A Provincial Province

Before I flew out of Shanghai, A asked me to do one thing for him. Please don't laugh at the Fujianese - everybody on my mission did. I smirked at his bizarre request and then took off.

My boss and I just landed in Fujian, a coastal province where people were known for being provincial, and breathed in the overwhelming humidity. The local taxi driver was playing the perennial favorite Chinese game of "Guess where the foreigner's from." Meanwhile, I was trying not to mimic his feminine quacking accent that was so stereotypical Fujian. As we drove away from the airport, the driver started tapping his steering wheel, perplexed that it was so hard to guess my boss' nationality.

My boss

Hmm. You don't look like us. 

Are you Japanese? But your Mandarin is so good. 

Oh wait, you're darker. Indian?

I know! You must be German. 

No, wait! You can't be - your arm hair is too long.

My boss was a standard six foot three American complete with five every day polos that he rotated.

--

Fujian is also known for its food.

A said that it was Fujian seafood that taught him to appreciate all other Chinese food.

After a late night dinner at a local stall, I finally gained more appreciation for Panda Express. Everything I was eating was just so . . . ugly.

These fish look like retired bull dogs who have given up on life.

 Worms writhing wearily in the water. 

Fish breathing thing.

 Surprising texture of chicken cartilage - crunchy yet chewy.

Durian. Gooey texture with pungent smell. 

A little like eating your own throw up. With chopsticks.

My colleague brought it back to our hotel room

 and I stayed up all night gagging.

Mini lobsters in chili oil. The messiest ever.

Definitely not a first date dish.

Discussing Love on a Lake

We discussed love while rowing on a freshly painted boat on Phewa Lake in Nepal.

He rowed. And I pretended I knew how to.

In the far distance, we could make out the faint outlines of the Annapura, the more accessible mountain range of the mythical Himalayas, which stood proud and silent on that hazy spring day.

Alex steered our boat around the small island that held the non-descript Hindu temple, dressed up like a blushing schoolgirl for the tourists, while we gazed upwards towards the pearly white Buddhist stupa planted up on a neighboring hill.

Sandwiched between the two symbols, we talked of love in the abstract. In the practical. In the religious.

I asked Alex what he knew about Buddhism. He shared with me the few tenets that he knew, most notably that of non-attachment.

I leaned back and frowned at a memory of a dear friend who recently embraced Buddhism. A year ago, she was bitterly and vocally unhappy with her marriage because of a void of understanding, touch, love, and common ideals.  She had dreamed of something different and contemplated divorce. Now, with the smile of the recently converted playing on her lips, she preached non-attachment to me in a crowded, cheap Italian restaurant. While her rambunctious 7 year old son screamed and kicked for his mom's iPhone, she patted him absentmindedly and explained to me why she was happy now. The key was letting go. All couples, regardless of the quality of their relationship, would end up apart at the end of mortal life. So why obsess about the journey? If she stopped hoping for love, then she would not despair over the deafening silence between them. Or the late nights she waited up for him to come home. Or the lack of gentleness.

If she stopped being attached to her husband, then she would be happy.

I swirled around my cream of mushroom soup with the tin spoon, hiding the torrent of anger behind my masked attempt to understand her sentiments. I wanted to scream that she was giving up. That she was settling for a shell of a happy life. We ended our lunch early because her son whined about going to the arcades and snatched my spoon to drum out his demands. I also grew weary of my curious burst of anger.

Alex listened quietly to my story and disillusionment with the concept of letting go.

I passionately argued that at least for myself, I either cared all the way or didn't care at all. Despite my parents cautioning temperance and 'it's just a job' whenever I cried on the phone because I wasn't sure how much more I could physically/ emotionally give to my work, I would still dip into my bank of inner reserve and drum out more energy to find solutions to never-ending problems. Or how I kept reaching out to a family member with a hopeful tentativeness even though she's hung up on me multiple times.

Isn't that what love is? I asked urgently. Not letting go?

In between a few more gentle paddles to maneuver us to a quiet alcove, Alex mused that love, in its ultimate form, is one of letting go of expectations of outcomes. It is the unconditional love that Christ spoke of, because He still loves us eternally regardless of our actions. He brought up the example of a proverbial modern mom who became angry because despite repeated reminders, the daughter was not practicing her instrument. The motive was love and hope that the daughter would develop her talents. But the anger arose because the daughter was not conforming to a set image the mom had crafted. Love, within the context of our conversation, would be for the mom to let go of the story she had weaved in her mind about her reality and instead persevere in love through the difficult, messy, and wonderfully unplotted life she ended up sharing with her daughter.

On our way paddling back to the muddy shores, I scanned the lake for the attachments in my life and saw them splayed out across the rippled surface of the the deepening water. Tangled in my thoughts, I decided to throw my stories, chained to their imagined endings, overboard and just let them sink to the bottom of Phewa. I decided to try to love in the best way I knew how and let things happen as they may. I would let go but not give up.

Across the lake, a proper Nepali storm was rolling in, a harbinger of the monsoon season.

Two Minutes Away from Being a Gypsy's Daughter

I was two minutes away from being a gypsy's daughter.

Let me explain.

One cold Toronto winter, my mom sat huddled on the bus, her mind stumbling over the accounting concepts she had just barely learned, and noticed two shiny black tags. The tags were worn by two girls, young and bright eyed, as they animated Jesus Christ and salvation with their excited hands, deep in a conversation with an indulgent Indian woman.

My mom, who could never mask her facial expressions particularly well, simply stared. The girls must have noticed and smiled. They eagerly pulled out their notebooks and asked for her phone number. My mom, who had recently awakened to her blossoming yearning for higher meaning, started reciting her familiar digits. All of a sudden, the bus pulled to a violent screech and the girls got up to go. It was their stop. They hurried off the bus, while twisting behind to catch the last of my mom's number.

The door closed with a stubborn finality. My mom shrugged. She never did finish telling them the last two digits of her number.

--

Another frustrating accounting class. Another bus ride.

This time my mom plopped down tiredly beside a large woman. The woman looked at my mom intensely and asked her if her birthday was May XX. Spot on. My mom whipped her head around, frowned, and consciously checked to see if her ID was exposed.

The large woman with the fleshy hands and the exaggerated rings ('a really gypsy type' as my mom later explained) patted her and told her to stop checking. She nonchalantly explained that she had looked into the crystal ball that morning and foresaw that she would sit next to a person that day who was born on May XX.

For the next few stops, my mom sat, spellbound, by tales of stars and tea leaves. She promised that she would make it to their large convention on divination later that week.

And she tried. Through trains, buses, crowds, she made her way uptown after class one day, racing to catch the shuttle that took everybody to the convention. She arrived, panting, just to see the bus pull out of the parking lot. Through the blue-tinted window, the gypsy woman pursed her lips and gestured resigned acceptance with her large palms face up, shaking her head at my mother who was standing pathetically on the lawn.

Two minutes. She was two minutes late.

A little down, she retraced her steps back to the temporary house she was staying in. She had barely sat down when the tired old phone rang.

Hello? Hi, we're missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Saints! Did you happen to meet some sister missionaries on a bus around a month ago and start giving them your number? Well they relocated to a different zone, but er, if you're this woman, we would love to teach you more about Jesus Christ.

There were 100 combinations of the phone numbers. There were endless number of scenarios where my mom could have missed that fateful call. There were two minutes that could have launched my mother, and our family, down a completely different path.

But God chose this particularly curious sequence of events. And that was how my mom became a Mormon.