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.

Baiting the hook

My mother has come and gone, and the house is a little bit emptier -- and cleaner -- as a result. Our last-minute, desperate cleaning of the townhouse paid off, to our mutual benefit. It helps that our new living arrangements are not in the ghetto, and not of a type to raise eyebrows in police officers or Child Protective Services. Barring the uniform and generic cookie-cutter nature of any townhouse community, it is, in short, a vast improvement over my old place, which Mom has been convinced for years would eventually get us killed. The old apartment's managers could put up a sign saying "Featured on COPS," and it would be a draw to prospective tenants. About the only excitement imaginable in our new neighborhood would be if someone painted his front door something other than white. Gasp. Shock. Horror. World coming to an end.

You get the picture. Anyway, so Mom approved of the new place. Barring an incident during which she Cloroxed my sink and scrubbed it back to its original factory condition, she managed to repress her more urgent cleaning instincts.

One of the great things about visiting with Mom is that she invariably gives me some hilarious family story to pass on to the rest of you. It's true that many of these stories are ones that I've heard before, but the mind is an impermanent thing, mine more than most. Though dim shadows of the original tales linger somewhere in the recesses of my brain, they require reinforcement and repetition to take.

We were sitting in a small greek gyro house in Mountain View, waiting for our falafel and gyro wraps to be made, and Mom noticed some pictures on the wall of Greece, which she'd visited in her pre-married days. In 1970, she made a solitary trip around the world, backpacking at random. My sister comes by her wanderlust honestly, which Mom will admit when she's not feeling particularly vexed by Sako's inability to settle down and live a normal life.

Mom regaled me with stories of her Mediterranean trip, and right around the time we got our food, had moved on to visiting diamond factories in Holland. "I saw a black diamond," she said, "and I thought, this one I can buy because it was very small. So I bought a ring and sent it to your grandmother. She was so happy. She treasured it for years, but eventually it fell out and she lost it."

My grandfather was a doctor and a graduate of Todai, Tokyo University. His engagement to my grandmother was through a matchmaker, an omiai encounter. When they were engaged, my grandmother apparently was expecting to get an engagement ring. Days passed and my grandfather made no mention of one, so she finally just asked him.

My grandfather (or so goes the story) was incredulous. "Don't talk such nonsense," he said. "I've already caught the fish. Why would I want to bait the hook?"

I suppose there are more tactless ways to begin a happy married life, but I can't think of them off-hand. It just goes to show that more than one culture has its own version of the masculine, "Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?" saying. Also, that men can be sort of stupid.

It was with that story in mind that my Mom bought her mother the diamond ring. The conversation veered around to wedding rings. She wears hers now that she's a widow, though she never wore it when my dad was alive. She inspected it while we walked into the parking lot. "It keeps away trouble," she told me complacently. "I have already been married. I do not need more men, thank you."

I laughed. It's difficult to think of mothers as having romance problems, though it occasionally -- dimly, mind -- occurred to my sister and me more than once that an awful lot of men seemed to be a little in love with Mom. "Has there been trouble?" I asked, tactlessly.

Mom looked reproachful. "Not my trouble. I did not make it. Yuuuuuuuuuuuhri," she said. "Your mother is also a woman."

Well. I suppose she is.

Old Man Driving

The Guy pretty much always drives when we go anywhere. This has nothing to do with masculine imperative or who dominates whom in the relationship. To be direct about it, he drives because he likes to drive. I do not. In terms of chore distribution, this works out just fine for me; if I could just get him to admit a fondness for cleaning toilets, or washing dishes, or even housecleaning at large -- even laundry -- there would be nothing left to desire in my life. Hope springs eternal, but I'm not holding my breath. It's enough that he drives.

It works out for the best in more than one way. He is fond of driving. I am fond of sleeping. Driving, like a great many tedious things in my life, makes me sleepy. This is not really compatible with safe transportation. I know I've mentioned it before, but I have had complaints from family, friends, and complete strangers that my driving style is not really compatible with peace of mind. My argument is that my style is caused by the sure knowledge that, given enough time on the road, I will eventually start to snore. It behooves me to get my passengers to their destination before that happens. That I speed, tailgate, and generally violate common sense and manners of the road purely for the good of others somehow fails to impress most people who have either driven with me or have seen me drive. I daresay they're privately comforted by my explanations, but it's hidden deep.

On the other hand, the Guy drives well. He drives well enough that the old epithets about Asian drivers don't apply to him. He drives, if you will forgive the comparison, like a European: one who is aware that there are other people on the road and actually concedes their right to long life and continued good health. He steers. I sleep. It's a match made in heaven.

Which is why it was a little disconcerting to realize one day that he was going exactly at the speed limit. On the freeway. In California.

"Oh my God," I said. "What's wrong? Are we breaking down?"

We were, it was true, in the right-hand lane, customarily reserved for semi-trucks and old people. The Guy explained to me that it was an experiment. "I heard on the radio that if you drive at the speed limit, your mileage goes up. I wanted to see if it was for real."

NPR. Damn NPR. I watched cars from the 1940s whiz past us, and checked his speedometer. Still going exactly 60 miles per hour. "Isn't this unsafe?"

"No."

More cars whisked past. A little old woman so shrunken with age, it looked as though her car was an unmanned probe being steered by satellite signals from outer space, got tired of being stuck behind us and pulled into the passing line. A wee, wrinkled little hand gave us the finger as she tooted by.

"So how's your experiment going so far?"

"Pretty good. I'm getting really high mileage. Better than usual."

"Great."

Silence. I watched cows slowly saunter by in the fields bordering the highway. Some of them, I swear to God, passed us. "Aren't you worried about your masculinity?" I asked.

"What?"

"Your masculinity," I articulated carefully. "If you drive so slow. Don't you have to drive fast if you're a man?"

He gave me a baffled look. "No."

"Are you sure? What if you're wrong? What if you have to give back your penis if you drive at this speed? What if we get pulled over--" I was warming to my theme, "--and the cop makes you return your testicles?"

"Just imagine," he enthused. "If everybody in the United States drove at the speed limit, we'd save millions of gallons of gas each year. And what would we lose? There's no proof that driving faster gets you someplace sooner. Look at my mileage! I mean, it's always good, but I'm getting an extra twenty miles per tank!"

"Oh my God," I said desperately. "Go faster, damn you. Go faster." I may sleep during car rides, but I sleep because I am assured that I will reach my destination before grandma. I need the soporific of knowing that somewhere, somehow, even if only by proxy, I am breaking a law in order to attain my objective.

It was a lost cause. The light of liberal fanaticism was burning in the Guy's face. He started talking about comparative mileage and motors and fuel efficiency. Someone passed us in a Hummer, and he began frothing gently, like an agitated espresso machine.

I checked the speedometer. Still at 60. "Damn." I gave up. These are the compromises we must agree to, if we wish to be chauffeured.

I went back to sleep and let him fizz.