Be There Before The Light Arrives

One of my students loaned me a book, "The Writer's Desk" by Jill Krementz. Many well-known writers wrote about "their rooms with a view" and their creative process. Flipping through, what Toni Morrison wrote struck a cord - "For me, light is the signal in the transition. It's not being in the light, it's being there before the light arrives. It enables me, in some sense."

I always get very restless and unhappy if I haven't written for awhile. The writing I talk about here is writing writing, it is not quoting someone, announcing something, writings that have little if any emotional value. As the days are getting shorter, the sun sinks lower each day behind the alders, the seasonal change signaled a transition in me as well. I always get a panicky feeling when the day turns into the night.  I usually resort to a glass of wine, then busy myself with dinner. Sometimes it works to easy my mind because I love cooking; it gives me some creative relief, once it is "night proper" I am fine. One good thing about getting older is that you have lived long enough to see patterns. I have become more and more aware of this recurring "dip" in my days, life and psyche as I get older.

Morrison's words gave me a different perspective on how to interpret light and darkness -" It's not being in the light, it's being there before the light arrives." Days can't exist without nights; light co-exists with darkness. Be there before the light arrives.

  

Soul Food on a Dark August Day

The Buddha's Last Instruction

"Make of yourself a light,"

said the Buddha,

before he died.

I think of this every morning

as the east begins

to tear off its many clouds

of darkness, to send up the first

signal - a white fan

streaked with pin and violet

even green.

An old man, he lay down

between two sala trees,

and he might have said anything,

knowing it was his final hour.

The light burns upward,

it thickens and settles over the fields.

Around him, the villagers fathered

and stretched forward to listen.

Even before the sun itself

hangs, disattached, in the blue air,

I am touched everywhere

by its ocean of yellow waves.

No doubt he thought of everything

that had happened in his difficult life.

And then I feel the sun itself

as it blazes over the hills,

like a million flowers on fire ----

clearly I'm not needed,

yet I feel myself turning

into something of inexplicable value.

Slowly, beneath the branches,

he raised his head.

He looked into the faces of the frightened crowd. 

- Mary Oliver

Baked Tofu

Ingredients:

A packet of extra firm tofu.
Marinate:
2 Tbsp of soy sauce
2 Tbsp of Sesame oil
1 tsp of Chinese Five Spice


Instructions:

1. Take the tofu out of packet, rinse with cold water, pat dry, place tofu on a big flat plate and put another big plate on top. Put a heavy object on top to squeeze out the extra liquid. Leave it for an hour.

2. Pat dry tofu again and cut into 1/2" thick slices with a sharp knife.

3. In a small bowl mix soy sauce, sesame oil, and Chinese Five-Spice. Brush the mixture evenly on the tofu, hold the tofu gently in the palm of your hand, brush the top, sides and bottom. Lay the coated tofu in a container in layers. Cover and leave in the refrigerator for 4 hours or overnight. Turn occasionally.

4. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Spray a cookie sheet with cooking oil and lay the marinated tofu slices in a single layer 1/2" apart. Bake for 40 minutes or until golden.

There are many ways to enjoy the baked tofu, my favorites are:

1. Cut the baked tofu into 1/2" strips, sprinkle soy sauce, sesame oil, chopped green onion and cilantro. We love spicy food so I usually add a dash of hot chili oil. Chinese usually eat this as an appetizer or as a side dish for noodle soups, rarely as a main course.

2. Cut the baked tofu into 1/2" strips or cubes, stir- fry either with broccoli, or/and red bell pepper, beans, the possibility is endless. Since the tofu is already cooked, add last just to heat through and to coat with the spices you add and the juices from the vegetables.

3. Spicy baked tofu bean paste noodle sauce - I will post the recipe shortly. "Zha Jiang Mien" is the Chinese name for noodles with a sauce made with minced pork, baked tofu, soy beans and bean paste - it's a very common and popular street food in Taiwan.  But the quality depends on how it's prepared, and the difference is like using Spaghetti sauce from a jar or making your own with fresh ingredients.

Five Minutes of Heaven

"Five Minutes of Heaven" is a movie I watched last night. It claimed to be inspired by a true event. In 1975, 17-year-old Irish-Protestant Little assassinated 19-year-old Catholic Jim Griffin in his home. The murder was witnessed by Griffin's 11-year-old brother Joe. Thirty years later a TV talk show brought them together for a live on-air reconciliation. The movie told the story of two men haunted by that moment of violence, and how they came face-to-face with their own wolds of pain, violence and vengeance.

It is a thoughtful movie and thought-provoking. It asked the question of what is true reconciliation and is it possible to achieve?  Although it is set in Northern Ireland it is a question applied to every corner of the world where there is conflict, not only the ones we see on TV but what goes on in our own lives. In our close relationships, if we are honest, we all experience and fail to resist that powerful seduction of that "five minutes of heaven", when we relish the power of our anger and righteousness and the sweetness of our revenge. We lash out and punish. We get applause from our friends when we retell and relive the story. "He/She deserves it!" they cheered.

But when we go back to our own lives we realize that five minutes of heaven becomes days of hell and the damage we caused to others and ourselves took much more than five minutes to repair. There is no winner in violence. We are all victims.

My first memory of violence happened when I was 3 or 4 years old. No, it is not sexual or physical abuse. It is something that happens to most of us. It is so common that we tend to ignore its subtle and long-lasting impact. I was trying to reach and tip over a hot water thermos. I screamed when the boiling water spilling onto my chest. I don't remember much of what happen next except my father's fury. He was holding me in his arm and shouting at my mother blaming her for her negligence. I remember how his fury frightened and upset me more than my burn and how I so desperately wanted him to stop lashing out on my mother but the only thing I could do was to cry harder which only made him madder because he felt helpless in easing my pain.

I don't think my father is a violent person although he did have a temper. He was a sensitive soul, more so than my mother. He was more in tune with our emotional lives and because of his sensitivity he suffered deeply when we suffered. He didn't have any formal schooling; joined the Nationalist Army when he was 10. He taught himself how to read and write from reading and copying from the newspapers. He passed away in 1992; the year I came to the United States after spending a year and half with him and my mother in our old house in Xinchu, Taiwan. That was one of the best period of my life, not the happiest but the best. I was very fortunate to be able to return my first home as an adult and spent a year and half with my parents as one. I will never forget those sunny days sitting in the yard listening to my father, telling stories from when he was a young men. Behind his heavy "Long Life" brand cigarette smoke, I saw not just my aging father but a man, a life.

What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean ---
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down ---
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is,
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? 


- "The Summer Day", Mary Oliver

    

Free Choice, Food and Ignorance

My mother is a terrible cook. The reason she is terrible is because she doesn't give a hoot about how her cooking looks, smells and tastes. The only exception is this braised fish dish she makes. I'm still trying to master the sauce to braise the fish in. Food to her is just something she does three times a day. She never eats snacks but she will buy them for the grandchildren and she will eat them when they are going bad. In a way, I envy my mother. Food is simple to her and so is life. She is 84 years old and I haven't met anyone who is more content and healthier than her.

It seems paradoxically for someone who just offered cooking classes to be talking about the blessing of eating simply, not choosy. Well, not really, there will be no good fictional writers around if paradox is not a human condition. What inspired me to write today is the word "choice".  Recently my friend DC posted a talk on TED (http://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_on_the_art_of_choosing.html). Ms. iyengar started by talking about her experience in Japan when she asked for sugar for her green tea. She brilliantly and humorously used this example to open her talk on how our individual and cultural background influence our choices and how having too many choices or rather foolishly believing we do got us into trouble. Free choice is not free. One of my favorite scene in the movie "Borat" was the grocery(was it Walmart?) scene - when Borat went through the rows of hundreds of cheese packets and asked the help staff, "What is this?" The help staff answered, "Cheese." He went on to the next one and asked "What is this?" The help staff answered, "Cheese?" This went on for a few minutes! The help staff was as patient and expressionless as a robot . It was really painful and hilarious to watch and I understood why the movie company deleted the scene from the theater version. But this scene pointed out the ridiculousness of the so-called "free choices" in America. It is free choice but only in packaging! The better-informed consumers know that the cheese was all made by one or two big corporations.

I think most of us are ignorant about free choice, including myself. Let me tell you a story. This happened to me at the American history class when I took the Bard College's Clemente Course in the Humanities at WSU two years ago, an outstanding free (you do have to study and do the homework) college credited course for the low-income. The class was on United States Declaration of Independence. I read it for the first time after living in the U.S. for 15 years and I was moved to tears. At the class we are encouraged to speak up so I did and I got all emotional and all. After I finished I noticed the teacher looked funny and uncomfortable. He tried to put it to me gently that the men in "all men are created equal" meant men literally; it did not include women or blacks! I wish there was a hole in the floor. All the melodramatic remarks I made a few minutes ago about escaping a patriarch society to the land of the free to pursuit Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Believe me I had many more embarrassing moments like that during the six-month course. It made me realize that I thought I simulated into the American society seamlessly; I know how to talk and act like an American but I had not a clue about the fundamentals of what made America America. All these big words like freedom, independence, choice, rights we so fond of using are like the cheese in "Borat"; we are mistaken the packaging for the content. People asked me whether I am an American citizen. I am not but I am legal. I think I will become an American citizen when I figure out what it really means.

When it comes to the free choice about food the first step is to get informed - know where your food is from and how it is grown and transported. (1/4 of carbon emission in the U.S. is food related and majority of it is from transportation, that includes your drive to and from where you get food.) Read the ingredients: less is more. As far as my Chinese cooking classes go, I will use ingredients made in the U.S. or Taiwan where the food regulations are bettered enforced than China. By the way, I just found out recently that the standard for certified organic food in Taiwan is much more strict than the U.S. Here goes another of my ignorant assumptions!

These Please the Soul Well

I have perceiv'd that to be with those I like is enough,

To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,

To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing

flesh is enough...

I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.

There is something in staying close to men and women and

looking on them,

And in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,

All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.

- Walt Whitman