#01

.   1 --  I  AM  LOST      It is hard to know what can make myself happy.  I used to have many kinds of hobbies from playing piano to painting and sewing, quilting, reading and writing.  As a child, I used to dream of travelling around the world.  I wanted to experience all kinds of trades.  When I first immigrated to Canada in the sixties, I had even taken my five-year-old Tracy along to deliver telephone directories, earning almost nothing but to experience life. I did also import business selling wigs to modeling and hairdressing schools, meeting all kinds of people.  I sold real estates as well.  Yet, Mark didn’t like my prosperity or my association with others that I had to quit my job to be a housewife.  I certainly had much luck with strangers but not much with relatives.    Now Mark and I are seniors.  His cousin, Lucy, phoned in for the first time in her life that she would be coming from Los Angeles with two friends and would like to stay in our house in early February.  Mark told her that he had already booked a February plane ticket to visit his mother in the States.  Lucy said that she would just stay for two days on the Fifth and Sixth of February.  So we sat at home to wait for her arrival by car on the Fifth.  Yet, there was neither phone call nor her coming that day.  She phoned unexpectedly the following day, saying that she would be coming with a party of six in three hours.  She asked whether Mark could find her a motel.  Mark answered that she could all come to stay with us.  However, putting down the phone, Mark ate his lunch and left the house, going to the driving range to play golf.  He didn’t care how many guests were coming or where they would sleep in our house.  It is too much stress for him to handle in his retirement age.     If Lucy and her friends intended to stay in a motel, she could probably find one on her way driving up from Blaine to Vancouver.  Why wouldn’t she do it?  Obviously, she expected us to say yes disregarding how many persons there were.  I was a bit shock of her behaviour.  Who can book a date and then without coming or calling in to advise the hostess of a cancelled trip?  Which relative can come to stay in others’ house with a party of six within three hours notice?     My heart jumped to say, “Treat them as carefree children!  Don’t worry about cleaning the basement or rooms.  Put them there.  Bake them a cake for tea.  That’s what they want: free food and lodging.  They don’t mind even sleeping on the floor with their own sleeping bags.  That's how children travel and see the world.  How many would be so rude to come as Mark’s sister, Pearl, in a party of nine, demanding first class service, renting even a crib for her one-year-old grandson, John.”    Pearl and her husband had three adult children coming with their spouses and children. My family of eight invited them to dine at a nearby restaurant so that I could walk there.  After dinner, Pearl’s son, Francis, asked for my house key for him to walk home first.  I reminded him that he had already got my key.  He told me that he had given it to John’s mother, Betty, a lawyer.  I told him that was my only key.  He had to get it back from Betty.  Then Betty started yelling at me in the restaurant  saying, “Why can’t I keep the key, you think I’m a thief that would rob your house!”    My goodness, it was her brother-in-law who needed the key to go home.  How could she be so rude to a hostess?  No wonder Henry told Tracy that she and I were doormats to relatives and friends.    O!  I do have feeling and a tongue.  Only I don’t express my sorrow with tears or anger with yelling.  I was trained not only by the dogma of the forgiveness of sins but also by my stepmother, Pauline, to swallow all injustice in her constant verbal abuse in silence.  I want the barbarians to hear their own vulgar words and I wouldn’t act like them.    It is neither with enthusiasm nor positive attitude that I have been handling my daily life.  I am trying hard not to be breaking down by hostility.  However, I do feel lost in these days.     My eldest son Ron married his secretary, Sarah, when he was twenty-four, having a small software company at that time.  Now he has become a programming manager in a giant software firm earning top salary in his field, having two big houses: one in the city and one in the country. We would see Sarah only three, four times a year for dinner at a restaurant.  Still she finds that too much family gathering and is hostile against me.  She questioned me how much I had spent on Tracy’s wedding and housing, telling me that she and Ron had paid for their wedding expenses that should have been paid by the groom’s family according to Chinese custom. That accusation was a shock to me.  Why didn’t she consult me then how would she like me to help? Ron was rich and had fancy idea to please his bride that we didn’t question about his wedding arrangement to spoil his special day. Ron has been famous for his generosity among friends that he used to rent a rink for his classmates to play hockey because he had already earned $40 an hour in his college days in the early eighties while Mark earned just half of that amount.    There is indeed no such thing as equality but need: an elephant needs more food than a bird.  All our children came to borrow money for the downpayment of their first house and the amounts were not equal while we didn’t expect them to repay us.  However, Ron did pay us back afterwards due to his own pride of independence.  He has also given Sarah and his children everything they had wanted.  For a family with only two adults, Sarah and Ron have three cars and two motorcycles. Their insurance expense is more than my living expenses.  I had never taken a penny from Ron.  How could an elephant come to judge even an ant's way of spending?  Have seniors lost their right in spending their money the way they want?  What can I do at the end of the journey of my life?

#01

.   2 --  GOAL  SETTING      Do I have enthusiasm in visiting dying patients?  No, I don’t even know how to amuse or chat with them, whether wearing a masked smile is good or sarcastic?  Yet, I definitely feel good after doing the visit, doing my duty - making patients think that they are not abandoned. Before going for a visit, I pray for the patient’s peace of mind in having God with him or her. I can’t give patients false hope since they know that doesn’t exist but there will always be God with them.  All I can do is to bring a patient some food even though he or she may not eat or speak any more.  I find waiting for death is the hardest thing to do in life for both a patient and a visitor.  How can I ever conquer this problem?    Once I had visited a 95-year-old lady.  She was said to be in bed unable to recognize people any more.  I had met her only a few times, driving her to wedding parties with Mark previously.  So I didn’t expect her to recognize me but she did wake up and call my name that surprised her daughter.  Next time, when I visited her, she could sit up on wheelchair to be fed by her son but she didn’t want to eat.  She let her son wheeled her to the corridor where there was a picture of a vegetable farm.  She looked at me and then at the scenery picture back and forth repeatedly.  I followed her eyes and smiled.  I nodded my head and said, “Yes, you do remember that I am a vegetarian.”  She smiled and nodded her head because she could no more speak.  I felt the peace in her eyes and she passed away a few days later.  People said that a dying person would suddenly wake up at the last moment to communicate with loved ones.  I didn’t know that she would love me but it said so in her eyes.    I did listen to many tales of dying experiences of severely sick patients returned miraculously to health with stories of the other dimensions of different experiences.  For instance, a middle-aged woman waking up from 22 hours of coma claimed that she had come to a gate seeing many people wearing different costumes inside. When the gatekeeper couldn’t find her name in his book, he told her that her time had not come and kicked hard at her bottom to return her to this world.  In fact, it cost two million dollars of hospital expenses paid by her insurance policy to bring her back into life from a car accident but her bottom was truly bruised.  That gatekeeper was not gentle at all.    A Chinese-American of seventy-six years old once asked whether I believed in ghosts.  I said yes.  She told me that her late husband appeared to her and told her that it was wonderful in the other world and requested her to go with him.  She didn’t answer him and then her sickness got worse. After being advised by a friend, when the ghost appeared the second time, she told him that she wanted to enjoy a few more years traveling in this world; he didn’t come again and she got well.  So an escort may come early to prepare a person for her departure without taking her by surprise.  Some patients in hospitals had seen ghosts on their walls assembling at railway station heading to different directions. They had to wait for their escorts to get onto the train.     Apparently, the escorts may come at all to some ghosts as those in my dreams. Once a charming ghost told the people in her house not to remove her furniture but they couldn’t hear her because she spoke with her mind without sound.  In another dream, I felt trapped psychologically in ghost world, flying in darkness over hills and houses like skiers constantly in fear and lost with no home.  One night, I dreamed of seeing ghosts in a distance standing on small boats rushing down stream.  At first I thought they were fishermen.  Yet they were in fact ghosts who would never need to fish for food or for a living but they had been racing up to the top of the world to display themselves above God without time to chat with parents or relatives.  They believed that their success had come from their hard work while they were running down stream with no oars.     Once I dreamed of walking through one of the many tunnels in underground before crawling up to a place where people all wearing white sacks.  Each one was lowering the head walking and enumerating what he or she shouldn’t do. No one bothered to answer my question of where to register and apply for a job.  Then I woke up realizing that there is no job available in that ghostly world except penitence. There is no judgment but self-judgment over there with the absence of God.     In one dream, I was led by a child to enter a hall with a thousand mirrors telling me that walking into that room, a person can see his own thousand faces reflected from the mirrors.  Not one tiny act in human life would be forgotten by the conscience.  Then he pushed me back into the tunnel where I came up.  Sometimes, I would simply be in the other dimension unknowingly through a revolving door, a curtain, or an escalator with no return until I woke up.    When I was ten years old, I had set a goal to be a writer, telling children about God, comforting orphans that they were not alone on earth.  God is with them.  I had no idea why would I be so sure about God while I didn’t belong to any religious organization.  I just felt the enormous love of the other world around me, assuring me that it exists, watching over me in all my dangers, rescuing me without even my notice of the dangers.  Perhaps, my stepmother’s fear of the other world and the judgment there had made me so sure of its existence with justice and love.  I wanted to expose her evil manipulations and acts, assuring orphans their safety in God's love.     However, Christianity insists on the forgiveness of sins.  It had stopped me from writing about Pauline’s evilness which I couldn’t forget.  Thus, I lost my goal.  In my twenty, one night, I got a dream of being escorted by an angel with wings going up to the cloud to see a grand person in pure white.  I got a feeling that holy person could be the transformation of my late mother but he didn’t speak to me at all.  Yet my conscience made me understand the reason of my meeting him.  So I spoke through my mind to the holy person, “Please forgive me, I can’t expose Pauline’s sins to shame her on earth because she had saved me once when I got shot by the Japanese.  I can’t return gratitude with judgment.  I knew she had used words and indirect methods to frighten my mother to death psychologically.  Please, forgive me and Pauline that I didn’t write about her story.”     For sixty years, I have been carrying that burden in my heart.  I knew almost exactly what had happened although I was just five years old when my mother died.  In my thirty, I even dreamed of Mom being pressed on her heart that she was suffocated to death because I seemed to be in her body lying on bed. It was the second reminder of writing my family secret and God’s caring as my goal at the age of ten.    Pauline tempted us into sin by describing sex as fun while putting my brother to sleep with my sister.  To build up walls among us, the children, Pauline also charged an innocent child with stealing food from the storage room while obviously it was the three years old who ate the food without even knowing how to clean her mouth. Pauline’s method was to make the innocent one to accuse the sister for stealing, making the siblings hate one another. I found there was nothing wrong to eat our food in our own house.  Pauline was a refugee in our house but claimed to be my mother's sister and that was impossible since they didn't seem to have the same mother or brothers.  Pauline had kicked my mother's younger brother out of our house saying that he had the inherited tuberculosis when he coughed.  However, that uncle did live to old age.  Anyway, Pauline was probably my Mom's half-sister, a widow with two children from Shanghai.    Mom married my father when she was eighteen.  They lived in Hong Kong and had four children. She took Pauline and her children into our house. Immediately, there started the rumour that my mother’s older brother and mother in Shanghai had both died of tuberculosis.  Pauline claimed that my mother had inherited such disease as well and should not leave her bedroom to see even her children. Mom was a first prize swimmer at school.  Yet, she was young and believed that she had tuberculosis and stayed in bed since giving birth to my healthy and lively sister.     Pauline had forbidden us to peep into Mom’s room lest we might catch tuberculosis.  If Pauline was truly my mother's sister, why hadn't she inherited the same family disease?  I didn't trust her at all.  Her tongue was poisonous, ready to kill.    At the age of four, it became my curiosity to see how Mom looked like. I ignored Pauline’s order and peeped into Mom’s room.  Without even able to see Mom’s face, Pauline had already caught me peeping in there from behind.  She summoned my siblings and told them that due to my peeping into the room, Mom was then anxious to see us and her contagious disease would spread upon us.  To stop her anxiety, Mom must drink my brother’s urine and should be taken in by my two-year-old sister to her.  So my sister did.  When Mom drank the urine as soup, she screamed and threw the bowl onto the floor.  My frightened little sister ran out of Mom's room immediately.  Since then my siblings obeyed Pauline as queen and protector.  I felt Pauline’s trick disgusting.  How come my youngest sister was sent in to bring Mom the urine to drink while I was not even allowed to peep into Mom’s room?  Who had ever heard urine as medicine?  Well, today, people used pregnant mare's urine to make medicine! Still, it was a lie that Mom must drink my brother’s urine to suppress her anxiety.  Mom was completely helpless in Pauline's hands although we had two servants at home and they must face their doomsday too.    The Japanese soon invaded Hong Kong and I got shot at home sleeping.  Next morning, Pauline took me to hospital saving my life.  Our servant brought me food there everyday for three months.  One day, she came to say goodbye saying that my mother had died of heart attack.  Pauline had discharged all our servants to be replaced with new ones. One of my old servants was killed on her way back to China while the one serving me couldn’t find another job in such wartime.  She told me to watch out Pauline.  When I got home from hospital, Pauline forced me to call her mother that I refused to do.  She beat my palm with a ruler and told my siblings that if we didn’t accept her as our mother, our father would marry outsider who would rob us of our inheritance right.  So they all obeyed her.  They even followed her order to beat up my father’s mistresses in later years. Forbidding us to let any one know that she was not our natural mother, Mom's picture was not allowed to be displayed in our house at all; Pauline had also changed her children’s surname into my father’s surname, making us called our cousins as our oldest siblings.  She had covered up all the truth for having our father to be her husband with pressure. We were used as hostages for her scheme in taking over my mother’s place.  Still, other women soon came to fight Pauline even in our house to be my father’s wives, calling her our housekeeper as my father stood aside in silence.    Why should I write about Pauline when I have heard, read, and seen a thousand wicked women and evil men in books and on movies?  Their characters and methods have long been known to the world.  What is the point of adding one more evil account into this world?  How can I educate anyone not to be evil, not to be ungrateful?  Why should I tell others about God while millions of people talking and preaching about Him daily?  I am not denying of knowing God but I just don’t want to talk about justice and righteousness any more.  I am too familiar with the world beyond in different levels although I don’t know which level I’ll soon be put.  I am just as eager to have the true experience rather than simply in dreams to tackle the problem because I have no more a goal on earth.  I have no more wicked facts to inform others than those already been written down by others in books or shown on television. Since Christianity also prefers the forgiveness of sins, I don’t know what can I write to offer something to mankind?    My neighbour complained to me that her eleven-year-old son told her to get out of his game room when she asked him to study.  How much it had hurt her feeling.  Hurt?  I laughed in my heart that she hasn’t got yet a daughter-in-law.  Newspaper column taught married women escorted their parents and in-law to the car while chatting with them!  The new generations regard parent as eggs producing machines.  How can I ever make my books published for children to read even if I did write and publish my work?  I have to be realistic when setting a goal.  A realistic goal is to listen to all the complaints in silence, giving the wounded heart a sympathetic smile, sighing that God does know our feelings as He suffers likewise as we do, being thrown out of the conscience.     Probably, sixty years later, my neighbour’s son had children speaking the same thing to him as he had said to his mother, he would give her a phone call in penitence.  So the truth doesn’t need any hot argument but personal experience.  That’s how has God counted on His paradise even thousand years later on – with human understanding and penitence to form it without losing sight of His goal due to the present obstacles.

 #01
 

. . 3  –  SELF-ESTEEM      Children are taught to aim high and to take risks for achievement.  What is easy to reach is below one’s own ability. So children are normally pushed for higher and higher achievement till nervous breakdown.  When does a person know what is truly for himself or herself?    Yes, I had a goal to be a writer but my handicapped hand could not type although I wished to be a typist to an author, learning to write. Perhaps I was carved to be a teacher that my high school principal offered me a job as a primary school teacher teaching English and Geography to Grade Five pupils after earning a French teaching diploma in France.  Yet, I had resigned in three months.     The true reason was first due to my shaky educational background.  During the Second World War, I had no schooling for three years. I got only four years of proper primary school in Chinese.  Later, I had about two years of English tutorial class, then two years of proper English high school.  I didn’t think that I could pass the Hong Kong high school certificate examination in 1953 and I didn’t want to pass it at all because I was just sixteen, studying in the same class with my older sister.  She would feel bad if I could pass that examination and she couldn’t.  So I went swimming for a few days before taking the examination.  Well it ended up that I did pass the examination and she didn’t that she didn’t like to be seen with me.  I didn’t enjoy the luck or success since it had divided us.     Worse than my shaky educational background of not being sure of right and wrong, I had no strength or tactic to face my senior colleagues' anger when I took over a grade five Geography in the middle of a term discovering a spelling mistake in the text book and telling the children to correct it.  Since I had not been introduced to other teachers and I was a shy person, I let only the principal instead of the teachers know the spelling mistake of the book to be corrected.  I couldn't imagine that would hurt other teachers' prideso much that I was then snarled as the self-righteous and arrogant one by senior staff for having overseas education.  I was judged being antisocial for correcting students' papers during recess time.    Why should those teachers worry about not knowing everything in their field? Being a proofreader, my brother told me that each article in newspaper must be read ten times to look for mistakes.  In fact writers all need an editor too.  Making mistakes are human. Without action, there is definitely no mistake to be made by a coward; he would simply remain ignorant and inactive forever.    After my resignation, I decided to be a live-in nanny so that I didn’t have to live with Pauline in my father’s house. I got a job in a remote district where there was no shop or bus around that I had to drive my father’s big car to move my luggage in. My mistress had both a cook and a maid. My duty was just to look after two preschool children while their mother lying on sofa doing absolutely nothing the whole day since there was no television in those days and she didn’t have read or walk for pleasure. Her children actually wanted her attention: to be interested in them enough to love them and to be with them that they had made all their former nannies left within a short period of time. The only reason that she wouldn’t look after her own children was probably due to the class system at that time that she must show her neighbours that she could afford a nanny. I finally told my mistress that her children had no respect for me that I couldn’t teach them manners and must resign. Seeing my room piled up with children books with foreign languages which I intended to read to children, my mistress realized that I didn’t work for a nanny’s salary but for my interest in children; she told me sincerely that she would look after her children from that day on.  I realized then I could influence my master indirectly and this has given me pride and self-esteem.    Dad’s partner offered me a job in their firm.  I gained respect among my father’s employees not by being their master but by having the same lunch with them every day but eating just half of my portion and sharing the rest with them.  Often, knowing more than colleagues may induce hostility, only humbleness can win mutual respect.  The conscience questioned me how many cheques must I write to satisfy the hunger of the world?  Giving out all my salary once a month was like a drop of water in the ocean that whoever demanding it would never be satisfied.  How could I be happy to wait for another month to write another cheque?  Would that satisfy my ego or stupidity?  Why didn’t I give what I truly had that might raise human self-esteem?     Yet, I don’t know what I have that can raise human self-esteem.  That must be an unreachable goal.  How can my pen be so great?  What had maintained my self-esteem after being put by Pauline into mental hospital to remove my memory with electrical shock treatments?     I could remember nothing about being put into hospital to have my memory removed after returning from France until the doctor sent his nurse to ask for payment in Pauline’s house.  I was just shocked in learning that news.  Then the memory of struggling on the hospital bed being tied up returned to me.  God had revived my memory!  What had Pauline done to me?  Oh! She told my father that I had gone crazy because I felt in love with a Frenchman and couldn’t marry him, so I wanted to be a nun and must be stopped by removing my memory with electrical shock treatments.  What a dangerous and manipulated woman!  I thought that being a nun could eliminate men from chasing after me and it would be the best way to serve orphans but I had already been turned down by the priest who told me that a nun’s vocation should be called by God.  It could not be used as an escape. I should follow the Holy Mary’s example to be wife and mother, bringing up children for God.  So I couldn’t be a nun whether I wanted to be or not.     What right had Pauline to control my profession or my life? Except Mark, friends had distanced themselves from me upon learning that I was a vegetarian, being hospitalized as mentally sick and worked as nanny. I married Mark, assuming a poor man’s son couldn’t have any class system in mind.     After our marriage, Mark and I immigrated to Canada. Starting our new life in a new country with no relatives around, Mark had immediately become a different man. He believed that his success came from his hard work and he didn’t need to have any sympathy on poor people. He hated not only the wealthy relatives as snobs who had not help him in his poverty but also the poor or any one that needed help as thief and I am such assistant to rob him. Now I realize that before a person getting out of ghetto, a stranger should help him once before his heart turning into stone like Mark's to look down and trample upon every person of either higher or lower intelligent than himself with jealousy or contempt.    Mark told me that I was no more allowed to write dairy because writing would drive me insane to be put once more into mental institute. When I was giving birth at hospital, he told me not to disturb him with any phone call about our baby’s arrival because it was an unwanted one.  He considered that as a vegetarian, I couldn’t have any healthy baby.    To be a housewife in a foreign country was much worse than being on welfare: I had no pocket money for a postcard or a friend to talk to but people thought that I had married a wealthy husband.  His colleagues thought that I was snobbish without accompanying him to parties, where he had been a popular party animal. Once I did go to a company Christmas party with Mark. He took me to the middle of the dance floor and turned around to dance with his secretary, leaving me to walk back to my seat alone.  His behaviour upset even his boss that he came to ask me for a dance.  He escorted me like a gentleman back to my table after the dance, pushing out a chair for me.  He sat next to me, telling me that he had ordered a special vegetarian dish for me and hoped that I would enjoy it.  Probably, due to Mark’s rude manner towards me, it draws not only Gods’ sympathy but also others’ compassion upon me.  In another person's kindness, I feel like a child again.    Mark enjoyed humiliated me in public with the thought of raising his status above colleagues.  He told his colleagues I shone his shoes and washed his car. The reaction of his colleagues shocked him. His secretary told him that she would like to scratch his eyeball out of his socket. Male colleagues asked whether they could date me or exchange sleeping partners with him!  Thus he had learnt a lesson.    Indeed, so hurt by my loss of freedom in Mark’s hands with children unwanted, I had thought of committing suicide.  Then I reminded myself that I don't marry for love or for support but to bring up children or orphans.  I needed neither a penny nor any love from a husband.  Through history, men usually married for women’s rank as stepping-stones into society while fathers-in-law pick the strength of a man for their daughters to depend upon.  Parents would never consider love as a good match but stupidity. Women are supposed to have grace and wisdom to bring up children and men are supposed to protect women and children, defending any home invasion and the country that they must be strong.  So, health comes first.    In fact, beauty can’t produce intelligent, respectable and healthy children to inherit the world as confidence and honesty can.  Beauty is for amusement that some people risk health and pain to have plastic surgeries every few years.  When people can’t accept their true selves, how can others accept them?  So fatal attraction is only what play-boys would look for: a moment of pleasure.    Husbands and wives should simply maintain their distance, mutual respect and diverse duties to bring up children.  To protect family lineage, members should even go into different directions to be multiplied rather than to be concentrated at one spot to be killed altogether in disaster or war.  My siblings are living in different continents.  A friend had just phoned me.  A Chinese-American family members of eight from New York and other States joining force in San Francisco to return to Taiwan for a family reunion. They had all just died in an air crash in Taiwan.  For lineage sake, each person will be counted that survivors should be strong. She reminded me never to make the same mistake in having all the family members sitting on the same plane.  There should always be one seed leaving behind. A lineage is a relay of society and country that shouldn’t be cut off on earth.    I had a dream: there was famine on earth and strong people were eating weak people who ran and hid themselves in wilderness that all the residents in my high-rise apartment had left.  So had Mark gone away leaving me with my children in the city. We had just one loaf of bread at home and I moved my children down into basement for hiding, taking out a drawer to fill with soil and planting peas at our hiding place.  We eat one mouthful of bread a day to wait for the peas to grow.  Yet, my loaf of bread had never come to an end even till the harvest return in six months and people had started returning to the city, so did Mark.    Thus I felt strong.  Without money for toys, I made puzzles for my children out of cardboard and taught them geography. I didn’t need to bow to Mark.  My responsibility returned my self-esteem. My children have grown up not just as good students and sportsmen but good citizens as well, living in different parts of America.  Thus, I know that God is looking after me through all my adversities.  I have never been left alone.  I could find jobs easily.     Three decades ago, as a real estate saleslady, I could earn more than Mark did since customers loved chatting with me and offered their houses for me to sell. This caused Mark's jealousy and didn't allow me to work again and mistreated my children that they didn't dare to go home after school if I wasn't home.  Thus, I must stay home.  He warned me that he would kill my cat if I ever run away.  Obviously, a man still needs a free secretary, housekeeper, and gardener when a woman is no more a wife to him.  Those fields are too low for him to do but too expensive to pay for.  Mark definitely can’t make a cover girl to do such jobs without paying more than he can earn.  Love is for the eyes but can't be brought home.  The enchanted image is simply to share with millions.  Everyday, thousands of fans are running after a movie star, yet, just one or two may get to marry him or her; the rest can watch, read and talk about that: love can never be brought home where services and food are in demand for giving life to children. Duty and honor belonged to parents in serving God’s creation on earth.    Everything in me has been negative to Mark that he had forbidden me even to think.  He just wished that I would worship him like God and was annoyed that he couldn’t fight the ghost in my mind!  Yet, in fact he was fighting his own conscience and has rage in trivial things, especially in material things. For instance, last year, Tracy had bought each of us three DVDs.  After watching those movies, they should naturally be put back next to the television set in the entertainment unit.  However, Mark had hidden them in basement in fear of someone breaking into our house to steal them.     One day, Mark had finished his supper while I was still having mine, he yelled from the basement asking where had I put his six DVDs.  My DVDs have now become his!  He claimed that he had put them behind my books.  Well, I did move my books to another room. How could he hide the DVDs behind my books?  If he did, I guessed I could have moved them to the front room.  I rushed downstairs to help him looking for the DVDs.    Then Mark started scolding me for moving his stuff.  He would do the same to mine and burn all my books!  Yes, his heart is full of hatred and retaliation. The DVDs had not been removed from his bookcase but put on a lower shelf that he saw them immediately after cursing me.  Thus, there is no cure for suspicion, greed and hatred through ignorance in heart except with time for a person to discover his own mistakes. Yet, in discovering his own mistakes, he turns to hate me for being wiser than he is that he scolds me again for that. Demanding a wife to be immobile, being neither stupid nor wise, neither earning nor spending money, that is commanding her to become a presentable classic marble statue.  I am just a showpiece for Mark to friends and colleagues what he has collected.    Now I remember, my father played deaf and dumb to let Pauline run over our house. He also didn’t let me divorce Mark for the children’s sake because happiness depends on fulfilling one’s duties rather than having an easy life with no difficulties or challenges.  Self-esteem comes from pride without running away from duties, having courage in facing our opponents to let them see how we have triumphed over the difficulties and pain they had inflicted upon us.    People find living in a safety net boring and dull, under personal ability.   Although greed and lust are the causes of sins, these are the true excitement and fun for many people.  Taking risk is having courage to look for love, fame and wealth. Why should righteous people judge or are they so righteous after all?  Self-righteousness will always be looked at with contempt. Many people consider me self-righteous for not eating meat and I shouldn’t attend parties to spoil their fun.     O God!  How could I quote them Isaiah 65:25, “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock; and dust shall be the serpent’s meat.  They shall not hurt nor destroy in my holy mountain” and in 66:3, “He that kills an ox is as if he slew a man; he that sacrifices a lamb, as if he cut off a dog’s neck; he that offers an oblation, as if he offered swine’s blood.”  Wouldn’t this prove me more self-righteous?    Truly, it is some people’s pride to put their commands above God’s and nobody dares to utter a voice. God doesn’t seem to appear to fight as well.    Although God or the Holy Ghost is in Jesus as in everybody, Jesus says that God is greater than him, (John 14:28).  But Constantine the Great had first raised up a cross to draw Christians to fight for his empire. Then he presided over the Nicene Council of some 300 Roman bishops to make the Son equal to God, the Father and the Holy Ghost disregarding the First Commandment that there should be no other gods before the Father Himself.  Obviously, it is Constantine the Great who has created the church with the Trinity Doctrine, using the name of the Holy Ghost to put himself above God for controlling the Christians and all his people like Pauline did to Dad’s family.     Probably, I should confess my sin than criticize other person’s motive.  My greatest sin is probably the lust in my thought.  I have always burnt with desire for Pierre and detested Mark. Although my left hand has strength but those fingers couldn't hold any small article firmly.  When I requested Mark to screw on the ceiling lamp shape for me, he had even fear in falling off ladder.  I couldn't even ask him to hold a roll of carpet while I was cutting it for installation without provoking his anger and impatience, yelling at me for not buying remnants to save his trouble.  I should never ask him for help in fixing anything at home and I must shop alone behind him with my own money. Thus, a glance at Mark’s skeleton body with bent legs and imbalance shoulders made me look away to think automatically of Pierre.  He was the apple in women’s eyes, charming, helpful, witty, big and strong.  I am quite shock that my children have grown up more like Pierre’s structure and character rather than Mark’s trivial personality.    Why didn’t I marry Pierre?  I was too sensible to believe that I couldn’t marry a politician to ruin his career.  I was not the sociable type and would not try to fit into his society.  I preferred to be a nun and live a quiet life to serve children.  I would never argue righteousness with others and didn’t want to watch Pierre getting hurt with his righteousness.  I was not indifferent to leave him to his sorrow, because I have trusted that Pierre would forget and forgive me.  I would serve God to serve children and God would serve Pierre for me, protecting him from all evil fates. I would even suffer sickness in exchange for his good health.  Therefore, I had no complaint for any evil fate that had fallen upon me and didn’t want to return to Europe but to live in a convent to serve orphans.  Only I had not been accepted there.  When I became a nanny and the children preferred to be served by their own mother, I had decided to have my own children and married Mark. However, forty-seven years later, I am still burning with desire for Pierre but married to Mark.     In my childhood, I wanted to comfort the wounded hearts of orphans like myself. Today I realize that I want to comfort the wounded hearts of parents like myself.  Having just five years of English, I truly can’t write any story even for a child but just one line to a victim, “God is with you. If you are thrown from one hell to another, it is because God knows that you have already conquered one hell and you can conquer another with the experience, knowledge and strength gained that you can lay down the foundation of heaven for others.”

 #01
 

. . 4  -- HAPPINESS    Recently, Mark took me to visit his old classmate of primary school day.  He was a retired principal doing volunteer work for pastime.  Looking at his old photo album, Mark noticed that he was the head of a Moslem society.  I told the man that I was interested in knowing his custom.  The man sighed, “I became a Moslem in my youth to look for peace.  But today, I question that my parents and ancestors, who had never been converted into Moslems, would they go to heaven or hell.  I can no more find peace if custom and religion will separate me from my parents.  So I am having doubt now in any religion that separates people according to their faiths disregarding humanity.  We are all submitted to God’s righteousness, not customs.”    If intelligence or luck or religion separate people from the loved ones, how can we find happiness or peace?  Humanity unites peoples of different races, different religions and different levels of intelligence together that we can find peace and luck wherever we go.     Through the strangers’ love towards me, I find God in everybody and even in others’ pets passing by, loving me in a thousand different ways.  Once, a big dog, a St. Bernard, of a nearby street put his paw on my shoulder while I was walking home.  I thought it was hungry that it followed me home. However, it returned to its master living across the street the minute I entered my house. It had simply offered me its love and companionship for a few minutes to brighten up my day.    God's spirit is in every creature on earth.  He reveals Himself to everybody and has carved His words in hearts, in dreams and in the minds of geniuses as well that they can create things to benefit mankind. God’s words are not limited to the Bible at all.  He is creating new joy for all the creatures in universe everyday. The joy comes from spirit and impulse.  I recalled that at the age of eight in a primary school, students must wear runners in taking part of the 15 minutes morning gymnastic exercise before attending classes.  If any student didn't wear runners, he or she must go bare feet.    One day, a friend of mine had forgotten to wear his runners and was terribly afraid of the anger of our gym teacher.  So I exchanged my runners with his shoes to attend the gym exercises.  Among five hundred students, the teacher spotted me and came up to ask me to take off my shoes. I ignored his command and said naughtily, "It is going to rain, you haven't worn your runners as well."  Then the teacher walked away and started the gym exercise.     It amazed my friends that I had talked back to that renowned, harsh looking teacher. Well, I spotted his kindness other could not see: I challenged my classmates going with me to the teachers' room to put a blanket over his head.  Then we ran out laughingly because they had conquered their senseless fear.  I believe all the harsh teachers in schools like me because I was not afraid of them.  How can a teacher or God enjoy having children afraid of Him to keep a distance?    I was actually a shy bookworm reading fairy tales and great men's stories even under moonlight and I didn't know why I did such irrational thing impulsively now and then. Did God's spirit of love make me do silly things to cheer up others like the dog had brightened up my day to accompany me home?  Indeed, there was also a neighbourhood cat that greeted me and let me stroke its hair whenever I passed by its house to school.  The greetings did brighten up my days.    Few years ago, my sisters took me joining a tour to Turkey.  While we were taken pictures, there was a group of Turkish students taking pictures too. They wanted to have a picture taken with us together.  Young farmers in the market also posted for us to take their pictures and offered me half of a cucumber afterwards!  A Moslem woman and her daughter in a railway station allowed us to take pictures with them too.  People's friendliness was more than my grandchildren would show towards me!  When I went to visit my grandchildren even just once a year for an hour or two, they had hidden themselves in basement to play video game, ignoring me completely.     I have learnt from my father that if I love somebody, I should not tear that person apart with a fight for love or visit.  Word is silver but silence is gold.  After all, how often does God speak? Obviously, He wants us to meditate the truth instead of following orders.    I didn’t mind Mark kept all his earnings for himself.  I told him that I would give all his money to charity organizations after his death. He couldn’t tell me that he was a money pincher due to saving for my future but his own.  My old age security is more than enough for my living. The nature of men is to seek happiness and it is everywhere on earth like a baby may smile at his mother's touch and an old man may smile at the sight of a flower in winter.  There is no need of equality, wealth or great success to bring the spirit of happiness to mankind. Every time I look out into my garden in winter, I feel God’s love in keeping my last roses blooming for such an unexpectedly long period of time, giving His token of infinitive love to small creatures like me!  There is no need to be great but loved.     One day, I had a dream that Pierre’s leg got swollen and unable to walk and I woke up begging God to replace his leg with mine.  I didn’t know the existence of myself but just his well being.  The conscience replied, “Beauty and strength must be maintained by oneself.  It is not clothing or money that can be taken off to give away.  Besides, it is sickening to bind love with gratitude or wealth instead of mutual respect.”     Looking at Mark, I wonder how can he maintain strength with four hours of exercise a day?  It simply drives him exhausted and skinny. Youthfulness comes from grace, the will of God!  We must accept the appearance expressing our inner-self.  So I must accept Pierre just as the way he is. Tempting a patient to accept any part of other human organ transplant is a disgrace to an unselfish character.  I should be able to feel Pierre’s noble spirit being forever young without my interference.    Then, I felt the spirit of Pauline speaking to me.  “You can’t resist him as I can’t resist your father.  I need him coming into my bed as you need Pierre no matter whom you are married to.”    I cried and cried to God because I couldn’t deny my desire.  I would like to exchange my life just for fifteen minutes to be with Pierre in my bed.  Forty-seven years of separation didn’t make me love him less.  He had turned bald and fat.  I still want him.  His aging makes no difference to me.     Then I remembered a story.  According to a Chinese myth,  seventh daughters of the Jade Emperor in Heaven came down to take a bath in a river.  A farmer had hid one of their clothing and forced that naked girl to marry him before returning the clothes to her.  Thus, they were married and he got rich from the peacock cloak made by his wife presented to the king on earth that neither of them worked again.  So the Jade Emperor got angry and allowed them to meet only once a year on the Seventh Day of the Seventh Month without disrupting her duty.  Work is above sex.  Having sex just once, a person may have to serve a child for twenty-one years. In this universe, no spirit can possess one another’s body eternally to build up a wall against friendship with other beings or to stop serving children and animals.     Aging properly comes from the anger of a heart like Pauline.   At the age of seventy, she looked like ninety years old. I don’t want to be forever angry, possessive and jealous as she was.  Only having a caring spirit like my father’s would live forever young even in old age.  That’s how I see Pierre of his character.  A caring character and an adventurous spirit can never grow old.     In fact, just a day before, I went to a nursing home to visit an 82-year-old man. His two legs were amputated 10 months ago due to diabetes. Before the surgery in hospital, his rotten feet smelt terribly that he didn’t want to see a visitor or to live.  But today, with just one false right leg and no left leg at all, he could walk again with smile!  Showing me how strong he is.  He had stopped drinking and smoking: that makes him look much healthier than he was young.  He doesn’t want to go home to his wife to cause her trouble in serving him and enjoys his stay in the nursing home where he has his single room equipped with a sliding door in his private bathroom. The change of heart makes him a caring person with an adventurous spirit that I admire. I used to found him a hopeless, selfish drunkard as his wife, my cousin, called him - squandering all his money just in alcohol and cigarettes, turning her into a slave that she didn’t take him into her family wedding parties.  Now he is a clean and happy man with no bad smell at all.    Pauline’s spirit said to me, “You put your cat into sleep because it had cancer.  Is this murder or euthanasia like putting a sick person into sleep to reduce unnecessary suffering?”    Had Pauline truly murdered my mother or put a sick woman into sleep like that I had taken my cat to a veterinarian to put it into sleep? I felt that if my cat jumped off the railing into the sharp stones below, its head would be bleeding so dreadfully, I wouldn’t dare to touch its corpse any more.  It was better for me to bring the poor cat to the veterinarian to terminate it as told by the veterinarian seven months before while discovering that it had stomach cancer. Facing the cupboard days and nights instead of sleeping next to my pillow, it would no more eat.   Then it started jumping up and down the table repeatedly with a weak and limping leg.  On its last two days, it also rushed out into the yard, trying hard to kill itself.  So, the night before, I had prayed to God and asked who in Heaven would look after my cat better than I did on earth.  How could I let it go?  The answer was that a cat would no more be a cat in wait station but getting a chance to incarnate as a human being if I let it go.     Anybody or animal on earth is a spirit with a borrowed body through incarnation. Likewise, my cat’s spirit will not die but gain a new form in each grade of education.  I feel that there is a purpose for each person or creature to have his own form to facilitate a special training.  For example, with my crippled left hand, it makes me unable to work fast to compete in labor market to earn a living, that makes me concentrate more on being a mother and a tutor.  When this job is done, I’ll have another form with no crippled hand for other kind of training; likewise, my cat needs other kind of training in its second coming that it won't be in the form of a cat any further.    I questioned myself who loves me most on earth.  My answer is Mark.  Despite of his poor manners, he truly loves me whether I was mentally sick or not.  He has sacrificed the pleasure of sex to live without my permission of touching me. My indifference could not deter his love towards me just like my leaving Pierre could not stop my loving him.  I questioned God why can’t I love the man who loves me most on earth?  Through the years, Mark has changed a lot: he had first giving up smoking for my sake and he is giving up meat gradually for my sake.  He serves me like a housewife since his retirement.  Yes!  He is changing and acting like a woman to wear my daughter’s old jacket, running shoes and slippers! He has been trying hard to please me in these days by taking me for a holiday trip every year.  However, I simply don’t enjoy traveling with him.  I still dislike his manners or the way he speaks, acting like a woman.  My God!  Is he changing sex?    The conscience questioned: “If Pierre marries you now, how are you going to live – making love day and night?”    “No, I hope that we would go to a Third World country to look after poor children, educating them without governing by Canadian standard.”    Life doesn’t need a western standard education or housing but simple basic requirement and self-esteem.  I would like to cultivate my own food, living in a hut built by myself, being simple and content.  Oh God, how could I have married a man who didn’t even want my babies to arrive until they have grown up to be successful?  I had to struggle to bring my children to this world with lies and fights against Mark who didn’t want me to have children!  Yes, I lied about taking contraceptive pills which he forced me to take and fought against his will and decisions.  He didn’t even allow me to plant flowers in our front yard in fear of attracting insects.  He didn’t allow me to plant vegetables in my backyard regarding that as a shame of a wealthy class he thought he belonged to.  He knows nothing about beauty.  I don’t want any fight but understanding and encouragement.  I have got just the opposite from him!    “You haven’t talk about the true desire you have for Pierre. Fifteen minutes is an unrealistic time which you may regret.”     “Pierre has never kissed me or touched me.  I can only fancy the thrill of it through movies.  Yet, my heart tells me that I hate to be kissed or touched by Mark that it is impossible for me to know whether I would want it from Pierre or anyone until I have such experience.  Desire is one thing and fact is truly something else.  As a child, I enjoyed sitting on my father’s lap.  However, after growing up, one day after returning from France, my father pulled me to sit on his lap, I jumped up with unknown terror that it shocked me of my own behaviour. I told myself there was nothing wrong about it and I was rude but I couldn’t sit on his lap again and he had never made me sit on his lap again.  Nobody had ever kissed me but Mark, just once, and I didn’t allow him to do it again as I hated that.  So, the question of my desire for Pierre can’t be answered according to my fantasy watching television but after having an experience first."    Indeed, one good reason of my living with Mark is that I am treating him as a brother while he is treating me as a daughter without touching me for years.  We don't need sex. I believe now my fantasy of being with Pierre gives me happiness like lovely music. Sound can’t be materialized because it is just some notes. Listening to a song is a whole unit of happiness that can't be divided into small portions due to the sharing with a number of people. Therefore, happiness is forever a whole unit like fantasy that can be shared among all nations without touching the sun to be scorched.  Making love with Pierre will ruin the fantasy to face the reality of aging and death of a scorching sun. Jesus says that there is no marriage in Heaven and it is truly wise unless we have to be parents there as well.  To meet Pierre fifteen minutes and learning his well being is thus happiness without intruding into his life with inconvenience.

 #01
 

. . 5  -- FOCUS  ON  GOODWILL    Our fantasy may not bring us happiness until we see the ending. I am in the wait station on this earth, questioning myself what is right and what is wrong and what would I do in my next life because I am coming to the end of this exhausted life.  My shoulders are both a pain and a burden to me.    How do I focus on what I want and to reach that goal?  If Pierre acts like Mark does, would I love him although he may look much more handsome?  Certainly, there are many people much more handsome than Pierre but I am not interested in them.  My son is also handsome and kind, still I would not live with him although he had once asked me to move into his house.  The reason is very clear to myself: his energy is not of that I can match with and I find it impossible to stay in the same house with him to be with his friends.  I need my privacy and quiet surrounding although I love him very much.  Knowing that he is safe with his friends makes me happy even without seeing him.  His presence is unnecessary.  His marriage makes me even happier knowing that someone would be concerning about his health and having some home cooking would definitely give him better health than dining out every night.  So my love has never been possessive and my goal is to look for a harmonious living without causing other’s inconvenience.    Love is something in my spirit rather than in a concrete world.  My love towards Pierre is likewise.  It is not through seeing.  I remember walking by the river we used to sit down somewhere.  He closed his eyes smiling at his own vision.  I understood that he was using his mind more than his eyes to look at me.  He spoke more with his smile than his talking.  He thought of kissing me but he wouldn’t dare to advance me.  So he sipped from the cup I had been drinking, telling me that was an indirect kiss. Under the calm and distancing surface without touch, our minds had already been making love passionately.  After I had married Mark, Pierre wrote me that he had regretted of not raping me.  I could feel that the mind is real while the world is not real as Buddhism has taught.  We had already made love in our minds frequently.  However, letting Mark make love with me without my mind engaged into the act, he could hardly erected: getting exhausted and lost in a few minutes, he would go to sleep alone.     My friend was still a virgin after three years of marriage and her mother-in-law dismissed her because she didn’t have any children while her husband had five children with two mistresses who wouldn’t marry him.  So, the world is just a theatre under the eyes of audience but reality is in the minds of the actors and actresses invisible to outsiders.  In such case, God says heavens will vanish like smoke but righteousness shall last forever.  This means objects such as the world and heavens are not real because they can vanish like smoke. However, principles, thought and memory are reality like righteousness that can last eternally from reincarnation to reincarnation, generation to generation, and from earth to heaven or hell in the whole universe.  In another word, body connection like marriage is an illusion that lasts for some years; but a connected thought, a feeling or principle may last forever: therefore, it is real.    The first time I met Pierre, I forgot even my own date with another man.  I let him lead me away sightseeing. Over forty-seven years, it still vibrated the same in my heart.  The first day had never been forgotten.  My body was first excited and then melted away even without ever been kissed.  It makes me feel wonderful when seeing young people falling in love and getting married, knowing that they must have enjoyed the wonderful feeling like I had first met Pierre. I believe in falling in love at first sight that people shouldn’t wait for ten years to make up their mind for a proposal.    Pierre was then a union worker, a reporter and a political student at the same time. He told me his idea about politics and I immediately fell in love with him.  However, I felt that his idea and career should come first.  Being a foreigner, I would be a stumbling block in his political career and must go away.  I must have my own goal for what I was born for while he had his.  Life is to focus for the future.  I must keep myself busily occupied. Whenever I go to bed, even after forty-seven years, the thought of him would vibrate from my head to toes like shivering. Who can stand such vibration of desire forever and keep it under control? Of course I understand that had happened to Pauline too when being with a handsome brother-in-law under the same roof.  She couldn’t have any control for long.    Pauline’s spirit challenged whether I have had fear of the instinct of desire.  Is desire evil against God’s Commandments?     No, I have no fear but love for my desire. The Old Testament had allowed people to have many wives. Sex is to produce seeds and work is to produce fruit, cultivating seeds into maturity for harvest.  The natural instinct brings forth love and babies with vibration – enthusiasm.  I want to have children: not just to care for orphans but all the animals on earth and I want their prosperity.  Yet, above all, my desire is greatly influenced by God’s will of harmony in paradise. We have to focus our goal on paradise and harmony without being distressed by desire leading to jealousy or murder, the dangerous obstacles to paradise.  We must drive through the obstacles on routes cautiously without losing our focus of our paradise ahead.  The desire of bringing forth children is blessed on the route to paradise while the desire of killing is to fall over the bridge into ditches.  Suddenly, I feel the reason of aging in this world is not to let us dominate over the younger generations forever, but to let relay go on in mutual respect with reincarnation. Reincarnation will be stopped when a soul giving up domination, disregarding seniority and intelligence.    There is no death in universe but transposition in wait stations. Helping the dying one to reduce pain in speeding up the incarnation is not killing when being asked.  Euthanasia is not considered as killing at all.  Even executing criminals were allowed in the Old Testament unless they had reached one of the six sanctuaries set up for murderers without ever leaving there.  Since there is reincarnation, exiting from this world will also be the entry or incarnation to another world.    Love is to help and encourage the others to reach their goals instead of locking them visibly or invisibly into mental hospital. Where is justice if my father had to tie up in marriage with Pauline simply because as a sister-in-law, she claimed herself the most suitable one to be his wife and the guardian of his children?  Which person would like to tie up with a spouse that is forever in madness?  Dad called Pauline the butcher. How would God judge the unfaithful spouse of a criminal or madman? Would God tie a victim with a criminal forever as a couple? There can only be sincere love without marriage in Heaven.  God binds a father to be responsible for the living of small children only. Adults should leave home to be independent without living on parents’ expenses for life or waiting for inheritance.    Before my marriage, Pauline had shown Mark my diary and Pierre’s letters to me.  So Mark has always known my feeling for Pierre which I didn’t deny.  One day about twenty years ago, Mark dragged me to London, then phoned Pierre up in Paris to have us invited to stay two nights at Pierre’s house, to be driven around the country side for sightseeing.  When we left, Pierre told his wife to hug me goodbye.  He has always acted as a gentleman, being very polite without touching me.     His wife said jealously to me, “I have always wanted to meet you.  Pierre had told me that you were a good cook but slim.  I think you have gained at least a few pounds.”    Facing Mark, Pierre said behind his wife, “I want to be the father of your daughter.”    Mark replied, “Unfortunately, she is already nineteen, too old to be adopted.  Otherwise, I would let you raise her up.  It costs a lot of money.”    Mark knows that I have never loved him and he said to me, “I regret that Pierre had studied politics.  Otherwise, you would have married him and I don’t have to carry this burden.”    O!  Why wouldn’t he let me, the burden, go away?  Isn’t that stupid?  Setting me free, encouraging me in my work or career, he will have no longer any burden.  I can be independent in a Third World country and he can find someone who truly loves him for what he is.  It is never too late for him to seek happiness and the joy of being loved.  However, obviously, he cannot love his own type of people.  They would fight for domination at home every day till death.  A house cannot have two masters but two servants, serving one another: the conscience alone and not the ego should be the master.     Removing first the possessive mind and jealous heart, everybody is then free to express his talents in serving children on earth to create a new paradise.  Success is teamwork and not an individual achievement.  While a person is sleeping, the conscience is already sorting knowledge into his memory and educating him in dreams.  How can anyone deny the work of God and His angels?    When my children were small, in my spare time, I thought of writing a picture book for small children about God, as it was my goal at my age of ten.  Like a little child clinging to God’s neck with my thought in fantasy, I asked curiously how big is God. The conscience told me to put a bowl upside down on a table just in front of an ant and questioned me: “Do you think that the ant can see your face?”    “No,”     “You can never see my face but part of me when I come close to you.  Only when I am as far away as the sun, you may see my figure but you still can’t see my face as you can’t see the face of a moon from a distance.  Nobody can ever see my face as I said so to Moses.”    “Jesus says that you’re in him and with him.”    “So am I in everybody and in you and with you.”    “That’s no fun if you can’t be a man to be born on earth.”    “It will be a lie if I pretend to be of human size, deceiving you in dress up.”     I argued, “Am I not also dressed up in human flesh since  I wouldn’t be maintaining this human shape forever.”    “Certainly, you’re forever changing that the you of tomorrow will no more be of the present shape.  However, the shape of your flesh represents your present character and abilities.  So is my flesh representing my character and abilities, embracing you all and living in you all.  The more you love, the more you will embrace and the more you will live in the minds of the loved ones.  The more you fear, the more you shrink and distance yourself from me or others.  Then I can’t embrace you.     “Since I can’t just love one person ignoring the rest, my size becomes all I love with the sun being my crown and the earth my stool as described in the Old Testament.  Stretching out, I can have all sorts of creatures standing on my arms to share my love and joy. Likewise, you can love all those you want to love, making them happy to know about that, from a tiny bird to a big elephant.  Your spiritual body is as big as you love, in size spreading out as your loved ones in different planets and wait stations.  Your image and voice will forever reaching them.  None will be forgotten.  None can be killed by electrical shock treatments.”    I laughed in my heart saying, “But I feel hanging on your neck that you are of human size.”    “Don’t you think that I am also of your pillow shape for you to hold on?  Am I of your pillow size or human size or the size of the universe?”    “In my dream, you were a giant putting me on your shoulder from the raging sea on to the land.”    “That’s right, I am whatever you need me in crisis, lifting you up above the ocean water from a sunken ship.  How would I leave you alone to face your crisis?  Are you not always my little girl in tears clinging so tight onto your pillow?”    When my father had a mistress, Pauline took us all to leave Hong Kong to Macao.  On our way, our ship was sunk and I lost a sister.  So, who could protect my father from being blackmailed by Pauline in taking away his entire household? The devil’s possessive love has no caring but control.  I believe only less egoism and more moral education at school can help building up a paradise.

#01
 

. 6  –  CHOOSING  A  RETIREMENT  HOME      Carmela told me that she would like to teach refugee claimants simple English.  She had volunteered her services to three communities but people simply ignored her.  She felt that even a primary school child could teach refugees simple English.  Why couldn’t she do it without charging money?     Her son Charles laughed and said,  "Everybody needs to earn a living even while working in charitable organizations.  Roughly speaking, sixty per cent of the charity funding goes to administration expenses. Administrators can’t just trust anybody but qualified teachers to teach English so that they can apply for government funding. That’s how bureaucracy runs. So go and get your piece of diploma to learn to work with bureaucracy before talking about helping others."     Certainly, Carmela recalls how bureaucracy runs. Once in a preschool, a child showed her how to write the letter E but had it written the wrong side. As a volunteer helper there, she corrected the child. The supervisor immediately reproved her for teaching or correcting a child what to do, saying that would limit the development of a child’s creativity.     Anyway, there are so many licensed teachers unemployed, why should Carmela insist on taking away somebody’s job? She has a friend working in a free clinic in a Mexican village. The short term volunteer doctors from Canada there do not speak Spanish and need interpreters while local people also like to learn English for getting into tourist industry.  Therefore, Carmela planned to go there to be an interpreter and give out free English lessons. She asked Charles talking her husband into letting her go for a year there to improve her Spanish.  Carmela intended to use her own savings to lease a small house with a yard to cultivate her own vegetable garden.  She will cook and provide free lunches for poor children in the neighborhood whenever they come to learn English, enjoying the companionship of children without being their mother or full-time teacher; I would like to go with her.     Married women have little freedom. For example, Carmela’s husband, Bert, blamed his mother for walking by herself that she fell down.  Thus, he forbids his mother to stand up while nobody is helping her to walk, but he would not walk by his mother’s side even ten minutes a day while visiting her.   He also wants to put his mother in long-term care home although she is not spending his money to keep a suite and a housekeeper. Yes, he is condemning his mother for walking and forbidding his wife from doing anything.     What does inactivity means?  After moving into a senior apartment suite and having two meals very well provided, Mr Kelsch ate two portions of steak so that he gained a lot of weight and had a few strokes in one year.  Certainly, his strokes came from food high in cholesterol and lack of exercise. He has ended up staying in a long-term care unit, unable to get up by himself.     It is not really the visits of friends and relatives that can keep Mr Kelsch alive.  He often talked about his dog, which had died before his adult children put his house on sale. The dog used to keep him walking three times a day. His heart wants to serve and to be needed by his dog. Without minimal work, he has no more self-esteem or the will to live.  After staying a year in the long-term care unit, he loses his voice and can hardly utter a few words. He is just lying there to wait for his death.    In a similar case in a Seattle nursing home, there lives Mrs Jung.  Before that, she had been living in a million-dollar mansion with her son and daughter-in-law some fifteen years. She used to babysit her great-grandchildren whenever the granddaughter came home for a visit. There were just three persons in that big house and she enjoyed cleaning the house.  She could also cook for herself.  After supper, she wisely retired into her own room in the basement without bothering the working couple when they were home in the evening.  Mrs Jung looked unusually young and healthy that she could stand cold and walk fast in her eighties, travelling alone twice a year to visit her relatives in California.  About a year before, Mrs Jung got a stroke and was admitted into hospital. She couldn’t walk for half of a year and was put later into a nursing home.  At the age of ninety, she could walk quite well again; but her beloved son will never take her back into his house. He finds sharing a home quite difficult disregarding the size of the house big or small.  People just want privacy.  Thus, Mrs Jung is left permanently in a nursing home paid by the government.     Mrs Jung’s married daughter is a retired book-keeper who would like to take her mother home if her brother would employ a part-time help to look after their mother. Her brother refused to do so although his mother has put her savings of one hundred thousand dollars under his name.  Since he is a devoted Protestant who has donated lots of time and money to the church, his sister dares not judge or offense his decision, right or wrong. However, she feels uneasy in leaving her mother at the nursing home of an-hour-drive from her house. This makes it impossible for her to bring her mother the home cooked meal daily while the food in the nursing home is more like tasteless soup and cookies.    Mrs Jung felt being abandoned at her old age.  In spite of her son’s wealth, he saves three hundred dollars a month by making her share a room in the nursing home with another person whom she would hardly chat with. She often walks into the sitting room to avoid facing her roommate or talking about her past that is forever lost. She must ignore it for coping with her present. If there are other people in the sitting room, she walks out to sit by the gate alone to avoid a contact.   A preacher comes to the nursing home once a week. Despie being an atheist, Mrs Jung had faithfully attended the meeting in order to comprehend why she didn’t simply die in her last stroke but survived to be forsaken by her Christian son.  Why must she be observed 24 hours a day in a nursing home while she prefers to be left alone to die naturally without an extended life.     Finally, Mrs Jung starts joining the handicraft workshop for pastime, learning to be spiritually independent.  After all, in heaven, her children can’t visit her at all.  She must get used to the idea of living without them.     Unknown to Mrs Jung, her son had heart surgeries not just once but twice. Neither her son nor daughter can drive any more. A sick daughter cannot look after a sick mother. Quite often, a family member as caregiver dies a sudden death out of stress in burying alive at home, offering a daily 24-hour companionship or service to old relative or sick patient.    Perhaps, the best thing a visitor can do for a senior citizen is to let him speak onto a tape recorder, so that the visitor can write down and read back whatever the patient has said for his self-analysis to God who may listen.   It is the mutual understanding between God and men, which gives people comfort and goals to work for without the need of the attention of grown children.  Carmela suggests that I should start writing my memoir.                                 MEMOIR  1.  My parents, grandparents and their birthplaces 2.  How did they live?  What were their wishes and differences?  3.  How did I grow up?  4.  The happiest day of my life  5.  How did my dream come true? 6.  Should I allow my grown children make their own decisions?  7.  What kind of an adult is he who can't make his own decisions? 8.   How do I feel about sicknesses?  9.   How do I conquer or fail to conquer them? 10. My deepest regret in life 11. What would I do if I were given a second chance? 12. My idea of grace and beauty 13. How do I achieve eternal youth? 14. My hopes 15. What do wealth and poverty mean to me? 16. My expectation of the government 17. How would I like to be judged?  18. Do I prefer arrogant or humble people? 19. Am I acting like my role-model?  20. My words to the saints and God  21. The most important lesson of my life     Well, the most important lesson of my life is to be independent without depending on children’s mercy in taking me into their home.  There is no more life if there is no minimal work to serve an animal or even to cook for myself.  Besides, nobody can depend on employment for self-esteem especially in old age: I need gardening work to keep me busy without turning into vegetation like Mr Kelsch. Organ transplant would be on other's expenses and pain besides prolonging my own suffering that I definitely don’t want. The best way to leave this world is in a peaceful sleep with nobody trying to save my heart attack. As my spirit won’t like to return to my skeleton, I want my body to be burnt into ashes to be thrown into sea for setting myself forever free from it.

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7  -- THE  RAINBOW CONNECTION  IN CHAKRAS      My shoulder muscles are so tight that I am learning from a book to do touch therapy myself, helping the energy flow in my body.  It is said that the body has seven chakras.   Brow chakra is the domain of psychic power.  I didn’t want to learn this.  However, I couldn’t sleep at night.  Putting the book of Energy Medicine away could not stop the opening of my brow chakra, the third eye, to recall the past. Twenty years ago, my father came to visit me. We both loved stereo photography.  After I lost my stereo camera, Dad bought me a Nikon camera and gave me a car and told me to take stereo pictures for him. I used my Nikon to take scenery 3-D pictures, with the second shot taken a foot sideways from the first shot.  Consequently, I got better stereo pictures then a stereo camera could do. I also designed a stereo viewer for Dad and started drawing stereo pictures.    One day, I had an urge to draw the 3-D Solar system in cone shape spinning like a hurricane. The cone is slanting on one side.  My intuition told me that for scientific reason, the sun should be at the tip of the cone and the other planets were in different levels of the cone so that the orbits of Pluto and Neptune will never cross as shown in all textbooks. In order to travel to another planet, the shortest cut is to travel head on towards the orbit where the planet is coming closest to the Earth without running after that planet.  However, I found myself ridiculous in drawing the solar system while I was interested in neither astrology nor astronomy.  I ignored the intuition afterwards because it had happened the night just before the American rocket landed on the moon.  How could I prove my intuition being more correct than others’ proven success?     Probably, when Isaiah was told to predict that a virgin shall give birth, he might find it ridiculous like I had felt about drawing the 3-D solar system.  But nowadays, a virgin can be a surrogate mother as Isaiah had predicted.     So, the brow chakra integrates knowledge and the memory of intuitions and weird dreams, turning them into psychic power, or recording down the words of God that even the writers themselves may not understand at all.  The words are for the future generations to know that God was, and God is, and God will be forever and ever the Almighty Scientist, Our Creator.  Whatever a scientist can do today, He had predicted it 2,700 years ago.    Then the author talks about crown chakra could be called out of the body to enter another person’s body overseas to witness a tragedy. Immediately, I felt that the seventh chakra energy is light that can travel through space and in the speed of light.  The computer can see it in and out of a body as color energy but human eyes should be able to see it as well by wearing prism glasses as God’s will. So, 2Kings 2:11 states that Elisha had seen ‘Elijah taken onto a chariot of horses of fire; carried up by a whirlwind into heaven’ without mentioning the word of death. A soul is in light form capturing memory, being visible and invisible to some people.  Many people have regularly seen ghosts in some old mansions in England and in hospitals. Then many claimed to have seen aliens or light-beings and their space crafts.  This crown chakra must be the place where the soul is created in the form of energy between the visible and the invisible color spectrum to be released from the body in dream or in coma and in death.    To my understanding, my root chakra is like genes, revealing the characters and life of my parents.  The womb chakra reveals the talents of previous life as natural instinct.  The solar plexus reveals the ego and the free will of a person that plans the action. The heart chakra reveals personal ambition controlled by conscience to get sensation of love and the natural fear and respect of God’s Commandments.  The throat chakra reveals the expression of individuality with speech and writing.  Ah!  That is why my energy is blocked with shoulder muscles so tight!  I have refused to argue, to talk or to write about the knowledge I’ve known for sixty years!  To block the flow of energy there with silence has caused so much stress in me!    When a selfish person dissociates himself with his parents and God, having his soul cutting off from his heart and root chakra-energies, his organs would become sick. Only his change of attitude in lowering his own ego and selfishness that he can reconnect himself with God and ancestors, carrying the unbroken seven chakra-energies and memory as one spiritual unit to Heaven.  Without God and conscience, people will be running in ignorance, senseless fear of losing oneself in darkness as my many dreams in different wait stations of different tunnels.    As a unit coming from a cell development to receive love and knowledge from parents, family, and society, my being is a product of teamwork of all those who lived before me and I must be grateful to all of them.  I must remember my ignorance and all my faults, which have been forgiven that I must do likewise upon others. When I recall my parents, they will come to life in visible light form.  When they recall their parents, my grandparents will come to life, and so forth backward.  The past generations will all come into light spiritually to witness the fruit of their teamwork that they can harvest today and in the future. So, the greatest challenge in life is after the soul being released from the body, having some descendants to recall oneself to witness their success upon the day of God bestowing human beings a paradise on earth.

. 8  -- COMPASSION    One day, a woman whom I had never known or seen in my life phoned from Hong Kong calling me her sister while she didn't even know my name.  It must be a mistake.  Yet, she kept on talking and introducing herself as Maggie, my half-brother's common-law wife of fifteen years.  She suddenly discovered that my half-brother, Leo, was unfaithful to her after her trip to New York visiting her son for several months. She demanded a financial settlement with Leo in Hong Kong.    I assured Maggie that I hadn't seen Leo even once a year and I had no control of his life.  If anyone could talk to him about his private life, it should be his own sister in Hong Kong and not me. I knew little about Leo that I didn’t even know Maggie’s existence and had never been to their house.  If she wanted any financial settlement, she should go to a lawyer or family court instead of phoning me in Canada.  What can I do for her from such a long distance while the people in Hong Kong can't do it?    Maggie claimed that no lawyer or government official in Hong Kong would help her.  Neither Mabel nor Sheila would help her.  I am the only one that Leo had talked great about in front of her and she believed that my advice to him would be listened.  So I must phone Leo and talk to him!    My goodness! Maggie talked for an hour repeatedly calling Leo an animal, a gay man whom she couldn't live with any more.  Should I believe her words? Leo had once told me that he had cancelled his wedding with a woman introduced by his mother because that woman had insulted him for marrying her for her wealth! This woman must be Maggie.  Yet, how could I make Maggie hang up her phone?  Finally, I promised to write Leo a letter because it would be hard for me to talk such a subject on line without making mistakes.  Maggie agreed, but I must fax the letter to her. Thus, I sat down to write Leo, who is a Taoist believing also in righteousness leading to the condition of future reincarnation. Dear Leo and Maggie, The hardest thing in life is to admit loving someone else instead of a person’s lover or spouse.  To smooth the loved one’s anger and disappointment, people would hide the truth until it is being discovered.  Usually, the unfaithful one would take then the chance to admit it and blame the fault on the other side. Yet, before God or our saints, we should speak the truth without putting the blame on anyone.  A fact is a fact.  A flower may be just a female or male or of both sexes. It happens likewise to human beings.  Buddha was once a man and had many reincarnations.  One of his reincarnations, he was said to be a woman, Kwan-Yim, whom people revered as the Mother Goddess.  It is his will  to keep on reincarnating and preaching humanity till everybody has become good.  So a person can be a man in one life and a woman in another life having different spouses through former lives.  However, mixed sexual behaviour in one life would cause AIDS.  It is better to stick to one partner than to mix them up.  When it is time to say goodbye to the former lover, people should be fair to consider the ex-lover’s living with generosity.  Nobody can be so cold blooded to throw even a servant or a retired employee out of the door without some compensation. Therefore, I hope you two will come to a fair financial settlement without hurting one another’s feelings. Love is not something that can be brought with money.  None of you should use money to buy new love.  Each person should find true love without using wealth as temptation or you may fall into unhappy ending in future -- to be cheated by your new lover. I believe a divorced couple would still have some feeling for one another and can be friends like our Dad with your mother.  No love can be ended abruptly with anger and hatred in heart although sometimes, a couple wants freedom and separation.  Even enemies of war like Americans and the Japanese can become friends again after the Second World War.  So I do hope you two can remain friends forever, giving one another a helping hand whenever it is needed.  With righteous understanding and settlement, you will definitely blessed with peace, leading to eternal happiness. Yours sincerely, Laura    A person is forever changing in attitude due to the accumulation of knowledge and understanding in time; so is society progressing through centuries that there is no such thing as a perfect society instantly existed on demand. We must tolerate the society as a child in progress.  Long ago, I had already felt that from male to bisexual or female through reincarnations make people gain personal experience to understand their former opponents. Besides, God gives each person a different talent to cooperate in society as He gives different parts of the world different weather and geographic features, plants and cultures. Sticking just to one culture without accepting other cultures as beautiful as one's own, a stubborn person would remain ignorant as a frog in a well seeing just part of the sky as its whole world. We must understand that the ocean is beautiful to fish as land for animals and we can’t bring a fish to live on land as a mammal, saying that the land is good for fish as for mammals.  A culture can only be good for those who are born in it unless a fish wants to live on land and dies for it like Little Mermaid falling in love of a prince, wanting to have legs instead of a tail fin.    Maggie phoned me again the following day, telling me that she had handed my letter to Leo and he had said nothing.  However, she found my letter wonderful and wanted a quick financial settlement so that she could return to New York to live with her son from her previous husband.    What did she mean a quick settlement?  Leo had ignored my letter and she didn’t even name a sum.  It takes at least a few months to sell a house and to divide any property.  She has to discuss this in details with Leo.  I asked her to be patient.  The most important thing is her health.  If Leo is a gay man, has he or she got AIDS?  This should be the first thing she should check.  Leo has just been laid off and may not have cash in hand to pay her an amount she wanted.     Then, Maggie came into sense that she didn't want any separation. However, she told me that Leo had falsely accused her for being cruel in withholding sex from him that she must have been seeing other man and wishing her to have AIDS.  She wanted Leo to apologize for hurting her feelings with such unkind words.  She wouldn't make love with him simply because of having fear in catching AIDS from him.  But she still loved him.    I invited Maggie to spend a holiday in Vancouver, ignoring what a man would enjoy saying to hurt a woman’s feeling.  This made her happy and laughed, telling me that people do like her a lot.  She was no longer angry with Leo.  His affair is his own shame and not hers, so said her friends.  It is he who needs help and she would like to take him to New York to stay with her son. She wouldn't dare to let her son or siblings know about Leo’s secret in fear of affecting their respect to him that they would demand her to forsake him.    Probably, whether Leo loves Maggie or not, she still wants to have his family members as her family just as my late father's former mistresses all wanted my understanding of their love towards my father and needed my friendship and acceptance.  My divorced sister still visits the graves of her former parents-in-law every year. Speaking frankly, in Southern Chinese villages, fifty per cent women of my generation got married simply for avoiding to be called old maids, desiring to have children to be occupied. They might have spent more time with parents-in-law than with their husbands who had gone alone overseas or to other provinces. People are simply afraid of loneliness.  However, they can hardly communicate with their children that they seek friendship of the same age with similar experience and understanding.  Maggie had been phoning every member of Leo's family to seek recognition of being his common-law-wife, wanting to be treated as family member that she kept on calling me Sister. A sense of belonging to a family or society is what a human being needs!    To my surprise, Maggie did come to visit me in Vancouver after a fortnight!  She had left Leo without getting a penny and didn’t bother about that any more.  All she had wanted was to talk about her feelings.  She told me that if she didn’t love Leo, she would keep her tongue quiet and go away; but she was concerned about his health that someone should talk him into sense.     Truly, if there is no love and relationship, who cares even though knowing that hundred of people dying of AIDS every day?  Anger often comes from love and concern.  To suppress personal feelings of love or anger may lead to depression.  Having a chance in expressing oneself is some sort of healing.  In fact, neither Maggie nor I truly believe that Leo would enjoy being gay. It could just be a moment of curiosity.    Leo told me that he wanted to have a son.  But Maggie admitted that she had broken up with Leo twice and she didn't want to have children with him and had an abortion because Leo, although being rich, made her pay for the food expenses while he paid for the mortgage. If a man wants to be a father, he should truly be generous to his wife even before childbirth without causing any doubtful start of his responsibility.  If love based on sexual pleasure and economical advantage instead of caring on both sides, how can it last?  How can lust develop into caring in years after charm and sexual activity diminished or lost?    Among all my relatives and friends, twenty-two percent are singles, forty-five percent are divorced and fifty percent among the divorcees are remarried.  Many couples came to complain against one another during their once a year visit.  It seemed to me that those who did the most complain hardly get separated because they felt at ease of one another after the complaint.  Apparently, if something has truly gone seriously wrong, a listener may suggest some advice in fixing it that a problem can be solved instead of hanging there forever.  When it is a minor affair, listeners may just laugh humorously at the stupidity that the problem can be solved immediately.  Hiding a life long family secret will leave a person in constant fear of the mistake being known.     Couples should understand that their interests will always be different no matter how much they love one another and it is no good to stay days and nights, years after years together disregarding personal interest.  For love’s sake, people can tolerate poverty and hard work but not a spouse’s mean spirit with an unnecessary wicked tongue.  Everybody knows that people are all selfish in some degrees and we should ignore others’ misery since we should not covet others’ property.  Yet, any self-destructive manner such as misusing alcohol, drugs and cigarettes would ruin the family environment and causing harm to the health of family members.  In serious case, even social workers may come and take children away for protection.  Therefore, when a spouse ignores his own health and the physical and mental health of his family members, he should visit a family counsellor to learn about his own goal in life.

 #01

9  -- BLESSINGS      In November 2001, I went to visit my grandfather's grave in Philippines for the first time in my life.  I had to search for my long lost cousins there to find out where the grave is.  The eldest son of my grandfather was adopted.  This uncle had a grandson living in a mansion of seven thousand square feet.  He took me to visit my grandfather's grave, which was built like a small house with a locked gate with three tombs inside.  In the middle was my grandfather's tomb, on the right was my eldest uncle's and on the left was my third uncle's. Yet, something had gone terribly wrong there. Behind the three tombs was a wall with four pictures. There were two holes in the middle to indicate that my grandparents' pictures had been removed. The nameless picture of my grandfather was replaced above my third uncle’s on the left, while my grandmother's nameless picture was put below the bottom right side of my eldest uncle’s picture. For memorial, how could a nameless picture without tomb be put there to indicate who she was?     The reason of having Grandma’s picture taken down was probably due to her tomb being used by Cousin Martin to bury my eldest uncle after my grandmother was buried in Hong Kong.  Still, I felt it was wrong to put a mother's picture under a deceased son's picture to misinform descendants that she could be his nameless daughter or wife.  Her picture should be put high above her children's next to her husband in the middle of the wall behind my grandfather's grave with her name and title written.    The awkward arrangement of the pictures of my grandparents was the result of a family feud between the children of my eldest uncle and my third uncle that they have not been associated with one another for decades.     Cousin Martin passed away long ago, so had his eldest son, Jack, cleaning a gun at home, killing himself - accidentally?  Cousin Martin's wife, Gigi, having a heart problem and wearing a pacer, found Grandpa's tomb site having poor feng-shui.  She took me to visit her husband's tomb site in a spacious house with marble floor and kitchenette. There is a tomb space for herself next to her husband.  For her sons' tombs, Gigi knew well that it shouldn't be parallel to hers and her husband's tomb.  She placed Jack’s tomb at the opposite side of the room ninety degrees to her own reserved space, showing the rank of parents.    What does feng-shui mean?  It means a blessed harmonious environment.  It has scientific reason such as arranging furniture not to intrude into the runway to hit the legs.  To avoid a kitchen fire, an oven should not be put under a window where the wind blows in. A mirror may reflect an obstacle and remove accidents.  A bed should have the headboard leaning against north in alignment with the flow of the Earth’s magnetic field to facilitate the body’s natural energy flow, helping a person to breathe in sleep.  A healthy tree in the backyard is said to influence the limbs of a resident not just with fresh air. The invisible electrons of a tree’s atoms are moving constantly around the tree. Putting the palms near a tree without touching it can also draw the tree's energy and its smell to oneself with breathing.  So Feng-shui is to create pleasant environment, facilitate movement and good health based on common sense.     Furthermore, housing and food need the harmonious arrangement of both the positive and negative energies: yin and yang. A house with just yin or yang will not produce children or descendants.  Yin is concave in shape like a waning moon or being on the negative side of a magnet or food in alkaline or bitter taste; yang is a protruding shape or being on the positive side of the magnet or food in acidic or spicy taste.  All these must be balanced to yield a healthy body like a healthy tree needs the correct amount of sunshine, water and the right kind of soil and minerals to grow.     The cycle of prosperity in feng-shui or energy environment is in spiral form changing gradually upwards positively for some twenty to twenty-seven years; reversing then downwards negatively while also going forwards and upwards to another cycle: influenced by the orbits of the earth, sun, planets and stars. In addition, constant shift of the continental plates causes a well to dry up or a geyser disappears after certain years. Therefore, the prosperity of a sixty-year cycle is no more than a period of some twenty to twenty-seven years that a person must move thrice in sixty years to find the best feng-shui to match with the time, date, month and year of his own birth.     It is said that a person's prosperous burial site is unable to benefit his three children equally due to their different timing of birth.  Such individual feng-shui is very difficult to calculate; knowing just half of the truth will be more harmful than not knowing it at all since greed is most dangerous to us all that the secret of fortune calculation in feng-shui was not taught by masters to their descendants or apprentices.    In fact, feng-shui (called wind & water in Chinese) started in ancient days with building fortresses in advantageous positions and beneficial military arrangement at strategic points, calculating the season and timing of the sun position and wind direction for invasion or defence.  Therefore, luck changes frequently like wind and water in time fighting a fire. The true formula of feng-shui is hidden partially in various books that only those who are born to receive it can find it and understand it without being sold or passed into evil hands accidentally.    According to Chinese culture, life comes first having five elements at home: mineral for utensils, wood for building, water for drinking, fire for cooking and heating, soil in yard for cultivation. Then it is followed by fate (prescribed courses of education or adventures) determined by the past life, leaving feng-shui less important.  Harvest certainly depends on good work and behaviour or management to gain blessings and grace while environment good or bad can be created. Anyway, the two holes on the wall of my grandpa's tomb were definitely hurting the eyes with poor feng-shui, showing a fight within family self-created.    I recalled that Grandma came from the Philippines to live with my father in Hong Kong after Grandpa had passed away.  My third uncle did import/export for a living with little success. He died a poor man while his sister, helping in Grandpa’s shop, had taken over it and prospered tremendously. My eldest uncle had controlled of my grandfather's factory and prospered too. My third uncle couldn't even afford to pay the Filipino government a fee for his family members' citizenship to be allowed to work in Philippines.  The wealthy uncle and aunt would neither hire my third uncle’s children to work nor give them any financial help.  Unfortunately, wealth can neither bring forth luck nor grace to my Fourth Aunt.  One day, she and her daughter were murdered by their chauffeur, who robbed their house.     My father had supported his nieces and nephews in their difficulties, entertaining them whenever they had visited Hong Kong. Being a mechanical engineer, he built machines for unskilled workers and trained them to be independent by being their own bosses to produce goods for sale on streets.  He also helped illiterate people filling in application forms to apply for work.  It is kindness and generosity that put people together as one family while greediness, slavery, and jealousy would separate them. Therefore, the best feng-shui in gaining ancestral blessing is not the geographical feature and grandeur of a burial site or a special way in arranging the positions of the tombs but the respect of people's individuality with kindness to all creatures on earth.

 

10 --  LOVE & SPIRITUAL COMMUNICATION      After the trip to Philippines, I got a dream waking up seeing the beds of my two sons being occupied by two strangers sleeping in my room.  In horror, I screamed and said, “Get out of my room!”  But then a parade of people walked out of my room continuously that I was so shocked and ran out into street.  There I saw somebody reading a newspaper.  I knew something had gone terribly wrong in that unknown environment and rushed to ask the young lady, “What year is this?”    She answered, “Zero five.”     “What do you mean by Zero five?  Is it 2005 or 3005?”    “Zero Five is zero five as printed on the newspaper here.”    My heart knew that the year was 3005. How could I find my sons again?   I wouldn’t even know how their faces look like. With worry, I woke up.     Whenever I got a dream, it seemed that the first thing in my mind was looking for my sons while I hardly phoned them once a year.  I would only send them e-mails so that I won’t be a nuisance to them or speak the wrong words.  I hear mothers criticizing their children from head to toes and it certainly damages their relationship.  I try to avoid such situation.    Then the conscience said, “You would recognize your children whenever they recall you and you recall them.  It is not the specific image of a baby face but love that connects people.”     A few days later, Samuel phoned and told me that he was engaged and would be getting married in a few months.  I realized that in my dream, the people who paraded out of my bedroom would be my descendants.    Without love, there will be no connection, no discussion and no need to communicate at all; there are just unpleasant orders and complaints which people avoid receiving.  I remembered that while Dad was dying in hospital, Mark didn't even allow me to return home immediately but just a month later for the funeral.     Definitely, I can communicate with my mother-in-law much better than with Mark.  At least, she and I know the feeling of one another and use the same words and principles. The two of us don’t judge women marrying for duties, creating a sympathetic family of caring for all members and strangers.  Yet some people have only desire for power, fame, property and sex that make them forget all about parents, spouse and children.  The temporary desire of sex with one person is what people may call true love and the right chemistry. However, I think without compassion or feelings, people are simply living like the floating leaves on a river, easily to be forgotten in time.    Ordinary men can't have much power at work or in society.  Therefore, the love of power is to suppress spouses and children at home with financial control to count pennies. Yet control only brings forth resistance and the loss of influence. A fatherly love will not be appreciated by adult children or spouses who prefer freedom.  Living together, family members get more and more irritated of the repeated disagreement of trivial matters.  However, in separation, members will appreciate more and more the kindness they have missed at home.  Thus, love truly comes from the memory of what people have missed.  That’s why God stays away until we pray for His coming.  In dreams, He is absent because I couldn’t pray.  But in daytime, He is forever present in my need of advice.  We dance lightly in rhythm with the wind among the flowers, the trees, and the animals I have loved, kissing them with my mind and my heart.    I find a person may like or love a thousand things and hundreds of people but can't serve or possess them all. So, we can’t possess more than we can serve. For example, we may love the grandeur of a palace but we can hardly clean up a 3-bedroom house to make it comfortable.  So we should be content to live in a clean house for our comfort and visit a palace to admire the art on holiday.    Truly, an oriental woman needs mating for having a family of her own disregarding whether a lover or husband may forsake her in the future.  She takes hold of the present to win the respect of her family and husband even if he is not interested in having sex with her. If she offers him personal freedom, the more he would never forsake her or their children.     Only western people would consider a marriage with life long love instead of respect. It often ends up with intolerance and divorce, putting all the former love and happiness away. However, oriental people simply accumulated the love first from the day of birth to parents, then extended it to siblings, half-brothers and sisters, neighbours and classmates before adding a love to a spouse to reach adulthood, having children and grandchildren in life.    Friendship should be built up from the family of birth to all nations, connecting even to God and ancestors in universe.  I recalled my maternal grandmother had given her maid as my grandfather’s second concubine because her maid grew up with her and served her all her life.  Likewise in the Bible, Leah and Rachel had given their maids to Jacob as concubines too. Love should be able to accumulate with understanding instead of reducing into jealousy, anger and hatred, homeless and loneliness.    People talk about unconditional love.  I wonder whether it is a one-way traffic.  Probably, it means an indulgence in lust, being convenient to ignore righteousness without reciprocal caring, running away from duty to destroy life in cold blood and falling into disgrace eternally.    Unconditional caring means providing protection, education, understanding, work, encouragement and choices in decision-making to enable a person to stand on his own. To me, love is enjoying the same principle in life and harmony of the universe without drawing loved one’s attraction to oneself with evil manipulations, trapping, hunting or false accusations against others.  Love should be an everlasting communication between the souls with mutual respect that jealousy and ranking won't exist.    Furthermore, westerners talk graciously about forgiveness of sins and oriental people talk, on the contrary, about judgment and righteousness in life after death. I can never distinguish which principle is better but loving them both, feeling that I must judge myself so that I don't fall into sins but I must also forgive others of their ignorance because not all the people are born equally intelligent.  Some people may be highly intelligent but some may have been brought up in wilderness or in hunger and violence without education at all.     As long as a dog and a cat without interfering with one another's freedom, there will be peace in sharing a home with their master. The cooperation of two different species and talents are much needed. I have common sense while my husband is tough and hardworking even after his retirement day.  Thus, we can bring up healthy and intelligent children together. Without him, I can never do it alone. The achievement is an unexpected surprise that has pleased us both that we can ignore all our differences.     Mrs. Lowe is forty years old.  She has been working as a housekeeper for a widower in his seventies from noon to eight in the evening.  She may cook just a dinner for him and sits there the whole day because the old man uses to have lunch in a restaurant and taking her along to eat and to shop. He wouldn’t allow her to bring something there to knit during his nap. The maximum work for her to do is about two hours a day with the other six hours sitting there to read newspapers and magazines.  For such a leisure work, it drives her crazy for being bored to death although the pay is good!  So is my life with my husband.     My mind has always returned to my youth, carrying just a bag and wandering alone around Europe meeting all sorts of people.  It is neither comfort nor security I would seek, but a job that is interesting - serving strangers and a variety of species everyday: enjoying all what God has created.  I can’t live on forever listening to how good my husband has improved his golfing everyday. Compulsory faithfulness is to betraying oneself and others to serve devil's purpose unconditionally, disregarding duty and humanity. A person who would never set his or her spouse free is a coward who has never lived and will never experience true love.    I have a feeling that true love is to provide a home for others’ return in their need.  I feel like a puppy roaming freely in park and going home afterwards to my master for food and shelter and God is my master.  I find eternal youth in adventurous spirit in His house.  I can never grow older and wiser than God or His angels.  So I find security among their present to be protected forever.  It is wonderful to be the smallest among them while freedom is forever mine, food is wisdom and shelter is the universe.  Indeed, it is not a handsome mortal face that can attract me nowadays but a beautiful mind that can communicate with me sincerely with open discussion that I dearly love.     Martha came with an English business letter for me to read and translate into Chinese for her. Mark was sitting next to me. He interrupted my translation by snatching the letter to look for its address, saying that she should return a letter, telling the bank not to bother sending her such a letter of soliciting investment and bank loans again.  In my annoyance of his sickening manner in blowing his horn but knowing well that he can’t write a proper letter, I told him to finish the translation and write the letter for her. He responded in rage, charging me in scolding him for such a trivial commend and telling Martha that I had often scolded her son in bad temper.  How could this be possible? My conscience warned me to be silent with self-restrain: I can’t teach him manners with barking like his.     Indeed, everybody knows the truth without arguing with him. Even his former colleagues had endured him in silence but his employer of thirty years would never give him a raise over his senior draftsman because his gossip and intrusion into other’s business to defame others’ reputation has displayed well his character that couldn’t be compensated by his hard work.  Thus, all his junior engineers had become his bosses one after another like Gen. George Patton had to serve under Gen. Bradley who was once below Patton’s rank.     Our sickening married life is drifting us apart farther and farther with Mark having not a tiny bit of trust in my words, killing all our communication.  One day, Ron had given us two pictures of our two grandchildren jumping over a mould. Since the grandchildren were wearing helmets that Mark couldn’t see their faces, he asked me whom they were and I told him that one was Anthony and the other was Bruce wearing different color helmets and their names were written behind the photos. Mark knew very well that Ron had been teaching our grandsons the jumps for two years. Still, he said that the two motorcycles on the picture looked alike and Anthony must be on both pictures.  Even three proofs couldn’t make Mark trust me in such small thing.  Thus, a suspicious and twisted mind comes originally from an arrogant and stony heart that can neither be proved with facts nor be touched by reasoning.     Mark’s nickname is Master called by his classmates in college. He is sure to be the boss who doesn’t need to listen or to learn from any one. He told me that there were no God or life after death. Yet, Mark definitely had a dreadful fear of death.  Few years ago, he told me that he wanted an extended life no matter how painful it would be.  I regard my body is just to serve me till my children are all married and independent.  Then my soul is free to depart from my body as in my dream without any need of having my body revived after any stroke in the future.  I would answer God's first summon with no delay for a new job and a new life to learn something new.    Lately, Mark finally told me that it would be a good life living up to eighty and to die with one stroke in sleep without pain. I get a feeling that he is secretly looking up to God for help in getting away from nightmares nowadays. Truly, all living creatures can learn from their dreams. So we don't need to teach or argue with our neighbors about the truth. God picks His own timing to speak up with each individual in His own way.    Tracy’s friend, a dental hygienist has become a new mother for six months.  She told Tracy that she had gone crazy sitting home all day just to face her baby.  She must go out at least once a week to work again to see people and chat with people.  Life can’t be so monotonous in dedicating just to one person whether it is a child or a husband.    It is not a matter of good or evil, faithfulness or unfaithfulness that spouses should have their own interests and life styles.  Tracy is having a baby and she wants me to be with her upon her baby’s arrival and to stay with her for the first two months.  Mark has objected strongly claiming that my staying in the States would cause too much medical insurance expenses.  Tracy promises to pay for it and he still says no that I can’t go there more than a month while I hardly see a doctor once a year.  Why can’t I serve even my own grandchildren?    A spouse shouldn’t act like a father to me! Adults all seek to leave parents to be independent.  I want to live without being imprisoned at home!  I would rather be born poor and plain in my next life to be carefree.  Too much love and concern restrict even normal activity that is worse than having no love at all. Overbearing of paternal protection is like luxury food in restaurant that senior citizen can’t digest.     My friend who has a son being a chef came home a week for holiday and he cooked for her.  She told me that she got sick after eating his cooking.  It is the extra ingredients in restaurant food, which makes the tasty food unbearable to old people’s stomachs.  In my youth, I could eat lots of nuts every day, now I can hardly digest even a few nuts a week without getting acne and itchy skin right away.  Love truly doesn’t need to live together or dine together at all.  Overdoing it just makes a person sick.  I feel that the farther the loved ones are apart, the more we think fondly of one another, looking for a reunion once in a while and treasure each moment we have together without feeling bored. There is truly nothing wrong for being different in taste and loving the variety in lifestyle.    How does a caliph’s wife enjoy his love and services of being locked up alone in a room to be seen by none?  My niece, who has got a master’s degree in economy, had never been allowed to date openly.  One day, her mother found her phone books in her apartment and called up all her friends, scolding them for having taken her out. Even a cousin was not allowed to take her out for fun. Her boyfriend couldn’t stand the insult of her mother that he took a trip to China getting himself a wife right away.  When my niece failed in killing herself with car accident or jumping off the balcony, she refused to eat.  Good education and wealth could not bring her life which only freedom and free will can.  Taking away the loved one’s freedom with self-righteousness is like sentencing that person to death and turning oneself into an unpaid prison guard.     People can sometimes find cases in newspapers that parents had cruelly killed their own children here in North America and not just in Africa or Asia. Likewise, scientists are cloning animals for meat, babies for organ transplants or profit as some parents and guardians have brought up children simply for slavery or money. No wonder Jesus had said, “Who is my mother?”  He presented his disciple John and his mother to one another saying, “Here is your mother, and there is your son.”  In caring spirit, everybody can be one another’s mother and son. Through incarnation or reincarnation, we all have different mothers in different lives.  Therefore, only people who care about our well being and freedom will live forever in our memory. A caring society of all creatures in the universe is our true family.  An hour of friendship may forever be remembered sweetly but the struggle of being set free from possessive masters would turn a soul into suicide-bomber.    A person is forever growing: he can’t be a pet of yesterday forever without a decision of his own.  People shouldn’t be bound by another person’s interest but the universal law: without ever harming another soul.  The left hand should cooperate with the right hand to attain a harmonious living with free choices of harmless interests, hobbies, lifestyle or friendship.