Today is Saturday. In the morning, my son told me that he and his wife, Zelene, planned to come over for dinner around 5:30 PM. Zelene wanted millet porridge and my son wanted Korean-style fried rice noodles.

After taking an afternoon nap, I got up to make dinner. I started cooking the millet porridge first, since it would take more than two hours. Then I started to make lemonade, one of my son’s favorite drinks. Last year I squeezed out some lemon juice and froze it to save as lemon juice ice cubes, but there was only enough to make three glasses of lemonade. I knew from last week that this was not enough lemonade so I went to the backyard to pick a big lemon and came home and rinsed it. I looked at the lemon, which was bigger than my fist, and wondered how to squeeze the juice? After all, my manual juice squeezer can only hold lemons that are up to the size of an egg. I suddenly remembered that when I went to my college roommate, Ping’s house for dinner in big Boston in Massachusetts, I often saw her patting and pressing whole lemons with the skin on and then cutting and squeezing the juice directly. I put the big lemon on the cutting board and turned it while patting it. After a while, the hard lemon became soft. I held the lemon with both hands and squeezed until the juice came out from a hole I had cut into a large bowl. When I saw that some pulp was squeezed out, I felt that I patted the lemon too hard. After squeezing out most of the juice, I cut the lemon into half and scooped out more pulp into the large bowl, then added sugar and boiling water to make a large porcelain jar of lemonade.

It took too much time to make the lemonade today. When they arrived, I had only cooked the twice-cooked pork belly, the rice noodles and rice were not yet cooked.

I rarely cook fried rice noodles so I didn’t have a good sense of how many ingredients to use. The raw materials I prepared such as minced beef, rice noodles soaked in water, chopped carrots and onions were too much for tonight’s dinner.

While stir-frying the rice noodles, I said to them: “Yesterday, one of my high school alumni who came back from Seattle gave me a box of Qingtuan. Do you want to try it?” Zelene replied: “Is your friend from Shanghai? As Shanghai people like to eat Qingtuan.” I said: “No, she is from Sichuan just like me. I haven’t eaten Qingtuan before.” Zelene said: “Let’s try it together.” After the stir-fried rice noodles was ready, the children set the dinner table with bowls, chopsticks and napkins. Before starting our dinner, I followed the instructions given by my friend: “Remove the plastic wrap, steam in a pot, and let it cool before eating.” I steamed two Qingtuan that had a filling of red beans and black sesame for dessert.

There were only two dishes tonight: twice-cooked pork belly and stir-fried rice noodles (with minced beef, green vegetables, bean sprouts, red onions, and carrots). Zelene had millet porridge, my son and I had the leftover rice. I passed the porcelain jar of lemonade to my son and said: “The lemonade is made of fresh lemons with less sugar, drink it first. If it’s not enough, there are three more glasses of lemonade made from frozen lemon juice with more sugar.”

After taking a few sips of fresh lemonade, my son said: “It’s not sweet, it tastes good.” Zelene also took a few sips and said: “This lemonade is not sweet or bitter, it tastes good.” I laughed and said: “It means our lemons in the backyard are of high quality!” My son quickly finished the jar of lemonade. I took out a glass of sweeter lemonade from the oven for him but he noticed an ant floating in the glass and didn’t want to drink it. I took out the remaining two glasses of lemonade from the oven for my son. Fortunately, there were no ants in them, so he quickly finished them.

When we finish our dinner, the Qingtuan were finished steaming and had cooled for a while. Zelene cut the red bean filling Qingtuan into three portions of different sizes. She ate the smallest portion and my son ate the largest portion. They both said it was delicious. I liked it too. I then cut the black sesame filling Qingtuan into four portions. Zelene and I each had one portion, and my son ate two portions. Although my memory is not as good as before, I hope the scene of eating Qingtuan for the first time and the story behind it will stay with me forever.

Later, my daughter sent a text message from Shandong saying that her babies just woke up and wanted to see their grandmother. I quickly opened FaceTime and saw my daughter’s family and her in-laws were in the car ready to go out. After my son and Zelene greeted their niece and nephew, my daughter asked me to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star for my granddaughter Sue. After singing the song, I greeted my grandson Ben, whose arms were full with various stickers, and said hello to Ben’s Nainai, then hung up in a hurry. Although the time was short, it was also the high point of the night. My son listened to me singing and whispered to Zelene: “Look how happy she is!”

I was really happy to see and chat with my daughter’s family from a distance via FaceTime while having dinner and chatting with my son and daughter-in-law.

There was some millet porridge and twice-cooked pork belly left over from tonight, they will be my lunch tomorrow. I plan to stir-fry the remaining ingredients that were originally prepared for fried rice noodles with the leftover twice-cooked pork belly as a dish with the leftover millet porridge.

On Thursday morning, June 2, the air in the rain was very fresh. After thinking of the fragrant hanxiao (sweetbay magnolia flowers), I jogged two miles from home to see the flowers. Standing in front of the blooming sweetbay magnolia in the drizzle, although my sweaty wet body was particularly sensitive to the cold wind, I still took photos of the flowers one-by-one and smelled them one-by-one. Watching blooming sweetbay magnolia always brings back vivid memories of my late mother to enjoy the beauty and fragrance of the flowers with me. I told my mother: “The sweetbay magnolia flowers that were in full bloom last night are back in bud shape this morning. The sweetbay magnolia that was in bud on May 19th has seeds now. The fragrance of the flowers in the rain is more subtle and pure. ”

After enjoying the sweetbay magnolia with my late mother, I felt chilly in the sporadic drizzle. After jogging back home, I felt very warm. Thinking that tomorrow will be the Dragon Boat Festival and my daughter likes zongzi (rice dumpling), I took the frozen pork belly out from the freezer and thawed it in hot water. I also prepared other things, such as washing the sweet rice and then soaking it in water, washing bamboo leaves and then soaking them in cold water for later use.

In the afternoon, my daughter took her son Ben to see a performance in school for the first time, so I went along in case she could not handle the baby by herself. After the performance, there was a traffic jam in the parking lot and we couldn’t back up our car, so we walked around the school campus for a while. I didn’t wear enough clothes for a long outdoor walk and felt very cold while walking around. After coming home, I found that the pork belly had not been thawed yet. Because the pork belly needed to be cut and marinated using ginger and soy sauce for at least two hours before making rice dumpling, I had to break the frozen pork belly pieces with my bare hands and then cut the very cold pork belly into small pieces to marinate. It was unusual for me to touch frozen cold meat for such a prolonged time.

In the evening, Ben went out with his parents to meet his friend Vincent. I spent more than two hours to make rice dumpling at home, taking a cold bamboo leaf from cold water and wrapping it into a cone, putting cold water dripping sweet rice into the cone, adding a few pieces of cold marinated pork belly in the sweet rice, then wrapping close the bamboo leave cone and using string to tie it tight. My hands were touching and holding the cold bamboo leaves all the time for more than two hours, which made my body feel very cold at the end.

In the morning of Friday, June 3, I had a stuffy nose, hoarse voice, and sore throat, all obvious cold symptoms. I took my temperature and saw no fever. The COVID-19 pandemic situation of more than two years has trained me well, I immediately did an antigen home test, the second test in my life. I was happy to see the test result was negative.

I stayed in bed on Friday and Saturday. Lying in bed, I felt pain from every breath I took: my lungs seemed motionless and could not take in air and my nasal cavity seemed to be pricked by thousands of small needles when I inhaled the air. Lying in bed, I also felt aches everywhere: every muscle on my face was in pain, all the muscles in my body were also hurting, and I had a bad headache, like my head would blow up. The pain of the common cold had made me doubt life when I was alone in the empty nest period in the past. I remember that after climbing up to the bedroom on the second floor and falling on the bed, I felt so desolate, painful and hopeless. At that time, what helped me was my dream: don’t let my parents worry about me and be ready to help my children. Today, I have no concern about my late parents’ worries about me at all, but it is more practical to be able to help my children. My mind is set to recover quickly so I can help take care of my little grandson, Ben.

On Sunday, the third day after I caught a cold, I got up and went for a walk at Walden Pond in the afternoon.

On Monday, I was basically fully recovered and ready to take care of my grandson Ben.

Little Episodes

1. 04-21-2022, First antigen test in Germany:

Half July, Chinese New Year’s Eve, Qingming Festival and Double Ninth Festival are the four major Chinese traditional festivals for the worship of ancestors.

On August 15, 2019 which was also July 15 of the Lunar calendar, I was alone in Chengdu waiting for my high school reunion to be started on the next day. In the afternoon, while wandering around for street food near the hotel, I accidentally walked into Temple Wenshu, a famous Buddhist temple. I saw many people, old and young, burning paper money and incense sticks, kowtowing and bowing in the courtyard of Temple Wenshu, which was already piled with lots of ashes. An old man with incense sticks on his hands told me, “Today is the Zhongyuan Jie, a day to worship our ancestors.” What I heard and saw in the courtyard confirmed that Half July is really a trinity of festivals for Buddhism, Taoism and secular Chinese culture.

After witnessing the whole-hearted folk worship of ancestors in surprise, I also burned paper money and incense sticks, and knelt and kowtowed to pray for peace. In the land of my home province, after a long separation, I closed my eyes and thought of my ancestors. Under the rich ceremony atmosphere, I remember the remote full of love ceremony given to me by my mother and my nanny in the mid-1990s.

In the mid-1990s, while my parents and my nanny Yeyi were in my hometown Zigong, I did my PhD research at VSL in the department of physics at the Catholic University of America (CUA) in Washington, D.C. In that time, e-mail did not exist and my parents and I exchanged greetings and family affairs through overseas letters every month. After my daughter was born, my mother wrote to me in a letter: “Today, your Yeyi (my nanny) visited us and asked for the childhood clothes of you and your bother. Your Yeyi was going to Mountain Emei soon. She planned to hang the clothes on the JinDing (the top of Mountain Emei) for the Buddha’s blessing for a peaceful life for you and your brother.” My mother’s detailed and emotional description of my Yeyi’s love ritual for us touched me very much and I will remember this love forever.

“There is no boundary between life and death in Half July”. My love reverberated between heaven and earth, spreading sweetness and eternity, and enriching my soul. I suddenly realized that one of the driving forces for the continuation and spread of ancient customs is love and family affection.

Little Episodes

1. August 15, 2019. I burned paper money and incense sticks, knelt and kowtowed in the courtyard of Temple Wenshu, worshipped my ancestors and prayed for peace.

2. My shared moment: While witnessing the rich and deep rooted folk ancestor worshipping ceremony, I also burnt paper money, worshiped my ancestors, knelt down and expressed my feelings of thankful and gratitude. Today is my mother’s second Zhongyuan Jie in heaven. May my late mother and ancestors bless us with safety and auspice（2019-08-15-2019).

A few days ago, my little uncle and little aunt who were in charge of the kitchen were away from home. My cousin Xiaohua and I were serving two old men: my father, my uncle, and her father. While cooking double cooked pork belly, Xiaohua didn’t see the bean paste, so we searched for bean paste up and down in an unfamiliar kitchen. This unique experience reminds me of my mother’s homemade bean paste and the trivial process of making bean paste.

In the 1970s, when my mother, who paid great attention to food hygiene, heard that the process of making bean paste in Zigong was not clean, she decided to make her own bean paste at home. Looking back, I thought that paying attention to small details like food hygiene was one of my mother’s way of respecting life.

Because our nanny Yeyi was very capable, my mother’s small plan to improve our food hygiene was always well-executed. When I was in elementary school, I followed Yeyi to go through every step of making bean paste. I still remember the details of making bean paste vividly today.

Our bean paste was fermented from dried fava beans after many steps.

1. Preparing the fava beans

Each dried fava bean needs to be handled twice to become the raw material of bean paste. The first time is cutting a dried fava bean into two pieces with a small sharp and heavy chopper machete. The second time is peeling off the skin on the fava bean by hand. Cutting dried fava beans was a technical job, which could only be done by Yeyi; Peeling off the cut fava bean was cumbersome.

Both my brother and I had a quota of peeled and cut fava beans each day for about a week. Peeling dried fava bean always hurt my fingers, so I didn’t like peeling them at all.

2. Preparing the moldy fava beans

When all the dried fava beans were peeled and softened by soaking them in water, Yeyi would take us to the hillside of MaoJiaBa to cut the five-leaves chaste branches home. Yeyi steam cooked the softened fava beans, put them on the bamboo dustpan, and then covered them with the chaste leaves. In a few days later, the cooked and peeled half fava beans under the chaste leaves grew fragrant yellow mold (after four or five days).

I liked the smell of the moldy fava beans, so I went to smell the fava beans in the bamboo dustpan every day.

3. Pickled bean paste

While the fava beans were becoming moldy, Yeyi would buy a few kilograms of fresh small and spicy red pepper, wash them, dry them, and then chopped them into rice grain size. When a layer of yellow mold covered the fava beans on the bamboo dustpan, Yeyi mixed the chopped red pepper and salt into the moldy fava beans, then put the mixed moldy gourd beans into a ceramic jar and sealed them for a period of time. Then the homemade high quality tasty fava bean paste was ready to use.

Little Episodes

1. 2018-05-21, Grain Full, one of 24 solar terms in Lunar calendar.
【Rainy Day】Today is Grain Full, the leaves full of rain droplets are saying, “It’s raining hard.” Chaste leaves are used to cover the cooked peeled half fava beans to induce mold.

2. Fava beans. From top to bottom, left to right: peeled half fava beans, dry whole fava beans with skin, just harvested fresh fava beans with green shells.

03-25-2021， Thursday， cloudy in the morning, sunny in the afternoon.

The scenery of “spring-welcoming flowers” in my memory is framed as winter jasmine bushes filled with bright yellow-colored flowers. Therefore, in early spring, I often say: “Winter jasmine welcomes the spring.”

In March of 2021, I first time noticed that cornelian blooms ahead of winter jasmine to welcome spring on the East Coast. This surprise brought me great joy, as I really love flowers.

I recognized cornelian trees on 10-25-2020, the Lunar Double Nines Day (lunar calendar September 9th, a holiday similar to the National Grandparents Day in USA in terms of respecting and greeting older family members).

On that day, I was home alone rereading and enjoying the famous Tang poem, “Thoughts on Lunar Double Nines Day” by Tang dynasty poet WangWei (王维) . “One misses loved ones twice as much (倍思亲)” from the poem stimulated my deep longing for my late mother and brought back a hidden story about how I was actually an un-wanted child of my mother before I was born.

“Alone in a faraway place (独在异乡)”, I read WangWei’s poem slowly and tasted the loneliness as I was alone for more than a month now. I knew 茱萸(zhu yu), a plant, was associated with the Lunar Double Nines Day for long time, but I never saw it. I suddenly wanted to know: “What is 茱萸?”, the same as wanting to meet a old friend who I had never truly met before.

I did an online search in both Chinese and English and found the following information:

Cornelian (茱萸) is a tree with yellow flowers and red fruits, which usually grows in cold climates. There is a Chinese saying: “One sees cornelian flowers in the spring, its pretty shapes in the summer, its red fruits in the fall, and white snow on it in the winter.” I had never seen cornelian in warm Sichuan nor sunny California.

The cornelian, in Wang’s poem, referred to its fruits, very pretty with a color like ruby.

In China, wearing cornelian fruits on the Lunar Double Nines Day is similar to wearing artemisia argyi in the Dragon Boat Festival, both are Chinese folk customs that hope wearing those plants close to our body will let the aroma of the plants fight off evil and disease and bring us good fortune.

After seeing cornelian online, I realized that there are lots of carnelian trees on the campus of Brandeis University. Unfortunately, on the Lunar Double Nines Day, the cornelian fruits could not stand up the cold weather and were all gone. Afterwards, I began looking forward to seeing cornelian blooming again.

Silently longing for a flower in the fall and winter seasons is a joyful sweet journey, especially as a flower lover, in the COVID-19 quarantine period.

After waiting for more than five months, I finally saw the famous cornelian blooming again (I saw cornelian blooming last year as a nameless flower, without knowing its name). I was very satisified.

Little Episodes

1.Cornelian
“The cornelian tree grows to 5–12 m tall. The flowers are small (5–10 mm in diameter), with four yellow petals, produced in clusters of 10–25 together before the leaves appear. The fruit is an oblong red drupe 2 cm long and 1.5 cm in diameter, containing a single seed.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornus_mas)

2. In Boston Public Garden, the name-tag of cornelian is “Cornelian Cherry Dogwood，Europe”

The cornelian tree in the photo is across from the famous Cheers Restaurants.

3. The Lunar Double Nines Day Poem, by WangWei
jiǔ yuè jiǔ rì yì shān dōng xiōng dì
《九月九日忆山东兄弟》

dú zài yì xiāng wéi yì kè
独 在 异 乡 为 异 客，
měi féng jiā jié bèi sī qīn
每 逢 佳 节 倍 思 亲。
yáo zhī xiōng dì dēng gāo chù
遥 知 兄 弟 登 高 处，
biàn chā zhū yú shǎo yī rén
遍 插 茱 萸 少 一 人。

4. Artemisia Argyi
” In traditional Chinese medicine, The herb is considered to increase the blood supply to the pelvic region and stimulate menstruation, help treat infertility, dysmenorrhea, asthma and coughs.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_argyi)
The Chinese folk believed that it could fight off evil spirits and attract good fortune. Hanging a bunch of fresh artemisia argyi on the door is one of the customs during the Dragon Boat Festival.

02-11-2021, Thursday, Chinese New Year Eve

The global pandemic of year of Gengzi (the first year of starting sexagenary cycle in Chinese lunar calendar) not only shutdown the world, but also canceled many of our trips to visit families and friends. Such isolation cultivated more lingering feelings towards family than normal, especially during the Chinese New Year’s Eve and New Year.

My Chinese New Year’s Eve in the East Coast of US is the morning of Chinese New Year’s Day in my hometown Zigong. I called my father and others to wish them happy New Year.

Over the phone, my father said his taste buds are fine, but his sense of smell is weaker now; he reads books, uses the computer, and writes articles well with glasses, but his hearing is not as good now. My aunt had to repeat what I said over the phone to my father. My father was in a good mood. He still enjoys reading books, reading newspapers, thinking, and writing.

I told him: “The article you posted yesterday on your blog was blocked already.”

My father was not bothered by it, and he said: “I wrote a doggerel poem of eight sentences for Lichuan recently.”

My father happily explained to me the doggerel he wrote for my brother: “Kind and soft, with too big dreams and too easily deceived. Expanded too large, difficulty to downsize. Officials have long hands, private enterprises are stripped. COVID-19 canceled and stopped many things, endure and overcome the hardship.”

When I talk to my father, our topics were always shifted to my brother, because my father has lots to say about his son: blaming, caring, and feeling powerless to help. I used to think my father cared more about my bother than about me. Gradually, I understood my over 90 year old father’s pain, because my brother is the head of our family now; the great devotion of parents never end!

I asked my aunt: “Are you gathering during the New Year?”

My aunt said: “No, but we are planning to gather in March to celebrate your father’s birthday.”

I was touched and said: “Thank you aunt!”

My uncle said: “We worshiped your mother in New Year, burnt paper money, prepared food, wine, and meat for her. We wish she will bless you.”

I said: “I hope she will bless all of us with health. Uncle, you should reduce your drinking.”

After that, my brother called me. We chatted about our father, our late mother, our childhood memories, and our youthful dreams. My brother encouraged me to write daily.

I said: “When the writing isn’t good, I don’t share it.”

My brother said: “Your story about ‘The Screw of Joy and Frustration’ is very funny!”

I was very happy to hear his praise and immediately sang the complete version of “A screw on the side of the road”. Unfortunately, my brother and my sister-in-law don’t remember this song.

I also told my brother: “Recently, I read my college dairies and noticed that you had big dreams in college and liked to go out to meet people. My dream in college was become a good teacher who also wrote dairies.”

2021 Chinese New Year’s Eve, I enjoyed the familial love across Pacific Ocean, chatted about little things and grew excited over trivia.

“Unforgettable Tonight”, came from Chinese ChunWan (CCTV Spring Festival Gala Evening), on 2021′s Chinese New Year’s Eve that ChunWan already became so faraway and so vague.

10－27-2020, A Monday

My mother loves flowers, she loves light-colored fragrant flowers, such as sweetbay magnolia (含笑), chloranthus elatior (鱼子兰), Chinese perfume plant (aglaia odorata米兰), orchid, jasmine, winter sweet, osmanthus fragrans… I learnt how to enjoy flowers from my mother.

I never thought I would be attracted to the morning glory by my mother. Because the morning glory, bright colored without any sweet smell, is not my mother’s favorite type of flower.

From December 2017 to May 2018, during my mother’s last few months when she was too weak to step outside of the house, there were blooming morning glories inside the house. Therefore, morning glories were one of the last flowers my mother saw in her life. Because of this, I planted some morning glories in the front of our Waltham home to remember my mother.

The morning glory blooming in late October.

October 25th, 2020 is September 9th in the lunar calendar, which is the Lunar Double Nines Day (ChongYang Festival), a very old Chinese holiday that began as early as the Spring and Autumn Period (770 – 476BC) . Nowadays, during the ChongYang Festival, similar to the National Grandparents Day in USA, Chinese people usually send happy wishes to their older parents and grandparents.

The morning glories blooming on October 25th, the Lunar Double Nines Day, lasted for two days and faded at the end of October 26th. The extremely long blooming morning glories was like a lingering desire for the story of my mother deep in my heart…

In my hometown Zigong in the 1980′s, when my retired mother and I went out shopping, my mother often met her old colleagues and often stopped to chat with each other for a few minutes. After my mother finished chatting, while continuing towards our destination, my mother would tell me a bit about the colleague she had just met.

As a career woman who devoted her youth and beauty to her work, my mother told me the story about her colleagues which was also story about herself.

One day, we went out as usual, and my mother met a man. My mother stopped to chat with him for a while, and then we continue to walking. My mother told me a story that I never could forget.

“I first met him in 1964 when we were extremely busy, working day and night to visit factories and to prepare reports in the office. He just came to the office from a factory to replace my position.

When I started to transfer my tasks to him, I told him that I had scheduled an abortion in the hospital and need sometime to rest and recover so I needed to hand over all my current tasks to him. Once he heard my reason, he urged me not to do it, as abortion is very dangerous… At the end, I did not go the hospital, because your Yeyi also said she could take care two children so we had you.”

My mother hid this story about my life very deep; I only learnt about it after I grew up and after I became a high school teacher, and only by accident.

I remembered Yeyi（叶姨） often said to me: “When your mother was carrying you, I often used a whole big bowl of very hot red pepper to make fish for her, the fish was too hot for me, but your mother always said it was not hot at all. Very strange, because after you were born, your mother could not stand even a little bit of hot spicy.”

However, when my Yeyi was very angry about me, she never mentioned that I was once my mother’s unwanted child.

In 1960′s to 1970′s, there was probably not much knowledge about children’s psychology in China. That my mother and my Yeyi tight-lipped about my birth story for more than 20 years made me realize that loving makes people wise and I was deeply loved by my mother and Yeyi.

I am very thankful for the deep love from my mother and Yeyi.

Little Episodes

On Sunday, ChongYang Festival, the blooming morning glories in the afternoon

On Sunday, ChongYang Festival, the blooming morning glories in the evening

On Monday morning, still blooming morning glories