Quarantine Diary #70 6/4/2020 What's Your Frame?

Started this yesterday and couldn’t figure out how to say it clearly. Let me try again…

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It seems as if nearly all social media has turned into a referendum and compendium of ways to think about Racism in America. This is good. This is necessary. Keep reading and keep sharing.

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I’ve been walking. Here in June the new-blooming flowers are lusciously beautiful; flowering shrubs are in their Full Glory. My eyes, used to shades of slush, are dazzled by lavender phlox, white and purple lilacs, by Bridal Wreath spirea draping over itself.

(Oh NO! That beautiful phlox is actually invasive Dame's Rocket. Well, carry on .. but how sad.) 

I remember the two blocks between my two grandmothers’ houses. Tree-shaded Loomis Street was lined with modest, well-loved homes sitting next to each other like chubby kindergartners. I can still see the Spirea planted along their foundations, lilacs in front, irises beginning to unfold themselves into ballerinas. The flowers of early June give back to me my blue-eyed grandmothers. Rest in peace, Esther and Laura.  

Early summer feels like mercy.

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Do you realize what I did with my photos and my writing?

I framed everything. The photos of the river don’t show you the street and parking lot that is right there.  Those effusive lilacs grow in a line of bushes that edge the parking lot for a strip mall on Grand Ave. The phlox are between the building used to store chemicals for the water department, and the railroad tracks.

I gave you a vision of spring collated from banal places in my old part of my old town. 

And my grandmothers? They were lovely women and I was lucky to have them. But not everyone’s grandparents are or were loving and worthy; associating flowers and grandmas is a connection not everyone gets to have. When I talk about sweet women who hugged me, does something in you feel sad or jealous or angry because you didn’t have a smiling grandma with Bridal Veil growing outside her dining room window?

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I’m not done yet. Keep reading.

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This week I finished reading Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler. I read his River Town last month. Both books are excellent, and I highly recommend. He writes non-fiction like others write fiction. He pulls you in.

He asks this question. “How do we learn what kind of people and nation we are?”

He talks a lot about written Chinese which is famously complicated. Chinese doesn’t have an alphabet (there is a dangerous 20th century history to this). Chinese is written in characters. Depending on how you define and count, there are upwards of 100,000 characters, although to read about 90% of a modern Chinese newspaper, you ‘only’ need to know about 900 of them. 

What does it do to one’s sense of who they are to share a language that goes back 3000 years? Scholars can read what was written in 1250 AD because ancient characters are related to modern characters. China is a huge country with different ethnic and cultural groups who speak different languages (there are big variations within spoken Chinese). Yet they all share the same written language. What unites China is its 3000-year old record of government decisions, property and trade laws, and poetry – all written in the same language. 

The frame for Chinese understanding of their own culture is their 3000 years of written history of what they have done up to now. This is interwoven with their heritage of Confucianism (no longer much in vogue, but the predominant philosophy of how to live for centuries). Which makes for a culture where people make decisions on the basis of what will preserve the elders, the family, and the nation. Things are changing fast, but education is a priority of China and they continue to educate and support education that is conservative in the Chinese way.

Nothing is as simple as the paragragh I just wrote. I read 700 pages of Hessler and you just read a couple paragraphs of me - and all I really learned was what some of the best questions are. Do not source me as an understanding of Chinese culture!

But if we think about what’s the frame right outside the picture we see, it is interesting that the frame for modern China is a complicated ancient written language mostly understood by and passed down through the most educated people in the society. Men (and some women) who were preserving their own families first. Peasants were tools to produce what the fine families need.

There’s a frame.

Hessler is having a conversation with a Chinese friend who was educated in both China and in the West. They are talking about what is the modern language that passes along culture and values in the US. The friend speculates. “I think your movies. Everyone goes to the movies. You have a common language of movies you have seen, and how people behave in them, and what you think about that.”

Which brings us back to frames. When we look at our nation under siege right now, we have such opposing worldviews. Did we see two sets of movies? (and TV shows and social media and computer games?)

When you think about the response you have to what’s going on, and what you will continue doing and what you will do differently – check what’s framing your decisions and responses.

It’s interesting.

It might even give you more clarity and courage.

What movie, book, TV show, game, social media platform seems to call you forward? 

What’s our frame? What's your frame?