Fighting Serendipity
One Chinese New Year’s Eve, Martin and I were looking for a good meal. We were students at the University of Chicago which puts the year somewhere around the early 1950’s. The weather was bad, dirty snow on the ground, a piercing wind that would probably bring more snowfall. A poster on a student bulletin board advertising a New Year’s Feast by the Chinese Student Club sent us to an apartment south of campus. We were not members, but that didn’t seem to be a problem; we paid something at the door and were admitted into a warm, noisy, crowded room reeking of soy sauce, star anise, garlic, ginger, green onions, shrimps, shitake mushrooms, fermented bean cakes… I was seriously starved for Chinese cooking! Since leaving my mother’s house I had not found anything authentic on the southside of Chicago. Mind you this was the 50’s. There was a dire shortage of real ethnic food. The closest thing to Chinese was Louie Gooey’s on Sixty Third serving egg fuyong and chop suey blood red with syrupy ketchup. But tonight we had come to the right place. The table was laden with traditional New Year foods: rice cakes with pickled mustard greens, steamed fish, twice cooked pork belly, with more heavenly concoctions being stir fried in the steamy kitchen. Tsslaaaa…a pile of vegetables hit the grease. Music to my ears! These Chinese graduate students were cooks! We grabbed paper plates and piled them high.
Cramming on the Beach, University of Chicago
I found a seat on a padded chair and balanced my paper plate on my knees. As I bit into a chicken wing, a woman in a sweater and skirt approached. “Yeh Tung. Are you not Yeh Tung?”
I wracked my memory but did not recognize her. She said her name; it was not familiar. “You look just like you used to.” How embarrassing! She said that we had attended the same Kindergarten in Beijing; yes I had gone to Kindergarten in Beijing, but…. She said that we had been suspended for dancing on the desktops. The chicken stuck in my throat. I knew who she was.
She and I were born at the same time at the same place. Her mother and my mother had shared the same hospital delivery room. We have identical astrological charts.
Some five years after we were born in the same hospital room, we found ourselves in the same Kindergarten class in a small progressive school attended by the children of Beijing intelligentsia. This is what I remembered about that school. Each morning we each came in our respective rickshaws. My family was not rich enough to own a rickshaw; we leased one, a quite spiffy one painted red and green with brass lanterns. Our rickshaw puller was our cook’s husband, an athletic young guy proud of his prowess between the bars of the rickshaw. I always made him take me to school really early; most days I was the first one at school. One day, alone in the school yard, I got on a swing and pumped myself ever higher, way up into the canopy, my toes nearly touching the leaves of a gigantic tree, with each successive pump the tips of my shoes were getting closer and closer…suddenly I leaned back too far and flipped off the wooden plank. I hit the ground and had the air knocked out of me for a moment. Coming to, I struggled to get on my feet while the swing, in its high empty arc, rushed toward me. There was a scream, a shout for me to stay down. The rope of the swing was caught–in the hand of an upper class girl.
She made light of the event and went about her business; but ever after I paid special attention to her. She started the autograph album fad. Across the street from the school was a little stationery store where I often went to spend my allowance–on square sheets of shiny metallic or chrome origami paper or irresistably rubbery erasers. The shop also carried these little albums of various designs, all of them with swirling colorful end papers. In short order everyone at school had one and were very busy running about asking each other as well as parents and teachers to write in them.
After school there were rickshaw races. I remember sitting way back on the folded convertible top of the rickshaw and cheering our puller down the wide boulevards of old Beijing. About this time my parents gave me a bike. It was the rickshaw puller who taught me to ride–by taking me to an empty lot, giving me a shove. Off I went–straight into a pole.
First Picture
My First Bike
Back to kindergarten. Another event I remember was my “pro”. The entire school was fired up about a day trip to visit the campus of Yenching University. Only kindergarteners were excluded. I was outraged. Unfair to kindergarteners! Off I went to the office of the Principal to pro. Somehow I was able to convince her to change her mind. Amused by my nascent activism, my mother bought me a special lunch to take on the outing–a western style “box lunch”. The pink paper box contained a German sausage–probably a bratwurst. It was awful! A worthy precursor to the American hot dog. So I had to make do with the couple of stalks of celery for my picnic lunch while everyone else was scarfing their char siu bao or pot stickers. Of the outing itself, I remember nothing, but, to this day, I can clearly recall the icky taste of that cold, grey, fatty sausage.
As for dancing on the desktop, it’s not among my real memories of kindergarten. It’s one of those images that got implanted in my mind from stories others, probably my mother, told me–that we had both danced on our desktops and both been suspended. And of course, that had something to do with being born in the same room at the same time.
Shortly after that the Japanese invaded Beijing. School was closed. I had no idea where she went; we were not particularly close. My father left Beijing to establish a wartime combined University in Kunming. When we went to join him about a year later, it marked the end of my halcyon childhood in Beijing.
Fifteen years later here we were in Chicago…
She was a graduate student in chemistry and lived only a couple of blocks from where Martin and I had set up housekeeping. She was engaged to be married and so was I.
Martin & I at our wedding reception
On the other hand we were really quite different. She was much more Chinese, having come here for her graduate degree only a couple of years ago while I had been here since I was twelve. She was a scientist; I was in the arts. We agreed to meet, but we never did. Perhaps she was as uneasy about having a double as I was. I changed the way I usually walked to school because her apartment was too close to my usual route. Now we are both in our eightieth year. There is an old Asian lady who lives alone down the road; I see her often cleaning her yard, raking up the leaves or sweeping the dirt; I am not neat at all; my yard is a jungle. We usually nod to each other, but we do not speak…
My passport photo for leaving Beijing