The Reader Travels

We arrive in China by way of San Francisco following Olivia and her half-sister Kwan in Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses. Living on a sphere, it is sometimes easier to travel West to arrive in the East; and halfway around the world is a further destination than all-the-way around the world.

East and West are worlds apart, yet there are always consistencies in the human condition. Kwan’s father had to leave her behind in China to start a new life for himself. He longed for her and wanted to give her the connection of family as he lay dying.

Many years ago, my own cousin had to give up her child when she was struggling just to take care of herself. The baby girl traveled west from Florida to Texas to California to the Middle East with relatives who would claim her as their own and love her forever.

Kwan has “yin eyes” — she sees ghosts and hears their stories. She sees more than the blood connection with her young American sister. She sees love and both the strength and the sadness of humanity.

When we left our travels, we were in Northern Mexico, skirting the border to the US. We travel now to New Mexico, where the people live north of the border, but share a culture with their family to the south.

We’ve been here before with Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima. Like Teresa Urrea in The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Ultima is a curandera. She knows plants, and she knows the spirits around her. She knows healing.

Life is hard, but for some it is unbearable. There is pain and sadness in every family, but most of us hold it together by sharing the burden with those we love. One peripheral character I remember from Bless Me, Ultima was cousin Lupe, who went to the war and came back with “war disease.” After the gruesome bloodshed of war, he would never be the same again. I have a picture of him in my mind, running wild through the arroya, the men in his family chasing behind to keep him from hurting himself.

I see this kind of war disease in some of my beloved friends and family members. For most it is not a literal war, but some gruesome life experiences they can’t seem to recover from. May they all find peace and balance in their lives.

The last time I was in New Orleans was three years ago, which was a year before Katrina blew through town. It’s still the city I remember, filled with family I’ve missed. But it’s also gravely wounded.

I’m here in mourning, and my new journal is filled with eulogies. I visited a cousin who’s been rebuilding her house, and living in it at the same time. My uncle is in a trailer until his house is livable again.

We drove out to my Aunt’s beach house and stood on the empty lot overlooking the broken piers that were once the Bay St. Louis Yacht Club. My niece sifted through the ground, picking out buried Mardi Gras beads and pieces of plates and glasses from the house, like it was an archaeology dig.

I’m here for a funeral, and the optimist in me can’t help but think about new beginnings. The day we arrived, they opened the new bridge across the bay between Bay St. Louis and Pass Christian, Mississippi. For two years they’ve been ferrying passengers across the bridge, but today everything is connected again. Sparkly and new.

Because of Mother’s Day and the recent death of my grandmother, I’ve been thinking a lot about the women in my family. Somehow, each of them is linked in my mind to a kind of food, and the thoughts have been pouring in since I cooked dinner on Friday evening.

I grew up with three grandmothers. One was famous for her Jell-O concoctions, all nuts and fruits and marshmallows. Another cooked gumbo and crawfish, served French bread at every meal and drank martinis; the taste of gin always reminds me of her. The third always tried “gourmet” recipes that were somehow off, but made the best cheesecake I’ve ever tasted, a flavor I still search for, but can never find.

My sisters are linked to food too. My middle sister is all health - green spinach and fresh picked blueberries. She’s tricks for opening garlic and a million ways to cook tofu. My brother’s wife is meatballs, rice pudding and Spanish pastries flavored with anise. My husband’s sister is hot tea, fresh pressed coffee and spaghetti sauce with cayenne pepper. My youngest sister is love, and acceptance, barbecue, devilled eggs and chicken salad.

My mother-in-law is conversation and shared pleasures, Thanksgivings at nice restaurants, adventures in sights, smells and flavors.

I can’t cook without thinking of my mother, though. She is the very base of my existence, and everything I create is building off things she taught me. Just as she gave me life, she gave me food.

Happy Mother’s Day.

It’s a year for big family events - births, graduations, weddings, funerals. Two of my girlfriends will be having babies soon, and another just got married. My nephew is graduating from high school in two weeks, and my young cousin is getting married in August. So, I’ve been thinking a lot about hopes and wishes, prayers of good will.

Somehow it’s natural to also think of fears. I remembered something that Jane Smiley did to let us know her characters early in A Thousand Acres. One sister asked another sister, “What is your worst fear?” And their answers said a lot about them.

So I’ve been asking this question lately. One friend answered simply, “Death.” And my man, after joking about his fear of having his head crushed by something really large, said, sweetly, “A part of me is truly afraid of outliving my wife.”

We got the word that my grandmother died today, and her husband, who absolutely adored this woman, must deal with her loss. May he always feel her love around him, and never fear.

Amen.

Okay, so Gary Jennings’s Aztec doesn’t qualify as magical realism, but I thought since we were here in Northern Mexico that we might talk about the Chichimeca.

So you know how anyone can post on Wikipedia, and you don’t know if what you’re getting is completely accurate? Well, try searching “chichimeca” on Yahoo! You should come up with a Spanish Wikipedia article on the Chichimeca, and Yahoo! offers a cute little service to translate the article into English. Imagine how many inaccuracies you end up with using that little trick.

Regardless, I thought this was interesting. From what I gathered, the name Chichimeca started out a derogatory term, much like the word “barbarian,” making fun of the incomprehensible language of these dirty desert dog people. When I think of the Barbars, I picture these two cocky Roman soldiers with their helmets and their armor, laughing and making fun of their backward foes. One Roman says to the other Roman, “Bar bar bar bar, hee hee, bar,” and the other Roman says, “Yeah I know, right? Bar bar friggin bar.”

But even more interesting than how they got their name were the tales Gary Jennings told of the Chichimeca and their peyote. The medicine men at the top of the social ladder got to actually eat the peyote and then trip their balls off. Then the next rung down could drink the urine of the medicine men, and they could trip too. Then the next rung down and so on and so on. The people at the bottom of the ladder hardly trip at all. I guess because they’re already sitting on the ground (and they’re drinking pure pee).

Aztecs rule!

Another story that takes place in Northern Mexico is Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. It’s a tale of being enslaved by tradition, and the quiet and not-so-quiet rebellions against the chains that bind.

It’s Cinco de Mayo weekend, with lots of festivities happening around town. It’s not a huge tradition in Mexico, but here in the US, we love any excuse to party. Believe it or not, Cinco de Mayo is not the Mexican independence day. You have to wait until September for that one.

Regardless of what Cinco de Mayo is all about, it represents fighting for what you believe, like Esquivel’s Tita quietly fights for the man she loves, like her sister Gertrudis fights in the Mexican Revolution. For Tita and her family, let’s eat a burrito and drink a few margaritas. Viva Mexico!

_________

*Cake, Prolonging the Magic, “Mexico”

In The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Luis Alberto Urrea takes us on a journey more than a thousand miles north of Colombia. We start in the state of Sinaloa in Mexico with the Urrea family and The People. From there we travel north again to Sonora, follow holy men into Chihuahua and even venture beyond the Rio Grande into Texas and Arizona.

There is magic in this family history, with miracles and visions, births, deaths and resurrections. But there is also truth. Luis Alberto Urrea researched the story of his ancestor Teresa Urrea in fine detail, seeking texts, interviewing family members and modern day curanderos for secrets of the healing powers and truths about Mexican history.

I loved that this was based on a true story. And the magic made it that much more real.