Parents’ Day

We made it back to Marianas’ soil for Parents’ Day. Not one of the Chamber of Commerce’s favorite days of observance since the 1920 impetus was to replace Mother’s and Father’s Days and make them as one but we quietly got the parents on our holiday sight yesterday without getting mother and father out of the shopping lists, so the business home front stayed cozy at the mullah count.

Held on the fourth Sunday of July, the current observance was established by Bill Clinton in 1994 in a congressional resolution signed into law for “recognizing, uplifting, and supporting the role of parents in the rearing of children.”

All my children are reared, so I am now a grandpa, though in absentia since my four young ‘uns (all boys) are either into visual arts in Illinois or into martial arts in California. Only my grandma on my father side is the one I remember, my mother orphaned early and my father the runt of the litter, so by the time I saw his mother, she was a doting 90-year-old in tobacco country of Ilocandia who dubla (rolled) her own reefer that she enjoyed at least one per day until she was 95.

She probably got all that nicotine into her lungs but she skipped the chemicals that went with the filters in Marlboro country (I turned 25 by the Tar Heels on the slopes of the Piedmont in the Carolinas of Phillip Morris) so cancer was not a number that knocked at her door.

It was tobacco that got us coughing last week. One of my colleagues hightailed it to Inner Mongolia with his father and left a pack of Club 20 Monte Cristo from Havana, Cuba, at the office and though I cold-turkeyed in the mid-’80s, it had been a while since I sniffed a clean tobacco scent from the land of the Castro brothers in the Caribbean. With diplomatic relations getting established, a puff was in order.

My house requires I step out into the back garden to take a drag but mosquitoes equally thought the weather was fine so I took my Habano to the air vent in the toilet.

The first drag was too rich for my unaccustomed throat and I convulsed like I got epileptic seizure but being seated on the commode au naturel made the coughing on one end empty the content of the intestinal cavity on the other end, so the discomfort and the relief occurred at the same time. Stubborn as hell, I took a couple more cautious and regulated drags before hitting the shower.

It was Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court who said: “Replacing Mother’s Day and Father’s Day with a Parents’ Day should be considered as an observance more consistent with a policy of minimizing traditional sex-based differences in parental roles.” But the Galleria has too many scarves and neckties to sell so we now keep three shopping days. To its credit, like the “day on” observance of the civil rights movements, Parents’ Day focuses on what parents do rather than what gift we can get them.

This parent-teacher in the last three weeks was to tutor one of the students at Shenyang Aerospace University on oral English. The young fellow is a cadet doing simulated flying of a Cessna 172, an electric plane pioneered by the university. The young fellow wishes to attend a flying school in Dallas, Texas (in the city of my alma mater, me and Laura Bush) if he could get his spoken English clear and spontaneous enough, and understandable.

Our cadet failed three English classes so far, and he does not understand why. He is a recognized leader in his class. All his teachers were foreigners—a Filipina, a Niponggo, and a Brit, and charges all of them as prejudiced against an assertive local.

Confucius has three categories for students: the first studied and learned his lessons (girls did not study in Kongzi’s time), a second had not studied but is willing to learn, and the third studied, had not learned anything, but thinks of himself as educated. Our cadet who hails from Confucius neighborhood fits the third category.

Parading his knowledge of China’s history, our cadet went into the period of the three kingdoms of the Wei, Shu and Wu, timing it before the Qin dynasty. Not one to parade my little knowledge of Chinese history, I went back to my computer and discovered that the three kingdoms was after the Han, which came after the Qin. His chronology was off but since space and role is more locally important than time and rationale, I let it pass.

When he indicated that he had never heard of Mukden before (name for Shenyang to Russia and the Japanese Manchukuo), I made the unfortunate comment that perhaps, I knew more of China’s history than he did. He hit the ceiling, or more precisely, I crossed the mienzi (face) and ran smacked on his well oiled self-esteem.

For now, let’s hear it from the parents!

Editor’s note: The foregoing was submitted for printing sent from China when we had the Internet blackout so the copies are now just catching up. We will have them printed daily this week.