Delicate round face shined through a cascade of dark long hair,
Brown grey eyes, smallish nose and luscious lips, well placed
No need for makeup. Her elegance speaks for her do,
This is a life well-lived, perfectly fine,
Undistinguished to others, content within herself.
She has been faithful to: be productive, be responsible, and a lifelong learner.
Along the way, she picked up good friends of trust and respect,
A caring husband and loving kids.
For an average person with average talent,
above-average intelligence and education -
And a bit of hard-earned luck, this is good enough.
All this made for her ability to observe, reflect and renew hopes.
And she knows it.
Past was but a series of broad strokes, blurred memories.
Vivid is when coming to
Legally stamped “immigrant”,
Before that, she was a child, she barely existed.
Vivid is the realization that she entered into a grown-up world, child no more.
Before that, it was noise and passion, montage of trysts.
Wide interests, news, films, art, reading a book, watching TV, boys, school,
Be a personality, try glamour, try charisma, try ephemeral looks and appearance.
Everyone loves a young woman,
But every young woman gets old.
Youth was blissful, shifty, blinks, blanks.
She remembers pressures to impress others,
Living her mother’s high code of dead Confucian value.
Consumed by standing out in a small pond of toads,
Who hardly knew their ugliness.
She spent too much time studying to be number 1 in the class,
Precious little time to look at a painting, or a tree, or a building,
or to write poems, or to make music, which brought her alive.
Confucius dead for thousands of years, but still the grand social arbiter,
Rewarding the mediocre, the compliant; frowning on the independent spirit.
Her heart was burst with love of the impractical and beautiful,
Her mind was weighted down by books, tests, theories that elders dictated.
The soul was wandering, searching, rebelling, regretting.
Who am I? What do I want?
Just a brainy, dreamy child, going nowhere.
Coming to
No more privilege, no name, no mother, no friends, no back up, no nothing special.
Eclectic mix of cultures, electric personalities, more of most of everything.
A giant stage of brilliant lives against the tiny stage where she came from.
In
You can go any direction you choose, to
Excited, to be free from the old traditions,
Daunted, to be the fiercest critic of her developing independence.
She felt the joy and pangs of a grown-up.
She knew a lot of things then, but little of herself.
Initially she was terribly homesick, “Am I nothing without home?”
But she could also see the shabby sides of her home better, from afar.
She was, sigh, lost - giving up was so easy, building up so hard.
Where to start?
Then the thought, “A woman going through life without learning the simplest lesson that
she has only one life, if she fails to do what she wants with it, no one else would care.”
She had an immediate choice to make:
Hiding in the Chinese communities, living the village life of old
Embracing the new culture surrounding her.
There is comfort and familiarity in the old,
And, there is growth and fear of being slain in the new.
Her decision was not swift.
There was but one guiding principle -
Must lead to a richer individual world than a shallow existence for others.
In spirit an experimentalist, in life an empiricist.
She quietly measured her success as wife, companion, and weekend writer.
Writing is her way to communicate with herself, and with others.
She would write her thank-you note to
The lives loved and lost, the dreams pursued and broken, in
A bit of a ditherer, she took time to figure out what jobs to take on.
With freedom comes responsibility. There is no place for idle women in
Some jobs she would like to do, but she was too late.
Some jobs she could do, but she lacked depth.
She gambled on a practical but sure craft, which paid her good dividend in old age.
In solitude, she would ask - you work like a devil and earthly monotony drinks you dry.
Were you after things you don’t want, building a life you don’t care a rap about?
Being an optimist, she was never negative for too long.
But there was always something never quite settled in her.
Could it be her younger years that she yearned for? It was a pleasant kind of loneliness.
Her love of
A simple-minded immigrant was welcome to a culture of dazzling diversity.
An easy playground for adults making things up like youngsters.
It may take her a lifetime to find her soul and care for it.
But here,
She is grateful for a life well lived, in
Her love, family and work, realized on this sacred ground.
Her conscience clear;
Her eyes, ears, heart, mind open to the cacophony of music, words, arts and sciences.
