Tag Archives: tradition

Do you read or listen to books?

Posted on by
49

I normally love to read books and only listen to them while we’re on a drive of more than four hours.

This past week, I listened to “The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane” by Lisa See, published in 2017.

I highly recommend this book. A friend of mine in Santa Barbara only listens to books, she never reads. That’s because she is constantly moving and busy. She never takes a break from work around the house, yard, cooking or her business sewing for interior designers until bedtime. She also works at a school during the week. (She’s exhausting to be around!) She finished this book and said it was “so good!”

It was! I have read other Lisa See books including the novel “Shanghai Girls” and her family’s biography, “On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family.”

I’m a Lisa See fan.

I decided to experiment and listened to this book, rather than read it. It seemed like cheating, but I enjoyed it. The narration was good and I wasn’t hung up by trying to pronounce Chinese words in my head.

Here’s an overview of the story from Lisa See’s website:

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa See, a moving story about tradition, tea farming, and the enduring connection between mothers and daughters.

In their remote mountain village, Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. For the Akha people, ensconced in ritual and routine, life goes on as it has for generations—until a stranger appears at the village gate in a jeep, the first automobile any of the villagers has ever seen.

The stranger’s arrival marks the first entrance of the modern world in the lives of the Akha people. Slowly, Li-yan, one of the few educated girls on her mountain, begins to reject the customs that shaped her early life. When she has a baby out of wedlock—conceived with a man her parents consider a bad match—she rejects the tradition that would compel her to give the child over to be killed, and instead leaves her, wrapped in a blanket with a tea cake tucked in its folds, near an orphanage in a nearby city.

As Li-yan comes into herself, leaving her insular village for an education, a business, and city life, her daughter, Haley, is raised in California by loving adoptive parents. Despite her privileged childhood, Haley wonders about her origins, and across the ocean Li-yan longs for her lost daughter. Over the course of years, each searches for meaning in the study of Pu’er, the tea that has shaped their family’s destiny for centuries.

A powerful story about two women separated by circumstance, culture, and distance, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane is an unforgettable portrait of a little known region and its people and a celebration of the bonds of family.

https://lisasee.com/books/the-tea-girl-of-hummingbird-lane/

I loved the characters, the drama, learning about the different ethnic groups of China, how the Akha people believe in spirits and how they were untouched from the modern world until after the Cultural Revolution. I also learned about tea farming, connoisseur’s, and the many health properties of tea.

After I finished listening to “The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane,” I decided to try another book on Audible. I chose an Elin Hilderbrand novel called “The Castaways.” I have to confess that it did not work for me to listen to it. It’s about four couples and I can’t keep the characters straight, not did I care about them.

I’m not sure if it’s the format of listening to a book that made the Lisa See book so accessible and enjoyable — and it doesn’t work for Elin Hilderbrand. Or, maybe I don’t like the second book as much even if I read it?

What are your thoughts of reading versus listening to books? What’s your preference and why?

Are you a Lisa See fan?

The end of tradition?

Posted on by
46

Some of the pots of flowers I planted each year at our old house.

This is the first year I didn’t send flowers to my mom for May Day. It was a touching tradition that began when I was in first grade at Emerson School a block away from our house in Snohomish, Wash. Mom died earlier this year, so May Day brought fond memories, but also regret that I wasn’t ordering a bouquet with a card that said “Happy May Day, from ???”

Mrs. Iverson, my first grade teacher, had us make construction paper baskets and color them. She’d staple on the handles before the bell rang. On our walk home, the neighborhood kids would pick wild flowers or flowers from yards to fill our little May Day baskets.

When we got home, or stop at a neighbor’s house that we’d want to “May Day,” we’d hang the basket of flowers on their doorknob, ring the bell, run for it and hide. We’d watch behind a fence or bush at the surprised mom or lucky neighbor.

I wrote about that tradition HERE.

When I left for college, I always sent Mom a card for May Day. Later on when we could afford it, I ordered flowers.

“I got the most beautiful bouquet of flowers,” Mom would call and say. “Thank you!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. It wasn’t me,” I’d answer.

“I wonder who it was?” she’d reply.

When my kids were little, I showed them how to make the baskets and they’d fill them with flowers from our yard. They loved to hang them on our door knob, knock on the door and hide. After they left for college and moved on with their lives, my husband picked up the slack.

Monday was May Day and he got busy with work and forgot — in spite of my daughter texting him the night before to make sure I got flowers. He left a few minutes ago for a mysterious errand, so we shall see.

I do have one special friend who remembered. She sent me a Happy May Day text.

Did you celebrate May Day as a child?

What are family traditions that you’d like to keep alive? What ones have faded away?

.

P.S.. I heard the doorbell ring. Couldn’t find anything. Hubby was inside peering out the window. “Maybe it was UPS?” Later found this inside the house.

What odd foods did you grow up with?

Posted on by
42
oxtail soup on the stove
My mom cooked oxtail soup. Now it’s one of my specialties. I cooked these two pots of soup for Christmas week when we had our son’s girlfriend’s family stay with us.

My mother had a few recipes that I couldn’t stomach. Mom loved the odd cuts of meat (like organs) and learned how to cook them from her mother and grandmother. I don’t remember many of our neighborhood moms cooking the same things.

I liked her chicken hearts that were dusted in flour and fried. But I passed on gizzards.

Beef tongue was a hard pass.

Mom’s beef heart I could handle. She’d stuff the heart and bake it in the oven. Then she sliced it and I’d have a thin ring of heart around delicious stuffing.

The oxtail soup I shied away from until I hit junior high. Then I discovered oxtails were the most tender delicious meat I’d ever eaten and the broth was rich but so flavorful. Years later, I made oxtail soup for my “at the time boyfriend.” I overheard him telling a friend that he had to marry me because of my oxtail soup.

“How can she make something so amazing out of !!#!??”

I discovered this recipe in one of my great-grandmother’s cookbooks that she published in the early 1900s and sold to Ladies’ church auxiliaries across the country. It’s my dream to bring the little cookbooks back to life. Great-grandmother Nellie’s recipe is not how I cook oxtail soup, but it’s the same general principle.

My dad’s side of the family had some oddball dishes too. Christmas meant Lutefisk and fish head stew. I could not get myself to stop staring at the eyeballs staring up at me from the stew. It definitely killed my appetite.

If you haven’t heard of Lutefisk this is from Wikipedia:

Lutefisk is prepared as a seafood dish of several Nordic countries. It is traditionally part of the Christmas feast; Norwegian julebord and Swedish julbord, as well as the similar Finnish joulupöytä.

 Finnish: lipeäkala [ˈlipeæˌkɑlɑ]; literally “lye fish”) is dried whitefish (normally cod, but ling and burbot are also used). It is made from aged stockfish (air-dried whitefish), or dried and salted cod, pickled in lye. It is gelatinous in texture after being rehydrated for days prior to eating.

Besides the recipes I mentioned, my mom also served us canned Chef Boyardee ravioli, Swanson’s TV dinners, Space Food Sticks and Tang.

What are some of the foods you grew up with? Did your family cook anything odd?