Remembering the One or Two

Subtitle: Simple Joys of Life

In the culture I grew up there is a saying: eight or nine out of ten things in life are either disappointing or frustrating. Being a person who always has a positive attitude, my wife created a photo-story out of our family pictures -- A 20-year old picture showing our son eating grass off the ground in a park, a picture showing our family camping, etc. She named the photo story “Remembering the One or Two.”

I think it may be the most important attitude in our family--remember the one or two simple joys we shared; forget the unpleasant ones. I'll try to remember jutting down a thing or two when I encounter them.

Here’s one:

We recently bought a new car. The dealer provides life time car wash free of charge. We talked the dealer into letting us wash our other car for free as well. Now on weekends we would go for our free car wash together and have a simple lunch outside of home. Sometimes we would even drive separately and meet at the car wash place and call it a date. It’s almost like 30 years ago when we were dating--we would set a time and meeting at a movie theater. Not bad to be able to bring back the romance after 30 some years of marriage.

Here’s another one:

My wife and were both born and raised in Taiwan. We did not come to the US till I had already had a graduate degree and had our first child. While growing up, all the schools taught in Chinese mandarin only. Although we are both native Taiwanese and talk in Taiwanese at home and at any other places other than at school, we cannot write anything serious or give a formal speech using our native Taiwanese language alone; Chinese language will always sprinkled in. Some of the things we use in a conversation, we don’t even know how they look like written down.

Recently my wife took a one-day training in formal Taiwanese. She brought home the course notes; the written class notes as well as the mp3 audio files. We have fun listening to these mp3’s and test each other on how certain words look like when written down. We would point out some words and test each other how they should be pronounced. We would laugh and tease each other on the things we missed. We are having a blast.

I remember reading a story about a famous female poet (Li Qing-Zhao) about 300 years ago in China. The lady’s husband was a scholar. They both loved books. They were not rich. To enjoy a day without having to spend money, one would say a phrase and ask the other which book, which page the phrase came from. One would cite half a poem and ask the other to complete the poem.

Isn’t it just lovely, how my wife and I have such a great time learning Taiwanese! We are two modern day nerds.

Feb. 24, 2008
We both are new at doing blogging. I am eager to share with my wife a new posting on my blog and am eager to read her new postings. We gave each other comments on each other's writing. We share the new blogging tricks we found. This simple joy costs us $0.