In memory.

My family is not a very religious one, nor are we beholden to many traditions. Holidays pass by with maybe a phone call or two, a dinner with the family members living closest, but no reunions or trans-America flights. We have never, in my remembering, had a large Thanksgiving dinner or a house piled high with relatives on Christmas morning. Most of us prefer a quiet celebration with those closest to us to a large, raucous party. In this respect, we are all remarkably similar. Reclusive and private though this may seem, in my mind it has always belied the fact that we are always in each others hearts, and no distance can separate us.

My mother has 5 brothers, and my father also 5 and 2 sisters, most of whom lived within a half an hour of each other in my childhood. There is no lack of family to go around- my life abounds with uncles in particular and two loving aunts. Visits to Portland (where mother and father met and married) were always full of rushing around trying to see all the family before I had to go home to LA. 10 uncles, 2 aunts, a great aunt and two grandmothers that you see twice a year will do that to your vacation. Even though we don't get together on holidays or birthdays, though all of our family members are not physically present, we all know we're together in spirit.

Now, as I mentioned in the above paragraph both of my parents come from large families. My grandmother on my mother's side came from Oklahoma, then moved to Portland with her four sisters and brother. I'm not sure what growing up with that many siblings would be like, let alone that many sisters, but I can only imagine that it would have been both difficult and rewarding. For her part, my grandmother came out of it with a fighting spirit, one that she passed on in a lesser portion to all of her children, and if i'm any indication, her grandchildren as well. I say in a lesser portion not to play down the saucy boldness we all seem to share, but rather out of reverence to my grandmother's unflinching, insurmountable moxy. The woman made things happen, she made things work. With 6 mouths to feed and husbands that were in and out of the picture, I suppose she had to. My grandmother was a woman you didn't cross, if you knew what was good for you. That being said, she made sure all of my uncles and my mother had what they needed growing up- they may have been poor, but had food, they had clothes. They had someone to drive down to the station and bail them out of jail after a failed underage cross country attempt or a fight with a police dog (see what i meant about fighting spirit?). She was a strong, tough woman. With 6 children and a constantly moving Aleutian lumberjack husband, she would have had to be.

I loved my grandmother. She would sass me, she would tease me and joke, and she was an ornery old lady. Wiley and belligerent, not to mention a reputed fox in her youth, she was a force to be reckoned with. I remember visiting her as a little girl, being subjected to the usual cheek cupping and hugging. My grandmother loved jewelry, and what most stands out in my memory, like many people's memories about their grandmothers, is her hands. Soft, wrinkled and covered in rings. Emerald rings were her favorite, and she had them in spades.

This post is for my grandmother. It's for my mother, it's for my uncles. I'm in China right now, and when i called home last night and the first thing my brother said was 'Mom's flown to Portland', i knew something was wrong. I wish i could be with all of you, but I can't. I wish I could be with you all to celebrate her life, but I'll be having my own celebration for her in China. I don't think there is any more appropriate way to honor my Grandmother's spirit than to keep on the way she would have- making things work in the best of times and the worst of times. Things are far from easy right now in China, but if I learned anything from my Grandmother, it was that you can make things work by sheer force of will. She may not have been an apple pie style grandmother at home in the kitchen all day, but she was her own woman, strong and resilient, and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

My family doesn't celebrate the way most families do. We don't do large holidays, we don't like memorials either. We live in the vein of celebrating the life, not mourning the passing. I love you grandma. I'll miss you. You were beautiful, and you were strong. I hope that I can always be as strong and capable as you were. I know when things are difficult for me, I can think back to you, and know that you, like my own mother, knew how to make things work. This part of my spirit i can trace back to you.

All my love to all my family,

Jess

Oh, no.

I saw it yesterday.

My first "Merry Christmas" sign in Beijing. It was disturbing. It was 12 feet high. It was glowing.

I'm not sure I can handle this.

Mmm, sleep.

I need to update, and thusly, I am updating.

See, I do this thing whenever a thought occurs to me that I want to blog about, or whenever I see something that I want to make mention of- I make up a little outline in my head of how the blog post is going to go. The problem with this is it makes me feel as though I've already blogged for the day. And I haven't. But I think i have. It's a vicious cycle, especially when I start to do little blog outlines in my head that detail how I haven't been blogging lately. I've done this for the past two days.

In the past week or so since I've blogged I've gotten better (Sicksies no more!) And gotten a little more work. A lot of things that I've wanted to comment on have also happened (like Transgender Victims of Violence Day, Thanksgiving, and finding out that I make more in a month than the Chinese girls i work with make in a year), and I haven't commented on any of them. But I'm going to. At least, the last one. And there is a new J.Filth Challenge. By new, I also mean first.

I just wrote a long paragraph talking about why it is that I'm doing the challenge I'm doing, but then i read it over and realized that I'm too tired right now to write it in the proper, analytical way it needs to written. If you don't believe me, read over that sentence I just wrote and then imagine an entire explanative paragraph full of ones just like it. No good. So I'm going to settle for telling you the challenge and then giving you one sentence on why, with more to come tomorrow or the next day. Probably the next day. I have a lot of classes to teach tomorrow.

I'm going to be living, for the next month at least, on 200 kaui per week. Relatively speaking it should be easy, since every trip to the market costs between 4 and 7 kuai (for a bag full of veggies) and the oatmeal i make every morning (including the dried fruit i buy to go into it) costs about 40 kuai per supermarket trip. It's easy to get into this habit on converting prices to dollars in your head, but thats no good. I want to start counting a kuai as a kuai and not as a fraction of a dollar. This also means little (or at least price concious) going out, no frivolous taxi rides, and no spending anything without thinking about it. I'm going to update on here, everyday, about what got spent on what.

Why? Cause I know it's possible and i'm looking to both simplify and be more concious of exactly what it is i need to get by (i have a sneaking suspicion it's not much, and much less than what I currently consume). I want to cut back my consumption to things I actually need.

Now I'm going to do something else I actually need, like sleep. I'll be cool and analytical on my next post. Swear!

love&luz

tiredjessie

sicksies

It's bloody cold.

It's nice to know, from things like the comments on the last post, that there are people out there in reader land. I assume that some of you are lurkers, but commenting to say hi makes me want to keep on posting to say hi back :)

This post is going to be short and sweet cause it's rather late here and i'm rather sickly and tired. My fingers are in the process of defrosting. For those of you who have never lived in a cold climate (those of you like myself, spoiled and privileged to have only ever lived in sweet sweet seasonless bliss), let me give you a small window into the trials and tribulations of an LA bred, Honolulu relocated winter-that-is-actually-cold newb like me.

I washed my clothes today. In China, people have come to realize that if you wash your clothes and then you hang them or lay them outside, they will dry. Because of this, people in China do not use clothing driers (people in places like America would do well to take note of this Eastern ingenuity). Now, sloven and lazy being that i am i only washed my clothes because of a lack of both clean underwear and clean second pants ('second pants' being what the norwegian has got us what in the States we call 'thermals'). As such, tonight at 1:30am on my way to bed, I realized that tomorow i would be hard up indeed if my clothes were not dry by daybreak. This is how the 1:30am freezing cold hanging up of freezing cold wet clothing in the freezing cold courtyard came about. My fingers have never been so cold. You cannot wear mittens or gloves to hang up wet clothing. You can only use your poor, warm blood, unprotected fingers. They will never forgive you. You will type funny for a few days.

I feel like now that my readership has blossomed (kind of, sort of, a little) i should do things like follow through on my promises, go over my posts before i post them, and maybe hit spellcheck.

Instead I'm going to do things like say 'trials and tribulations' and then only give you one story, not look over my post at all with sincere conviction that i am always flawless, and shrug off spellcheck just cause i can.

love you.
jess

Brrr.

Fatigued.
I'm tired.

So, a lot of people on the vegan blogsphere are making posts about their 'go to' foods, or their comfort foods. I thought i'd go ahead and share mine with you all, since i've been eating it rather often of late.

Now, let me preface this by stating that I am an 80 year old woman, and you cannot judge little old ladies on the things they eat. Not many of you know it, but deep down inside i'm that little old lady who cringes at roller coasters and microwaves, the one who rinses out ziplock bags to use again. I'm rather proud of this, and I think it's rather sexy (just cause theres snow on the roof doesn't mean theres no fire in the oven, eh? eh?).In this same vein, my Oma (another small, old lady) has two sets of things she cooks- one set for other people, and one set for her. She constantly claims that the things she likes to eat no one else likes- they represent the strange and unmarketable culinary misfits that she deems good enough for her but not good enough for anyone else. I can sympathize with her, because i feel this way about a number of the foods i like to eat. This is why i do not offer them to people. I, like my Oma, know that i can cook 'better', but 'better' is not necessarily what i prefer. Case in point, my comfort food.

Boiled Sweet Potatoe.

Unseasoned, rather mushy, still in tuber form, boiled sweet potatoe.
Lately the one's i buy from market fit perfectly, cut in half, in the rice cooker pot i throw on the table top burner in the kitchen. I boil these suckers, shucking peanuts while watching the pot in my below the knee cashmere coat (the kitchen is inhumane amounts of cold), and then retire to my room with two plain halves of a boiled sweet potatoe in a bowl.
It's sweet potatoe heaven.

Then i take out my dentures for the night and crawl into bed.
But seriously, what can match the pure unadulterated delight that is warm, mushy, boiled sweet potatoe? Skin all soft though still adding that toothsome edge to counteract the soft and yielding sunset hued flesh? Okay, maybe i do enjoy them too much. Fuck it.

What else has been up lately? More job searching, bearing little though some fruit for my labors. The roomies and i have hauled a concrete block onto the rooftop patio above my room for a makeshift fireplace. We fill it with logs and huddle around it under the darkening, pollution tinged winter sky. We roast things in it. We are hunting for a cast iron so we can make baked goods. We shall be triumphant beijing gods of winter.

On a side note, while i wait for scottie to boil us some tea, i'll tell you what happened between the last paragraph and this line.

Scottie came home, hollered ahoy across the courtyard and shambled off to his room. Shrugging on my coat I went after and stole some of his ever so potent (it's got the taste and consistency of congealed jager) chinese herbal throat medicine stuff. Then we shambled over to the kitchen and did what two sick room mates suffering the Beijinger pre-winter weather do: downed raw cloves of garlic. Ohad, le Israeli roomie, insists this will make us better. I took mine, like a little 80 year old lady, unadulterated and pure. Scottie had to do his in glasses of water. Pansy.
Now what we refer to as "the garlic shivers" are descending, so i'm going to go to sleep. For those of you who have never munched your way through a handful of raw garlic cloves, the stuff makes you feel really, really weird.
l
ove&luz

jess

Excelllent

This post comes to you from my insulated and well heated room, in the middle of a dark hutong in Beijing.

I'm sorry i haven't been posting too much of late, but ive been running around town trying to get work and trying not to freeze and trying not to be sick.

So far only one of those has been accomplished, and it's only been kind of sort of accomplished halfway. I've got a little work but not a whole lot- thats something that will hopefully change soon enough. I've definately frozen many times over, and only truly manage to defrost moments before i am forced to re-submerge myself in the icy outdoors that currently compromise all of northern china. as for the sicksies part, well, i'm not as sick as i could be! hurrah! i'm going to keep saying that until the day i get another kidney stone. to me that will hold as the epitome of horrid, horrid illness.

on the upside i'm having a swanky coat tailor made for me in a lovely dark, dark blue. it's going to come down past my knees and once i have it HOHO! look out world. Jessie just might be warm. All i need now are gloves, socks, and boots. Yahtzee!

So as much as i love you all and miss you, im going to lay down now and go to sleep so that i can work on eradicting the last of my jetlag and attempt to overcome my illness before it gets too nasty.

love&luz
jessie

The jing.

Oh goodness.

Lets start off by giving a huge round of applause to Korean Air, which provided me with the most enjoyable 10 hour flight i've ever had. Not only did i have a row of 5 seats all to myself (ALL TO MYSELF), but i had two correctly vegan meals, a warm and large blanket, headphones provided, a travel kit including thick woolen socks, a toothbrush, and a mentholated (MENTHOLATED) eyemask graciously given me, free alcohol (only some wine to help me sleep, nothing like what went down that first flight to china...) but the bathroom was huge and included a full length mirror. Yay for Korean Air.

The layover in Seoul was grey and uneventful. I was accosted by some Christians in the Seoul airport, which was a little alarming. Besides that, the airport was much like both Beijing and Narita. More like Narita, cause the new portion of the Beijing airport is so large and cold feeling, but both Seoul and Narita feel cozier and have more bustling shops.

Getting to Beijing I took the new subway train from the airport into the city (so convenient) and then with a few transfers was being met by Scottie at the trainstation. We navigated through some seriously serious hutongs, and then found ourselves at his little home away from home. It's so beautiful. You walk into a courtyard through red double doors (which are standard in Beijing hutongs) in the middle of which grows and immense oak tree. The rooms all radiate off the courtyard, including a kitchen and two bathrooms. Theres Wifi. Theres heating. Theres lovely peace and quiet in the middle of Beijing. It's beautiful. I'm so pleased- theres even a rooftop patio!

Sigh. When i'm feeling more up to it i'll describe how the walls in the courtyard are covered in Indian-esque murals of various Goddesses and the rooms are filled with antique wood furniture (the owner, apparently, used to run an antique shop). I can't imagine a more lovely place to be staying.

Well, maybe if i could ship a few certain someones over from Hawaii, and set up a similar flat for my folks across the way, then i could. But then i wouldnt be making new lifelong friends and i'd be mired in the comfort of familiarity, so i suppose this is better anyway :)

miss you guys and love you
jess

Jessie Goes to Beijing

Not a take off of Debbie Does Dallas, I assure you.
So the news is in, I'm returning to the motherland, and that means that this blog is going to get more play than it has been lately.

Unlike me, who will be getting less play than i have been lately (sorry dad, oma still can't read the blog...)

Yes, I'm aware that the blog's most avid fans will likely be my parents, but as they are two of the most important people in my life I'm okay with that (hi mom, hi dad *geeky wave*), and as theyre the two that like to hear from me the most it's only apropos.

Now on to what i've been contemplating today while packing (by packing i mean, sitting at my laptop with a cup of tea stealing glances at my pile of things, spread across the floor of the apartment). In saying my goodbyes I've come to value silence over words. When i begin the whole "like, im leaving and want to tell you how much you mean to me" thing, I flounder about and never really get at what i'm trying to say. I try to build up to the big thing that i want to say with other 'clarifying' explanations of my feelings, and then end up stuck in the 'clarifications' without ever reaching what it is i'm attempting to clarify (pointless much?). So I've come to feel, why muck about trying to move ever so tactfully through the mire of emotions when focusing on the moment and companionship will likely bear better fruit? Can we ever really impart to another individual an exact meaning anyway? Words that hold specific emotions for me may hold a completely different set of emotions for someone else, regardless of the broader meaning. If i verbalize an emotion it's not guaranteed that what my listener hears will hold my intended meaning, will make them feel whatever way i want them to feel anyway. In that regard I've also come to feel as though my attempts at telling my loved ones that i love them is a little selfish- not all the time mind you, but at least currently. I feel better, more secure, more validated even if i feel i've made it clear to those i love how much i love them. It's almost as if i'm trying to elbow some room for myself inside of the people i love. Lame.

Which is why i've opted for some silence, which i like a lot. When it comes down to it after all of the mitigating emotions that make me feel as though this relationship or that relationship differs in this way or that way (blahblahblibbityblah) all that i'm really trying to say to anyone is "i appreciate you, and i know when i see you again i'll be happy".

jess.