Act of Love

I used to joke that the Learning Annex has classes on things only rich people know like how to hide your money in overseas accounts.


Knowing about how to protect your family in the event of death, catastrophe, is one of those cultural capital that so many immigrant/low income families don't know and so get screwed over and remain in poverty. We went to a parents' workshop about it at Bananas Inc (Oakland).

My biggest take away is "A Will is an act of Love; it shows your children you love them enough to take care of them even after you die."

A Will is for when you die; a Living Will is for when you are incapacitated, establishes power of attorney; an Advance Health Directive is re: your medical care if you are incapacitated.

Other things we learned--if you write your own will it must be entirely HANDWRITTEN so that your identity can be verified through handwriting; if it is typed, probate court will disregard it even if you have notarized witnesses. Everything you own is your Estate including property, cars, life insurance, etc. Unless your Estate is in a Trust (a fictional company that your family are the "tenants/employees of"), it will go through probate court to ultimately decide even if there is a Will and your heirs will have to pay heavy taxes (something like 40%). If your Estate is in a Trust and you die, it does not go through probate court, your personal debt will be forgiven. If you don't have a Trust and die, your debtors have first right to claim everything in your Estate before your heirs see a dime and they will still have to pay probate tax on your entire estate, not just the remainder.

Guardianship of minors always goes through Probate court, but your Will can influence placement. No Will means the Court decides what is best for your children. We bought the Nolo book on DIY Wills until we can save up for a lawyer but each state also have different probate laws (it costs something like $500 to do a Will and $2500 to set up a Trust).

wretched of the earth

My ong ngoai passed away very early this morning. He had a heart attack at home, called all his daughters, and accompanied by my youngest uncle and my mother, he died without prolonged suffering. One of his last wishes because he had already a lifetime of suffering. His heart was broken after my ba ngoai died two years ago. The had been married over 60 years.

He was a good man who lived through a lot of hardship. Born a Catholic peasant in 1925 in a tiny hamlet called Lien Thuy under French colonization, though he was chau dich ton--the patrilineal heir, the firstborn son beget of the firstborn son beget of the village chief and so on and so forth, he tilled the catholic-ceded land land under peonage to his own grandparents for his disowned father's gambling debts; his mother left him at age 7 and a baby brother behind to become a wet nurse in the big city Ha Noi. He minded the water buffalo, ploughed & harvested the rice paddies and fished in Ha Long Bay and learned to be self-sufficient though unloved. He never gave up the hope and faith that his father's family would love him and perhaps even restore him to his rightful place.

As he grew of age, he was conscripted as coolie labor to the colonial Army and learned to build bridges and to hate the French. He had an customary arranged marriage with my ba ngoai. In his teens, he survived the Japanese invasion and their torching of the granaries and their deliberate famine that took 2 million lives. When armistice was declared, he joined the Viet Minh to prevent the French from regaining colonial power. And when it became clear that religion and Communism would never reconcile, he left behind his what ought o have been his ancestral lands, uprooted his family--ba co|his mother, ba ngoai, my eldest aunty and mother--to enter the South where he tried to find a small piece of earth to call his own. Roaming through the Mekong for many years, they finally settled in Quy Nhon in the Central region where my parents grew up.

My ong ba ngoai, my parents & siblings (& me in the womb), 4 aunties, 3 uncles, all left Viet Nam to join my oldest aunty in Honolulu where land was scarce to be had and jobs even scarcer. My grandparents, 3 of my aunties and 3 uncles tried to make a go of it in Missouri but the winters and the chicken factory were misery.

We were all reunited in San Diego; we all lived together until I was 12. I still mark time not by years but what street we lived on--Reynard then Ohio (ong ba, aunties, & uncles on Whitmen) then Auburn (then ong ba and 2 youngest uncles on Alta Dena), then mom & us separately Oro Vista, and finally Jason; for peasant stock, we were awfully nomadic.

I learned so many things from my ong ba ngoai. My ba ngoai of unconditional maternal love, spoke the love language of food. My ong ngoai though had only his stories of loss and perseverance to give to us grandkids, and at Tet, his handmade banh chung and his sesame candy gooey and almost scalding. I am one of the only grandkids who is fluent enough and was around enough to have listened to his stories. Ong ngoai secretly loved my siblings and I best he once told me years ago because he said, my mother suffered the most from my father's heroism and fate; and perhaps too, because we were his only full Viet grandkids and he had not the prospect of a chau dich ton|patrilineal heir to carry on the Phamily name and to remember his legacy. He taught me to be proud of being Viet; that was my first day of kindergarten when we lived on Reynard Way, when I came home proclaiming I was American, he took me by the hand, squatted down beside me, and told me that to Americans, I would always have yellow skin, black hair and eyes. I would always be Viet.

I learned to love tools and making things from watching him make banh chung|pork sticky rice cake every Tet, building non-permitted additions to our rented houses (Ohio & Auburn and later their house on 54th), and making flapping wooden angel harnesses from scraps of wood and cloth for the Christmas pageant (Auburn Dr).

I don't grieve very well. I tattoo.

I lost my father when I was too young to understand and taboo to speak of it. And so, I write. I feel so bereft to have lost my roots in this world. There were so many more things I wanted to learn from them, about them. And with the narcissism of youth and American-ness, I marked not the time until too late.

My grandfather wore 3 piece suits, fedoras and pocket watches, loved cognac and good food, made the best banh chung and keo me every Tet up until very recently, and lived to play with his great-grandchildren. In his elder years, he learned to forgive (not the French nor Japanese) but certainly his paternal family, and to love. He still dreamed I think of water buffaloes and rice paddies (and thit cay on occasion) but he and my grandmother had their garden, family, and Church. And now he has peace and rejoined my ba ngoai in the either.

An era has passed. I am disconsolate, desiring what is in the past, a byproduct perhaps of being partly raised by my grandparents. I feel in this modern society we lose our rituals and I feel it the most with death. We've lost our rituals of death and honoring our loved ones by being with them as they die and our hands that loved them so well, preparing them for their final resting place. I am bracing myself for the artifice of mortuary preparation and the dullness of performance.

mangalitsa

dreaming of pork part 2

I think I remain on the Heritage foods listserv just to torment myself.

Last year around holiday time, Trung and I braved the mega-hipster crowd to get heritage pork from the Pork Prom over at Blue Bottle in Jack London (that's hipster to the third power!). We were in self-snaking lines for an hour. But, we ate Mangalitsa. That's right, the hungarian curly pork I salivated over.

my fave is still Red Wattle. Nyum nyum.

magic tricks

A couple of weeks ago, I teased VL by that cheap kiddie magic trick of "stealing" her nose between my fore & middle fingers (really just my thumb) and then sticking it back on her face. After a few times of doing this, I was tickled pink when she "stole" my nose and held it in her fist between her pointer & middle fingers.

Today as I was getting ready for work, she sat on her potty and was quietly playing some game and chattering away. When I turned my attention to her, I realized she had both thumbs in her respective fists because she had just stolen her own ear lobes. Too cute!

lickety splits

For the 1st time VL just asked her Ba to help her go down for a nap before noon! i'm lickety splits outta here!

p.s. this lasted only 1 hour. I was gone for 2.

raison d'etre

these last 2 wks, VL has discovered butter, salt, real ice cream, & chocosoymilk are the primary reasons for existence.

non-toxic baby products

i've got chemical sensitivities. i know this sounds like some Bay Area hippy psychosomatic thing, but ever since i was a kid, i would always get unexplained rashes and all my blood tests come out with elevated levels of eocinophils (white blood cells; in other words, my immune system is constantly on the offense). the worst outbreak was after we painted the house in the late 80s and i swolled up. not just my skin, but also my lips & eyeballs to the point we called poison control who were absolutely useless by the way. bathing in baking soda only addressed the symptoms. if you have ever had swollen fish eyeballs you understand that this is not some crazy imaginary thing i made up in my head. my immune system just doesn't handle very well the thousands of toxic chemicals that have become increasingly present in our society & environment. ever since then, i've been sensitive to chemical vapors including most synthetic perfumes/fragrances, deodorizers, etc. and i became more sensitive under the stress & duress of grad school.

so upside is we try to be as ecologically responsible and non-toxic as possible on a very tight budget. when we remodelled our fixer upper, we went as non-toxic as we could afford--non-formaldehyde treated lumber, non-off-gassing insulation, milk paint (and when that didn't work out b/c of the vinyl joint compound, non-VOC paint). i also went on a gluten/wheat-free and dairy-free diet the year before I got pregnant. it was really hard, but i'm lucky to be living in the epicenter of all things hippy and natural and near a gluten-free bakery. my allergies almost completely went away. of course, i fell off the wagon but i keep meaning to purge wheat & dairy yet again.

it's not always affordable to buy non-chemically treated organic products though so a neat trick that i recently learned

• vinegar vinegar vinegar! strips away toxic chemicals!
  
• carpet cleaner-mix mild soap (castile or natural soap) with vinegar
  
• baby products-(tip is from Organic Grace) wash all new baby products with a cup to a cup and a half of vinegar. This removes a good amount of the toxic flame retardent chemicals that most baby products are coated in. You can remove padding from car seats, swings etc. Wash new non-organic clothing with it. Use a drop of lavender essential oil in the wash to make it smell nice and soothe baby.

And of course, good ole consumer products which I've thoroughly researched on EWG and a few other online sites. This is not exhaustive because I tend to buy the least toxic one and once I find one that is adequate to my purpose, not experiment with others, new or emerging. I suppose if I was a paid blogger/reviewer I would try and be more comprehensive.

• Earth Mama Angel Baby Bottom Balm has the best diaper rash/first aid balm. Cleared up VL's milk allergy bottom rashes.
  
• I use EMAB baby soap/shampoo which is a castile soap. Castile soaps tend not to strip so it feels a little tacky on her hair. While VL doesn't have the (luxuriant) thickness of my hair, she definitely has my hair waviness plus. So it's better not to use stripping shampoos on her. But I don't like the feel of castile soap on hair. I've switched to using my organic Aubrey Island Natural shampoo and conditioner (a must for her curls!) on her which has fantastic results on her hair, but of course it's not baby soap so if it gets in her eyes, she cries. I've switched to using natural handmilled bar soap and Dr. Bronner's Baby Mild. It's way less expensive than EMAB castile soap. But I've got to find a toddler-friendly, wave-friendly conditioner.
  
• Gaia Natural Baby Conditioning Detangler-everyone I know loves California Baby, and while it's better than Johnson & Johnson by farI'm still a little horrified that it contains antimicrobial ingredients polyaminopropyl biguanide. I had to buy Gaia products from Canada when I first got it around a year ago. It's available on a major monopoly webstore now which if you are going to buy from it at least find an affiliated charity/non-profit that will get a minuscule percentage of the sale. [It looks like California Baby reformulated without anti-microbials. We're giving it a try now. We picked it up at Tarzhay]
  
• Nature's Baby Ah-choo Chest Balm for colds. Total late night anxious parent saver.
  
• Weleda Sunscreen Spf 18 This German homeopathic brand is nice though EWG supposedly docks them for their use of fragrance that is essential oil-based and therefore not toxic petro-based. Germans have a thing with purity (and yes, that is a major historical/cultural generalization but I'm anthropologically minded so get over it) so I tend to "trust" their products more; they make the best non-toxic toys and were the original innovators of the baby wrap sling in the 70s. I don't know enough about the chemistry of fragrance to know if it is truly toxic or not, but though the smell is assertive, it doesn't irritate me. You really have to have yellow-undertones for this sunscreen. Some folks have said it leaves them pasty. It comes out of the tube creamy yellow already. I like it though I haven't refilled because it is expensive and hard to find. I did find that the Pharmaca in Rockridge has it.
  
• TruKid Face stick SPF 30-great for when you are in a hurry. You have to rub it in pretty good. The mom who owns this has her HQ in West Oakland and is happy to have pick up orders which mean no shipping & handling charges and sometimes, ahem, tax discount. She gave me free lotion (too strong smelling and kid-fruity for me) and samples! VL associates facestick sunscreen with facepainting. She says "con mèo|cat" and meows everytime we put it on her.
  
• Loving Naturals Sunscreen SPF 30-we used this in Hawaii, intermittently. We liked it well enough though once your hands get greasy, the cheap sticker label ink rubs entirely off which is slightly annoying to have questionable ink flakes all over your body and then a now unlabelled white bottle. Like most mineral-based sunscreens, it starts off purply tinted and then is supposed to absorb.
• I just got Badger sunscreen SPF 30 and Facestick. They have the lowest toxic rating on EWG. I love their balms which contain only natural pronounceable ingredients from plants. Like LN above, you got to rub it in very well. Not waterproof and you must reapply frequently. T & I got a mild burn from 5 hours of Tahoe sun and a single application.
  
• We've mostly used reusable flannel wipes for VL along with butt/diaper spray (punkin butt has their in house brand and there's also another one which name I forget), but now that she is a messy toddler, we occasionally indulge in the ubiquitous disposable baby wipes. I hated how soapy Earth's Best is, so we found this European brand Nature Babycare. It claims to be biodegradable and it actually works great for gentle cleaning. It doesn't sting either. Our local Farmer Joe's has it, but only the scented one. I prefer the unscented which I got bulk offa the monopoly capitalist named above (affiliated non-profit link)

whoa nellie

Today Trang took us (Trang's daughter LA, me, T, & VL) to her secret kid spot The Brunk Children's Museum of Immigration in nearby Andersonville. Like any great children's museum, it had really great interactive roleplay exhibits; in this case, of life in the old country, the journey to America, and life in America. Not to detract from the museum's Swedish mission nor to detract from the basic fun-ness of it, I must allow that it's a rather grandiose museum name that surpasses its subject by far since it focuses on a very specific segment of Swedish immigration in the 1800s. The museum acknowledges as much:

The Museum has a Swedish focus; however, the story of Swedish immigration parallels that of many other groups who left the old world behind and forged new lives in America.

Indeed, there was the almost universalized American romantic meme of immigrating to America in the 1800s-a least if one was a European settler and not an African slave or a Chinese coolie or a dispossessed Injun. That substantial historical context aside, there was definite wholesome, rustic charm to delight my girlish homesteading heart having grown up reading & watching Little House on the Prairie. Think roleplaying Laura Ingalls Wilder. Plus, who doesn't love kid-sized pinafores, cast iron stoves, coffee mills, and chamberpots? The wooden milking cow that one could actually milk was RAD. So Sweden farmhouse in the 1800s was lots of fun for the girls. They cooked us fish, made us coffee, and had lots and lots of kitchentime fun. Then we took the cruise ship to America, a quick journey really because the girls weren't interested in rowing or shuffleboard. And then onto pioneer America of the 1800s, where the little one room cabin was adorned with hand embroidered aphorism in cryptic Swedish, with Ikea furniture (I kid you not), and *real* animal pelts-ugh, it looked way cuter on the actual racoons and coyotes. There was a darling garden handmade with recycled/repurposed rubber tires, boxes, fabric. Tucked away in a corner in front of the emergency exit was a small life raft-a story symbol of the desperate third world refugee influx to Sweden. This display was marked DO NOT PLAY. Refugee boat stories are depressing and not to be roleplayed, apparently.

At any rate, I thought wouldn't it be great for VL & LA to have kid-sized dioramas of vietnamese life? Oh, or better yet, a children's museum that could really reflect the diversity of immigration experiences? To come over, one could chose the boat or an airplane or... climb a barbwire fence. And then Life in America could reflect more recent realities like uh, urban homesteading, public housing, section 8, refugee camps... While not without humanitarian precedent, this roleplaying idea quickly devolved. Perhaps like the fragile refugee life-raft diorama, some stories are not meant to be roleplayed...

How do we tell our stories to our children?

Dead Dad's Club

I once caught this scene from Grey's Anatomy, that struck me with its truth:

Christina: There's a club. The Dead Dad's club, and you can't be in it till you're in it. You can try to understand, you can sympathize but until you feel that loss.... My Dad died when I was nine. George, I'm really sorry you had to join the club.

George: I don't know how to exist in a world where my Dad doesn't.

Christina: Yeah, that never really changes.

For so many decades, I have lived with death and loss and I am ever so very sorry to welcome anyone to one of life's fundamental rites of passage.