{"id":101,"date":"2021-08-15T22:52:50","date_gmt":"2021-08-15T22:52:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glorianing.com\/?p=101"},"modified":"2021-08-15T22:59:26","modified_gmt":"2021-08-15T22:59:26","slug":"going-going-gone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glorianing.com\/?p=101","title":{"rendered":"Going, Going, Gone"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It\u2019s four in the morning and I\u2019ve just woken up in a puddle of my own sweat. The mix matched blankets and naked pillows are strewn all over the bed. This is it, the aftermath of the second dose has finally taken my body and I must bear all the pain and horribleness for the greater good of humanity. Don\u2019t say I never did anything for you. I sit up, groggily trying to piece together where I am. I see darkness and not much else. The five dollar mini fan from Walgreens sits to the left of me and I turn it off. I fumble with the red cap of the Tylenol bottle and take a big gulp of water from my Stonehenge souvenir cup. I fall back asleep dreaming of home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The first image I get when I think about home is my kitchen from the the top of the stairs. I can see my mom by the electric stove with her ear-pods in and her phone propped up against the salt shaker. I can see my brother wearing an apron, washing the dishes. I can see the tiny plant pots lined up on the window sill, the compost bin filled with used coffee grains and egg shells, the young seedling heads poking out of the dirt in my mother\u2019s favourite broken cup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For as long as I remember, I have grown up alongside wild things. From the moment we arrived here, in our little 2 bedroom apartment, my parents raised plants and turtles; fruits and fish; alive beings that were not human, but needed human things, water, shelter, food, and love. Throughout the years, as our family roots dug deeper and our homes got bigger, so did our gardens. Our kitchen turned into laboratories where my mother would experiment with different seeds. Our living room turned into a greenhouse, because my parents would pick up any plant they saw at the stores or abandoned in the streets. Our backyard turned into jungles of infinite possibilities.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In many ways, gardening was a way for my parents to remember the homes they left behind while teaching me and my brother things they could not communicate through spoken language. Growing up as a child of immigrants, language had always been the primary barrier between us and them. Misunderstandings turned into fights, jokes turned into explanations which turned into a sigh. The garden was a place where we could be together with very few words, \u201cshovel this\u201d, \u201cwater that\u201d, \u201cYaya, Joe, come look\u201d. It was a place where the hard things like I love you or I\u2019m proud of you, didn\u2019t need to be said, but we felt them nonetheless, through a pat on the back or a slice of homegrown watermelon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    I can see my father through the screen door. It’s dark inside the house, in the summer when there is the sun, lights are a waste of electricity and money. I can only make out his silhouette sitting in his Ikea chair reading a book by the front windows. This is usually how I find him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I knock on the screen door to get his attention while my mother wanders through the green bean stalk. He comes and greets us with his usual boyish smile and immediately starts rambling about his most recent harvest of green beans, zucchinis, and peppers. I can tell he’s excited about the interview, but I tell him that we should do the photoshoot first and he asks if he should wear a hat to seem more in character. It’s a pork pie straw hat with dark red lining and white letters that says Costa Rica in the front. Simply, it’s a dad hat. We take a couple of photos, but the afternoon heat quickly becomes unbearable so we retire to the concrete deck and sip diet Pepsi. My dad washes some fresh tomatoes and we munch on them happily as we sit in the shade. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    I hit the record button on my phone and ask the first question. \u201cWhen did you start gardening?\u201d He thinks about it for a moment, his head tilts and his eyes squint as if he can see the past. He answers, “The first I hit the record button on my phone and ask the first question. \u201cWhen did you start gardening?\u201d He thinks about it for a moment, his head tilts and his eyes squint as if he can see the past. He answers, \u201cThe first home we had, the semi detached. Do you remember? It was the first house with a backyard. We tried to grow cucumbers, but they were very bitter. Your mother said it must be because the animals peed on them. It was a small area right? Back then we focused mostly plants, flowers, or trees. Not vegetables.\u201d He proceeds to recount the details of every garden we had over the course of a decade, switching back and forth between English and Mandarin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    At one point he goes back into the house to get the bag of sunflower seeds he planted. My mother and I look at each other with a knowing smile. My father comes back and starts explaining the process of sunflowers and when he is done, he laughs and says we are going to be here all afternoon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The next question is “Why do you love gardening? What does it teach you?” He begins, “I don’t know… When I was very young, I was interested in trees and plants, but not animals. I’m not sure why. Plants are easier to deal with than animals, for sure easier to deal with than humans, because they cannot speak. Instead you can give them water or fertilizer and they give you very good feedback.” He recounts his childhood and the changing times in China when the country was recovering from the Cultural Revolution. I watch his face as he talks and try to picture him on his aunt’s farm, all scrawny and mud-stained running around the open fields. What an odd thing it is to remember your parents have had faces much younger than the ones they wear now. <\/p>\n\n\n\n