an unexpected garden

My mom and I had to drop off my brother at his church, which also used to be mine up till two years ago. I walked up the steps and took a right turn around the gym when I was quite surprised. Within the last two years of my leave the church had turn into an Eden’s Garden. There was a field of white roses. The doorways and poles were draped with lavender and ivy and there was a creek that flowed through the church bubbling at the top with lillie pads. The creek was surrounded with tall green reeds and palm trees. In short it was beautiful.

I left my home church as a means to escape an ex-boyfriend and as a protest to the rest of the congregation that outrightly accepted him as a leader despite his lying and cheating during our relationship, which ultimately caused the end. The church left a bad taste in my mouth. I felt like nothing good could come out of their service.

But today I was so taken aback by  the sheer transformation  of the church physically that the beauty reminded me how everything bad can be changed to something good. That’s the beauty of the gospel. No matter how ugly and dirty you are God has the power to invert the bad and produce something holy.

So my mom and I decided to have a photo shoot. =)

a mission

 

After a day spent shopping my mom and I called my uncle’s family to join us for some dim  sum in Chinatown. 

Go all the way through KTown until you meet Hill Street then take a left. Welcome to Chinatown, home to dragons, luck tapered in red paper bags and dim sum – but only from 11 to 2:30 pm. We arrived ten short of 6. 

“Aughh!”

“What?! What, mom, WHAT?!” A shriek from mom can mean anything from locking her keys in the car, forgetting to pick up eggs along with the groceries or leaving the stove on in the house before leaving for work.

“WHAT IS IT?!”

“…They only serve dim sum for lunch,” she said. 

I exhaled, slowly, picked up the regular dinner menu and proceeded with life.

…

We ate Peking Duck, fried shrimp puffs, chicken feet, Chinese broccoli in oyster sauce, fresh crab with flat noodles and sweet, white bread. After dessert we went on a mission: to find a local Chinese market. 

We knew there was one, probably several within 20 square feet of us. So we set off on foot in search of the market rumored to have the freshest seafood for the lowest price.

After fifteen minutes we didn’t find the market but we did find a Chinese fortune pond. A stone was carved out with several holes and levels, each one carrying one or two small cans with a name tag: Luck, Money, Vacation, Peace, Love. The stone was already covered with pennies of people who were out of fortune and didn’t leave with any. 

We each got three pennies and took our swing at it. I aimed for money and was widely short both times. On my last try I thought “what the hell” and went for Love. I tossed the penny which hit the stone and jumped into the can. My mom and I screamed. 

“Maybe you shouldn’t go to Africa this summer…” said my uncle. 

I looked at the green buddha grinning. It doesn’t hurt to have a penny’s worth of hope, does it?

 

Our crab dinner with flat noodles. yumm =)

We eventually found a Chinese market. But it was closing.

Tons of Chinese drinks!

 

The Buddha Fortune Pond. Do you see LOVE?

 

a visit

Today I went to visit my grandmother of 78. She just had a stroke. She passed out in her kitchen and was sent to the ER. She stayed in the ER for a few days until they determined that it was a stroke, and now she was back in her studio apartment in KTown. My grandma never felt like a grandma, so I never really thought of her as one. She would always carry the heavier groceries, she swam laps everyday at the local Y, and if we ever wrestled I knew she would beat me. Easy. She makes kimchee the old fashioned way completely out of scratch with a whole room’s floor dedicated to bowls and bowls of fermented cabbage and red pepper chili flakes. 

When I woke up to a voicemail of my mom at the hospital telling me that grandma passed out in her kitchen in her studio apartment in KTown, I couldn’t believe it. 

So I erased the message and didn’t call her back. I watched Star Trek with my friends and ate dinner at PB. 

But today I visited her in her studio apartment in KTown. 

We sat down on her bed. She offered fruit: strawberries and melon. The neighbor grandma had gotten so scared when my grandma had fainted that she announced to the whole complex “somebody in the building died, somebody in the building died!” When grandma came back from the hospital fine she brought a box of strawberries. 

My mom and I declined but my grandma brought a slice of melon anyways. As she scraped the seeds off of the melon, cut it into smaller pieces and peeled the tough skin off with her knife I finally realized what was different about her. 

She was old. 

There were wrinkles by her eyes, her arms were twigs, and now as I looked carefully I wasn’t sure how she was even able to wield the knife let alone use it to cut through a melon. My mom was yelling about some new dietary supplement powder my grandma had used right before her episode. My mom blamed the $700 powder for grandma’s fainting spell. 

I guess she refused to see grandma’s wrinkles too. 

 

My grandma asked me about school and graduation and did I have a job lined up?
“No grandma, I don’t.”
“What? No job? Every morning I’ve been praying to God to give you a job. Why isn’t he hearing me?”

There is no man, only the moon.

It’s pretty ridiculous to say at the age of 21 that you’re going to be single for the rest of your life. Anybody else in an older demographic would scoff saying, “What could you know?” But at my ripe age of 21, I do profess times where I am completely convinced I will be single for the rest of my life. 

I recently wrote a monologue about a 10 year old who expressed her feelings to the news of her parents’ divorce by announcing that she lost her appetite for a Big Mac. My peers during workshop criticized my character to literary death. “What does a 10 year old know?” “How could a 10 year old be mature enough to knowingly repress her feelings?” “Does a 10 year old even know what ‘divorce’ means?” 

Yes, you egotistical literary pricks, for your information, a 10 year old knows a lot of things such as it’s wiser and more logical to get a divorce than to fight everyday while still having the gnawing feeling in the back of her throat that life with separated parents would not be two christmases but two separate halfs of herself; a 10 year old is mature enough to repress her feelings if she is given no other option, a 10 year old is mature enough to do anything when forced into situations beyond her grade level; and of course a 10 year old knows what divorce means – 10 year olds aren’t retards, they’re just young. 

I was that 10 year old.

When I was younger, maybe 5, we were standing in front of our door waiting for mom to find her keys to open the lock. My dad looked up into the sky and asked me if I could see the man in the moon. 

“Yes, dad! Yes, I see him!” 

 

I’m 21 now. And I know that there is no man. There is only the moon. And I also know that I just may be single for the rest of my life.