There, On Her Own

“You look like someone who’d like to review college essays?”  I’m busy, of course.  And, as I always do, I pause whatever I’m working on if my older daughter comes in with a smile and that particular line.  What a lost opportunity it is, in the digital world we inhabit that we don't share writing more regularly.  These essays force her to bare a piece of her heart, model a political perspective, struggle to express a theme clearly.  Every time, every essay, I learn something interesting about her.  How did I not know that before?  And, she is a captive audience for a discussion now on any of these themes.  When she’s ready to go, I invariably head to my shelf and grab something she must read, that speaks to what we just talked about, even though she knows and I know it’s unlikely she’ll have a look amidst all the rest of her work. 

I imagine her back in the States in a liberal arts college next year.  We don’t know which one yet, obviously.  But in my mind, she is back with all my friends, in that remarkable first year of college I had in 1984.  One and then another conversation where I waded in and asserted things, which would never have been challenged by chums back in high school, were suddenly matters of fierce debate.  “I don’t agree with that.”  “Why do you think that?”  No more free passes, intellectually.  The bar was suddenly much, much higher, and I was forced to think harder, about everything. 

I imagine my older one being challenged on China.  What will she make of that?  I imagine her trying to position herself within the mine-field of race politics.  "I'm of Chinese and Irish descent, but I'm a U.S. citizen, though I never lived here and . . ."  Next fall, we’ll be well into the election cycle.  The Dem’s will have a crowded pen of aspirants and though it’s a given that all but a few freshman will likely loathe Donald, knives will be sharpened most assuredly, as these teenagers cut their way through from Sanders, to Biden to Warren to Harris.   I imagine her there, on her own, with a surfeit of strong opinions, that are all inchoate for now. 

She had dinner with her pals tonight, so my wife and I headed to our local family style favorite, Han Feng, Piazza Café, with the little one.   We’ve probably dined there a few hundred times over the years.  We all complained that it didn’t taste like it used to.  Does it?  How could you really ever know?  I considered those first “Chinese” meals I ever had back in 1993, in the informal little restaurants out the back gate of Hau Dong Shi Da, (The East China Normal University) in Putuo Shanghai.  No dish was more than a ten yuan, which cost about a dollar twenty.  I’d never tasted anything like any of those dishes and each one was better than the next.  Posited in my mind like something divine, I have spent the subsequent twenty-five years trying, in vain to find that taste in Shanghai, ever again.  I suspect though that even were I to somehow find it, it would no longer surprise and delight the way it once had. 

Saturday, 01/12/19