same.) Telling a story to an audience of even just one person is deeply intimate and rewarding. And terrifying.

So, back to The Icelander. On the walk, we in the group were invited to share our memories of the area. The Icelander told us a few family anecdotes, as she’d grown up there. And when I say she told a few anecdotes, what I really mean to say was that she, without any sort of preparation, gave us a fascinating account of her childhood. Later, she and I fell into step and I shared some stories of my family, and of my aspirations to write a blog on gratitude. She invited me to come to a “tellaround”, an informal gathering where storytellers of all levels are invited to listen and, if they wish, participate.

That was last May. Since then, I’ve met storytellers, a.k.a. tellers, so compelling I never want them to stop talking. They come from all walks and all ages. The youngest teller I’ve met so far is 9 years old and I aspire to tell as well as she does. What they all have in common is the ability to tell a story well. It’s a remarkable skill.

For me, writing and storytelling are like fraternal twins. They’re so similar that I often learn things when I’m writing that I can immediately use in storytelling, and vice versa. Just today, I learned that a story should centre on its Most Important Point (MIP), but the most important point only needs to be important to me. When I’m writing this blog, the MIP is gratitude, but I don’t feel that I need to belabour the point now as perhaps I did in the beginning. A storyteller uses the MIP to emphasize some aspects of the story, and minimize others. For example, to me, the MIP in the original story of Beauty and the Beast is how much Belle is misled by the Beast’s physical appearance, because he is in every other respect a perfect mate: rich, generous, kind and compassionate. The MIP might be quite different for you.

So, about this Friday. It’s World Storytelling Day, and I’m going to tell a story I wrote. No notes, no cue cards, no teleprompter. Just me, the audience and a mike (and my core group of support!) I’ve been asked to fill a quarter-hour slot, so I’ve practiced to come in at 12-13 minutes. Thirteen minutes. Oh. My. God.

The fear of failing so publicly at this has encouraged me to do things I’ve never done before. Just last Thursday, I told a 5 minute story to a group of about 35 strangers in a pub. No practising, no forethought, just straight off the cuff. I did it for the experience of storytelling for a larger audience, and while it certainly could have been better, it also could have been so, so much worse. Tomorrow, I’ve invited my coworkers to eat their lunch while I tell a story. I work in a very conservative office. Nobody does this. But I’m doing it.

And what all of this tells me – all of these big and small experiences – is that it’s good to be scared. It’s good to grow, and risk making a fool of yourself, and learn something in the process. It’s good to connect with people outside your normal sphere, to get out, as it were. By being vulnerable myself, I encourage others to be vulnerable in return. Already, I’ve learned things about people that I never would have otherwise. For me, in the end, it’s all about a deeper connection with my fellow humans. And on Friday night, after I’m done telling my story, I’ll have the huge pleasure of listening to someone else tell their story.

Yes, that will be sweet.

Canto Lessons

I’m a fourth-gen Chinese Canadian. There’s an acronym for it: Canadian-born Chinese, or CBC. And like many 4th-gen kids of any cultural background, I can’t speak my “mother” tongue. And when I mean I don’t speak Chinese, I mean I can’t even say hello.

That is, until  a few months ago.

There’s lots of reasons for it. First of all, there are a lot of ways to say hello in Chinese depending on time of day and so forth, but there are also unexpected wrinkles like trying to use the proper form of greeting to show respect and face – what the hell is face?? – and that’s before you even get into the tones. English-speakers can get away with being pretty-near tone-deaf and still be understood, and there’s no face issues at all. Of course, listening to a monotone speech may put a listener into a near coma, but that’s a problem with delivery, not fluency. In Chinese, tones are everything. There are intimidating words in Cantonese that mean 7 different things in 7 tones. I was always getting it wrong and then getting a lecture and after a while I just gave up.

I’m not sure why, but Canadian kids of any ethnicity don’t want to speak languages other than English. Parents must find it infuriating to be able to impart a gift so rare and special as another language, only to have their brats respond in English. I think kids are furiously trying to fit in and speaking any other language is a big, flashing neon sign that you’re not from here. Surviving school was part fitting in and part invisibility and speaking Cantonese of all languages was definitely something I didn’t want to do.

And then there’s Chinese school. My parents, tired of listening to complaints by my grandparents that I wasn’t learning Chinese and unable to argue further when my grandparents offered to pay for lessons, finally asked if I wanted to go to Chinese school. My parents, I should mention here, never spoke Chinese at home. They were, after all, 3rd-gen CBCs, and they grew up back-talking their parents in English too. At least, my mother did. She didn’t speak a word of Chinese. My dad was fluent but I’ll talk about that later.

So when my parents finally got around to asking me if I wanted to learn Chinese, they had mixed feelings about it. My dad was for it and my mother was against it because she didn’t want me to speak a language she hadn’t learned and couldn’t understand. It would make her look bad and I might be talking about her. When I think back on this time, I am reminded of the marketing concept of framing. Putting a question into a context of your own devising can have a huge influence on the answer. My mother’s question to me was a marvel of marketing technique. She said, “Your grandmother wants you to go to Chinese school. It’s downtown. You’ll have to go every day after school and you won’t be done until 9:00 every night. Do you want to go?” I defy you to find any kid, even the ones who claim to enjoy homework, saying yes to a proposition like that one. It sounded like the educational equivalent of prison.

I didn’t go to Chinese school.

Chinese isn’t something you can just pick up if it’s not spoken at home. Learning a language is also learning its culture, its mores and beliefs. It’s far more than simply thinking of what you’d like to say in English and translating – it’s learning when and how and why to say the things you’re going to say. I had to spend a lot of my life figuring out who I was and where I fit in before I could address the topic of learning Chinese. My mother has never really reconciled herself with being Chinese, and even more so with traditional Chinese values regarding women. I can’t blame her for that. My father, on the other hand, didn’t have quite as many problems with being Chinese, and having grown up in a boisterous house with many cousins, was arrogant in his fluency. He didn’t agree with my mother, but he also didn’t want to fight about it.

Today, middle-class modern Cantonese speakers living in China are not just modern in their speech. They’re also modern in their thinking. I’m gradually coming to find that the serious old-school traditions that I grew up believing were held by “all” Chinese are really more held by us, the immigrants who brought our culture to Canada. Today, Chinese women in China attend university, work and have careers and families. Learning Chinese, therefore, is not necessarily giving in to all of those old-world (really, new world) belief systems. And so, it’s with a new outlook that I am taking Cantonese lessons, at last.

I highly recommend learning Chinese when you’re a kid. It’s damned hard as an adult. It’s so hard, in fact, that I’m not even learning written Chinese. Spoken Chinese is taught using English letters which, augmented with tone indicators, help the student remember how to say the word. It’s called pinyin and it was invented to help Westerners (according to legend, the Jesuits) get a small toehold on this enormously difficult language. I memorized the characters for the numbers 1-10 for fun, just to be able to recognize something written. (Fun fact. This is 1 [-] and this is ten [+]. No kidding.)

For me, speaking Chinese overcomes a major personal hurdle. It helps reconcile my past and present selves, and since I now approach learning it from a place of pride rather than shame, it’s no longer a matter of face when I make a mistake. Learning Chinese had always been emotional, fraught with humiliation, frustration and failed expectations, not to mention family drama. It’s no wonder I avoided it. Now, I treat it the way I treated learning French. It’s hard, but it’s not impossible. Every sentence where I make myself understood is a win. People who deliberately misunderstand me in an attempt to humiliate me (“lose face”) can suck it. I’ve lived with this fear my whole life. It’s great to let it go.

I’ve just come back from my first trip to Hong Kong. It was a blast. I’d never before had the guts to visit any Chinese-speaking country because I couldn’t speak the language, but finally thought to hell with that. Thanks to a few conversational Canto lessons these past few months, I can say a few things, like hello. That’s enough for now.