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
