Tag: life

塞翁失馬 The Lost Horse

I’ve just finished reading the really well written “The Many Meanings of Meilan” by Andrea Wang. Having spent 16 of the last 20 years in Hong Kong, Singapore and China it was a reminder of so much of my time there and the discoveries of the language, literature, poetry and idiom.

There’s a lot happening in this book, but what I enjoyed most is the idea of naming and meaning and the ambiguity of sound and meaning in the homonyms of the Chinese language. I loved how she wrapped herself in the different meanings of “Lan” depending on the character, so as to adjust herself to the interpretations of herself of others around her, while discovering who she really was and claiming herself.

It also reminded me of the first time I came across the 塞翁失馬 (sai weng shi ma) chengyu – enjoy.

From November 2009

Today a story. Here is the famous story which is commonly interpreted as saying that “every cloud has a silver lining” This is the version from YellowBridge. Certainly in my own life in the long run this parable has proven to be true. But as impulsive as I am emotionally I don’t always recognise it at the time!

“A man who lived on the northern frontier of China was skilled in interpreting events. One day for no reason, his horse ran away to the nomads across the border. Everyone tried to console him, but his father said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a blessing?” Some months later his horse returned, bringing a splendid nomad stallion. Everyone congratulated him, but his father said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a disaster?” Their household was richer by a fine horse, which the son loved to ride. One day he fell and broke his hip. Everyone tried to console him, but his father said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a blessing?”

A year later the nomads came in force across the border, and every able-bodied man took his bow and went into battle. The Chinese frontiersmen lost nine of every ten men. Only because the son was lame did father and son survive to take care of each other. Truly, blessing turns to disaster, and disaster to blessing: the changes have no end, nor can the mystery be fathomed.

塞翁失馬 (sai weng shi ma), the title of this story, is actually a commonly used Chinese idiom or chengyu . It literally translates as “Old Sai loses a horse”. Old Sai is the wise man in the fable. The expression is used to remind others to take life in stride because things aren’t really as good (or bad) as they seem. Certainly seems like a wise advice for a society that lives only for the present.”

Ed Young has written this into a children’s book.  We’ve got some compilations of Chinese stories, but kids somehow like having one story per book and to have that story lavishly illustrated.

Aqua should not be the colour of death

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while. A friend died in February. She was not just a neighbour but someone who had been a part of our lives ever since we started coming here. Being back for the summer means that her absence is a constant presence. We have been fortunate in our lives to not lose many people on a permanent basis along the way. Living abroad has meant the constant temporary loss of person and place, sometimes our selves. For my children the first big loss was that of our wonderful golden lab. After she passed we could not bear to be in the kitchen without involuntarily anticipating tripping over her as we cut vegetables and she was there particularly for the broccoli scraps. The habit of her presence only began to cease when we moved house and the substance of her being was not in the next place.

Similarly the process of empty nesting with first the one child, coincided with us moving country at the same time she did. So there wasn’t a her-shaped space in our new country, even as we created a guest room which wasn’t so much a guest room as a room for her when she could visit. Which covid quickly slashed the delusions of. With the next child to fly, a combination of yet another home and the continuation of covid, life was this weird limbo of presence and absence, being and not being. There was not so much specific as generalised absence and grief for everyone and everything that was familiar and real.

I wanted to combine this with some picture and middle grade books on death and dying and grief. Which of course means a few days delay while I research and search and put a poster together. Publishers have very homogenous and defined ideas of covers and what displays the essence of a book. Unfortunately for death this seems to converge on a blueish aqua. Culturally traditional colours such as black, grey or white are apparently not seen as right for the K-14 crowd.

DESIGN: AlwaysWithHonor.com and David McCandless.  RESEARCH: David McCandless, Pearl Doughty-White, Alexia Wdowski

“The Colour of Death” led me to this interesting graphic by David McCandless (see video below). Which makes me wonder where the dominant colour for the books come from.

Whatever colour death is, it is not anything in pastel hues. If anything it is the absence of colour, of everything. A vacuum. Which brings me to one of the best books on grief and the grieving process – which didn’t come up in my initial search with the keywords of “death” and “grief” – the extremely clever – visually and verbally – “Bug in a Vacuum” by Mélanie Watt.

I’m sitting on my balcony as the light and shade shifts after the rainstorms we’ve had in the last few days watching the clouds gather and separate and the shadows on the lake and in the lake. Where depth is darker and shallow is lighter. The depth of grief can never be lighter, and definitely not a light acqua.

Relationships are part of both mental and physical memory. And part of the grieving process is retraining my impulses to pop downstairs with some food, or to say hi or to see if she needs anything when I go down to do the groceries. To sit and hear memories of her life in Canada, the Congo and Australia and Switzerland. The unspoken lessons of growing older and less mobile and more removed from tactile life. With life experienced second and third hand through media and text. The lessons of the absence of choice in when to let go and the technicalities of a life lived and a life living well. The horror of the creep of the wish to die becoming stronger than the will to live.

And as we in turn age, these questions become less abstract and more real. When to cling on and when to let go, and who decides.