Same Same, But Different

[Note: This was first published in the June 2014 issue of The Bamboo Telegraph, a publication of the American Women’s Association of Singapore, a terrific group of warm and supportive women who will always be close to my heart. TZ]

“The piano is gone!” My daughter noticed the absence right away when she got home from school. It was not unexpected, but even expected departures can be unnerving when they actually happen. 

You see we are leaving Singapore, but the piano is staying. It is right that it should stay here. It is a Singapore piano specially designed for this tropical climate. This is its home. Our home is elsewhere. It is time for us to go.

The piano was the very first thing in our Singapore apartment when we moved here four years ago. My husband bought it in the weeks before the kids and I joined him from a young music student who was leaving to continue his studies abroad. It was the first thing I saw through blurry eyes when I walked into the apartment at the crack-of-dawn, fresh off a 19-hour flight from Newark, in the place that would be my home for the next four years. So it is fitting, I suppose, that it was also the first thing to leave the apartment as we prepare to say goodbye.

Before we moved to Singapore, I had a very specific and concrete idea of what “home” was: what it looked like, what it smelled like, what it felt like. I selected objects to bring with us in an attempt to re-create that feeling of home here on the other side of the world: my grandmother’s rocking chair, the desk my husband’s grandfather gave him as a child, a favorite teapot, my books, our instruments. I cooked familiar foods in the tropical heat, filling the apartment with the smells of roasting chicken and fresh baked bread. 

It started to feel like home, even though in the backs of our minds we knew our time here was limited. And now we are moving on, off to another adventure on yet another continent, prepared to make a new home for our family. 

But something happened here in Singapore, a subtle but definite shift in my idea of “home.” It is less concrete. More ephemeral. “Home” isn’t so much a place anymore. It includes the friends who did not let me drift away when we moved to the other side of the world, and the friends I made here who will always be connected to me. It is my children and my husband and the experiences that tie us together.  

But home is also a place. So as I select the objects that will go with us I choose carefully. Our new home will smell like the frangipani oil I so enjoy here. The smells of curry, cardamom and coconut will join the baking bread and roasting chicken in the kitchen. Maybe I can even get some jasmine to grow in pots among the rose bushes.

And there will be a piano. Plans are being made to buy a new piano in Germany; a digital piano with weighted keys that is easier to move from place to place, like us.

Whose Tradition?

It has been a bad week for breathing here in Singapore. Monday morning we all woke up to the pungent, acrid smell of the smoke that blew in overnight from forest fires in Thailand, Laos and Myanmar. This happens a couple of times a year when our neighbors burn their fields for planting. The first time, just after we arrived nearly three years ago, I quickly dug out my stash of Claritin to help with my stinging eyes, runny nose, and nagging cough. 

Now, I have another option when the haze hits. Taking a page from Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), I brew up a pot of chrysanthemum tea with wolfberries, a potent combination that helps clear toxins from the body, especially the lungs, and supports the immune system. It really helps. I have been drinking it all week.

I have been an eager student of TCM and other traditional healing here in Singapore, and have added several new staples to my medicine cabinet. Herbal oils that take the sting out of bug bites and ward off headaches, a syrup that clears the sinuses and soothes the throat, little vials of pills that settle an upset tummy and make short work of a hangover, turmeric for, well, pretty much everything in the Ayurvedic tradition.

From that first “haze season” when I walked into a medicine hall in Chinatown and announced that the aunties in my husband’s office said I need to buy chrysanthemum tea, what else do I need? I have never missed a chance to ask a willing shopkeeper what was on their shelves, and what it could do for me. (The tea seller is the one who told me to add the wolfberries, by the way, she also sold me some rosebuds, jasmine, and lavender).

Since arriving in Singapore, I have taken courses in TCM and acupressure, studied tai ch’i and qi gong, bought many new books, and made at least two really spectacularly awful traditional herbal healing soups. 

I was jealous of my Asian friends who seemed to have been born knowing all of these things I was trying so hard to learn. Recently, however, I realized that, for them, all of these exotic-to-me remedies, teas and tinctures were more like my mom’s chicken soup. Something you just do to feel good.

Which brings me to an encounter I had today in my local grocery store. A Chinese man was in the canned goods aisle trying to find sauerkraut. He was disappointed in the lack of selection and I made some comment about how my husband’s grandma used to make it. He eagerly asked me if I knew what was in it. Cabbage, vinegar, spices, I guessed. He said he had tried to look it up on the internet, but couldn’t find any detailed recipes. I suggested he check his spelling, or, if he was really interested, make a trip to the German grocery store. They would likely have a better selection and maybe even someone who would be happy to tell him how to make it. 

He was very excited by the idea, didn’t know there was a German grocery, would go over there as soon as he could. He reminded me of myself setting out to figure out the wet market or track down an ingredient at a medicine hall.

I must have had a curious expression on my face, maybe he could tell I was wondering where he had developed this enthusiasm for a rather ordinary (to me) food as he answered my unasked question. “This” he said to me seriously, holding up his can of sauerkraut, “is excellent for detoxifying the system.”

I walked home through the haze, brewed a pot of chrysanthemum tea, and wondered if maybe I should have picked up a can for myself. 

My Tree

Last week, I was really worried about my tree.

You see I have the luxury, in a city of 5 million plus people, to have an apartment where my living room and bedroom windows look out into a mass of green.  My personal oasis, dominated by a large tree with delicate leaves that, in the right light, gives a gentle green glow to everything in the house. 

I have come to love this tree.  It makes me feel calm and grounded.

Which is why, when we got home from our winter vacation, I was concerned to see that the tree looked, well, a little peaked.  Not so green.  A little sparse.  The concern turned to alarm a few days later when, as has become my habit, I stepped out onto the porch as the sun was coming up and saw that it was almost completely bare.  Not only that but the branches were looking decidedly dead.

What was happening to my tree?  I wracked my brain.  Did this happen last year?  Is it happening to other similar trees?  What could be done?  Was it the flooding in December?  Did my tree drown?

After pulling myself together, and reminding myself that it is very unlikely for a tropical tree to drown, I quizzed everyone in the household.  What did the tree look like last year?  Did it do this before?  We decided that this might just be something the tree does.

So I decided to postpone raising the full alarm, postpone the worry, watch, and wait.  This was not easy.   Patience is not necessarily one of my virtues.

I have often commented since moving here that one thing I find a bit disorienting is the complete absence of seasons.  We joke that there is hot, hot and wet, and really hot.  But we don’t get the natural rhythm of the shortening of days into winter and the wonderful return of the sun and green growing things.  Nope, we get twelve hours of light, twelve hours of dark and sunrises and sunsets that take about a minute and a half.  

So we make our own seasons.  We decorate for Christmas, include orchids with our poinsettias, note the solstice with some candles.  Even the clothing stores are in on the charade, showing coats and sweaters in the shop windows in December and January.

So imagine my delight when my tree started to sprout new, vibrantly green leaves.  On the eve of Chinese New Year, in the dead of winter (although you wouldn’t know it to look around), my tree is giving me my own personal spring. 

In the end I didn’t need to worry, I didn’t need to fret.  All I had to do was wait.  And isn’t that the eternal lesson of spring?  Not a bad reminder to start out a new year.

Happy New Year.  Gong Xi Fa Cai.

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

My chicken man isn’t speaking to me.

Actually, I should say my former chicken man.  The one I have been buying chicken from since first venturing into the local wet market with my friend “A” last September.  You see, I recently left him for another chicken man.

It wasn’t that I was unhappy with my chicken.  Actually, it was “A” who started the whole thing.  I remember the day, we were sitting in her living room, drinking coffee, when she lowered her voice and confided to me: “I have been given the phone number of a chicken man who delivers...”  

This is gold in a town where we walk or take public transportation everywhere, dragging wheeled carts behind us to the markets when we are buying more than we can carry in a tote bag.

Now, I have to say, I did have a certain feeling of loyalty to my first chicken man.  I mean, his stall is where I first saw the heaping bowls of chicken heads, the piles of feet, and those strange, not yet fully developed eggs that some around here think are a delicacy.  He always cut up my chicken to order, and I even gave him a couple of home remedies to get his voice back when he was a bit worse for the wear after the Hari Raya Puasa holiday.

But still, the idea of a chicken man who delivers was too enticing, I mean, chicken is heavy, without chicken in my wheelie cart, I would have room for pineapple and mangoes every time, without the risk of crushing my bean curd.

I called the number:  “Hello, chicken man!”  Hey, I like this guy.

It hasn’t been all smooth sailing.  For one thing, we have a little bit of trouble understanding each other, and the phone doesn’t leave any room for the hand gestures and pantomime that are so useful face to face at the market.  His wife helps to translate,  not by taking the phone, mind you, no, that would be too easy.  We do a sort of hilarious three-way round robin where I say the address, he hollers to his wife what he thought I said, she translates for him, he repeats it back to me, I try again...surprisingly, it works.

On our first visit to the market after ordering from the new chicken man “A” needed a couple of chickens, I did not.  I tried to act casual, but I thought he gave me a funny look.   The next visit confirmed it.  “Did you see the scowl on the chicken man’s face?”  I think I did.  

Discussing the situation over dinner at our place, I wondered out loud whether I should buy a chicken from him from time to time, just to stay in his good graces.  Our husbands, who were weak with laughter upon hearing this story for the first time, advised against it.  No, they agreed, a clean break was best.  There is no point in buying “mercy chicken” from the fellow at the market if we intended to stay with the new guy.

So there it is.  My new chicken man brings me chicken and eggs whenever I call, and last time he offered to bring me fish too, if I want it.  I admit, I am tempted. 

Not a Tiger or a Pussycat

It may take a village to raise a child but heaven help the villager who tries to give parenting advice.  

I learned this lesson the hard way, before I even had kids, when I innocently responded to a friend’s complaints about having a back seat full of cracker crumbs left by her toddler by asking “why don’t you just feed her before you get in the car?”

Once the laughing had died down (it took a while) my generous friend simply responded, “Well, just wait and see what you decide.”  And, she was right.  Parenting is not a spectator sport.  Once I was in the thick of it, my back seat was a disgrace of cracker crumbs and hoagie wrappers.

Parenting is a tricky business.  On one side of the balancing act is the long term goal of raising a happy, educated, well adjusted person who is prepared to go boldly into the world.  On the other side are hundreds, even thousands of daily decisions about where to push, where to ease up and where the line is between letting a kid be a kid and abdicating your responsibility as a parent all together. It isn’t easy. 

Here in Singapore, parenting has been front page news with the recent release of Yale Law Professor Amy Chua’s book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” and it’s description of her “Chinese” style of parenting.  Keep in mind, this is the land of “Singapore Math,” a country where the top students get their names and test scores published in the newspaper.  Singapore parents are not pushovers, and even these parents thought the Tiger Mom was a little harsh.

At the same time that I was reading the book, I had the opportunity to see a compelling documentary called “The Race to Nowhere: The Dark Side of America’s Achievement Culture,” which challenges the way children are educated in the United States, especially the focus on test scores and crippling amounts of homework.  This film showed kids who were exhausted, frustrated, miserable, and had no idea why they should even get out of bed in the morning.

It is here that I have to give grudging respect to Amy Chua.  While many of her methods were by my measure extreme (and by her own admission, not wholly successful) her daughters are smart, talented, accomplished young women.  They know how to work hard and achieve their goals, especially the goals they ultimately set for themselves.  Whether I agree with her methods or not, her daughters have learned the important lesson that they can do hard things and that success often means trying again, and again, and again.  

What seemed to be lacking in many of the kids interviewed in “The Race to Nowhere” is what I think of as resiliency, the ability to bounce back and re-group.  These are also smart, talented kids, but many of them seemed wrung out and emotionally fragile.    

Too little sleep (this is a huge problem), too much pressure, and a system that is skewed toward “posting good numbers” left some of these poor kids completely adrift when they reached a point when the numbers weren’t there.  I was shocked at the statistic given in the movie that the University of California system, which enrolls students with an average weighted GPA of more than 4.0, has to provide remedial math and English courses to nearly half of the freshman class.  Ok, so these kids had the grades, but should they really feel good about it?

Trying hard things, failing at first, and eventually being successful; I believe that is what makes a person feel strong, competent and brave enough to reach for goals that are way beyond their grasp.  I would even argue that protecting children from failure does them more harm than letting them fall and teaching them how to get back up.  How do we teach our kids that “failing” at something extraordinary can be judged more of a success in life than playing it safe?  

I don’t know the answer.  I do believe it is our job as parents to give our kids the tools that they need to be successful and happy adults, including discipline, empathy, resilience, self confidence, and a curious mind.  How we decide to go about it is up for debate, but I am not going to criticize the Amy Chuas of the world for trying what worked for her.  And I hope she won’t judge me for telling my son that if he wants to take on the challenge of the more advanced Chinese class, I will be thrilled with “Bs.”

It seems to me that the best we can do is try to understand what motivates our kids, push them when they need to get out of their comfort zone, cut them some slack when they are up against it, hug them a lot and, in good faith, make the tough parenting choices.  With any luck, our wonderful and resilient children will forgive us for our inevitable and all to human lapses in judgment. 

It's Good To Be King!

“When the game is over, the King and the pawn go back into the same box.”  - Italian proverb

I love a good story, always have.  So imagine my delight to discover that, in addition to breathtakingly magnificent architecture and stunning countryside, my recent visit to Cambodia was going to be full of stories of gods and heroes, epic adventure, mystery, magic and, yes, tragedy.   It helped that our tour guide had a flare for the dramatic.  On the first day, taking us to Angkor Wat, the 12th century temple that remains the world’s largest religious building, she brought us in through the back entrance and across the moat “so that you can imagine you are all alone, discovering a lost temple in the jungle.”  

She kept us captivated by the stories carved on the temple walls, Hindu legends of love, adventure, and the search for immortality.  Angkor Wat was built in the 12th Century by Suryavaraman II, one of a line of Khmer “god kings” that started when Jayavarman II, who is credited with uniting the Khmer Empire, had himself declared “Chakravartin” or “king of kings” in the year 802.

A dazzling array of Khmer kings followed, with reigns marked by prosperity, religious tolerance, and the building of some of the most amazing temples anywhere in the world.     King Jayavarman VII, known as the king of all the god kings and the most prolific builder, shifted the official religion from Hinduism to Mahayana Buddhism and ruled in a golden age when all of his subjects, men and women, enjoyed rights to education, property ownership, and healthcare  There is even good evidence to suggest that his two wives, Queen Indradevi and Queen Jayarajadevi served as his chief counselors, taught in the monastery and ruled with him as equals.

Now I have to add, much of what is known about the Angkorian period is pieced together from the carvings in the temples and one 13th Century diary kept by a Chinese diplomat, so there is plenty of room for stories and speculation about how bucolic an existence it really was.  

One area that hovers on the line between history and legend involves the succession from one king to the next. It appears that in this Southeast Asian Camelot, there was no birthright to the throne.  Just because your dad was king didn’t necessarily give you a better shot at the job than any other clever and talented prince.  When it came time to decide, the princes vying for the role pitted their talents against each other and the Brahman would decide who would be king.  Our guide told us that there were ten kingly “qualities” a prince would have to show in order to be found worthy. 

So, what does it take to be an Angkorian god-king?  Well, the king must be honest, he must be a good judge of the people, and he must possess respect for the ancestors and respect for the religion.  In addition, the king has to be the best architect (to design the temples), the strongest, the best warrior (so he could command the army), the best chess player, and the best trainer of elephants.  Last but not least, a king must be handsome.

Actually, that doesn’t sound like a bad model for a 21st Century leader.  Handsomeness aside, the qualities required in an Angkorian king are all ones that could be cultivated with hard work and dedication.  And all of them, except maybe elephant training, would be a good basis for a successful life and compassionate leadership in any century.

Of course, we all know what happened in Cambodia.  The classical age of the Angkorian period was followed by a period known as the dark ages, then French Colonial rule, and decline into the chaos and destruction of the country and it’s people by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.

Since 1979 the country and its people have been struggling to rebuild.  What kind of leadership does Cambodia need right now?  Although the golden dream of an Angkorian god king is tantalizing, our guide had a more practical take on the question.  She told me with a rueful chuckle that she would happily settle for a leader who possesses just two of the top four qualities.  Any two would do.  

And she is teaching her young nieces and nephews how to play chess.

Putting Down Roots

“There are two lasting bequests we can give our children:  one is roots.  The other is wings.”  William Hodding Carter, II. 

I am a rather haphazard gardener.  While I love to be out digging in the dirt, I am likely in my enthusiasm to plant things too close together, or in an inconvenient spot.  This means I often spend much of my gardening time digging things up, dividing, separating, re-planting. There is nothing quite so vulnerable looking as a formerly strong, steady and upright plant that has been dug up and is hanging, roots dangling, from my gloves, waiting to be safely and carefully planted in its new spot.

In Pennsylvania, where winters are cold and the spring is wet, plants need roots that go deep into the ground and hold them steady.  Think Oak trees.  Here in Singapore...well lets just say plants have a few more options.  On my first visit here, I was amazed at the sight of trees whose trunks appeared to start 10 or 15 feet off the ground, roots exposed to the air, sending new tendrils out to find a place to plant themselves away from the main tree.  These trees are also the happy hosts of many epiphytes, plants that live non-parasitically on trees and other plants.  

A couple of months after arriving, I was running through the Botanic Garden here, watching the wind blow some particularly long and dangling roots swinging from the limbs of a tree when it struck me.  These plants are just like us!  Me and my expat compatriots have been dropped into this place, roots forged somewhere else dangling freely, reaching out for something, anything, to hold onto.

I will admit, the months leading up to the move and the first few weeks here are still in many ways a bit of a blur.  The process of uprooting and moving left me literally feeling a sense of vertigo, of spinning wildly through space.  Our roots in Pennsylvania were deep, friends, family, community, we knew who we were.

Here, these things are much less certain, especially for the person in the family known as the “trailing spouse.”  Many people don’t like the implications of this term, arguing that they are equal and enthusiastic partners in this life choice.  However, once the person with the job is digging into work, and the kids are making friends at school, there is a sense of being at loose ends...roots trailing.  

Some jump into volunteer work, others join clubs, or sign up for classes, some (like me) do a little bit of everything.  And do you know what?  It works.  The first connections are the obvious ones, find a grocery store, find a doctor.  I was also lucky early on to find a good friend who is game to tromp all over town and explore.  It is much easier to figure out strange things if you have an equally confused buddy.  Our conversations for the first couple months were frequently punctuated by exclamations of “Oh, I am glad you said that!  I thought I was the only one!”  

I have also been overwhelmed by the generosity of people who seem to really want to help me feel settled:  a mom and nurse who has been here for more than 10 years who gave me thoughtful recommendations for doctors, an acupuncturist and a great Thai restaurant; a friend of a friend back in Pennsylvania who invited me to join her for lunch and introduced me to a group of interesting women; the checkout ladies at the grocery store who made sure I didn’t pay too much for the overpriced imported produce (and who goaded me into finding my local community center so I could get my “Passion” discount card); too many people to count who opened up their address books, iPhones and Blackberrys and asked “what do you need” before sharing phone numbers for hairdressers, tailors, shops, restaurants; and the one or two seasoned expat spouses who looked at me thoughtfully and said “you are doing well, you will be fine.”  

So, here it is, a new community.  Not the firm solid kind built on years of knowing each other and working side by side, but a different one, based on a shared experience and a desire to help each other along.  These roots aren’t deep, they aren’t even planted in the ground anymore, but they are strong.  Combined with the ties to the amazing friends and family back home who never left me feeling alone out here on the other side of the world, I find I feel sure footed and firmly planted, right where I am.