Time to breathe again

I left my job yesterday. Well at least officially, though there is still a temporary contract being finalized. This gives me time, for the moment, for some non-work interests. It will be fun to spend time on writing, music, and crafts again. Also time to clean and organize. This is a new month and I'll be writing every day again. What joy! It feels like I put a large part of my life on hold for a past couple of years. Today begins a new day. I'll take a new breath and enjoy life.

Back from Hong Kong

It's great to be back "home" in Hong Kong for just over a week. I had the opportunity to celebrate my dad's 70th birthday with my family. There was of course the usual sightseeing and shopping, paying respects to departed loved ones at their gravesites, getting together with friends... I also got to see my old school, albeit from the outside, and the neighborhood I grew up in, and was very surprised to see the old tire shop and the old snack store still in their old places, still with the same owners.

The customer service staff in shops are much more polite and patient than before, as are bus, taxi, even public van drivers. The streets are cleaner. The aire is cleaner. There are more domestic helpers--Phillipina, Thai, Idonesian--everywhere, not only in upper-middle class neighborhoods, but in solidly middle class and lower middle class neighborhoods. A growing number of Nepalese girls work in hair salons and restaurants. But as international as Hong Kong is, cultural standards and expectations are still constrained in a very narrow band. It's still essentially a monolingual moncultural society which borrows liberally from other cultures, but adapts these foreign cultural elements aggressively into a uniquely Chinese version.

Ah it's nice to visit, but it's also nice to be reminded what I didn't like about Hong Kong. Next time I'll take the children and show them that side of the world.

Redoubling my efforts

I'm deboubling my effort to write in my blog every day. It's just like exercising regularly, or going on a diet. It just takes quite a bit to get started, but once I get in the groove, everything falls into place automatically. I like writing but spend way too much time thinking than putting thoughts on paper (or its electronic cousin.)

So yesterday I gave my administrative assistant her annual review. As usual, it is glowing. She is organized, professional, responsive, discreet, deals well with internal and external customers, what more can you ask for. Well, you can. She herself wants to move away from supporting others to building an expertise of her own. Last fall, in large part due to my encouragement, she started evening classes towards completing an undergraduate degree in business. It will take her another 2 to 2.5 years to finish at this point. Unfortunately she'll have to take a leave of absence in the fall semester due to surgery, but I encourage her to go back in January.

Once her undergrad is completed, she wants to pursue a career in training and development. So we discussed different career paths and preparations. It's fun to play academic adviser again. When I used to do it as a full-time job, it was exciting to see all the possibilities in front of 18 and 19 year olds. Now it's great to see all the possibilities in front of a 45 year old. Life is ever changing and ever growing. Each of us needs to grow with our lives.

My great aunt

My great aunt passed away a couple of days ago following a stroke. It was a good peaceful way to pass away. She was spending time with her children and grandchildren at a vacation home on the ocean front when she had her stroke. She had always said that she desire to just pass away in her sleep. This is very close, since she never regained consciousness from the stroke, and died within a few days.

I won't be able to make it to the west coast for the funeral. But I am grieving quietly from afar, not only grieving for the passing of a woman with an interesting life, but grieving for the passing of yet another person in her generation. I think she is the last person in her generation I have known enough to get part of her story. Everyone else has passed on.

There are some remarkable stories, mostly of strong-willed women, in my family. I keep saying I want to write these stories. Now is not too late to start.

The Disappearing Govbot

I read in today's Hong Kong news about how the Examination Authority mis-graded the English Part B paper of the Hong Kong School Certificate Exam. No, they didn't mis-grade one or two papers. There were a total of 670 wrong grades! The Examination Authority announced this a few days after the school cert results were out, never mind that this test literally affects the life and future of millions of students. Most of the grades were adjusted upwards, yielding a total of 23 students who were previously denied spots in Form 6 because of failed English grades who now qualify for a Form 6 spot.

The aggravating thing is that the Education Department urged schools to be "generous" in opening one or two extra spots for the students, but wouldn't give the schools more funding if they do. Also aggravating is the fact that news of the wrong grades came out on Friday and no officials were available to talk to reporters for half the day on Friday because they were "in meetings". Then on Saturday, instead of putting in emergency increased hours to answer questions from students, parents, and schools, the relevant departments only opened their usual half-day Saturday hours.

Watching this from across the Pacific, I just can't help but compare HK government to US government. Okay, we don't ever open on Saturdays, so HK is one up on us. But the disappearing civil service bureaucracy is a reality here as well as in other countries. Thirty forty years ago, HK government was a fine place for a bright young man (okay, they only took care of bright young men then because there was nothing for bright young women other than teaching and nursing). People used to say that going into banking is getting a gold rice bowl and going into government is getting an iron rice bowl--not as glamorous or expensive as a gold rice bowl, but it wouldn't break! Now, bright young people don't go into public service and civil service positions are being eliminated left and right in the name of budget management. Top level civil service positions are being replaced by political appointments, in HK, as in the US.

So what we find are holes everywhere. People who are not as qualified or not as bright working in civil service jobs who make mistakes grading papers, among other things. To top it off, the systems are old too. I bet you HK government is using the same crumbling old mainframes installed in the late 70's and early 80's we are using in federal, state, and municipal government agencies in the US. I am of course most familiar with my own Agency, but a friend who works for the school district says they can't even figure out who's on their payroll easily out of their system. Welcome to 2005, using a completely outdated model of human and technological infrastructure.

I'm not saying that the old civil service bureaucracy was perfect. By no means. But it was predictable. Change happened slowly, but usually in a carefully planned way. By eliminating positions willy-nilly in an effort to cut costs, by placing inexperienced, ego-puffed political hecks in powerful decision-making positions, and by not having good strategic processes to replace old physical and technological infrastructure, government as an industry is heading towards a crisis everywhere. And who would have the vision, the knowledge, and the courage to fix it?

He'll get a Starbucks card after all

A couple of weeks ago I went to Starbucks to buy a coffee card as a birthday prensent for a colleague's birthday. Unfortunately the Starbucks near work had a computer problem and couldn't encode cards with dollar amounts--two days in a row. After trying for a second time unsuccessfully at the Starbucks I decided to buy him a clock from a nearby department store instead. Thank God I gave him the gift receipt too.

This week the colleague called to tell me that the clock doesn't work and he tried to exchange for a new one. He ended up getting bounced from one department to another in the store because nobody knew where the clock had come from. Finally someone directed him to the greeting card section. Well I could have told him the clock came from the greeting card section if he'd asked.

In any case, there were no more clocks for exchange, so he got a refund. "I'll try to find another item with the money, " he said. I laughed. "I didn't want to give you a gift and create an administrative burden on you to go to the store every day in search of an appropriate item. Tell you what, my first choice was a Starbucks card but that didn't work. So go get yourself a new Starbucks card with the money and you would have gotten what I intended to get you to begin with."

Real life is stranger than fiction. I kid you not.

My little "vegetarian"

After church today, I was broiling hot dogs for lunch. When I announced lunch was ready, my six-year-old said she didn't want hot dogs. She said, "It's meat, which means that it is animal's flesh. I don't want to kill animals and I don't want to eat animals." I said, "What do you want to eat instead? A salad?" She said, "Yes, a salad."

Meanwhile, her nine-year-old brother, decidedly a carnivore, was saying, "But you can't eat so many animals that they do extinct anyway." To which the six-year-old replied, "I still don't want to eat animals. Animals are cute."

By the time I finished washing some Boston lettuce and tearing it into a bowl, my little vegetarian said, "I think I'll have some hot dog first before eating salad."

Willow Talk: Resolutions are to be broken

I should have said here that I vow to write in my blog at least twice a week. Resolutions get broken--easily.

Anyway, here's an attempt to restart. I was working on some entried to a group cookbook recently and thought it may be nice to start posting some recipes in this space, given that food is one of my passions.

I like cookbooks, but tend to draw on them for inspiration. Seldom do I follow recipes exactly. Even though most weekday meals at home needed to go from prep to table in less than 30 minutes, I still like to jazz things up. In Chinese, we say that dishes need to have color, fragrance, and flavor. I take this to heart, even for everyday meals.

So here's what's for yesterday:

Chicken with Spinach and Mozzarella

Ingredients:
6 chicken breast halves
2 TB olive oil
1 TB lemon juice
3 TB water
12 oz. fresh spinach
4 oz. finely shredded mozarella

Directions:
Brown chicken breast halves in olive oil. Make sure each side is browned slightly. Add lemon juice and water. Cover and cook for 4-5 minutes until chicken is thoroughly cooked and juice runs clear when you pierce each piece. Add spinach and cook down quickly. This will generate more liquids. Finally add shredded mozarella. Melt gently over low heat. Stir to make a thick and creamy sauce.

Serve over rice or pasta.

Too many things to do

It's been more than a month since my last blog entry. One of my resolutions this month is to write in my blog at least twice a week. As my husband says, there are so many stories in me, I should take time to write them down.

Anyway, the tyranny of the modern day is having too many things to do and not enough time to do it. Recently the newspapers, I think it was the Washington Post, reported that partners in law firms are upset that young associates do not want to "work hard". This perception is based on the fact that the new gen Y associates don't want to spend the crazy 90 hours per week at the office. Rather, they would like to spend time away from the office skiing, going to concerts--gasp, having fun! So, the baby boomers complained that the gen Y'ers are slackers!

Putting aside whether balancing work, life, and family is a good thing or not, it is simply ridiculous to expect today's gen Y'ers not to have hobbies other than work. This is probably the first generation of young people who grew up being driven from activity to activity by well-meaning parents--soccer on Monday after school, piano on Tuesday, ballet on Wednesday, art on Thursday. These same well-meaning parents ARE the baby boomers who think that young children need to have enrichment outside of school. And now they are surprised that some number of them would like to continue some hobbies (not everything even, mind you) beyond age 25????

People reap what they sow. At the same time, change and growth happen so slowly, in people as well as in plants, that most people do not realize that change is taking place while it happens. What usually happens is that people take a look one day and are shocked that what they thought was is quite different now. That's why we as human beings have to constantly fight against becoming routine, monotonous, unchanged. Because when other things change around us, we'll be left behind.

Pursuing Passions

I had lunch with a friend the other day. She just got a new job which she enjoys. The job offers the right amount of challenge, excitement, and rewards. She is also a new mom. As if all this isn't enough, she said that she is trying to find a non-work interest to be passionate about. People keep saying that work is her passion, she said, meaning it to be a compliment, while she wishes that her life contains more balance.

Thankfully, I don't have her problem. If anything I have too many hobbies. Now my husband thinks that I'm not really passionate about any of my many hobbies. I beg to differ. I'm actually deeply interested about all of them. It's just that there are on;y so many hours and minutes in one day. If I spend an hour playing the piano, I am not cooking or baking or making a craft project. If I learn to speak Spanish, I'm not learning Arabic. What to do. How to choose.

I made up a schedule yesterday, just like I used to do when I was younger, trying to fit some of everything (something active, something creative, and something intellectual) into the week. It may have been fine for Da Vinci to be a renaissance man. It sure is hard for this modern girl to remain renaissance.

Mountains Beyond Mountains

I just finished reading Tracy Kidder's biography of Dr. Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains. What an inspiring story! Farmer is a doctor who lives to serve the poor, living out the social gospel curing one person at a time. He also works to improve the living conditions of his patients, giving him/her a tin roof, paying the children's tuition, in other words preventing the conditions that permit the disease to happen in the first place to happen again. His work has given me a new way of thinking about how public policy, which tends to focus on cost-effectiveness and tends to rely compromises to achieve the so-called greater good. This stands in stark contrast to work that impacts one person at a time, without consideration of cost. Of course, there are still decisions to be made, and helping one person necessarily means not helping another at the same moment of time. But as Farmer said, it's all a long defeat we fight and the victories along the way is just gravy.

This books goes well with two others I just finished, Danielle Allen's Talk to Strangers in which she used the event of school desegregation in Arkansas following Brown vs the Board of Education to illustrate how social change happens via private negoations, one conversation at a time. My husband and I were at a book reading which was part of a week-long Martin Luther King celebration at which Danielle read her new book. I was happy to get an autographed copy of this elegant little pale green book. The other work was good old "Walden", by the old curmudgeon Henry David Thoreau, in which he of course lived a private revolt against all the trappings of so-called civilization in mid-19th Century New England. I skimmed this old favorite quickly before hearing Paul Friedrich's talk about three weeks ago, in which he discussed, ostensibly the poetics of "Walden" but of course got into the politics of it as well. All three stories are revolutionary and prophetic, and all elicit wonderful reflective moments that are fitting to this Lenten season.

Talking about reflective teachings, I must go back to Paul the great apostle himself. I read chapter 14 of Romans today, in German, and wrote out the following verse for reflection for the week. It fits amazingly well with the service of Paul Farmer to the poor, the calling of Danielle Allen to political friendship, and the devotion of Henry David Thoreau to only the things most essential in life.

Romans 14:9
Denn hierzu ist Christus gestorben und [wieder] lebendig geworden,
daß er herrsche sowohl über Tote als über Lebende.

Trip to the ER

Saturday morning we had to take our youngest son to the ER because he had a seizure. Fortunately all the tests came out normal except that he had very low blood sugar and ketones in his urine. As soon as the ER got his blood sugar level up, he was his old happy and active self again. We saw his regular pediatrician today and will follow up with a metabolic geneticist soon. Hopefully it's just an isolated episode of not having eaten much for a few days because he had a cold.

We had a long day on Saturday and our weekend schedule got kind of thrown off. It will be a little while before my body and my brain catch up with each other again.

People are funny

I had a day off today, thanks to Abe Lincoln. So I spent the morning shopping.

I started out in Chinatown looking for traditional Cantonese breakfast of rice porridge and thousand year egg, and stumbled upon a traditional Northern Chinese restaurant. So for a mere $2.75 I got dou jang (kind of a thick soy milk) and you tiao ( like a long john donut, but without filling). Ah the simple food of North China. The shop was small but tidy and very simply adorned with handwritten signs advertising menu items and prices and a couple of photographs of 1920's and 1930's Shenyang. Shenyang is the fifth largest city in China and is located way up on the Northeast, in former Mongolia. It had been both a Mongolian and a Manchurian city in the past. Today it's a science and technology hub, thanks in part to the Russians, who had great influence in that area of China at the turn of the century.

After breakfast, I bought a few bakery items, some frozen food, and some dried meat. All Cantonese stuff. After I finished shopping for Chinese groceries, I stopped by at Target to buy cake decorations for my son's birthday party tomorrow and craft supplies for Sunday School. Target was as much modern America as the little restaurant was rural China. What a contrast!

On the way home, the radio was playing an old interview of playright Arthur Miller, who died yesterday. Coincidentally I attended a lecture on the Poetics of Walden last night. Miller and Thoreau were both ardently humanist in their own ways, and fiercely independent. They would have much to talk about. The world is ever changing but people are always more interesting that things.

Ash Wednesday

Having the first day of the lunar new year coincide with Ash Wednesday created a bit of cognitive dissonance today. Do I celebrate Chinese New Year, or do I celebrate Ash Wednesday? I decided to do both. On the food end, it was easy. After the traditional rich feast shared with family last night, the Cantonese Chinese tradition is to eat simple vegetarian food on New Year's Day itself. So that actually went well with the tradition of fasting and spiritual preparation on Ash Wednesday.

My work day started out with a phone call from a woman who works in another division wishing me happy new year. She is also of Chinese descent. She also wanted me to post a new year message on our internal website. It will mean a lot to the few Asians working on our staff, she said. So I did the posting, and received a few more happy new year messages during the day.

After work, I went to Ash Wednesday service at church. My Christian background encompasses quite a bit of diversity--Catholic school education, evangelical church upbringing, then later Episcopalian and Lutheran musical education, and still later ecumenical youth group experience, and now a socially active progressive Baptist church experience. What a mixed bag! I end up celebrating pretty much all the important rituals from many, if not all of these traditions. I enjoy the Ash Wednesday litany for all its solumnity. Even though service tonight was very small--the pastor couple, two deacons, and two others--it was no less meaningful. It is sobering to begin Lent with the reminder that we came from dust and to dust we will go.

Chinese New Year 's Eve

No matter how hard I try, I don't seem to find time or energy to post every day. Oh well.

Today is the day before Chinese New Year. Traditionally, families gather together to have a big feast at dinner time. It just so happened that we have enough leftovers from previous dinners to put out quite a spread tonight--broiled chicken breast, roast duck with orange sauce (kind of a light version of Duck l'Orange), broccoli and steamed rice, pork roast and rice with a tad of hot sauce, mussels with garlic black bean sauce, and boiled brussels sprouts. OK, it's not all Chinese food, but with the composition of our family, an international flair seems appropriate for an end-of-the year dinner.

We also put up decorations for Chinese New Year. There are the red decorations full of traditional sayings of blessings, happiness, and spring. We also put up some paper lanterns, a traditional decoration for the 15th day of the lunar new year, knowing that we probably won't find time to change decorations in two weeks!

Today also happens to be Mardi Gras, and tomorrow Ash Wednesday. It's interesting when these holidays are juxtaposed. I like celebrations of all kinds, so we'll end up celebrating all these special days, in big and small ways. It's fun to have fun, and to remember the stories and histories that are important to different people groups.

Crazy Weather

It's been two weeks since my last entry. Where has the time gone?

In any case, the title says it all. The weather around here is crazy. Two weeks ago, we had a snow storm, followed by some freezing temperatures. This weekend it's busy 50 degrees and sunny. Go figure. There was an ice-skating outing at church that got changed to a movie trip because of the unusual warmth. Unfortunately Coach Carter is neither a preteen girl nor an 8-year-old boy's cup of tea.

So, instead of Coach Carter, I took the kids to get take-out pizza from Pizza Hut instead, using two of the Book-It coupons for two personal pan pizzas. It's a great idea to give pizza for reaching reading goals. As much as I shun fast food, the children do love it, and free pizza is a great motivator for children.

Slow Snow Day

It snowed pretty much all night last night. Now the ground is all blanketed in white. So rather than trudging outside for ballet lesson, grocery shopping, and other Saturday routines, we decided to jettison all outside programming for the day and stay indoors. It will be a day full of blues music, reading, crafts, drawin, cooking, baking, and reflections. It will be a nice quiet day on which every minute is stretched.

Tofu, Tu Fu, and Other Chinese Things

I made tofu and green beans for dinner today, with an accompaniment of jasmine rice, of course. My children, who aren't really steeped in Chinese culture in any other way, love Chinese food. They especially love tofu. I think it's partly because of the smooth texture of the bean curd, but also because of its ability to pick up the flavor of whatever it is being cooked with.

Tofu's subtlety and adaptability is emblematic of Chinese culture. Chinese poetry, for example, aims to illicit a mood and paints a picture, and sublety is highly valued. Not to be confused with the similar-sounding food, Tu Fu (712-770), the great Tang Dynasty poet, was known for his delicate language and intellectualism. Here's an example of his skill in creating beautiful imagery using the simplest of words and rhythmns:

Welcome Rain One Spring Night

A good rain knows its season
And comes when spring is here;
On the heels of the wind it slips secretly into the night,
Silent and soft, it moistens everything.
Now clouds hang black above the country roads,
A lone boat on the river sheds a glimmer of light;
At dawn we shall see splashes of rain-washed red --
Drenched, heavy blooms in the City of Brocade.