Category: Relationships

2 Truths, No Lie

BettyLeave a comment

“If I had been like you when I was younger, I would have been much happier.”

It would have been a very sweet thing for my boss to say if he hadn’t meant that I was hopeless. Happiness = foolishness. Inept. Didn’t think things through.

“You aren’t happy now?” I asked.

“Oh I’m happy now, but when I was working, I wasn’t like you. I was afraid to mess up. So I thought things through. I would never come to my boss like you come to me now, just talking.“

I laughed because it was funny and because it’s what I do when I have nothing to say. 

“Your parents gave you a good brain,” he said, “Didn’t you do well in school?”

Yes.

“Then why don’t you use it?”

Should my confidence at work, or more specifically, in front of my boss be charted or graphed, it would look like a rather unstable company’s stock ticker. Up and up when I’m paying attention, writing things down, listening. Reading my damn emails. Down and down when I don’t do any or just half of that. I am one person inside his office, then once I step through the glass doors and am back at my desk, my spine curves a little. Certain muscles loosen – and if the brain is a muscle, that’s the very first one to go slack. I forget who I’m working for and busy myself with other things, other executives, and Gmail. And this tumblr. 

My boss wants me to be a better person. I know and appreciate this. He asks me to raise the bar for myself by using my brain in relation to getting his affairs in order. As getting his affairs in order is 99% of my job description, this is not much to ask. Sometimes I even get his affairs in order. In a good week, his affairs are 90% in order. In a bad week, I’ve let what seemed like 50% of things fall to the wayside and he, with his razor sharp memory (don’t be fooled by his calm, sleepy demeanor and his perpetually reclined posture), shoots me little daggers of reminders.

“What happened to this and this?”

“Where are we on this and this?”

“When is this meeting I asked you to schedule?”

And with each ping comes a little zap to my heart and I want to die because goodness how could I have forgotten that! And that! And this! What the hell am I doing in this chair? Why hasn’t he stormed out to replace me already?

The worst (and funniest) is when I go in and speak to him because it’s my best version of firefighting – better talk to him in person than ping him back with my shortcomings – and he looks up, mildly surprised to see me in the flesh because he expects me to hide behind a giant screen of lost productivity. He adjusts his eyes to my grim, exhausted expression and asks point-blank: “Who’s the assistant here. You or me?”

“I am.”

“Then why the hell am I the one reminding you to remind me about things? Do you want to sit in this seat? You want my job? Because I can do yours a helluva lot better than you do it.”

Instead of reply with words, I just sigh and throw my hands up. My signature – the “I’m sorry, boss. I’m a dud. You hired a dud. And now I’m just going to throw my hands up and make the universal sound of tired defeat. Sigggghhhh.”

                                               —————————————————–

When I’ve gone old and hoary and have had children more productive than I, and they have children more productive than I, I’ll relish telling them the story of grandma’s first real job.

“I was the executive assistant, kiddies, it was my job to help my boss, the company’s biggest cheese to keep his appointments and remember important things.”

“But grandma, your memory sucks. You can’t even remember our birthdays.”

“I know, but back then it wasn’t so bad.”

At which point my daughter will pop her head in and say, “Mom, please. You never remember MY birthday and you gave birth to me. I doubt you could remember anything for your boss.”

Then I’ll sigh and shrug, a mischievous grin on my face. I’m always one for a story.

“Did he fire you?”

“Oh no,” I’ll say, (hopefully this will be the truth), “He thought I was useless, but I like to think that he liked my personality.“

“Did you make him laugh?”

This question will catch me off guard, but I will answer honestly.

“No, I did not. I made a lot of other people laugh, but I did not make him laugh. More often than not, he made me laugh.”

The grandkids will be perplexed, why keep a clown around when she can’t even make you laugh?

“Then…what did he like about you?”

And I’ll answer as truthfully as I can.

“I don’t know. Perhaps nothing. Sometimes, you can’t ask for love or even like, and you wouldn’t ever ask for hate. I think he just accepted me. Hiring me was his decision and he stuck by it. You don’t give up on people.”

“That’s why he told you over and over again to think things through, right Grandma? That’s why you tell us too, right?”

“Yes. In his strange, borderline indifferent way, he didn’t give up on me. Never exploded in my face. Never complained about his mouth going dry giving me the same lecture over and over, almost once a week. Sometimes twice a week, for over a year.”

“So he was a good boss.”

“Yes, he was.”

“Then why did you leave?”

And here, I’ll tell them two truths: one about myself and one about life. The first was that their grandmother was not good at very much, but she was quite adept at quitting. Quite. It could be masked this way or that: getting out while she was ahead, or just stopping something before she reached what would eventually be a dead end…but the fact of the matter was that she abandoned paths almost just as quickly as she began new ones. It was not always a bad thing, but certainly, many doors remained closed to her because her stride never quite hit the threshold. What’s more, it was written on her palm, in her life path line, which was not one line but many, tiny fine lines that crossed and recrossed so that it formed a chain down the middle, to her wrist.

The second was that for all her boss’s talk about using her brain, he had neglected to mention – not that he needed to, because wordlessly, by his constant presence and visible devotion the Company he created, demonstrated – that she should evaluate too if her heart was in it. For the old woman looking back, the two were never meant to be separated. A job without the other is just that: a job.

“Head and heart, darlings. Head and heart. It is not too idealistic, no matter what people tell you, to work with both.”

And my grandkids will nod and say, “That’s why you write, right Grandma?”

“That’s right. That’s why I write.”

Kharma

BettyLeave a comment
We’re not a religious family. Once, when my Christian friends in elementary school asked why it was that I slept in on Sundays rather than attend church, I shrugged and said, “I go to Chinese school on Saturdays.” 
They stared at me blankly and said, “Yes, but that’s not the same thing.” And hearing them talk about their church activities and romances and holiday festivities, it didn’t sound like the same thing. They seemed to enjoy church and I, at least on Saturday mornings before I arrived, did not enjoy Chinese school. It was not my religion. It was the linguistic and utterly necessary (now when I look back) facet of my culture. That wasn’t a distinction I was wise enough to make as a child. 
So my friends went to church on Sundays while I slept in. One Sunday (or perhaps it was another day, but for narrative’s sake, let’s pretend it was Sunday), I asked my father, “Why don’t we go to church?” 
Without looking up from the TV he said, “You can go if you like.” 
“I know,” I said. My parents were very open that way. They encouraged me to try this and that, at least my father did, because it meant I would have less time to pester him during the Taiwanese news.
“But why don’t you go to church?” 
“I don’t need it,” my father said shortly. I didn’t see him move, but I detected a slight increase in the volume of the television. A young, pretty Taiwanese news anchor rapidly announced the evening’s headlines. It never seemed strange to me that my father was always watching the news in Taiwan. Because we had a fancy satellite dish, we got it in real time. I grew up with the sharp voices of young female anchors in the background. 
I asked my father what was then, for a 9 year old, a very thoughtful question, “You don’t need church or you don’t need religion?” 
“Neither,” he said, “But if you want to go to church, go.” He raised the volume one notch more before I could ask another question. I’m sure my father would have asked me to go to Church at that moment juts to stop bothering him. 
Later, I posed the same question to my mother, who answered more thoughtfully: “I’m not religious, but if I had to align myself with a particular faith, it would be Buddhism.” 
This made perfect sense. We celebrated Christmas, but not because of Jesus or anything, and I think the only times my mother stepped inside churches were weddings or the time she visited Europe. “That’s all they have in Europe,” she said, “Giant churches that all look the same. And pigeons.” A few years later, when I was going through a shoebox of photos from that trip, on which she’d gone to 8 or 9 different countries, I asked her where a few of them were taken. “It’s written on the back,” she said. I turned the photographs over and saw that she’d written “Europe” on all of them.

Aside from Christmas and the odd Easter dinner at so and so’s house, we really didn’t do anything else remotely religious. At least not in America.

Rene Magritte Golconde ,1953 Oil on Canvas. Houston, Texas, The Menil Collection

In Taiwan, we are religiously, a different family. This came to head when my grandfather passed away and suddenly all of us Ho’s became almost monkish in our devotion to the temple where our name plate was displayed. “Name plate” is a rough translation – a more direct one would be “ancestral name placeholder.” Basically it’s a small, standing plaque with our family name on it. You pay “rent” (actually I don’t know why I put that in quotes. It is actual rent) to the nuns at a temple to have it displayed (either prominently, which means more rent, or less so) and it represents the souls of your ancestors. I think it’s a convenience thing, as going to a local temple to worship the plaque is a lot more convenient than driving to the actual grave site, normally located in the countryside.

Apparently you have more than one plaque, because families, as you know, can be quite complicated. We had one for my grandma and her aunt, an old woman with no teeth who came to Taipei from Shanghai and helped raise my dad and uncles. They called her, in Shanghainese, “Nn’na.” I think their plaque is under “Hu,” my grandmother’s maiden name (some day my parents will read this and tell me, ashamedly, that I got everything wrong).  For many years their plaque was displayed at a temple that wasn’t very good about the upkeep. As happens with limited storage space, more nameplates kept on crowding in because other people in other families kept dying and pretty soon the “Hu” plaque was pushed back to a dark, dusty corner of the display case. Also, people weren’t too good about paying their rent – either that or the nuns at that temple were just lazy jerks and just let things fall to the wayside. Whatever it was, my grandma’s spirit was getting really sick of it. My grandma wasn’t a flashy woman, but she had been the proud matriarch – mother to three well-to-do sons and the third wife of a well-to-do customs’ agent who, even if he didn’t bring home too much bacon, made enough so that she could invest it in property. The property passed down to her sons, who built things on it and sold the things to people who needed such things (namely, housing and office space) and yeah, she was kind of proud of all that.

It made perfect sense that a woman who had built a small fortune around property should be in want of good real estate, even long after she’d left earth. She was disappointed with the set up her sons had left her in and decided to do something about it.

This is where things get weird. In Chinese numerology people born on certain days at certain times are said to be “lighter” in spirit than others. Their spiritual “weight” is lighter than average, meaning they can, if they’re not careful, drift to and fro between realms. I’m not explaining it too well, but I’ll quantify it with two stark examples. If 1 were extremely light and 10 was extremely heavy, my father, the man who doesn’t need religion but isn’t quite an atheist, would weigh in, spiritually, at around 7 or 8. Oddly enough, he studied numerology on a whim in his late twenties and, when my brother was born, predicted his son’s future physical attributes and certain personality traits quite accurately. By the time I came around he’d lost the instruction booklet.

Rene Magritte The Beyond, 1938 L’au-dela Oil on Canvas Private collection

But with children and the responsibility that comes with, my father more or less planted his already firm feet more firmly into the present, earthly life. When his father passed away, he worshiped at his grave out of respect to the rest of the family, still living, not because he actually felt my grandfather could hear what he was saying. (Indeed during a particularly long chanting session – I’ll more into detail about that later – my father fell asleep while kneeling and almost keeled over until a nun came to nudge him awake. My family was embarrassed. My father said, “What? What?”). My mother on the other hand, despite her relative poopooing of western churches, is extremely open minded to religious practices and other matters of the heart and spirit. She is not only receptive to Buddhist teachings, but also, on the whole, a spiritual person. She is the one that first brought to my attention the idea of Kharma – that what you do in this life could very well affect your next life – and while I know some people who resign themselves to this idea that their life now sucks because they’re paying for something bad in their past life, I don’t buy it – or at least try very hard not to. But on the spiritual weight scale, my mother is probably a 2 or 3.

If a spirit floated into the room where my mother and father sat watching television, the spirit would have a better chance getting my mother’s attention because a.) my mother doesn’t really watch too much television and b.) my father would, should the spirit successfully make faint contact, just turn up the volume. Even if the spirit happened to be his own mother.  

On Working

BettyLeave a comment

I had dinner with my boss’s wife and their preteen daughter tonight at a fancy club, of which my boss is a member. There’s a gym there and separate “grills” for men and women -built like an old Tuscan building with a sprawling dining room that overlooks a man-made lake with geyser-like fountain, kind of a shittier version of Lake Geneva, though on a sunny afternoon the view from the dining room is quite nice. They did everything they could to make the patrons forget that they were actually dining in the middle of a bland business park, less than two miles away from the airport, and instead created the illusion, with the tall windows, marbled hallways and crawling vines that they were in some sort of opulent yet rustic escape, a Bavarian king’s winter hunting palace. The whole place is very strange. The patrons are mostly white – a tense mixture of old, new and corporate money, and old. My boss once said he felt like a newborn baby when he hung out at the club because everyone else had one foot in the coffin. Well, he didn’t use those words exactly – I’m pretty sure the expression he used was even funnier, or it was the deadpan way he delivered it because I had burst out laughing and for a minute thought, “Hey, this man I work for is pretty damn funny.”

And he is. I think I’ve got a good sense of humor, but that sense stiffens when I’m in “professional assistant mode,” (which, sadly, really isn’t very professional or helpful at all). In front of my boss, whatever I say in the way of humor usually falls down flat. There are plenty of other people at the office who think I’m funny, and I guess that’s good enough – but in front of my boss I’m too much of a nervous, stuttering mess. I leave the jokes at the door along with my brain and put all my energy into not forgetting anything he says, though I usually do anyway, because if memory serves, the brain is where memories are stored. All that forgetting makes him pissed, which makes me less funny.

For the most part, I think I’ve written this before, I like my job. There are mornings I wake up, glare at my work phone (from which my two alarms ring) and think, “I think it’s time to enroll in a master’s program. Any master’s program, with classes that begin after 10AM,” and certain evenings, when I drag my feet out of work at 6PM, my body exhausted not because I’ve done anything particularly physical, but because I’ve been sitting and staring at the computer so long that my body doesn’t seem to know how to straighten up and move any other way. These are usually the days I drive past a homeless person sitting near the freeway entrance with a sign that says, “Please help me, I’m hungry,” but what I read is, “Be glad you have a job, you ungrateful wretch.”

On particularly taxing mornings I am heartless enough to roll my eyes and think, “Well, at least you can sleep in.”

I don’t know what it is, but lately, I’ve been losing it. And I know what I’m overdue for is an attitude adjustment. My parents are sensing my unease, and my mom has taken to coaxing me with her usual spiel, of “once you make a decision, stick to it.” She is, of course, referring to my casual mentioning some months ago that I enjoyed my job and could see myself staying here for a while. I left it deliberately vague then, because I am nothing if not self-aware, but after the holidays and CES, I had thought, stupidly, that the “taxing” part of the job was over and that everything after that would be cake. So one evening, I announced to my parents that I planned to work at the company for at least another year.

They were overjoyed, low are their expectations for me, and said they supported me in whatever path I chose, but that they were very happy I had decided to extend my current status as a productive, tax-paying, salary-earning member of society.

“If you decide to go back to school after you put your time in, we’ll fully support you then, but please work as long as possible. Who knows? You may grow to like it more and stay even longer!”

My father half-joked (other half entirely hopeful) about my climbing the corporate ladder, but I pictured the tree outside my bedroom window and thought of how much I preferred to climb that instead.

But of course the taxing part of any job is never over, just as the taxing part of life – for the long haul – is never over. In elementary school I braced myself for math tests and spelling bees (which I secretly enjoyed because I read a lot and knew some big words, until I lost to a girl who read more and knew bigger words. Then I hated the damn bee). In middle school I dreaded math tests and puberty, though it sort of hit me like a mild cold – something that made you uncomfortable, but wasn’t so harmful as to prevent you from having friends (with similar symptoms) and being, for the most part, an upbeat human being. In high school there were too many honors and AP classes and the godforsaken SAT’s on top of that AND the million clubs I joined when really, all I wanted to do was play badminton. And even then I didn’t think seriously about being a writer – because in high school, you think very seriously about other things, but becoming a writer is not one of them. But almost every day, I wrote something. Somewhere. Either online, or in my diary, or in a long letter to a friend. 

Any job, if you are seeking to turn it into a career, must be viewed as a marathon – Forrest Gump cross-country style – and not a sprint. It was stupid of me to promise what, at this point, I’m not sure I can deliver. I have a terrible record of commitment – to schools, to jobs (though to my credit I have never been fired, expelled or suspended and almost every job I’ve left – the ones I’ve bothered to list on my resume – have left their doors open to me in case I should change my mind one day. Imagined future epiphany: Oh my God, I did want to assist that funny man and get gas for him and lunches for forgetful executives forever and ever until the end of my days! I think not. No, I’ve come to recognize that my marathon is based on another road.

But when it comes to people, I stay. I have no problem committing my ears to their stories, their stories to paper. Some, I stay in their lives because I refuse to let them forget me. There is Jane, whom I met during my first week and liked immensely and who then promptly moved to Chicago. And more than a handful of others I’ve come to know and like and, when I get the chance, pepper them with questions about their lives outside of work because not only is it fascinating, it is sustaining.

At the Company, it is a rare bird who does not like the people. A young coworker once caught me on a bad day and in an effort to cheer me up, wrote a me a kind message telling me to look on the bright side, that we were surrounded by great people and that he had recently been offered a better paying position at a better job, but which he rejected because he couldn’t bear to leave the people. It was honestly a terrible day at work, but the fact that this young man took the time to write me the note cheered me immensely, and renewed my faith in myself. That is what the best kind of coworker can do for you.

I don’t believe everyone likes their work – I for one, do not mind the work, but I do not love it. I said I did in the beginning but that was me making the noises of a newborn – everything is new and fresh and you haven’t developed a sense of yourself in this new world. But then you grow a brain (the one you inevitably leave outside your boss’s office) and realize, “Hey, I don’t like the work, and perhaps I do not have to. Not as much as I think I need to. What I do like are my coworkers. I like almost every single one of them, even my boss when he is angry with me, even the strange, stoic product guy with the bad haircut who drives a rape van; even the loud, brash, borderline misogynist Chief of this or that because he is a good story and, more generously, misunderstood.”

And that’s why I stay. For the time being, anyway.

The Fool

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When she was sixteen, Suzy’s mother came into her room one afternoon with a glass jar filled with fresh cut roses.

“Where do you want these?” her mother asked.

Suzy sat at her desk writing one thing or other – perhaps a school assignment or letter, but years later, when she looked back on that moment, she recalled very clearly the two distinct feelings she felt before and after her mother brought the roses. Of these, she would never fully revisit the first.

Suzy surveyed her room, wondering where she ought to put the roses. It didn’t happen very often, this offer to have fresh flowers in her room. Suzy’s mother had a green thumb, but she showered most of her attention on her orchids, her favorite type of bloom, and left the roses to the gardener’s shears.

Roses could essentially protect themselves, what with the thorns and all. And while educated pruning could ensure the most beautiful and stout blooms, it appeared that they grew and bloomed regardless of the care they received. There were certain breeds that were smooth stemmed, Suzy noticed, but they were different from the thornier roses. They seemed weaker, needing more wiring or perhaps a trellis to snake around for additional support. But Suzy’s mother had only one of those bushes and the blooms upon it were often the first to wilt.

Orchids were a different sort of flower, her mother once told her. They were like cats – paradoxically high and low maintenance. When you administered the right kind of care, they could be left alone for a long time. Though they required special bark instead of soil and thin green sticks to prop up their stems and a certain temperature to thrive, her mother’s orchids could bloom and bloom for weeks if not months with only light watering in between. It was a different kind of maintenance, but the result were stunning, exotic plants that all of her mother’s guests oohed and aahed over whenever her parents had dinner parties. Suzy noticed no one ever cooed over the roses. When an orchid began to show the slightest signs of tiring, her mother would whisk it off into the greenhouse and nurse it back to health until it was ready to show off its pristine blooms once more. If the roses began to wilt, she simply cut them off the bush.

But still, roses were beautiful in their own way and Suzy’s mother had a soft spot for them. She half-heartedly grew a dozen rose bushes in the planter in the side yard, where they kept their garbage cans. The soil there wasn’t really suited for much else. There had been a time before when orchids were a luxury, bought only on special occasions or received as a birthday gift. They were, as nursery hierarchies go, exotic blooms that could command exorbitant prices, but those were the early days, before her husband’s business stabilized and began to do quite well. By the time Suzy was a teenager, Suzy’s mother had loosened her flora budget so that almost every month a few new orchid plants would appear. The roses and indeed the other plants in their yard became the gardeners’ ward and the orchids, both in the house and in the greenhouse, Suzy’s mother’s sole focus.

And hardily, the roses bloomed for no one but whomever happened to take out the trash on Thursday evenings, though usually this happened at sundown and you couldn’t see them anyway. 

Except for this day. It was Sunday and the gardeners would come tomorrow, but Suzy’s mother took it upon herself to prune the roses. She waited patiently as Suzy considered a place to set the roses. Suzy tapped the pen to her head, her wrist on her knee. Suzy’s room was neat as a pin. She liked it that way, though for some reason new friends visiting for the first time were always taken aback, as though from Suzy’s person they had expected a less tidy room. There were plenty of open surfaces upon which to place the jar of roses but where would the roses look best? Suzy imagined someone coming in to snap a photo of her at work, bent over her diary or a letter she was writing, the roses sitting wanly on her bookshelf – but it was too dim there. Perhaps next to her desk lamp? It cast a warm glow on Suzy’s workspace and there was an old tin can in which she held her pens which would go nicely with the glass jar the roses stood in, as it was an old peanut butter jar with the label washed off. There. The lamp. The pens. The glass jar of roses.

“Put them here, mom,” Suzy said, tapping the space on her desk.

Her mother set them down and, like the photographer Suzy imagined, smiled and said, “Well isn’t that a pretty picture.”

The bouquet changed the entire landscape of her desk, making her feel feminine and artistic and smart, in the British sense of the word. Virginia Woolf probably kept roses on her desk.

Suzy leaned over and smelled the roses, taking a deep inhale of the largest bloom. Compared to the rest it didn’t smell like much, but that didn’t matter – it was so pretty to look at. 

But she admired the way one of the roses was apparently in full bloom. It did not have as vivid of coloring as the other roses, but it certainly took center stage in that its massive petals threatened to cover the other buds entirely.

“I like this one,” Suzy said, fingering one of the velvety light orange petals.

Her mother was silent and Suzy, expecting a murmur of agreement, looked up.

Her mother had a strange expression on her face, one which, as Suzy grew older, would come to adopt as her own when she found someone’s taste questioning. Truly it was a matter of taste, which bloom mother and daughter found attractive, but Suzy’s mother wanted her daughter know:

“That rose looks like a fool.”

The Fool. 

 Suzy was taken aback. The rose, a fool? What had it done but bloomed beautifully for all to enjoy?

Her mother sighed, wondering if it was too early in her daughter’s life to impart one of the most important lessons a woman needed to learn, though it seemed that few did. She hadn’t even thought of her now apparent distaste for roses in this stage of bloom when she clipped it and only brought it up now because Suzy’s attraction to it brought it to her attention. There was a small but dangerous fire to be stamped out – a young woman’s identity was at stake.

“For one thing,” her mother said, “It is an inelegant bloom. Roses can be quite elegant, but not at this stage.”

Suzy acknowledged that the rose had probably bloomed to maximum diameter and was on the verge of wilting, but it surprised to hear her mother say this about a poor flower nearing the end of its short life.

 “Then why did you bring it in here with the rest?” Suzy asked, “Why didn’t you throw it away?”

Suzy’s mother searched for the right words. If she was absolutely honest she would have said that how the rose bloomed was no different from when a whore spread her legs for clients. There was no mystery, nothing secret to anticipate or unwrap. It had opened its very last petal to reveal all of itself so that even the fattest fly could trample around, freely spreading disease and God knows what else.

But Suzy was sixteen – a young, naive sixteen penning young, naive sixteen year-old thoughts in loopy cursive.

Instead Suzy’s mother replied, “It’s so open-faced,” then added, “There’s no mystery.”

She paused, wondering if Suzy understood what she meant. Were mother and daughter on the same wavelength?

“But aren’t your orchids the same way?” Suzy asked, “Aren’t they all open-faced too?”

Jester?

Suzy’s mother couldn’t help but be a little offended. They were, mother and daughter, still worlds apart in experience, and rightly so – but this would be, at the very least, a lesson in art. Suzy’s mother left the room briefly and returned with an orchid plant whose petal edges showed decline, but was still regal in bearing.

“Suzy,” her mother said, “Look at the rose and look at the orchid.”

Suzy did. From her seat at the desk, she looked down at the rose and up at the orchid, the blooms of which were suspended in a prim row, like pretty virginal sisters who had hung themselves from a slender green stem.

“They are both open faced blooms,” her mother conceded, “but isn’t the rose more inviting? If it was a person, would it not be more approachable?”

“Isn’t that a good thing, mother?”

“Yes and no,” and then Suzy’s mother turned to look at Suzy’s confused expression. As she did, she felt a mild panic, as though all this talk of roses and orchids wasn’t getting the important message across. That as a young woman, as any woman at any age, for that matter, Suzy had to keep something of herself for herself.

Her young daughter was on the brink of a long bloom, more rose than orchid. And there was nothing wrong with that. Suzy was and had always been that kind of girl – open and approachable, friendly, chatty, giddy. Though she did have her quiet moments, such as the one her mother had walked in on, with Suzy bent over a piece of writing. What did roses write about?

Suzy’s mother realized she had no idea. But she knew then that if her daughter was a rose, she wished her thorns – big fat thorns found on the hardiest of rose bushes. The rose bushes that during winter, still stood straight albeit barren, in three feet of snow. They wouldn’t always bloom, but you could tell, a mile away, that it was a rose bush and that sometime in the spring, the color would return and the petals would be soft and open and inviting, but the thorns would still be there.

Mother and daughter looked at one other, each searching the other’s face until finally Suzy’s confusion melted away and her mother’s very mild panic subsided.

And that was all. Suzy’s mother kissed Suzy on the forehead and left her daughter to her work, whatever it was. But Suzy was not quite ready to return to the thought her mother had interrupted minutes ago – what had she been writing? It no longer seemed important. She pursed her lips and furrowed her brow, her features suddenly feeling very heavy. Slowly, she turned the jar so that the fool faced the wall, then thought better of it. She plucked the fool out.

It was a ridiculous sized bloom, nearly the same span as her long-fingered hands. The stem was incongruously thin and quite useless – pliable, without a thorn in sight. Suzy held it like she would a pen, but it flopped to and fro, and Suzy felt almost irritated by it. It had bloomed itself to a point where it could not even hold up its own head. Finally, with a quick, sharp pinch, she snapped the stem in two, causing a few velvety light orange petals dropped to her desk. It was not indifference she felt but the strange subtle force of an unspoken vow – the kind young girls make to themselves when they are about to become young women – that provoked her next actions. She reached underneath her desk for the trash bin and putting her pen down for a moment, swept the fool away.

Because Some People Do it Better: John Steinbeck

BettyLeave a comment

Apparently I am having a long bout of writer’s block, also known as laziness. But I’ll leave you with this for the weekend…though perhaps not the whole weekend. The sky looks as though it’ll start sobbing any moment due to god knows what (in my dreams the clouds wring their fluffy palms and wail, “That Betty, why isn’t she writing?” and burst into tears) and a good rain sometimes, makes me feel like a diligent writer.

Any who, the following is a letter from John Steinbeck to his son Thom, who wrote to his father from boarding school confessing that he had fallen desperately in love with a girl there. It is, in the poorly populated genre of letters from fathers to sons, one of the sweetest things I have ever read.

New York
November 10, 1958

Dear Thom:

We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.

First — if you are in love — that’s a good thing — that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.

Second — There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply — of course it isn’t puppy love.

But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it — and that I can tell you.

Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.

The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

If you love someone — there is no possible harm in saying so — only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.

Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.

It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another — but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.

Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I’m glad you have it.

We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Love,

Fa

Duty

BettyLeave a comment

Behind me, men and women dressed in variations of cocktail attire sip on glasses of red and white wine. They talk excitedly (the women’s voices more animated than the men’s) against the live quartet, which plays a strange selection of classical music I associate with Shakespeare’s time.

I am sitting in a tiny alcove at the Ritz Carlton Dana Point where the hotel has set up a not very high-end version of a business center. There’s an outdated HP Deskjet in front of me, and an even older Lenovo computer and keyboard upon which I write this out. To my right, an off white hotel landline, the kind that normally hangs in the bathrooms in Las Vegas, right next to the toilet, in case you croak on the john.

I hadn’t planned on being here. On Thursday nights, I plan for yoga or some other exercise class. If I’m tired, I drive home slowly (to the frustration of other drivers), and have a simple dinner with my parents and then take a walk. If I’m really tired, I eat dinner, then stare at a blank blog post. But this afternoon my boss decided it would be a good idea if I went with him to an awards ceremony.

“If you’re busy, get someone else,” he said. But what do you say to that. “Oh yeah, I’m going to be busy. I was going to exercise.”

So I shook my head and said, “No no, busy? Pah. I’ll be there.”

So here I am, dressed in my not even very professional work clothes, hiding in the “business” alcove while women in sparkly tops and heavy perfume swish around behind me. The men look more or less the same, though some of them wear tuxedos that look so crisp it’s a bit too obvious that this is their first time at a function like this. Look at me. The executive assistant doing her own peculiar brand of sneering.

There are hobnobbers and then there are hobnobbers. Corporate climbers. Brown-nosers. Ass-kissers. Whatever you want to call them. You can spot them a mile away, but not before you hear them. They greet you a little too warmly. Shake your hands a little too firmly, as though willing you to remember their grip and their steely, semi-desperate stares.

At dinner later, I will meet a 50 year old female photographer, hired by the company putting on the event to take photos of all the honorees. She will have a hard look about her face, though maybe it’s because she’s tired of doing these events.

“Thirty years,” she’ll tell me, “I’ve been a photographer for thirty years, and before, I liked it. I worked for builders and took photos of houses and condos in progress, and it was fine. I went to shitty middle of nowhere places like Perris and Temecula and Fresno, but it was calming. I made little road trips out of it and memorized where all the In n’ Outs were, and when I got to where I was going, the houses would just be there and I would just photograph them and then head on out. There wasn’t no fuss.”

“What happened?”

She will scoff, as though it were obvious, but not unkindly, “Well the economy went to shit and all those builders stopped building, which is how I got roped into gigs like these. These corporate circus shows.”

She will talk a little too loudly and you will be grateful to be sat at a table in the corner, right next to the speakers so that the “corporate ring master” at the podium will drown her out somewhat, at least to the people at the surrounding tables.

She’ll tell you stories about the brown-nosers she’s met, because she’s done the circuit for almost a decade now, and which CEO’s are the real deal and which are full of corporate “baloney sawdust bullshit,” though more often than not the latter are hardly ever CEOs but people on the brink who for some reason, just can never quite make it to the top.

She’ll nod her head not too furtively towards the chairman of this or that and say, “Like him. That guy is SUCH a phony.” You will think that perhaps Salinger based Holden Caulfield on this wiry, rather mannish woman sitting next to you who rather than eat her steak and shrimp pushes them around the plate, an errant corral.

“My boss is very genuine,” you say, and she will nod in agreement, and you can tell she means it. 

“I know him,” she’ll say, “I’ve met him a couple of times and I can tell you, he doesn’t do that bullshit. I know who’s an ass kisser and I know your boss gets his ass kissed plenty and he doesn’t need to do none of that himself. He’s the real deal.”

You will look at your boss then, though you can’t see his face too clearly. He’ll be sitting at one of the head tables, dressed smartly in his tuxedo, which although pressed, is hardly new. He wears it well. His forehead will be a bit shiny from the warmth of the room, or all the bodies trying to introduce themselves to him and his wife will be standing next to him with the tired smile she puts on at events like this. He shakes hands with a tall gentleman and laughs, then turns slightly and his attention is quickly devoured by another shorter, rounder gentleman. He laughs again – a real, hearty laugh, from the belly. Or is it? You won’t be able to tell, but then again, does it matter? He’s doing his job. You’re doing yours. You turn back to the photographer, who hasn’t eaten any of the meat.

“He is the real deal,” you repeat, but she doesn’t hear you. She’ll be getting ready to stand up and has already lifted her heavy camera and hung it around her neck.

“Ugh,” she’ll say, “Save one of the desserts for me. I’m off to photograph some phonies.” 

Dragon Lady

BettyLeave a comment

A few months ago there was talk of hiring a Chinese teacher to come to the company once a week to teach a conversational Mandarin class during the lunch hour. It seemed like a great idea – we have many Mandarin speakers, but most of the people in Business Planning – the department that deals most closely with our mandarin-speaking suppliers – do not speak it. It was very strange to me. All the Mandarin speakers (myself included) were scattered across accounting, legal, logistics and HR (me). They used it sometimes on conference calls to Taiwan and/or China, but mostly Mandarin was most useful for gossip. I speak Mandarin most often with the overly enthusiastic HR girl downstairs, and with the President. With my boss, I speak Chinglish. It is the language in which we are both most fluent.

When the HR girl told me they were looking for a teacher, I said without thinking that my mother taught Chinese. What I meant was, “My mother has a large network of Chinese teachers and can probably find someone to do the job,” not, “I am nominating my mother for the job.”

But the HR girl clapped her hands gleefully and tugged at my arm and in an eerie baby-girl voice that both suited her yet was utterly inappropriate, said, “Oh my goodness that’s great! Have her come in and teach! I’m sure your mother is wonderful.”

HR girl was right. My mother IS wonderful. She is, in highly sophisticated parlance, a bomb-diggity Chinese teacher. Just listen to my accent when I speak Chinese. Oh wait, I don’t have one. I sound like a native. 

Dragon Lady and her daughter (right) in 1996 with a family friend, Pearl, who was at the right place at the wrong time. Children who unwittingly wandered into the Ho household during Chinese lessons were forced to participate as well.

As tutoring one’s offspring goes, my Chinese education was a tortuous road, filled with beatings and screaming and more sheets of grid paper (for writing each character fifty million times) than I care to count. What’s worse is my mother taught us in addition to our Saturday classes at Cerritos Chinese school, which took place at the run-down Artesia High School, a poor, backwater of a high school that was known for gang violence and underwhelming test scores. It’s interesting that on the weekends, the high school morphed into a center of success – not because kids actually learned Chinese, but because it would be flooded with over-achieving Chinese kids who aimed for perfect SAT scores and thought (and someone actually said this), that the kids from Artesia High would one day mow their lawns. They mostly attended only so they could write Chinese School down as another activity on their college applications. Chinese School was not so much a school as a messy, disorganized network of frizzy-haired and frazzled middle-aged women who had nothing better to do on Saturday mornings than exert power they had nowhere else and teach uninterested children of all ages a language none of them cared to learn.

Wow, that was really mean. That was me looking through the lenses of my bitter classmates – I actually liked most of my Chinese school teachers because they paled in comparison to my mother, who was ten times stricter and could use physical force as punishment. (Most of my classmates were also ruled with similar iron fists, though sadly, a majority of their parents were so eager for their kids to “make” it in the American school system that they let Mandarin fall to the way-side of violin, piano, tennis, golf, and supplementary math courses. A decade or so later, this decision would nip them in the bud when China woke up and said, “Hey, I’m gonna run this town.” (阿,我睡醒了). 

No, my mother saw early on that her children weren’t talented at much else – I hated the piano and my brother froze without fail at every single recital. We were athletic, but not marvelously so – my brother loved basketball but was about a foot too short to consider it seriously and I preferred climbing trees and doing crooked cartwheels to anything with a ball or court. She had unsuccessfully tried to sell golf to me, but I didn’t see the point in standing, squatting, and hitting a small ball as far as it could go. It was like asking a rambunctious two-year old to meditate.  

Most disappointing was that we didn’t even shine academically. Asian kids are nothing if not brainy – and we definitely weren’t. I had tested into GATE, but was always at the back of the class. I did well enough in “language arts,” but my math scores were dismal, way below those of my Asian peers. and my brother was one of those strange fearless kids who just couldn’t be bothered to do homework sometimes, and was able to lie about it. He could lie straight-faced through his teeth, earnestness oozing from his eyes. He once erased the “D” on his report card and changed it to a “B,” and when my mother found out (though even if she hadn’t, I’m not sure the punishment would have been different because you know, a B might as well be a D) was livid and took out the belt to give my brother a memorable thrashing. My brother bore the punishment heroically. He cried a bit, apologized, and when his tears had dried continued to lie in the same way many years down the road up to his college graduation, in which he walked, dressed in cap, gown, and goofy smile but was actually four units shy of a degree. We, the family, stood sweating on the lawn for four hours, wondering if our tired legs were being pulled. Lesson learned then forgotten as quickly as the belt leaves the skin. 

No, my mother was adamant that if we were going to be good at nothing else, we’d at least be fluent in Mandarin. Or else SHE wasn’t a Chinese teacher. She had a reputation to uphold, and as an active member of the Council of Chinese Educators (or something like that) as well as a teacher at the Cerritos Chinese school and eventual owner of her own Chinese school, she would look quite foolish if her own flesh and blood were walking around with stuttering, accented Chinese. So to the extent that she was involved with Chinese school, so were we. We were forced into countless speech and poetry recital competitions as well as National Chinese History Bees. We placed first at several (those were good days) second at some, and none at others (those were terrible, terrible dark days), and all in all, form a rather amusing strip of memories, moments of “Hey, this isn’t so bad if I let myself get as competitive as my mother wants me to be,” intertwined with my earnestly wishing, “Why can’t I have a white mother with lower standards.”

My mother is wonderful now. She went through menopause some seven or eight years ago when, luckily for my brother and I, something snapped in her brain and her personality turned towards the light. She became docile. Patient. Sweet, almost eerily so. The hot flashes also erased part of her memory. Ask her now if she ever raised or voice or hit us, and she’ll say with a look of horror, “Oh God no, I don’t remember ever hitting you two.” 

Really.

Six or seven years ago things were very different. Not to paint a bleak and bloody picture of my childhood, which was for the most part filled with laughter and fun, but there were moments of sheer terror. My my mother was not the same person. She wasn’t a tiger mom – no silly feline cliches for my mother – she was another cliche, born in the year of the Dragon and thus a bona-fide, fire-breathing Dragon Lady.

Ira Glass on Having taste, Talent and Being Successful

BettyLeave a comment

Yesterday Madame Receptionist and I took a stroll around the company parking lot. Sometimes, when my boss takes a long lunch or when things are not so busy I have the time to do so. Sometimes I come back a little late and he is already back from a not-so-long lunch, and instead of asking me, “Where the hell were you,” as I feared he would the first time I came back late, he merely nods as our eyes meet and turns back to his computer screen.

“I’m no slave driver,” he once said, when I asked him for two days off to visit Chicago, “Go, take a break. Have fun.”

When I returned a lady from accounting asked me if I had gone to visit a boyfriend.

“No,” I said, “Just a friend.”

She giggled and nodded towards my boss’s silent figure behind the glass.

“You know,” she said, “He told me you went to Chicago and I suggested that maybe you went to visit your boyfriend, and he said, ‘I hope so.’ Isn’t that funny?”

Anyway, that is beside the point.

On our stroll, we discussed various social media tools we used for our blogs. Mine is mostly writing – hers, a fashion blog, is mostly pictures. We both use twitter, Facebook and recently, Pinterest, an online pinboard that allows you to ‘pin’ images you like to customized boards. People can follow a select few or all of your boards: a more organized version of Tumblr, if you will. Yet I’m wary about using Pinterest in the same way I was wary about Tumblr – mainly, that it didn’t promote original content but the constant reblogging or “repinning” of others’ content.

I think before, it wouldn’t have bothered me so much. The internet is for sharing. Who cares if I’m unoriginal and I have nothing to post? I’ll just repost articles written by other people who made time in their days to generate original content. I’ll share pretty pictures I didn’t take, songs I didn’t write, clothes I didn’t make or outfits I didn’t put together. There’s nothing wrong with being an editor. 

Well. There is nothing wrong with being an editor – in fact, I suspect sometimes I edit better than I write (you’re welcome, dozens of people whom I’ve helped with college essays and letters of rec – except for the ones who didn’t get into the schools of your choice, in which case, you have only yourself to blame) just as there is nothing wrong with being a curator. And indeed there is “art” in curating and editing and tweaking something original so that it is enhanced, but nowadays with the proliferation of social media sights that promote sharing, those that merely share will take a back seat to those that create in addition to sharing.

Madame Receptionist and I discussed what it meant to have taste – or how having taste doesn’t necessarily translate to success. Recently, a member of the marketing team announced her departure for the apparel industry. She had started her career in tech and was indeed poached from a CE company to join ours, and while she never verbally expressed her interest in fashion, there were little clues to be found here and there. The steady stream of fashion magazines, for instance, that came in the mail for her, and the random compliments she paid both of us, “Cute shoes!” or “I love that skirt. Oh my God where did you get it?”

Perhaps the biggest clue she could have given however, was in her own dress, which unfortunately fit in a little too well with the other wardrobes of the tech industry, which is to say, she dressed rather drably. Her ensembles consisted of black or grey slacks, shiny polyester tank tops from Banana Republic or the Limited, and boring, pointy-toed pumps that could either be very expensive or very cheap – a choice you never want pose to people who care to guess. Her hair was a limp, depressing mess, and though her eyes seemed energetic enough, I wanted very badly to hand her a hairbrush and to convince her to eat some protein to promote healthier hair shafts. Critical, no? Yes. Very.

That’s my point – it’s easy to be a critic. When she announced her departure I asked her why and more importantly, wondered what the apparel company saw in or on her person that could possible convince them to lead marketing at their company. Surely it wasn’t the pointy-toed pumps? Perhaps they had thought them more expensive than they were?

“I’ve always loved fashion,” she said, “and they really liked what I did here and at my previous job for digital marketing, so they want me to help them do the same there, except it’s for clothes, which is much more geared towards my interests.”

I’m not say the woman did an amazing job at my present company (that remains to be seen), but whatever she created was eye-catching and most importantly, tangible to land her a “dream” position she really wanted. When it comes to design of website, clothing, interiors – it’s easy, if you read a lot of magazines, weblogs and come into contact with the actual things, to formulate opinions of what you like and dislike. What’s harder, and what few people actually push themselves to do, is go one step further and ask themselves why. At least I am very bad at this.

I used to think it was perfectly acceptable to say, “I like what I like, I don’t have to explain why,” and in certain contexts, it is. But not when you want to drive change, or innovate, or make something better. You have to be able to say why.

During my first week I got a head of myself. My boss asked me for more business cards and I found a box of them in my desk and, upon handing it over, remarked that they weren’t very pretty business cards.

He looked at me curiously and said, “Well, we are in the process of changing our marketing image, but why? What don’t you like about the card?”

I could answer that easily enough. I didn’t like the card stock (it felt flimsy), and the logo on the back seemed dated despite its being only a year old. The card was neither “timeless” nor clean, attributes I felt excellent designs had. The colors were also to dark for my taste. The card looked like a promotional item for a cheap nightclub or a bad movie poster.

“Okay,” my boss said, “Interesting opinions. But how would you change it?”

I wasn’t prepared to answer that – at least not in as much detail as my diatribe against the card warranted.

“Simplify it,” I said, after a while, “We can make it cleaner looking. Use thicker paper. Different fonts and perhaps a different logo. Less color.”

“Be more specific,” he said.

I had a vague idea of what I thought was an attractive business card in mind, but could I actually sit down and design one? I don’t know – probably, after a few days of researching and studying other business cards, but at the moment, I was ill-prepared to back up my assertions. Why should my ideas (criticisms) reasonably trump the existing design? I was merely being a critic and not ready to deliver any solution to the problems I had called out.  

My boss shook his head. “It’s great to have an opinion. It’s great to have taste, but you have to be able to support it. It’s easy for anyone with taste to say ‘Oh I don’t like this, I don’t like that,’ but are you actually creating anything to remedy what you think is bad taste?”

Okay, maybe he didn’t use the word “remedy,” but that is what he meant and it stuck with me. Probably one of the more important things I learned at work (in addition to never parking my boss’s car too close to the curb because it scratched the bottom of the car). Was that all I was? A spout of opinions? I have always been one to sprint to conclusions and shuffle towards reasoning, but at work (and slowly elsewhere, including on this blog), it’s becoming dangerous to do so, especially where other people have stronger opinions, stronger criticisms and the work ethic, stamina and reasoning skills to drive those opinions home.

Basically, it won’t do to just have taste. You (or I, really) have to do the work. Otherwise you’re just adding to the noise. 

That was much longer than I intended – really, I just wanted to share this wonderful video with you all. I didn’t create it, sadly, nor did I say the words, but in this case I’m acting as curator 🙂


Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.