Mexican and Chinese Housekeepers, Invicitus
It’s Saturday, April 29, 2006, and we have had a pleasant week with temperatures being in the seventies. I just wish it would stay this way, but the summer looms like an approaching hell of heat and misery that South Louisiana will become in just another month or so.
The Mexican Question reminds me of my brief experience with Mexican importation of labor, but it can hardly be called labor. Back in 1988 I had two little boys, Jake, who was six, and Tom, who was two. My wife Michele was working as a landscape architect and serving on staff at the Baton Rouge mission, and I was a twelve hour a day lawyer. We needed help watching our boys, so I fished around and finally located a friend from Mexico city who had two ladies who would live in our home, baby-sit, keep house and cook.
I was delighted. We picked up two girls, appearing to be no more than twenty or so, at the airport. They didn’t speak a word of English, and we didn’t speak a word of Spanish. Through some medium of communication, they said they were Doctors. My friends Dr. Bob and Peggy Westerman said they would take one and I would take one. I thought it mighty peculiar that these young, nubile women, so bubbly and wide-eyed, were doctors, but I didn’t care, as long as they were responsible and could take care of my boys.
It became immediately apparent that they had never kept house or cooked a meal in their lives, but they could watch the boys. Bob said his was a terrible cook and was just trying everything for the first time. They made no real effort to learn English, but kept up a phone dialogue between themselves regularly. I got books on Spanish and learned enough to get by with words for window, picture, door, stove, hot, cold, all the basics, and learning phrases as I went. We paid them well, and over the three or four months they were here they took their pay to buy TVs, irons, radios, etc.
After they accumulated a number of items, they announced that they had to go back to Mexico City to operate on their mother’s brain, but they would be back very soon. I had one means of communicating with them, and it was with a little Radio Shack laptop computer, the first one made anywhere. I asked them, in writing, if they were doctors, why did they come to the US like this, if they were not going to stay any longer than they had stayed. They looked at each other and with big smiles and sparkling eyes, said, almost simultaneously:Abenture! I remember laughing out loud at the spirit of these two little girls---Adventure indeed!
Then I tried oriental. A very elegant Chinese couple from Bejing appeared on the scene. He was getting his PHD from LSU music school, and she had a masters in French. She was a real lady and very intelligent as well as could speak several languages. She kept my house for a short time, perhaps a month or so, when he graduated and she took a professor’s job at Tulane in New Orleans. They introduced me to another oriental couple with the husband also getting his PHD in music from LSU, but his little wife, Weiping, was a language deficient as our previous Mexican experience. She was very sweet, but was having hell with English.
The meals she prepared were traditional Chinese, far from the Chinese food we have in our restaurants. It was bland and I guess nutritious, and only passably edible to my taste. I can only remember not liking it. I asked her to teach Tom to speak Chinese. Once, while he was in his high chair in the kitchen, I heard her talking to him as she held a box of Frosted Flakes before him---Flosta Frockasa, Flosta Frockasa, she kept saying, proudly pointing to the box. Tom was learning Chinese!!! I ran into the kitchen and said, No, no, Weiping! Teach him Chinese, not English!
As time passed I would hear her telling Tom something or another. Holding up a grape she said, "grapeah, grapeah." I let it go, and evidently it hasn’t hurt Tom for he is now a course supervisor in the top academy in the country. But he didn’t learn Chinese. I think that is one language that this generation would do well to learn, and learn well. Like Monty Python’s song, "I like Chinese," they are going to be around for a long time and there are a billion of them now. China is turning over in its sleep like the immense dragon it is and sooner or later will come fully awake and can easily devour or burn the rest of the world to a crisp with a fiery blast.
So I tell everyone to learn Chinese, and Spanish. If I was younger, and hadn’t had the arrogant trip down the spur track of law, I would learn several languages and learn the import/export business, and become an international trader of things like ancient art and artifacts. Or for that matter, new art and artifacts, for man has the capacity of creating things and concepts so exquisite they alone can change the direction of history. My good friend Iz Chait of Santa Monica has done quite well doing this dealing in ancient oriental objects d’art. And there are many things to trade and apply as a result of such interchange of ideas among these diverse cultures.
For example, my friend Dr. John Tarver, in his travels into China a few years ago on behalf of the Department of Agriculture or whoever he was representing, said there was a shrub or bush in China whose berries possessed a compound or chemical basis that was a thousand times sweeter than sugar. How many things just in this area are there that could be converted to better use than the disaster heaped upon our bodies by aspartame and its poisonous brood of other sweeteners, including sugar itself.
There are so many things to do. As I grow older I grow as excited at the possibilities as I grow depressed at the power of societal suppressors such as Eli Lily (the mother of Prozac) which has the FDA as its branch office in D.C., or the petropowers eating hungrily at what is left in our wallet, and now the looming nuclear spectre which has once more raised it’s grinning head in Iran. Yes there are awful things, but there are wondrous things as well. We allow the media to direct our mood of the day. While it cannot be ignored, it should not be obeyed as determinant of our conduct or our indestructible spirit.
I have as my personal mantra,Invicitus by William Ernest Henley (1849-1903):
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate I am the captain of my soul.
Today’s issue of The Writer’s Almanac had this interesting little morsel about Hirohito, born in Tokyo (1901). He was the Emperor of Japan during World War II, and the Japanese people believed that he was a living god. When he announced the surrender of Japanese forces over the radio on August 15, 1945, it was the first time that his voice had ever been recorded or broadcast. People across Japan gathered around their radios to hear him. Unfortunately, they couldn't understand him, because he spoke in an ancient form of Japanese.I guess he saved a little face by not saying it straight, and there is really no telling what he did say.
I have spent all day with a couple needing financial help, and it appears we will be able to rescue them from the brink and put them on the bridge across the chasm. This business is so rewarding. If anyone you know wants to make good money part or full time, have them contact me and I want to share the joy that we have in helping people.
My Cajun wife tole me today dat dere is tree direction in Houma: (1) up de bayou; (2) down de bayou; an’ (3) cross de bayou.
Mais, ya’ll laissez le bon temps rouler!
Ldsledge, Rantor At Large April 29, 2006
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