How one
thing leads to another:
I was under some dark theft star one night last
week, very unusual here: in the evening, a pickpocket, sneaking up behind
me in the dark, tried to get into my purse; the following morning, I
discovered that during the night some other knave had nicked the ceramic
flower box that was home to our kitchen window morning glories, leaving all
their poor naked roots dangling helplessly in the wind. The pickpocket I grabbed
and told off (in my best Anglo-Saxon) & got on with things if a little
shaky with adrenaline. But the flowerbox broke my heart. Our neighbor &
housekeeper, Wu Fang, wrote 素质差 (su4 zhi4 cha4) on my phone which my (life-saving) Pleco
translation app translated as “So ignorant! So uneducated!”
All summer the morning glories had brought
pleasure to our neighbors who use the narrow walled-in lane behind our block of
rowhouses, for washing vegetables in their outdoor kitchen sinks & hanging
out laundry on the bamboo poles overhead. I’d look up from my own (indoor) sink
to see someone paused in their path to gaze for a moment at the unexpected
beauty of the vines. Once, an elderly man who had once lived in America as a
chemistry professor, spoke to me approvingly as I watered the flowerbox: “I
think you are very comfortable in China.” (Not.)
So morning glories gone but determined not to be
robbed of beauty outside my kitchen window, I plotted my own theft…
