Pig's Feet and Window Friends

During our first grocery shopping trip on Saturday morning, James instantly steered our whole troupe over the "meat" section and picked up a large package of two pigs feet (1/2 of one four-footed pig), as well as a medium sized package of chicken's feet.  

I know, I know, the immediate obsession with feet.  It is rather odd, but I was not surprised in the least.  I can't pretend that I have the same affinity for these animal extremities that James does, but I have at least figured out how to enjoy them.  This is by far the largest hurdle to overcome.  I was however a little surprised when these were the first items to go in our cart, prioritized over such things as bread or milk.  

(On a side note, I was once given two large bags of cold chickens feet in Chengdu as a special gift for my children, being told that they would LOVE them.  Since I was going to be flying back to Beijing that day and I was having a hard imagining Ari and Jude gobbling them down, I re-gifted them to a different Chinese colleague.)  

Back to the story.  My policy is that if James buys them, I am more than happy to let him prepare them.  Today he made a fine soup broth from them using Chinese Five Spice, a main ingredient of which is anise seed, and rice vinegar.  The seasonings were a great combination of sweet and savory, and the end product was very aromatic and flavorful.  Bad quality picture, but good food.

The trick to eating and enjoying pigs' feet, is to reject the notion that you are eating "meat".  The contents are mostly made up of thick fatty skin (ideally shaved of all bristles, but not always), collagen, connective tissue and bone.  There are a few delicious tender morsels of meat, but all said and done, these might be easily collected into a small spoonful.  The general consistency of a well cooked pigs foot is that of gelatin, with scatterings of crunchy connective tissue.  You are probably grimacing right now, as I certainly did before acquiring this taste.  You have to change your mindset, so that the thing that you find least desirable is actually the very quality that you seek! 

For example: North Americans enjoy the thick creaminess of a good Cream of Broccoli Soup, or the different textures that are added to oatmeal by adding nuts or fruit.  So it is with pigs feet that the jello-y-ness of the skin and fat are the best feature.  It soaks up the flavor of the broth the best, similar to how the skin of a roasted chicken or turkey is the best part.  It also leaves a warm, pleasantly full feeling in your belly, from only a very small portion.  

I theorize that it was a "waste not, want not" society that developed an appreciation for food portions that we would consider to be undesirable, such as Thousand-Year-Old eggs (read: rotten egg) which are considered a delicacy in many parts of China.  It makes keeping a nutritionally adequate diet on limited resources an achievable goal.  If you're going to butcher a pig, why not use it all?  The same mindset would be the one to figure out that we can use the natural spoilage process of fermentation to our advantage.  Just as we now purposely spoil grapes to make wine, and many cultures still love eating pigs feet, even when there are other options available to them.

Incidentally, Russian Mennonites (my background) have a traditional mode of preparation for pigs feet which involves pickling.  However, I have never actually encountered it before, so I don't believe it is all that common anymore.  Most Mennonites don't have a regular butchering season like they used to.  The recipe is still found in the Mennonite cookbook however.  

Chinese people hold that eating pigs feet is an especially desirable thing for women, since the consumption of pure collagen is supposed to lend itself to amazingly smooth and healthy skin.  We knew of a Chinese university student in Winnipeg who acquired a whole barrel of pigs feet from a butcher for a steal of a deal when there were none to be found in grocery stores.  Her skin was AMAZING (just kidding, I don't actually know!)

On to window friends...
While we were eating our pigs feet we noticed that Ari was lost in some kind of fantasy world, staring off into space, winking, grinning, posing, posturing and doing jaunty little dance moves.  He seemed very impressed by himself, which was in itself very funny.  However, his utter lack of awareness that he was doing this all in front of his family, who had all stopped eating to watch him, was probably the funniest part.  I knew there was a mirror behind me that he could see himself in, but he seemed to be "making eye contact" in multiple directions.  Finally I asked him, "Ari, just how many reflections can you see of your best friend over there?"  

The total answer, to our amazement, was NINE!  The mirror behind me was set inside a cabinet that had three glass shelves in it, so he could see himself in the mirror and on the undersides of each of the glass shelves.  Then there was the dining room window to the left, the cut glass divider to the entrance on the right, the glass table below and the two fake gold posts of his chair behind.  NINE ARI's!  All dancing and smiling and winking and making passes at each other!  James, Jude and I couldn't stop laughing at him, thereby fulfilling all of his lifelong dreams of having an audience (although the three of us made up only a quarter of that audience!)

Now I know what you are thinking about all the glass I just mentioned.  All I can say is take it up with our interior decorator (aka landlady), who tends to "overdo it".  Oh, and for those of you who remember the crystal ship... its back!  

Before we left last time, I sailed its heavy glassy bulwarks into a dark closet space where it suffered a broken mast during some closet rearrangement.  I silently thanked my lucky stars that I didn't have to face the landlady when she discovered it.  But it seems that sometime in the last 2 1/2 years, some loving hand repaired the broken mast and it is back in its place of honor - on a glass shelf... what else could be more logical? 

Returning to the Mainland

For those of you who have fought your disappointment that the Freys fell off the face of planet earth, I bear good tidings of great joy.

The Freys have returned to the Mainland!  As of February 20, we once again find ourselves living in the unexpected spontaneity of a foreign land.  It's not that life in Canada is boring.  Far from it!  We have gained an appreciation for our home and native land that far surpasses what we had before.  Nevertheless, there is something addictive about leaving the house to buy groceries and using a different language to do it.  Something about learning new and strange things, having your language abilities stretched, coming home to share your experiences, and hearing the days events from the rest of your family.

So spread the news!  We're back online, ready to share our observations, stories and lives with you again.  We will resume our former construct of sharing our lives with you here, but for today there needs to be a little back story.  Last you heard was that I don't remember faces anymore, and suddenly I am writing from China! 

The road back to China has been festooned with a lot of emotional hurdles and plenty of moments of reflection.  Many people have asked us if we are excited to be returning, but have been surprised when we answer with a carefully considered, "Um, yeah, I guess so".  The natural assumption is that, given the circumstances under which we left and the obvious attachment we had to China, we have spent the last 2 1/2 years biding our time, emailing organizations and pounding on the doors of heaven just for the hope of going back.  This is entirely untrue.  The truth is that this has been a journey of a long year to bring us to the place where we are ready to return.

I believe that this is a healthy thing.  If we were returning with great big dreams of picking up where we left off, as if nothing had changed, insistent that we had found our life's purpose in China (blah, blah, blah), we would quickly catch that horrible disease called "disillusionment".  Our purpose is found in our Creator, who has seen us through some tumultuous times in the last few years, and it is in Him that we must rejoice (whatever the circumstances).  Not in a glorious return.

This is the real story.  One year ago, I was still living with the feeling of a death sentence over my head.  My ambitions for a future had been fried away by radiation, and I didn't see much purpose in rebuilding them.  I decided that if God had brought me to this place, he had a reason for me to be there.  And that is of course true.  The problem is that God never stands still, he is always moving.  I followed him through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and having reached a grassy knoll called "Humble Existence", I decided that was all I was ever going to have, so I might as well learn to enjoy it.

This made James rather upset with me (in a gentle sort of way, I will add).  Conversation after conversation, he would prod me, asking me what it was that I wanted for my future.  I had no good answers, and when I realized how upset this made him, I couldn't even fake okay answers.  As he came close to finishing up his Masters Degree and we explored options, I blithely stated that I would go wherever James led and be happy there.  PhD at Yale?  Sure.  Agriculture position in Belgium?  Alright.  "But what will you do Jess?", he would ask, which led to a shoulder shrug.  My ambitions had been so thoroughly seared away.  Why try?  I  could live out Micah 6:8 anywhere in the world doing anything. "He has shown you oh Man, what is good.  And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy, to walk humbly with your God."

James continued to hold out for a future that had us working together, doing something that made us excited.  Much as I wanted to tell him to give up on that, I began to see that I had to at least explore the idea of doing something again, even though the idea made me want to soil my trousers (and not in James' agricultural sense).   The fear of stepping out on a limb and being disappointed is a cruel dictator.  But my attitude was beginning to take a toll on James' morale, so something had to be changed.  In a time of prayer, I felt convicted that I was reneging on the vows that I had made to James: to be his partner in the adventures of our lives.  By settling for the trailing, purposeless spouse with no opinions about anything, I was essentially ditching James to do all the adventuring by himself.

That was an uncomfortable revelation, but having it brought into the light like that started a slow cascade of release.  How like the Holy Spirit to turn the light uncomfortably on one's dark corners, and then leave refreshingly clean spaces behind (given that we are willing).

From that point on, without much effort, things began to fall into place.  Our old positions with opened up again and unbelievably (to me) we were invited to re-apply.  It was one thing to be open to "something" and another thing entirely to contemplate going back to the same thing.  It was far beyond the realm of anything I had ever thought possible.

So here we are now, back in Beijing.  The road back has not been easy; full of high and low moments.  One of the only symptoms I had pre-diagnosis, was momentary lapses of random deja vu mixed with some mysterious smell that was only evident to me.  This was followed by intense confusion as I tried to figure out what it was that I was "remembering".  But when there was no memory to connect it to, the confusion would spread even farther.  Where am I?  What am I doing?  Who is this person I'm talking to? etc.  I usually figured I was overtired and would then go to bed.

Needless to say, one of my arch enemies in our preparation to come back has been deja vu: only this time, there is a good reason for it.  I HAVE done all these things before and I HAVE smelled these smells before.  However that doesn't prevent me from experiencing a panic that rises from my gut and tries to choke me when I find myself back in a place I've been before.  When I smell China again and when I wake up in our old apartment again.

The road back has been full of these moments.  The peak moment (completely unrelated to our return) was when I visited a good friend of mine at the hospital a few weeks back.  She had been diagnosed with a brain tumor (benign thankfully) and was recovery from surgery.  She was in the same recovery room as I had been post-biopsy, staples in her head and very disoriented.  It felt a bit like having an out-of-body experience, standing by my own bedside 2 1/2 years ago.

God has not been content to only heal my body, he is taking me back to the point of wounding and touching those places as well.  Apparently it is not his will that I live with psychological scars.  We are simultaneously going back to the origins and also starting something totally new.  Before we left, James' Grandpa felt that he needed to impress us with the words of Isaiah 43:18-19.  "Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing!  Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?  I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland."

So the experience of returning (so far) has been one of mixed emotions.  I smell lamb kebobs (a wonderful smell I assure you!) and I rocket back in time.  But then I am reminded that these are the smells of lamb kebabs roasting today.  They are not the ghostly smells of kebabs that I remember smelling from my hospital room back in 2010.  (Fittingly, we ate lamb kebabs yesterday for lunch and it was a wonderful gift to my taste buds!)

So far, the best vehicle for experiencing newness has been the wonderful observations being made by Ari and Jude.  They remember a lot of things when they see them, but when we were last here, they just took it for granted that things are the way they are.  Now we get to hear their thoughts as they experience everything, almost for the first time.  They also loved the lamb kabobs, in spite of the fact that their mouths and lips were burning from the spice.  They gobbled it down and Jude even finished off Ari's left over rice.  There is also an added element of a more mature analytical approach.  Ari commented "I'm glad that I have such good cotton in my pillow.  Afterall, I'm sure you know that China is the world's largest cotton producer!"

This morning the smog has cleared, the skies are blue, the sun is brightly shining and there are birds singing.  We went for a long walk to find out if any of our favorite little breakfast vendors were still around.  James was set on eating dofu nau and you tiao (translated tofu brains and oil sticks!), but the place appears to be deserted.  Not surprisingly a lot of things have moved/changed.  For example our local market has been shut down which we are quite disappointed about.  It was the best outlet for street foods, fresh produce, clothing, phone cards, strange pets, kimchi, dried goods etc.  But then on the other hand, we know for a fact that the garbage can outside our door is the same one and saw the same old sign prohibiting saxophones from playing on a neighboring apartment building.

Most of all, I am enjoying a regained sense that our family is on an adventure together again.  Almost as though we are sharing an inside joke with each other.  This afternoon we are off to tour a potential school for the boys are we are looking forward to it.

Farewell for now, and we look forward to sharing great stories with you all!