============================================================== To reach ALL SJD members, please send to sjd@satjadham.net ... Do NOT include any other addresses when sending to the list... Include as LITTLE of the original messages as possible........ Message sent by: Soudary Kittivong *** Announcement: *** Please register for SatJaDham Fifth Annual conference at the website http://www.satjadham.org/sjd5sd/ ============================================================== Dear SJD, Here is my posting for April 11, 2000.. I have to thank SJD for giving me inspiration. Happy birthday, mut tuk khon! I hope you'll like it; it's just a piece of what I hope will be a large, more developed manuscript. Consider it fiction based on the few lives I've lived. Soudary (I'd love comments, since I'm literally still working on it..) .. There are times when I wish all my existences could merge into one. Where freedom meets family. And independence is housed underneath my father's place. Where love need not hide; or be alive only between two. Where political questioning is not frowned on as stirring trouble. Where bonds survive distance. Where communities exist without hypocrisy. Time when the choice between time running out and wasting, killing time, is not a choice, but an obligation. .. Late July in Anchorage I sit picking snow peas in my grandparents' backyard. The vines are over-grown, and the peas resistant to my tugging. Letting the green vines swallow the length of my arms, I work my scrawny fingers carefully around the mess of vines, winning another round of hide and seek with the snow peas. I snatch the green pea from its mother vine as soon as sight gave me its offering, and drop it into my plastic basket already filled with green crispy treasures. Spending Sunday afternoons at my grandparents' was the norm. Unlike my little brother who was off rough-housing with neighbor kids, I hung around the backyard and enjoyed this fun task alone. The backyard was an odd place for Grandpa's mini-jungle. The patch was encased in a long, hand-built rectangle box, built alongside a fence that created the border between my grandparents' side of the duplex and the neighbors'. The patch gave life to an otherwise dull and not-yet-broken into yard, which was mostly still filled with bumpy awkward stones and untamed baby weeds. It was my grandparents' oasis in the middle of their own little private, dried permafrost Alaskan desert. I would sit there, picking, patiently.. "Pai, leuk, let's go," I heard a call from the sliding kitchen door. "Time to go home," my father beckons in his gentle yet firm tone. I lift my head up slightly and without taking my eye off the last snow pea, I called out, "Okay, Dad." With that, I snap it from the vine, drop it into my basket, and hop merrily back inside with my bounty. I was eight. Life was simple and fun, like picking green peas from the vines; each presenting its own little challenge. And when time was up, someone would call. I would listen, and move. .. Moved I was moved once, by how your words, at times, would cut into my stream of wandering thoughts. I was drawn to you by your portrayal of caring. I enjoyed your company of real thoughts, lacking any sugar-coated small talk. I was intrigued by your seeming knowledge of the me behind my gaze serious and tough. Simply, I liked the manner in which you expressed your world to me. I was eighteen and off on my own for the first journeys, teetering between childhood and adulthood. We came upon each other accidentally. On a path, we had walked toward one another. At the moment of passing, we had become invisible to one another. After we passed, I look back and see you there; and you me. Later, we become acquaintances. And then more. You would call and we would meet under a tree beyond the lakes on a crisp autumn day. We would walk along the banks of the main river and my heart would skip as you did around me, making swirls in my vision. We talked of life, studies, family; the beauty of the day and the ugliness of people. And then we talked of nothing. We would stop at a bridge and cast looks to the water below, as if in mid-sentence, we were brought back to the reality of the bitterness of truth. Our backs would be turned to the afternoon strollers walking past us, hoping to keep alive the illusion of just us two against the world. But it wasn't illusion. "Is it wrong to want to be your friend?" I ask. "Is it wrong of me to think of you?" You ask. Of course it's not wrong, we agree aloud. But secrecy could not be completely right either, our conscience reminds us with a judgmental and unforgiving air. Following the dead maple leaf floating down the current, I close my eyes to feel the cool breeze and wish for spring to arrive. Perhaps then, we could be together. .. Spring into Action No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace! The crowd chanted its chorus to the beat of the protest. Deep within the crowd, I walked and clapped along, and ant among an army. It was the morning after the vote came. We had been prepared to walk out; to show the campus, the state, and country the backwards affects the proposition would have on people of color and education. The issue at hand was affirmative action. But the larger issue was access and breaking down barriers to true opportunity. Ironically, I recall having voted, since I was a skeptic about the relevance and impact that I had as an individual in a system that I thought wasn't truly mine. I had thought it more pure to be a radical, and radicals did not vote change in--we chanted and marched to be heard. Still, it was the most exhilarating feeling-to be amidst all the action, voicing my concerns in unison with hundreds of other young, aware members of society. We still believed in the ideal world; we believed in something. Later on that night, I came home and chatted over the phone with Mom about everything else in my life except about the euphoria I felt in marching; the difference I thought I was making; the empowerment of hearing my voice in a sea of many. I could share with the world in a crowd my thoughts about justice and demanding a better world. But with Mom, I spoke of doing so-so on my biology midterm; about my internship at the design studio; and my plans for Thanksgiving break. I kept thinking, how dishonest. Not sharing such a feeling with Mom made me feel half alive and half able to share. How come I couldn't share this feeling with her? Thinking it a hypocrisy to in one breath force change, and in the next, resign to convention in private life, I say my usual good-bye, and hang up the phone. .. Winter of Loss I pick up the phone and dial. It was only the second and last time I was to speak to Grandma since she had returned home from the hospital. The chemo and testing had made her weak. The mere fact of being separated from her loved ones weakened her spirit even more. She had begged to come home. She needed her loved ones to care for her, bathe her, and feed her, not the strange hands of a healthcare worker, no matter how well-trained. Her voice pled to me over the line. "Why don't you come home? I worry about you down there..Alone." She continued, "What if you get sick..Man peay, la, si bung leuk?" What if something happens to you; who will take care of you? What Grandma says this time is no different from our phone conversations before. Only this time, no excuse-no defenses were good enough to counter the depth of her pleas. They came from her heart; from a place of desperacy, when you know the battle you've been fighting is about to be lost. My body becomes paralyzed, and my breathing short as I hold in quivers of sadness, and fear. I am sad because I understand that she misses me. I am afraid because she is afraid. I muster up courage to speak, but choke on the simplest reply. "I'm..I'm fine, Grandma. Don't worry about me..Bo bpen yang dor, Ma tow, bo tong bpen huang, OK." I responded in a soft but high-spirited voice, yet I was barely able to convince myself of what I was saying. It was in that moment, I realized there was reason for my unattainable response. I was out of school and working. I had followed that whispering legend of Asian America, only to have it separate me from the most primitive of community. It was a sacrifice not meant to be; and one I could not have foreseen when, on one fateful day years before, I chose a life of distance from my family. I sit, awaiting these existences to merge; in confusion-alternating between hot and cold; warm and freezing; longing to swim out of this sea of shattered focus. Until then, I savor each existence. .. 4/8/00 copyrighted sk2 == karmic@qon.lao.net -=kar.ma [kar me, ker-] noun, often cap: the force generated by a person's actions held in Hinduism and Buddhism to perpetuate transmigration and in its ethical consequences to determine one's destiny in one's next existence=- _____________________________________________________________ Check out our community at... http://community.lao.net and access the world's best search engines instantly at... http://search.lao.net _ ***************************************************************** Visit SatJaDham Homepage at: http://www.satjadham.org (or .net) *****************************************************************