Green Tea and Teacups

It seems like Mom is the theme of the week. Since she's in California at the moment, this is only fair, though it's pure coincidence that assorted conversations over the course of the last two days has made me do a little reflecting on things she's actually said to me over the years. Like a lot of daughters, most of the wisdom she's attempted to impart to me during my childhood went in one ear and sloshed almost immediately out the other. Repetition didn't result in any obvious improvement in that regard -- not that she didn't try, to my intense annoyance.

Now that I'm older, a lot of her lessons are actually starting to make sense. Mom smiles very kindly when I tell her this, and I can pretty much tell she thinks I'm completely retarded. I can't imagine which would be the worse conclusion for her: realizing that it's taken her daughter 32 years to comprehend a piece of fortune cookie wisdom; or concluding that her daughter feels it necessary to lie about comprehending said wisdom, because she was completely unable to grasp its inner meaning. It is deeply annoying to be a parent. She has never told me this straight out, but I can tell. My mother and me, we've been together for a very long time, and there's a certain quality of martyred patience when she looks at me sometimes. In her own gentle, saintly way, she is thinking, "I blame his genes."

My mom occasionally has a quality of stereotype, if you look at her just the right way. That little old sage on the mountain with the long beard (which she lacks) and the cryptic utterances that fit conveniently into one comic panel or a fortune cookie. One of her favorites is the story of the tea and the teapot.

Prepare yourself, my round-eyed friends, for a bit of Asian wisdom.

The teapot is full of tea. The teacup is empty. Though the teapot may be cracked and cheap, and the teacup may be the jewel of the Emperor's collection, if it wishes to be filled with tea, the teacup must lower itself before the teapot, or else it will remain empty.

Here endeth the lesson.

At the age of 6, I was all, "Huh?" At the age of 8, I graduated to, "Whatever." At the ages of 10 through 27, I did a lot of heavy sighing and impatient tapping of the foot. I imagine my mom and my aunt, who taught me piano at the time, had a lot of conversations about this back in the day.

"Did you tell her about the tea thing?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"And she picked her nose."

"So it didn't register anything with her, did it?"

"Not so you'd notice."

"Maybe you could try again. Tomorrow. With visual aids--"

"There's an idea."

"--applied to the head. I have a nice cast-iron pot you can use."

My aunt, sadly, was not to be the beneficiary of my mother's painstaking work. At the age of 28, well out of college, I finally got it.

Humility means something different for the West than it does for the East, I think. I don't have a very clear American perspective on it myself, since it's a word (and a concept) that has always been very wrapped up in my upbringing and my cultural identity. In Japan, at least, it has a positive connotation, tied inextricably with the concept of sunao -- which is commonly translated to "obedience" in English. Like many cross-cultural concepts, it translates poorly.

For the Japanese, humility comes hand-in-hand with pride: a typical, often homicidal Japanese characteristic throughout the ages. It is the quality of being open to change and learning, to acknowledge your place and to accept it, to take pride in who and what you are and to take the ultimate responsibility for your actions and your choices, eschewing excuses.

In fact, our humility is, by Western standards, barely humility at all.

It's a quality that we start out with when we're born, but gets rubbed away as we grow. Somewhere along the line, humility stops being an innate characteristic and becomes one we have to relearn. Humility is the first casualty of fear, just as courage is the first casualty of ignorance. There's more fortune cookie wisdom for you. Figure that one out. Humility acknowledges that even though the teacup may be more beautiful than the teapot, there's something the teapot has that the teacup doesn't. The teacup bows its head to the teapot. The teapot fills it with tea. Embarrassment doesn't enter the equation. Neither does pride, nor fear of failure. The tea doesn't care.

I had complicated relationships with kitchen appliances in my youth. I always thought they were judging me.

I blame my mother.