"Tran" completes the HAT

This here is one of my favorite moments during our five days of Christmas in Portland. These are my grandfather's hands (dad's dad). His name is Tran Lam (or, Lam Tran, in the American way), but all he remembers is Tran, the family name. And so he writes it repeatedly: Tran, Tran, Tran.

The name Tran is the only thing we have left from my great-grandfather (dad's dad's dad), who was a merchant from China, whom we believed to have married great-grandmother as a second wife. Great-grandfather died when grandfather was three years old, and great-grandmother was pregnant with another son. So there is really no memory of a father in grandfather's life. Because great-grandfather was Chinese, his entire family lived in China, and we had no connection or relations with the Chinese side of the family. After great-grandfather died, great-grandmother raised two sons alone, with nothing.

It is beautiful, and sad. It strikes me that when asked to write his name, Ong Noi (vietnamese for dad's dad) writes his surname. It is the family name that is most important, and most valued. The heritage, patrimony that he received from great-grandfather. Not this individual name, not the "I" but the "we" of a family, a community. He remembers the title that calls all of us together, whether or not we wish to be called, and his memory of it is still strong, even if everything else is beginning to fade away.

I recently posted some rantings about my name. It isn't hard to realize that I've been too fixated on establishing my identity as first person me, as the individual, as HAT. But, I've always taken for granted that Tran is a part of me and have never dwelled much on the family name. It is the easy part of a rather differently spelled name that I carry with me. Seeing Ong Noi write his name, I am reminded of my connectedness to other Trans. It's not so much the H-A part but the Tran part that makes a complete HAT.

Naughty or Nice

This year, I've been doing a lot of things the easy way.

(1) This Christmas, I took the easy route and ordered Christmas dinner from Whole Foods. I even ordered La Buche de Noelle from Whole Foods (this was not a good idea, b/c it turned out dry and unappetizing, and a great disappointment, considering that my mother used to bake and sell Buche de Noelle during Christmas -- so there I was serving bad cake to my mother the baker of Buche de Noelle).

(2) I ordered (most) gifts online for Christmas.

(3) I even paid for cleaning service -- the two nicest ladies came and spent 3 hours thoroughly cleaning my house. I AM THAT LAZY.

There's more! But, I can't reveal all my vices at once.

I try, most of the time, to keep perspective. It doesn't succeed always. I skip the baking, the cooking, the cleaning, and the selecting of certain gifts in person. But, on the whole there have been other things that hopefully will redeem me, somewhat.

(1) Christmas cards AND Christmas gifts. A pretty big feat on the whole. I stopped making my own Xmas cards years ago, but it still counts to write them, right?

(2) Personally wrapping gifts instead of merely shipping them off in their prepackaged containers. Hours of gift wrapping. (all the while being mindful of greening)

(3) Single-handedly decorating the entire house for Christmas. By myself. All alone.

(4) Kept the new (greener, anti-consumerist) Christmas purchases under $300.

So, 3 to 4. That's not that bad, right...?

Christmas in Portland

Recent trip to Portland: 5 days. Freezing cold. Rain. More rain. Constantly raining.

Visited with Grandfather for 8 out of 12 hours of the day. Ate. Slept. Talked. Reminiscing with great gusto.

Thank you, Lord, for hotel rooms that you don't have to clean and sweep and for rental cars that you have to maintain.

Thank you, Lord, for mind-numbing, sleep-inducing cold medicine.

Saw falling snow for Christmas this year, and didn't even have to go into the mountains!

Powell's book store in Portland sits on its own block of the street. One entire block. Four levels of rooms filled with books. You can only imagine what the poetry section in the Blue Room was like! Bibliophile's delight.

The Japanese Garden is the sweetest thing to walk through on a chilly, wintry day. Rain drops on bare branches. The moon bridge over slowly rippling brooks. Wisteria arbors covered with crawling branches. Poetry stone along the gravel pathway.

Portland's art museum. Van Gogh's The Ox Cart. Tiny oil lamp dated from 1-99 CE. Silk prints for kimonos.

93 y.o. grandfather remembers my name, but forgot what I look like. He loves origami cranes! Why wasn't there a dictionary to decipher Grandpa Aphorisms and Declarations?

Thank you, also, for home. Sweet home. Coming home is the best thing ever. Second only to arriving home to a delicious home-cooked meal -- cooked by younger brother!

Monica de la Torre on Thursday, Dec. 6th

She plays with language. She chews up those words and then smears them on the page with ink. She rolls those words around and pounds at them and bends them and puts dents in them and squeezes them, then packs them in hard then stretches them out until no elasticity is left then hurls them back at us sitting in the audience. She mixes them up, English with Spanish and something undecipherable but still sounding magnificent, and then she utters them with relish, with punctuation, with hiss and energy and coercion.

I'm sitting in Morrison Library in Doe on the Cal campus. I've forgotten completely that the great Robert Hass is nearby somewhere, almost tangible. I forget I am at a Lunch Poems event. I've been sucked into the words and music and poetry of Monica de la Torre. I am a listener, a Talk Shows participant, and a part of the unpublished manuscript that she is writing, a member of the daffy, crazy, topsy-turvy world she has inverted and subverted.

She says "saliva is not interchangealbe with ink." She transforms storyline into scenes into paragraphs into absence into loss. Narratives are invented, rewritten, erased. Language is twisted, substituted, melded, so that Si and Non are almost interchangeable but not but all singsong, lyrical.

She bends rules, bends lines (great poem!), changes planes of interiority and switches contexts w/o blinking. She takes people's responses to a question on a radio show and translates them. She takes another poet's Spanish, translates it into English, then finds the Spanish poet with similar lines and mixes them and retranslates them. She makes me wonder about language and believe in language. She forces me to think of the tranmutability of language as well as the limitations of language.

She stuns us all.

would Jesus buy an enchanting country for old men's retirement?

What movies have I seen recently?

What Would Jesus Buy?
Wild and crazy comedic documentary that shocks more than delves into the serious conversations about curbing consumerism. Amidst horrible revelations about America's over-spending and rising debt loads, Reverend Billy and his Stop Shopping Gospel Choir travels cross-country exorcising people from their consumerist tendencies. He calls Mickey Mouse the AntiChrist, and he absolves people of their sins while sitting in a makeshift "shopping confessional" booth. Lots of funny moments, but also plenty of jaw-dropping data -- especially the interviews with parental figures who willingly admit they would max out 2-3 credit cards just to purchase Christmas presents for their children, b/c the children want them. Documentary doesn't question or probe into ways of being better consumers, neither does it plant questions of how we can provide better models for parenting. The best moment for me, which I felt was sadly lost in the documentary, was when Reverend Billy's wife spoke out loud her weariness and doubt -- she essentially states that it would be so much more worthwhile if they could at least know that their trials have affected some change. And there are trials indeed. They travel for 30+ days and get broadsided by a semi, Billy gets arrested, they get kicked out of stores, cafes, Disneyland, etc., and they endure a lot of painful and ridiculous publicity demeaning what they do. If only the documentary went just a bit deeper than the pockets of the consumers they were trying to stop...

Lingering Q: How did they fund this cross-country trip?

4 points for taking on the subject.
3 points for being so creative and funny.
2 points for glossing over the potentially rich conversations.


No Country for Old Men
Creepy, heart-wrenching, nervy story that kept me on my toes and which prodded me constantly with this unceasing restlessness, nervousness, fear. I admire that the movie was so wonderfully scripted. The deadpan way in which the characters live and play out their lives parallels reality but also parodies it in a way. The entire time, there was a throbbing unease that never quite settled but just was passed on from scene to scene, from image to image. Sort of like greed. The money that's being passed on from person to person, from place to place, infuses everything with greed and corruption. It's like everything becomes tainted. Odd and scary in a slow, quiet sort of way.

Lingering Q: Which country are we talking about? Should I read the Cormac McCarthy book?

5 points for the whole movie all put together.
3 points for the script and cinematography.
3 points for acting.


Enchanted
An interesting attempt at the subversion of fairy tale narratives. Funny characters, beautiful costuming, nice singing, but no real substance. Too heavy handed with the theme and moralizing. Susan Sarandon as a witch? Patrick Dempsey? Way cute. But beyond the handsome face? Script was unimpressive. Graphics was good -- applaudable. I appreciated the opportunity to get away from reality and to let my mind turn to mush while watching it. It has some teachable moments for kids.

Lingering Q: How do I get animals to clean house like that?

3 points for missing plot, good score, interesting graphics.
2 points for pretty peopling of storyline
1 point for depth.