AUNTY SHAI AND THE SLEEPING MYSTERY

There is a mystery that lies at the heart of Aunty Shai. It baffles and befuddles. Why, oh why, does Aunty Shai of the non-stop games and stories, stay awake at night and sleep for hours in the day? What a waste! What a shame! Think of the lost games! The nonsensical rhymes...

Last December, in Singapore, my niece Bella could be heard puzzling this out, just beyond my bedroom door, 'Why Aunty Shai always sleeping, sleeping?' And this Christmas, my niece Eva: 'Shy-star, why do you wake up in the night and sleep in the day? Why wake up at night and sleep in the morning? Why Granma, Papa, Mummy, Daddy, Ellie and Eva wake up in the morning and sleep in the night but Shy-star doesn't?'

This is what I cannot tell my nieces, but what I hope they will read one day when they pick up their aunt's memoir:

What does it mean, having lupus? It means spending more of your life in bed than out of it, not asleep, or even resting, but engaged in invisible battle with the monster under your bed who slimed up over the covers, ate part of you very quickly and then paused, mid gorge, panting, contemplating where to devour next. His paws are resting on your belly while he uses your ribs to pick his upper incisors clean.

What does it feel like? It feels like fiction.

The only one of the children who doesn't ask these questions is Raf, because he had the mystery solved for him a long time ago. The answer was no less of a head scratcher. Apparently there was a wolf out to get his aunt. A wolf called lupus. Very odd business, but this part he comprehends: Aunty Shai is sick, and he needs to take care of her, watch over her. At four, he was encouraging me up steep hills ('You can do it, Aunty Shai! Just believe you can do it') and holding my hand in the dark, or on steps slippery with swimming pool puddles.

Of course he'd much rather that the lupus would simply take a hike up those steep Portuguese hills and  leave us all alone for good, but so far the only way I truly let him down is by not being ever-present. If only I could reside in a small cosy hut outside his house. We could walk to school together. We could catch Pokémon together - he could finally bring my paltry level 11 up to a respectable 22. 

It is January of the new year. I am more wolf-bound than ever. But like Peter Pan or Tinker Bell, determined to believe that something intangibly permanent will persist. Hope, I think we call it, on a good day. Meanwhile, since it is Chinese New Year...

Gong xi fa cai!

And here is a beautiful little tale by artist Jeanne-ming...

'On the Threshold of Something New' by Jeanne-ming Brantingham Hayes

Beautiful Grace sat in the doorway of the Door of Hope Girl's Home waiting for something to happen. She had made a careful list of all the wonderful small blessings that might follow her to this threshold. By night fall, when she was called to come in for dinner, Mei En was convinced that none of her dreams would hatch, at least not tonight. But tomorrow was a new day.

GONG XI FA CAI AUNTIE SHAI

I love environment

I can see a bird flying free in the blue sky

After the rain that washed everything new

Environment gives us oxygen and carbon dioxide

Birds are talking to us. 

This is a little group poem written in cahoots with three children from a Delhi slum - the wonders of Skype! They form part of an organisation called ROPIO - Reach Out and Pass It On - which aims to build a self-sustaining, empowering environment for children.
Subjects covered: Cricket (I wanted to know if there was an all-women's cricket team - there is)
Poetry: the name of one of the girls was Kavita, which means 'poem' in Hindi, so naturally yours truly assigned the task of co-writing a poem. I also sent them one of mine - about autumn breathing outside my window… I could hear them reading it aloud to one another before they approved of it :)

It is Chinese New Year and although there are no festive dragons or fireworks here in Cambridge, my year began with Rafi's angel voice on my phone belting out 'Gong Xi Fa Cai Auntie Shaiii!!' which, as you can imagine, I have replayed several times. It is a feather sent from a thousand li away and it never fails to cheer me.

The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum. This bird, boasted the market vendor, was once a duck that stretched its neck in hopes of becoming a goose, and now look!- it is too beautiful to eat. Then the woman and the swan sailed across an ocean many thousands of li wide, stretching their necks towards America…but when she arrived in the new country, the immigration officials pulled her swan away from her, leaving the woman fluttering her arms and with only one swan feather for a memory… Now the woman was old. For a long time now the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, "This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions." 
Thus begins The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. I think about the feathers I am carrying for my nephew and nieces - some will appear worthless, and some may be misunderstood, but I shall carry my heart in them, and with it, all my good intentions.

first image from Slum Children Who Want To Do More

second from Lorraine Nam - Neatorama

(Lady of) No Fear in the Year of the Dragon

Yesterday found me at the Arts Picturehouse -watching Aung San Suu Kyi in a brief documentary about her early years as a North Oxford housewife, mother of two young sons, trying to ascertain what her true purpose in life would be. Michael Aris, her husband, was the famous Tibetan scholar, Oxford don, figure of importance. And then suddenly, late one night in 1988, the phone rang. Suu's mother had had a stroke. She returned to Burma alone and never left, could never leave, inherited her father's heroism and became mother (Daw Aung San) to Burma. When Michael died in 1999, the military regime persisted in their refusal to grant him entry. He had not seen his wife for an unbearably long time. He had been walking in her footsteps for years, as carefully and diplomatically as possible - she had been walking, and continues to walk, in the footsteps of the Buddha, who sacrificed being with his family, his son Rahula, for humanity.

Perhaps such grace, such fearlessness, can only come with such sacrifice. When, after ten years, Daw Aung San was re-united with her son Kim in 2010, there was such tenderness in her embrace; she held him lightly as though he were the breeze, or a feather. As though she had never held him at all.

But she had. Of course she had.
How does a warrior survive house arrest over decades? How does a prisoner of conscience smile the way she does? Tease and laugh with her people the way she does? I think it must be because she is living up to her father's memory, and because she knows her sons are safe. I think it is because she is a mother.

In the Quiet Land of Burma, where cries are strangled, one flower blooms for all of us.

May the Year of the Dragon bring something wonderful for mothers everywhere. May your children be protected, may your fears be calmed. May your children recognise and be grateful for your sacrifices.