Yamei Visiting New York - Sunday 3/22/2009

Yamei and husband Bob paid a short visit to New York to do some house hunting for their daughter who has been working and living in Manhattan for the past few years. I saw Yamei last November, 4 months ago, in San Francisco when I visited my daughter. She was still going through chemo, her hair slowly growing back to fine and budding shape, her spirit high but physically still somewhat weak.

This time, she is a different story – energetic, warm, interested, in her natural happiness, with a head of full and hardy hair (how I remember her hair used to be) and her usual lightness of style.

We (Chin-ming, Wei-ping, Yamei, Bob and I) met for brunch at the “Tavern on the Green”, an upscale garden dining place, before their Sunday house-hunt. Outside was still quite chilly (maybe in the 40F), but inside we bonded instantly. We still saw in each other the 18-years-old young girls from Beinu, despite the ages (It’s been 35 years since Beinu). We’ve found so much to enjoy in each other, as if we had never been separated before – This is true, enduring friendship.

Yamei told us that what helped her post-chemo recovery was work, “I started working right after the chemo. Everyday I worked, I was busy, I forget about my illness, and I didn’t think myself into a corner.” Work was, and is, her therapy. I suspect that to be true for the rest of us. “However, I have changed my priority after cancer. I’ve learned to put things into perspective.” Part of the priority is to take time off, to be with the loved ones, no matter how busy we are.

Bob is a nice man, funny, gentlemanly, no doubt a great husband. This is the first time I’ve met him, but we’ve already wholeheartedly accepted him into the Beinu family.

As we took a stroll through the busy Central Park, I mentioned an idea to Yamei of inviting Beinu alumni to write their individual “This I Believe” essays - a few hundred words to express the core principles or convictions that guide each of our lives till now. I know this project can be daunting. But I think it’s worth the try; here is why: As we grow older, slowing down from our busy lives of being mothers, wives, and professional women, and becoming more comfortable in our skins, we begin to reflect more on what we have done, what life is for, where we are going, and what is the one belief that has carried us through all these years. It won’t be a simple task (how can you condense one’s life in a few words?) or easy thing to write (should you tell a personal story, or just make a grand statement.) But we owe it to ourselves for not writing those words down, if not to sum up our lives before we pass on.

Three hours with Yamei was a short time, but we’ve really accomplished a great deal - We managed to make every minute count.

Susie Li
3/25/2009

Around New York with My Friends - Saturday 12/6/2008

My Beinu friends and I were on the go again, this time exploring Harlem and Upper West Side of Upper Manhattan in one day.

Around New York

The Cloisters, A branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
(Devoted to art of medieval Europe)
Fort Tryon Park
(Special Tour: The Christmas Story)

The museum was built in the 1930s with the generous endowment from the philanthropist John D. Rockfeller Jr. The “Cloister” is like a Chinese courtyard surrounded by art galleries (Chinese living quarters). The works of art cover chronological periods from AD 1000 to 1500 – the Romanesque period, the Gothic era, Medieval art.

We came initially to admire the magnificent museum architecture and attend a special “Christmas Story” guided tour.

I am no expert in European art; but I must say that, an excellent guide would make a world of differences for neophytes like us. We were lucky to have an extraordinarily animated, funny, and knowledgeable lady volunteer as our guide. Watching her telling the intricacies of Western religious/Christmas/nativity stories and the art spawning from them was like watching a one-woman performance, immeasurably enlightening and entertaining. I have gained a heightened appreciation of the Christianity faith and the European religious art and as a result.

Admission: $10 (We used a friend’s museum membership ID to obtain a discount)
Friends: Agnes Young, Kathy Ding, Susie

Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine
(This magnificent cathedral was burned down in 2001, and painstakingly restored to its finest form today.)

St. John Cathedral is one of the greatest urban cathedrals that blend great medieval Europe with modern New York traditions. After the fire, it took 8 years to clean and restore the architecture, stained glass, stone and wood carvings to their previous grandeur.

It wasn’t just the holy feeling walking through the restored church. It was actually a happy experience - There were public performances of edgy music and story-telling going on when we were there. We heard the fascinating stories of modern artist angst told by a poet named Master Lee, a long-hair, bearded, middle-aged man of Chinese descent in tuxedo. He was whimsical, philosophical, and occasionally even profane in his story-telling. I remembered him questioning about “out of the box” (What’s wrong with ‘in the box’? We live in the box – our houses, we die in the box – look around the church, it’s full of the tombs of deceased abbies. The box containers today enable the global trade, etc…)

Admission: Free
Friends: Agnes Young, Kathy Ding, Shan Lo, Susie

Saigon Grill – Vietnamese Cooking
620 Amsterdam (corner of cross street 90th)

I suggested this place on account of an old colleague’s recommendation, and my Chinese friends quite liked it. We didn’t know what we were ordering. So we asked the waiter to order for us.

And we ended up liking almost all what we’ve ordered, especially the Sate Vietnamese rice noodle dish, the shrimp summer rolls, and the Sate chicken dish. The price was also very reasonable. This restaurant is definitely our favorite West Side story.

Lunch for 4: $60 (4 dishes and soup)
Friends: Agnes Young, Kathy Ding, Shan Lo, Susie

(PS: We had coffee after dinner at, guess what, one of the Dunkin Donuts shops. Agnes and I both realized how Dunking Donuts meant so much to us, because both of our kids loved the Dunking donuts when they were little…now they are all grown up. This place brought back the unique memories of us as young mothers and our babies together…)


Susie
12/7/2008

One Week of San Francisco 11/9-11/14/2008

Sunday 11/9/2008 – Weather was fantastic, a sunny and brilliant fall day. I met with my Beinu friends and my daughter – Kristin, Grace, Koren and Yamei – in a famous restaurant in Chinatown, R & G Lounge, for lunch. We then took a long walk through Fisherman’s Warf, while stopping at Peet’s Coffee for a relaxed cup of coffee. We ran into one disturbed, disruptive person, loud and unruly, at a Safeway store. My daughter told me, “In SF, you’ll get a lot of this type of crazies. Usually they don’t do harm if you don’t provoke them. In New York, you can get into big trouble with similar type of people.”

Monday 11/10/2008 – My husband Steve and I went to Berkeley, checking out our old haunts (we lived nearby for one year in 1980). Not much was changed. We toured the Spral Plaza famous for the political rallies and riots in the 60s, then went on to Albany where we rented a place on the street of Ordway (We never located the house – they all looked the same.) “Walker’s Pie Shop” on Solano Avenue where old people liked to congregate and socialize back in those days, where one could get a decent size of meal and pie for a fair price, is no more. We then strolled down to Vivarian the snake aquarium, and browsed the REI where we used to do a lot.

Tuesday 11/11/2008 – Veteran’s Day and Kristin had a day off from her paralegal work. Steve, Kristin and I first went to the DeYoung Museum, but it was too crowded. So we turned around and went to the Asian Art Museum instead where they had an early Afghanistan art exhibit, mostly gold pieces from the period when Alexander the Greek occupied northern Afghanistan. Afterwards, we toured around the Japan Center which seemed a bit quieter than I’ve remembered. At night, we met with my sister-in-law and niece at an Indian restaurant, the Rotee, near Kristin’s apartment on Pierce Street (in the Haight-Asbury neighborhood). San Francisco is a beautiful city distinct with its colorful and varied Victorian or Edwardian architecture, much prettier than New York City. It also seems to be friendlier and easier for young people like Kristin to start out, except the rent is quite high for her.

Wednesday 11/12/2008 – I took the day off resting at my in-laws’, only went out at night to meet Steve’s high-school buddy Tom in Berkeley. Tom works for a prestigious architectural firm in SF for over 30 years.

Thursday 11/13/2008 – Steve went with another of his high-school friends, David Gowen, for a strenuous hike. I went by myself to explore Oakland Chinatown on account of Kristin’s recommendation (She thought Oakland Chinatown is a bit more “authentic”, less “touristy” than San Francisco Chinatown.) Indeed, I was able to take care of my mundane Chinese business quite well there: I ate a hearty Vietnamese meal; bought a pair of utterly comfortable walking shoes; picked up some nice jade pieces for my new craft projects,; finally visited the popular Asian community library sampling the large selection of Asian and Taiwanese magazines. I came back and met with David, Steve’s friend, who was quite an amazing individual in his own right: an autodidact who never went to college, but has a great love for nature and is becoming an well-known expert on Bay Area plants, publishing articles in respected journal and all that.

Friday 11/14/2008 – Steve and I went to visit the San Francisco Aquarium. Steve didn’t like it as much as the old one before all the remodeling fanfare (He thought, in an effort to make the aquarium environment feeling “more natural”, the new aquarium was becoming less friendly to the visitors – It was hard to see the creatures, and hard to move around exhibits.) I was happy nonetheless - I got to see the weirdest creature I’ve ever seen in my life: the leaf sea dragon. After the aquarium, we drove to Sausalito for a quick tour, again, not much change there – same old, same old!

Saturday 11/15/2008 – This concluded my 1-week vacation to San Francisco. Susie

Overachieving Beinu Geniuses

It has been a pleasantly busy November for me. I took a one-week trip mid-month to California, visiting Kristin, and got to see Yamei, Koren and Grace Wang – my greatest reward. Everyone seemed to be doing well, which is something to be thankful for.

It was interesting to come back to New York and talked with Agnes about the fate of the many overachievers from Beinu in America. (Her sister was one of them, and we had a couple, sort of, from the Shu class too.) The culture in Beinu was such that all we had to do was to work super hard to stay on top of the class, and we would be recognized for our “talents”. Unfortunately, once out of school, there is more to life than getting good grade. All the Beinu advantages could not guarantee success in America. In America, some Beinu achievers may succeed where others fail, and some Beinu geniuses may just get a little luckier than other Beinu geniuses.

Overachievers are by nature hypercompetitive, no matter how old they become. Life is unfair. There is surely a lot of later-day disappointments for the Beinu genius type in the Chinese quarters of American cities. This phenomenon is nothing unique about Chinese, however, we Chinese have perfected the art of jealousy and envy.

Is it necessary to be disappointed? I don’t think so. We may have spent too much time naval gazing - Time to rise above the narrow circle of Chinese and look around at this beautiful adoptive homeland, with all its intelligence, creativity, energy, interesting experiences to offer, and fascinating people to meet. I was fortunate to be exposed to the culture early on, through my American husband and his friends. I lived away from my Chinese friends back then. I had to struggle to learn new things by myself; I felt inadequate for not knowing the different forms of Western music, English literature, arts and sciences, and history in this country that made life worth living for; at the same time I was excited like a child about learning all these new experiences. Suffice to say that I have turned my competitiveness into competing with myself; I have worked hard trying to be a more cultured, broadly intelligent and happier person. Considering how far I have become, I feel personally fulfilled: This is not a wasted trip; it is certainly good enough for me; and I quite enjoy myself.

The conventional wisdom says, "If you aim higher, so will you fall harder." Ted Turner turned it around and observed, "If you aim higher than you are capable of, then you will always have something interesting to work on all through your life (so that you don't die off 24 months after you retire...)" The key is to satisfy yourself, not others.

Attached are a few Christmas gift jewelry I've recently made.



Happy Holidays.

Susie Li
11/30/2008

Around New York

I heard this story over the radio: Two friends from Philadelphia, in their 80s, after one's wife passed away, made a pact to go to a museum every two weeks within 200 miles of radius. They have visited well over 50 museums so far, some spectacular, some mundane (like traveling all the way to see a horse...granted it was some special horse of historical value.) My Beinu friends and I are doing similar things right now.


New York Botanical Garden

(Special Exhibit: The Flower Art of Kiku)

The New York botanical garden is having a flower show "The Art of the Japanese Chrysanthemum (Kiku in japanese)", which covers a wide range of exquisite Oriental landscape objects: flowers such as chrysanthemum, camellia, lotus; trees such as red maple, pine, bamboo (Take), bonsai; settings such as lotus ponds, rock gardens, and a monumental bamboo sculpture.



The bamboo sculpture was huge bamboos being twisted and turned into a canopy. A lot of work, but not exactly beautiful.

As far as the centerpiece chrysanthemum goes, they come in all sizes and colors. I personally prefers the small, delicate kinds, which work equally well as ground covering as show pieces (or simply as the main ingredient in the Chinese chrysanthemum tea), so vibrant and effortlessly beautiful. The large breeds were too much for my taste, like peonies. It’s freakish to see how these huge flowers were “bent” (or “woven”) out of shape in the Japanese hands, like being made into a bouquet of 230-bulbs from one spindly flower stem all precariously propped up by massive amount of wires and contraption.

After the flamboyant outdoor flower shows, the indoor bonsai displays seemed a little pale, and, a little diminutive in comparison.


Very nice overall. I had all the pictures to prove it.

Admission: $20
Friends: Agnes Young, Hsiao-Hwa Hsu, Echo, Susie

Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), NY

(“Meeting with Bodhisattva” – the drum dance show by the U Theater, a Buddhist inspired dance group based in Taiwan, ROC)

In Buddhism, a bodhisattva is an enlightened being who postpones the attainment of nirvana in order to alleviate the suffering of others.

I guessed the show told how a person attained enlightenment through facing life’s many unknowns. I got only one act right: when the center character wielded his stick as an oar (Buddha’s path to enlightenment included the stint of being a ferryman.)

Ode to Buddha, my spiritual leader – I got that.

However, it would be quite difficult for the lay audience to understand the point of the dance without some preparation. There was plenty of acrobatic drumming and physical aerobics, but the movements were stealthily quiet, and there was no music.

Objectively, the dance was a bit too mystical and obtuse for popularity. Fortunately, it was not too long, lasting only 1 hour 20 minutes, and no intermission. On my way home, inside the Union Street subway station, a man and a woman were drumming vigorously on an array of improvised tin/plastic cans. They sounded almost familiar, and quite good.

Friends: Agnes Young, Hsiao-Hwa Hsu



More garden pictures are available at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/li.chungying/20082009Activities#

Susie Li (11/4/2008)

Six-Day (10/4-10/9/2008) Fall Foliage Drive to Maine

(It has been a while since I wrote. Life had been all work until this fall. Now that kids are gone - Jake went away to college at Buffalo, and Kristin works in San Francisco - the adults get to play...)

Sunshine everyday (high in the 60s, nighttime in the 30s), State of Maine (mind) goes like this: Shorelines (beautiful coasts, cold waters); meticulously preserved lighthouses; abundant seafood (lobsters, haddocks and shrimps); Arcadia state park has everything recreational one could ask for: ocean + Cadillac mountains + lakes + fjords + sea birds (Elder ducks, loons, puffins, American bald eagles, sea gulls) + plants (blueberries, cranberries, rosebuds, maple syrup) and fall foliage + hiking trails + rocks + boating or sports fishing, moose and miniature squirrels.

10/4/2008 Saturday (Day 1) Sunny and crisp day

- Drove 400 miles from Mount Kisco in the morning
- Arrived early afternoon in Maine: the “pine tree” state, the beautiful state, sunny
- Visited LL Bean at Freeport, ME. Not in a buying mood. Same stuff as in the catalogue. Too crowded.
- Stayed in Trade Winds Motel in Rockland dock side. Ate lobsters at the Big Fish Restaurant, my first. Morning breakfast at the motel was quite sumptuous.

10/5/2008 Sunday (Day 2) Sunny and crisp day

- Arrived in Arcadia State Park; stayed at the Seawall Motel on the Quiet Side (met Dave Loyd); met “speed bump” the cat and Dave’s daughter and guests at breakfast. It was a surprisingly warm and intimate breakfast. Lots of great conversations.
- Took a 3 mile beach loop hike around Wonderland. Ate at the “Dry Dock Café” (which was not much). Bought a cane-sugar green apple soda from Canada at a corner market, quite tasty.

10/6/2008 Monday (Day 3) Sunny and crisp day

- Visited Bar Harbor, the Sausalito of Arcadia; bought a beautiful red “father” vase at the tiny Asian/American “Eclipse” Gallery run by a lady from Beijing named Hongrun Lee (part-time resident from May-October)
- Drove to Cutler point, looked around, almost ran into a big moose on the way to the border town Lubec (the northern tip of Maine bordering the great state of Canada). Ate dinner at this cute but quite good restaurant, “Murphy’s Village Restaurant” (no more than 2 restaurants in town). Steve liked their Southern Burrito.
- The dockside motel in town is booked full. So we drove back to the next big town Machias. Retired to a roadside motel (not much of place to mention).

10/7/2008 Tuesday (Day 4) Sunny and crisp day

- Quoddy Head State Park and its Lighthouse (the Eastern most point of the US). Took a short 2.5 mile hike along the coast. Turned around at the Green Point.
- Stopped over at the Cutler Trailhead Public Conservation Land, and took a very strenuous 5.9 mile hike (1/4 along the coast, the rest was rugged, hunter trails with rocks and more rocks, not many switchbacks.)
- Had a slow leak in one tire. Went down to Machias, and stayed in an AAA-rated motel, quite nice.

10/8/2008 Wednesday (Day 5) Sunny and crisp day

- Had the tire repaired at a gas station, a very friendly neighborhood business.
- Stopped by the Jasper Beach at Machias. Jasper is a type of dark-greenish jade-like rock that forms the mountain whose erosion turned into beach pebbles. Collected Jasper stone pebbles and drift wood to complete my miniature beach garden at home.
- Back to Arcadia State Park, the Quiet side, stayed at the Seawall Motel again.
- Ate a pretty good lobster dinner at the “Gilley’s Head of the Harbor” restaurant.

10/9/2008 Thursday (Day 6) Cloudy in the morning and a little rain overnight, sunny afternoon

- Seawall breakfast with Dave: learned so much about his life story, and how he made a go of the motel business (was a Hartford Insurance executive to start out; laid off in 1999; remembered a business traveler that he met on the plane talking about Maine and Arcadia a year and half before his layoff; decided that no need for the insurance job stress, took a trip to Maine, and bought up the rundown Seawall motel on the spot and the land it sat on in 2000, renovated the place since and offered artist workshops (his wife Vicky is a painter); motel marketing through internet booking and the local chamber of commerce and word of mouth; offered breakfast as a way to communicate with guests; the reward of living in a beautiful park land with the peace of mind (in the deep winter, there is no guests, you could cuddle in an armchair, covering yourself with an afghan, with speed bump by your feet, and a good book in hand, classical music in the background, and just look out the window for the gorgeous winter coast – life cannot get any better than that.); found stage-3 testicular cancer and cured in 2006 (everyday now is a blessing, this place gives him strength to recover and fight on); final advice: follow your passion.
- Checked out of Seawall. Took a short hike of the Beech Mountain trail to the fire tower, 1.1 miles, easygoing and fantastic view of 2 autumn lakes of fall leaves (can’t be beat, like Norwegian fjord in my imagination).
- Sun came out in the afternoon. Heading home at 2pm along the same coastline.
- Arrived in Mount Kisco around 11pm.

Fearless Seagulls ..............

..... Mussel Tidal Pool

Cadillac Mountain .................

Wish all of you well !!

Susie Li (10/31/2008)

Journal -Take A Break, Really

I’ve made a pact with myself – One day a week, on Sundays, I will completely shut down my computer, my TV, my cell phone and blackberry, fully disconnected for 24 hours. I’ve decided that living a good life requires a kind of balance, a bit of quiet. I need time to think, to reflect, to find the real me (not the virtual me.)

Unfortunately, turning off the screen did not turn off my brain. I managed to walk, nap, and read the whole New York Times, without hyperlinks. Skimming through the Sunday Times, full of thought-provoking articles, I experimented with discovering my humanity, if I still have any left. I stopped to take notes of where I wanted to revisit, stories that touched me, things that interested me:

Real Estate section - Michael Heller Chu, a flamenco guitarist, and a UN humanitarian relief worker: A peripatetic musician finds a place of his own, a one-room coop on the Lower East Side, for $500,000

My Thought: Musicians are a special breed (writing good music is extremely hard); international relief work is hard work, if not hardest of all careers; super-expensive Manhattan still has a little room left for a rambling musician (His house-hunting story reads like a romantic dating story. “This is how you find good places - by chance, by random conversations,” he said. “We met in an elevator; I told her I was apartment hunting; she told me that she had one for sale. I walked into her place, and it was just what I was looking for.”)

Political Opinion section – by Frank Rich: McCain channels his inner Hillary (trumping fear of terrorism and the prospect of perpetual war)

My Thought: Obama, on the contrary, is not naive. His upbeat campaign tone speaks to American pride and idealism. His prescient anti-Iraq war judgment is not something “experience” can buy, and the organization of his campaign superior. He is smart about talking hope and change, because he may not want to be held hostage to the policy promises he made during the campaign.

Obituaries section - John Lewis, son of a Wall Street titan who became a lawyer to fight for the rights of the poor and powerless, and in December persuaded gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York to pardon a paroled convict, died at 64 of lung cancer. He deserted his upper-class way of life, giving away his generous inheritance to the down-and-out and to causes like Indian welfare, and never stopped.

My Thought: How many heiresses have the heart and brain to do the right thing?

Ideas and Trends section - Religion is less a birthright than a good fit (author Dana Jennings eloquently wrote about his conversion from Rockweiler-like Protestant Christianity to soul-searching Judaism.) More than 1/4 of Americans left the faith of their childhood, either choosing a new one (from mega-church to Buddhist monastery, or from mosque to the Cross) or easing into a life of no faith. This isn't all bad: this cross-pollination breeds tolerance and understanding, and carries with it an unexpected energy and spiritual melting pot to all traditions.

My Thought: We seem to go through the same path. Before 40, we are indifferent, agnostic, and too busy with one thing or another. What happens after 40s, we became hungry for wisdom, meaning, and purposes, even though we are adrift in relentless shallow information. Our lives begin in mystery and end in mystery. In between, we try to explain ourselves to ourselves. We became seekers. I became a Buddhist, because I believe in the metaphors given to me from the Buddhist philosophy. And Buddhist metaphor is how I choose to lead my life - it is no better than your metaphor, and vice versa - just something deep (and beyond words) that moves my soul.

Sunday Style section - Eye of the Artist. How to work a creative mind. Mr. Gondry, the French-born film director who made “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, talked about how our brains and eyes have a way of modifying reality to fit our preconceptions of it. “Your brain is very creative,” he said. “It makes up all sorts of meanings and shapes. We build up our reality from very little information.” For example, he saw an end piece of a baquette on a Air France flight, he could see only one thing: the breast of his former girlfriend (There's some sadness in it. It was a breakup that was never explained.)

My Thought: Everything has the possibility to have a different reality. If you are a creative person, or if you are forced to make things up, just use your eyes. Be assured that you will see what you want to see. With enough practice, you can harness that creative energy too.

Finally: I picked up a few new words: peripededic, pique, prescient

My Thought: English is such a rich language that never ceased to fascinate me - Reading it has the same effect on me as writing it, or speaking it out in the Toastmaster club.

I dearly love the NYT. With all its reporting on the arts and sciences, commerce and humanities, politics and religion, I don’t have time (or the need) to keep up with my virtual friends.

Susie Li