Nov 2019 by Elleen Xue
Beware the dreaded Mei ban fa in Chinese, whose mere utterance is experienced like a punch in the stomach, and is among the most dreaded of expressions in the Mandarin language. But the saying is more than just words; it expresses a requisite lack of emotion and learned helplessness, or acceptance of fate that my parent’s generation seems to have embraced from their parents, and an attitude my generation abhors, but can understand.
Mei ban fa roughly translates to “nothing can be done about it” or “it can’t be helped.” Even this rudimentary explanation was something mom and dad disagreed about, because dad first explained my first mei ban fa to me as “I can’t do anything about it,” and mom went on to add some layer of nuance: emphasizing that mei ban fa is more usefully understood in the passive voice, as in “there is nothing that can be done about it” presumably, due to the operation of higher forces. Yet on another level though, mei ban fa was also said to work as a curse on certain families, following them generation after generation, like a sadistic stalking shadow, and as such it was said to follow mine. But according to mom, grandma and grandpa were able to wrestle defeat from the jaws of fate, and turn the curse around: into a blessing.
My grandfather was a Chinese version of a Renaissance Man: learned, artistic and intellectual, and was an aspiring sculptor when the Cultural Revolution swept across China. As a member of the wrong class, he was targeted and sent off for “rehabilitation” in the labor camps, where he had to abandon his dream of working with his hands. “As for being a sculptor back then, well, mei ban fa,” he would say, somewhat wistfully. But what grandpa couldn’t do with clay, he adapted to do with wood, and found himself cultivating his thin arms to augment his sinewy hands, chopping down trees to build schools. Gradually, as the years went by, and he proved successful in his rehabilitation, Grandpa graduated to not only building schools, but teaching in them, first as merely a homeroom teacher, but then on to other subjects, until two decades later, he became the principal of the local high school, and then Provincial Academic-Vice-Chancellor, a job he held and loved until his retirement. But there was one thing he loved more than his job, and that was his new wife.
“I’ll never forget the first time my eyes set upon her, washing clothes, in the sultry, setting sun, sweat glistening off her delicate, lithe, yet firm shape, that emanated both an inner and outer strength and beauty, but also a gentle grace, like a lily dancing, or the undulating whitecaps on the shimmering surface of the southern sea.” and his voice would trail off, as his gaze turned unfocused and inward, almost as if looking back into benevolent blinding sheen and shine of a self-esteemed and reverential time.
Grandma was a peasant among many in the fields of not quite plenty, and her only dream was to literally stay out of any trouble and get through the day alive, “alive in the bitter sea” as she would sometimes put it.
“I was so hungry that sometimes we ate tree bark, and when the chickens lay eggs, they were much too precious for us to eat ourselves, so we would take them into the nearest village twenty miles away to sell in the scorching sun. The idea of ever leaving my family’s farm for the city, well, we had no illusions. That was like an opium-induced pipe-dream, my father would say. This was because we had the wrong hukou, or dwelling designation, so. . . mei ban fa. . .”
For a long time now, I thought of how far away her aspirations were to mine: just get through the day, alive, having avoided any trouble. And it was an every other day like this when Grandpa finally approached her.
“She just smiled, and cupped her hand over her mouth, an old-fashioned gesture of shyness and timidity,” grandpa told me, “but when I saw that hand, I knew right then and there I would someday put a ring on it, and I did.” And over time, grandpa taught his young wife to read, and then to write, first pinyin and then poetry, so that someday she too became a teacher, winning the year 2000’s National Merit Teacher of the Year Award, and although she was too frail by then to attend the ceremony near the Forbidden City, my mom, in China on business, did so in her stead. So, it seems there was a way after all.
It was precisely when my mom was in Beijing accepting the award for her mom that my optometrist broke the news to me: there was nothing more he could do for my amblyopia, or “lazy eye.” My left eye, refused to work, and after many surgeries, and Traditional Chinese Medicinal treatments, and exhaustive expert opinions, nothing more could be done, so I had better, he said, “focus on protecting the right one, pardon the pun.” I will never forget those words, because among other things, the blunt doctor was telling me that I had to quit my three varsity sports, activities I cherished more than most things in my life. Being a student-athlete was my identity so having to give sports up, was like a self-erasure or negation, right as I entered a new boarding school. Now, not only would I have to make new friends and assimilate in a sea of strangers, but my personal branding was taken away: I would have to reduce my lacrosse stick to a mere room decoration, a teasing testament in the corner to who I once was, but never again would, or could be.
One afternoon though, as I watched the sun dance among the crisscross net of my retired lax stick, casting diamond shaped shadows on my wall, I was reminded of the diamond ring grandma also recently retired, her finger too swollen in old age to wear it, a ring my grandpa gave to her on their fiftieth wedding anniversary, having been too poor to bestow diamonds or even charcoal in his youth. As the net shimmered in the late afternoon breeze, I felt a newfound solstice arising in me. It was in that surreptitious moment that I vowed to still attend many meets and matches, and soon was invited to become my coach’s assistant. Then, in my downtime, when not on the field, I devoted more energy to other endeavors, such as Doctors Without Boarders in Uganda, and the founding of the Asian American Medical Society (AAMS).
Thus, rather than sulk and stare at that abandoned dusty lax stick in my room at Blair, I reached out instead, and overcame my reticence and dread. So, where this is a will, there is a way, and in my very own, I was able to stare mei ban fa in the face, and wrestle with it, too, such that now I have discovered a new me, and even perhaps you.
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