From little things, big things grow

In the last few weeks at kinder, young Master Grizzlewick has been (figuratively) working on his emotions. Specifically, he has been putting together a statement and picture to match the basic emotions: happy, sad, angry, upset, surprised.

He brought a stapled booklet of these home yesterday, and proudly showed it to me.

I smiled as I read the first entry:

"It makes me happy when...

...there are no bugs or wind outside"

Fair enough - I prefer a still day to a windy one too, but then I'm not a windsurfer.

And then I turned the page to find this:


"It makes me sad when...

...people ruin my mum's ideas"


I don't know how other people might respond to such a statement, but I gathered him into my arms, thanked him for his love and told him that it makes me sad when people ruin his ideas, too.

This follows on from a moment, a few weeks ago, when he was trying to comfort his friend Beach, who had recently had his father die. Grizzlewick said to him, "It's okay. When you die, you get to go up and live in the clouds"*.

"Don't be stupid," Beach replied matter-of-factly. "You'd fall straight through".






* I don't know where he got this from, it wasn't from me.

So who shall I start with? Tell me how to begin*

So, in the spirit of not becoming irretrievably paralysed by guilt and depression over the state of the world (and also because I hate it when people try and make every problem some one else's) here is what I am doing about it.


1. Riding my bike to work.

I will freely admit that I let this go a bit. No more. If only because I told my friend L that she must ring me on Friday night to check that I did. There's nothing like a bit of outside pressure.


2. Giving blood

Not everyone's eligible. Some people are excluded, and some throw up (I share an office with two people who fit one of these criteria each). But I can do it, so I shall. I did it yesterday in fact, and the little 'un scored a whole bunch of dry biscuits, besides**.


3. Putting a bucket in my shower and watering the garden with it

Particularly useful when one showers more than once a day, as one almost must in weather such as this, at least if one wants any discerning company.


4. Turning off all the appliances at the wall when I'm not using them

Requires more discipline than you'd think.


5. Putting my money where my mouth is (figuratively)

I have spent a lot of time lately revving up a local community group. Tonight I took on a committee level position. It's about freakin' time.


6. Taking my local government vote seriously

Yeah, you just KNEW I'd work that one in somehow, didn't you?


7. Remembering how much I love stuff

Not just my family, who are obviously at the top of this list. All kinds of stuff.

Like granny smith apples when they're just a little bit too tart for most people.

Fresh linen.

Sherbert bombs - how awesome are they?

Trash-talking Led Zeppelin: it's not like you can say they don't deserve it.

Friends who are deliriously happy about their new babies.

The look on Grizzlewick's face in photos of him operating a fire hose under the supervision of the local fire station staff.

The singlet top I'm currently wearing. Trust me, it's excellent.

Coming home to find the freezer fully stocked with calippos.

Living right near the beach, when you just know it's going to be a long hot summer.

Friends finding awesome jobs that suit their lives perfectly.

Having the kind of good ideas that make you rub your tummy with glee.

Lusting after houses you may never own, but it's really nice to dream.









* This is a line from a Bonnie Raitt song, 'Cry like a rainstorm'. It's an awesome song and I demand you listen to it immediately. Also 'Return of the Grievous Angel' by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. I'm on a bit of a country jag, what can I say?

** It's possible people are horrified by this. Grizzlewick wasn't.

Words I have no interest in reclaiming for the sisterhood:

manhole.

I'm not going down there.

I don't care how feminist it is down in the dark, smelly, dingy claustrophobic tube of horror.


I'm not going.

You win this time, patriarchy*.

































* Just so we're clear, the running score now stands at

Patriarchy: 7,678,364,243,555,9876,123.5

Gigglewick: 3

I think it's a fair fight.

New Gold Mountain

When I was five years old, I started school at a small rural school. My family had lived in the area for two years, and I had been to playgroup and four-year-old kinder in another town nearby.



During that year, I was the only girl in a prep class of four, and one of just five girls in a school of 14 students. I was also only one of two students who had parents who were not farmers. But there was something else significant about me: my father. My father is half-Chinese. Although he is Eurasian in appearance it is also clear, particularly when one is surrounded almost exclusively by people of Anglo heritage, that he is distinctly ethnically different.



At the end of first term, when autumn had begun its rapid descent into winter and the mud began to gather in patches across the school yard, the boys found a new game to play. The game was “World War II”, and it revolved around finding sticks shaped like guns, and heaping bracken into piles to create trenches. And, of course, shooting the enemy. That enemy was me.





Because, even though I don’t look particularly Chinese, it was clear to the boys (who had seen my father) that I was probably Japanese, and as a result, the perfect – if unwitting - enemy combatant in their role-play. After about a week of playing this game, I acquired a nickname: “Jappy Jappy”. Two older boys would dance around me chanting it, while they pulled their eyes to slits and stuck their tongues out at me. I didn’t know what it meant, but my five year old sensibility was keen enough to realise that it was mean.


The teasing became significant enough that one day I went home to my mother in a flood of tears. After letting me wail for a couple of minutes, she stood up and stalked across the room. “Well, you just go back and tell them that they haven’t even got the race right,” she said, matter-of-factly. Which I did, because I was a precocious and, despite that experience, proud child. The older boys shut up pretty sharpish when I made this retort, because while (they thought) they knew all about the Japanese from their grandfathers’ stories of the war, they didn’t know much about China.



What I didn’t know then of course, was the defining nature of this experience. Since that time, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, I have collected around me a narrative for my Chinese family which tries to marry sameness with difference. For while they were, until my grandfather, a wholly ethnic Chinese family, they have been in Australia longer than any of my mothers’ German or English relatives. My grandfather himself was a soldier in World War II, even though many of his own countrymen could not tell the difference between a Chinese face and a Japanese one.



I don’t have the camaraderie of the “them and us” experience, which can bind families and groups together in their defence of their heritage: mainly because there were never any other “us”s around when I was growing up. Instead, I have “your dad’s funny-looking” and “what IS your dad, anyway?” and “What are you, like, a quarter?” It’s not the overt racism of my father’s childhood, with its associated beatings on the Lilydale train line. It’s sort of empty really: like I’m not Chinese enough to claim it, but not Anglo enough to deny it. Meanwhile my father fights his own battles, justifying his heritage in an Irish pub recently when a prominent musician accused him of being out of place: “I’m Irish too,” my Dad replied, “however I might look to you, I’m Irish too”.



I am, in retrospect, thankful for my own experience of racism by proxy, because the strong protective streak that other kids teasing my father evoked has not left me, it has grown and flourished. As an adult I have a strongly defined sense of social justice, of inclusion, and the knowledge that we define ourselves by the way we receive others. And it’s that inclusion, that blindness to difference that I see in my own child.

For this most important cultural heritage I thank my father and my mother, and those who came before them.

While I don't normally do such things, this post is dedicated to E.M.L and D.B.