A hoodie day

No, this is not a tribute to Trayvon Martin and the hoodie. It is a cold day in Dong Bei and the children by the playground are wearing mitts and neck scarves, and yes, the hoodie is up. The sun is out alright but while its rays hit me on the second floor of my building straight to my solarium, the building across shades the park where the children play and the guardians huddle in the benches.

My retirement motto says, “Monday to Saturday, I do nothing. Sunday is my day of rest!” It is a Hoodie Sunday.

Knowing human nature to always see the grass greener on the other side, those basking in the sun on Saipan would detest my description of the cold while they sweat it out midday, or fan themselves with the afternoon breeze that blows in from the lagoon. I, too, am in the same bandwagon of delusion, thinking that anywhere other than where I am must be better. But I have grown old enough to know what a terrible illusion that is.

Meanwhile, the transiting Pinay nurses who already settled their NCLEX and are waiting for their visas to Canada while putting in a couple of years at CHC browse through the jackets offered in the T Galleria, often grabbing many items on sale when a shop discards old inventory to accommodate incoming ones. I once saw a closet full of attires one would not be caught wearing even in December in one of the hotels that lowers the temperature for effect. Later, in Sherbrooke or Quebec, or St. John’s in Newfoundland, it will be fashionable to put up the hood but looks awkward on Middle Road, Garapan.

My retired schoolteacher neighbor in Shenyang already has her northern China leeks laid out on the ground next to the napa cabbage that will make great hot and sour soup in the cold, though with natural cold and refrigeration available I still do not understand the culinary necessity of drying both into flakes just for preserving the items.

Across the Yalu, the napa cabbage is the main ingredient for the famous kimchi and I understand why they ferment them in big jars on the ground in autumn. It not only preserves the vegetable but also the heavily spiced variety is not only a delight in the palate but also an internal inferno of warmth in the cold. Eaten in moderation, the kimchi is a requisite side dish in Saipan’s eateries if the olfactory trail does not offend. (Enclosed dining rooms in the starred hotels forego the dish to avoid the smell, or assign you a table by the porch!) It can only delight the tourists from Japan, Korea, and China!

It is the flakes of the dried leeks that are a subtle flavor savored by tongue licks on the discriminating palate. The romp of the gourmet on this one is a slow boat to China, not to be rushed down the Chiang Jiang through the rapids of the Three Gorges Dam. Yunnan spices tend to dominate and overwhelm, and Sichuan reds tend to have someone see red. But the onion flakes of the leeks dried in the sun require the disciplined concentration of the samurai consuming his geisha tea, properly rotated and ceremonially served, before giving a slurp on the shirataki.

One might get the impression that when confined indoors on a hoodie day, one indulges in the fine points of cuisine. One can’t stray too far afield with the rice and wheat noodles and dumplings in northeast China as a main offering before dipping the chops into the hot pot, the all-purpose boiling water where the raw ingredients laid on the side are cooked and sauced accordingly. The broiling variety is the preferred mode outdoors in the summer but the Zhongguoren is sabi (casually used to mean “crazy,” though the word is also literally sexual) enough to unfold his tables and chairs outside in the afternoon before the snow comes, the charcoal adding haze into the smoke and fog of the ambience.

The “hoodie” though is the democratizing leveler in many grounds these days, whether it is the gym sweatshirt in Gualo Rai, gone thicker with long sleeves north of the Tropic of Cancer, or the hoods that comes along with any decent winter jacket to protect one’s earlobes from freezing Siberian winds. Unlike residents in the windy city of Chicago, dealing with the cold is not to get out of it but to learn how to be in it. Many store personnel in Shenyang bring their wares out in the sidewalk, put their hoods to match lipstick and legging, and hawk their goods to the pedestrian market.

The point of our musing is deciding to live in the richness of the location one lives in rather than hope to be elsewhere. A Finnish friend once narrated how a new couple retreated to the Lapp lands in the ’60s to avoid modern incursion into their lives until the Russian military started maneuvers in the area. They moved to Barrows, Alaska but not too long after, the derricks came to gush the oil. They looked for another place and located paradise in the Atlantic some 30 degrees south latitude of the Tropic of Capricorn. They discovered the Falklands! So did the armies of UK and Argentina.

Enjoy your hoodie day!