Family tree

I may have mentioned a while back that my family did some tests via the Genographic Project to trace our ancestral origins.  They looked at my maternal ancestry, and we also had them trace the ancestry of my father's paternal DNA.  (On order is a kit to have my dad do his mother's side, which may help us to figure out which of our ancestors was Cherokee - or at the very least will help us eliminate one option.)

I took the (free) option of transferring our results over into FamilyTreeDNA also, which has turned out to be an incredible thing.  

Based on my father's DNA results, we were able to identify a few distant cousins in the system.  I have been talking to one of the women with whom I share great-great-great-grandparents (I'll call this great(3)-grandparents).  It turns out that she has been an absolutely AMAZING source of research.  She's shared some published information about various ancestors and - what Laura and I agree is absolutely the neatest document - a transcript of a letter to our great(4)-grandfather Peter from his son Jacob (a prominent Lutheran minister) discussing the former's conversion to Baptism.  (The conversion was very successful, to Jacob's sorrow, and that line of the family remained Baptist for generations... I believe up until my father left the fold, although I am not sure about the spiritual leanings of my paternal grandfather either.)    

Our correspondence today - email, primarily - contains nothing like this level of detail or historical value, which makes me kind of sad.  On the one hand, our future generations may never even have genealogical mysteries to solve as everything will be already tracked and available online...   but, then, without the challenges and mysteries to get them excited, I wonder how much they will really care?  

Wedding traditions, part 3

Yesterday I promised you that I would be touching today upon the other and most noticeable Japanese element in our wedding: the sake ritual.

The sake ritual is one of the oldest elements of the Japanese wedding ceremony, dating back to a time when sharing a sip of sake was as formal a bond as a Victorian handshake. The ritual as it is practiced today is known colloquially as the san san ku do: three [san] sets of three sips, for a total of nine times [ku do]. Starting with the smallest of three nested cups, the groom drinks a small amount of sake in three sips. The cup is then refilled and passed to the bride, who does the same. They move on to the middle cup, then to the largest. At the conclusion of the ceremony, both families drink together to signify the unification not only of the bride and groom, but of their families and traditions as well.

The sake set that is used for the ceremony, as you can tell from this description, is a very specific type. I scoured the web (pre-Google this took a bit more effort than it would today) and finally found a store in Los Angeles's Little Tokyo that had such a thing. In fact, they had two - one in red lacquer and one in black. The one we chose (lucky red, of course!), was etched with images of pine, bamboo, and plum.

At the very end of our western wedding ceremony, we had my little sister (then 10 years old), our sake maiden, pour for us. As she poured, the officiant explained the meaning of the symbols on the sake set: pine for longevity and endurance; bamboo for constancy; plum for hope. Then we walked out to our parents, poured for them, and they drank together to symbolize the joining of the families.

Afterwards, one of DH's grandmothers came up to us, beaming, and said that when she was young, she herself had served as a sake maiden at a wedding ceremony. She hadn't understood what it was all about, and had wondered many a time, but had never known for sure - until this very day.

I beamed back, too thrilled to speak.

Wedding traditions, part 2

Our wedding celebration included a number of elements from DH's Japanese heritage as well. Our invitations had a cherry blossom motif, and we used folding fans to decorate the pews of the chapel. (Fans are symbols of the wish for future happiness and prosperity at weddings: just as the ribs of an open fan stretch out in many directions, so the couple's future unfolds before them.)

But there were two traditions that really took center stage. One was the folding of origami cranes. (The other I'll cover tomorrow.)

In Japanese-American families, it is customary to fashion lucky paper cranes for weddings. This may be due not only to the crane's association with longevity, happiness, and fidelity, but also to the belief that folding 1000 cranes will grant a wish. To make 1001 of these origami birds signifies a wish for luck "a thousand times, and then some."

Folding an individual origami crane goes pretty quickly, as you can see in this animated crane folding tutorial. Folding 1001 cranes, however, is a bit more daunting. Fortunately our mothers agreed to pitch in on the task. So we purchased packet upon packet of gold origami paper, and reconciled ourselves to devoting all of our downtime to crane making!

When the cranes were ready, we strung garlands of them from a large hoop (like the garlands of flowers and ribbons at the top of a may pole). We placed a single crane at each place setting at the reception, as an accompaniment to the chocolates we offered as favors. And even after all this, we ended up with hundreds of cranes in reserve.

Over the years, I've been tucking our wedding cranes into festive packages, and have given several batches to friends to share at their own weddings. We double the good wishes by sharing them :)

Wedding traditions, part 1

Tradition has it that in colonial America, young women made a dozen quilt tops before they married. When they became engaged, friends and neighbors would gather to help complete the twelve tops and begin on the lucky thirteenth - the coverlet for the new bride and groom. This special quilt often included blocks with names of friends and relatives embroidered or signed in ink.

You've heard me blog about my friend's wedding, where we embroidered signatures on blocks for a quilt. At my own wedding, we provided pens and squares of white fabric for people to sign at the wedding reception itself.

Curious how well it worked? One of the grandmothers (a quilter herself) took it as her own personal mission to make sure that everyone came over and signed their squares, so we ended up with a pretty complete set! And only two people, who shall remain nameless (although my mother used to be married to one of them, ahem) managed to sign on the wrong side of the fabric.

Doing a wedding quilt instead of a guestbook was one of the ways we made the wedding more personal and expressive of us. (Branches of my family have been in this country since pre-revolutionary times, so in a way, this tradition and the choice of the historic site [shown in the Christopher Gurshin painting below] were nods to my heritage, as well as to my interests.)



I'm pretty tired tonight, so I think I'll tell you about the traditions we chose to follow from DH's heritage in tomorrow's post...

Qianjiaxiu: 1,000 families embroidery

Last month I wrote about the East Asian tradition of making robes for children out of 100 pieces of fabric, as referenced in a museum exhibit of antique children's clothing. Like the Good Wishes quilt custom, the Hundred Families Coat tradition incorporates the idea of sewing 100 pieces of fabric together into a lucky item for a child.

I wanted to introduce you to another tradition that overlaps with the ones we have been examining. (What's so exciting to me here is that this time, there is not only a quilt involved in the custom, but also a [general] locale where this custom was practiced, should we feel inclined to search for more information.)

Back in the spring of 2002, an article appeared in "New Internationalist" magazine about a project intended to bring attention to the importance of China’s dying folk art. A teacher and five students traveled along the Yellow River collecting pieces of cloth from farming families in the area. They assembled these pieces, 1,000 altogether, into a 350 meter long patchwork quilt which they termed "Qianjiaxiu," or 1,000 families embroidery. (NB: 350 meters of quilt would be around 230 lap quilts in a row!)

Why did these artists use patchwork to underscore the importance of folk art in the region?

The idea... came from an ancient ritual in the Yellow River Valley, in which local families praying for good harvest and fortune made a quilt out of 100 embroidered pieces to please the deities. The tradition has been dying out as more and more people have left their villages for towns and cities. (Findarticles.com, "Folk fabric: Chinese villages where unsung artists dwell"; originally printed in "New Internationalist," April 2002)

If this Yellow River custom of creating lucky quilts from 100 pieces of fabric is truly "ancient," I wonder if it could possibly be the basis for the Hundred Families Coats (ca. mid-19th-mid-20th centuries), and ultimately, the basis for our 21st century 100 Good Wishes quilts today?(!)

Speaking (of) heirlooms (part 2)

Ceremonial clothes from the mid 19th through the mid 20th centuries were featured in a Honolulu Academy of Arts exhibit back in 2000-2001. The exhibit, entitled "Family Ties in Asian Textiles: Children's and Adult Costumes from Japan and China," focused primarily on children’s wear.

Like the heirloom clothes and other textiles my family has passed down from generation to generation, these garments speak volumes about the people who wore them. A high infant mortality rate meant that families engaged in "lavish celebrations and rituals" to try preserve the lives and ensure the prosperity of their precious children. Wishes for well-being and prosperity were often woven right into the children's clothes: symbols (like lucky or protective animals and plants), auspicious colors, and even the stitching itself conveyed the parents’ fervent wish that the child should flourish.

One custom in particular, practiced in both China and Japan(!), should by now sound familiar to you:

in China… the Hundred Families Coat [was presented] during the child's first month. This coat was made from silk fragments from many different families and symbolized the combined good fortune of one hundred families. This custom was also practiced in Japan where the robe was called the Hundred Virtue Kimono.(Asianart.com, "Family Ties in Asian Textiles")

While the Academy was not able to obtain any such robes for this exhibit, an article from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin confirms that the curator had "seen them in a couple of pictures."

(As documentation from an actual textile historian, this finding is tremendously exciting to me. I am considering trying to contact the curator to try to learn where she saw these pictures!)

What symbols do we have in Western culture that convey to a child of the early 21st century just how much she is valued? Will they continue to speak eloquently 100 years hence; or will a textile of our time be so steeped in our popular culture, all Disney Princesses and Dora, that our descendants will need a cultural historian to decode its meaning?

I can't wait to see how the friends and family members who contribute squares for the Good Wishes quilt address these questions. (If the fabric itself remains cryptic, there is always the wish scrapbook!)

Speaking (of) heirlooms (part 1)

When I was small, we kept a pretty strict clothing budget. One of the department stores in town was rumored to have great prices, and seemed, to us kids, like a good way to stretch our dollars. My mother said no: the clothing, she explained, was cheap because its construction and fabric were cheap; they would not stand up to the bike riding, tag playing, base sliding, tree climbing, and overall horsing around of one daughter, let alone two.

By the time we had both outgrown a piece of clothing, regardless of where we had procured it, it was often consigned to the scrap heap. I'm not sure what became of these scraps. A vogue for traditional crafts like quilting sprang up with the American bicentennial (as my patriotic patchwork blouse, ca. Christmas 1976, aptly if somewhat humiliatingly attests); but, one ill-fated foray into the world of corduroy patchwork pants aside, nobody in my family made patchwork things then, and nobody would for another 15-20 years. So I know we never used any of those scraps in quilts.

Lightly worn ceremonial clothes, like prom gowns and fancy baby dresses, faced a brighter future than the scrap pile. Some were saved to be passed down as "vintage" items to the next generation. A very few, handmade or otherwise special, were put away as family heirlooms. They sit alongside our great-grandmother's intricately engraved pocket watch, her impossibly small dove grey fingerless gloves, our grandmother’s spotless lace baby gown... All are precious treasures now (even more so when we can pair them with their stories).

The delicate and pristine nature of our ancestors' things speaks eloquently of their refined and proper natures, and of a world in which these qualities were much valued in ladies. I wonder what the things we choose to keep will say, 100 years hence, about the kinds of people we were, and the world in which we lived.

Go to part 2

Of ladybugs and bats

When I was in Nürnberg, I was given a small stone painted with a pair of scarlet ladybugs. I was told that these Marienkäfer (Mary’s bugs) were good luck.

I don't know whether I had an especially good harvest that year, as Sandie's ladybug lore promised, but I do know that whenever I see ladybugs in my garden today, I'm sure to have better luck in my struggles against the aphids. (Have you ever seen a movie in which a monster runs amok, stuffing hapless humans into his ravenous jaws? That is exactly what a ladybug looks like when she rampages through a colony of aphids. It is strangely fascinating to watch [as long as you are not an aphid!])

Now, if you have rejected these rosy godzillas as having only tenuous ties to Chinese culture, what other creatures might you select in their place?

If you look to Chinese art, you will find quite a number of animals (and plants) with cultural significance. As a Westerner, you may be surprised by what you learn: for instance, my only real association with bats is vampires, but in China, bats are a symbol of luck:

...[I]n China, instead of writing actual good luck characters (words), objects with the same pronunciation as the lucky characters are often used instead. The Chinese word for "bat" happens to have the same pronunciation as the characters for "good luck," so the bat has become a symbol of good luck.... The bats flying among the clouds [on a robe that is being described] are a reddish color. The pronunciation of the characters for "skies full of red bats" is the same pronunciation as characters meaning "the heavens are full of happiness and good fortune." (Kyoto National Museum, "Textile Stories")

(Admirable wit! I love being able to gain new insight into the designs like this. Since we don't have any real knowledge of Chinese, I fear most such puns fly right over our heads.)

Given our Western sensibilities, I suspect the only bat(t) we'll include in this quilt will be a cotton one. But perhaps one of the other creatures on this list of symbols in Chinese art will be auspicious in both Eastern and Western cultures.

This last gets at something at the heart of our whole discussion here. When two disparate cultures come together in an international adoption, there are a lot of adjustments to make, a lot of differences. Adoptive parents are probably glad to find points of commonality wherever they can. If they are told that both ladybugs (cheerful and good in Western culture) and bats (creepy and evil in Western culture) are considered lucky in China, who would doubt what their choice would be?

More on lady beetles

I've been researching lady beetles to see if they really are considered lucky in China and this is what I have come up with.

From Wikipedia:

Some people consider seeing them or having them land on one's body to be a sign of good luck to come, and that killing them presages bad luck.

and from the good folk at Ask Jongo:

The Ladybug is considered a kind of beneficial insects which protect crops from aphid (a bug that eats crops).But not many people know it is a symbol of good luck. The kind of superstition is believed in many countries: Central Europeans --and similarly some Swedes--believe that if a Ladybug crawls across a maiden's hand she would soon be married; Germans believe that the Ladybug is generally good luck but a traditional belief is that if there are less than seven spots you are guaranteed a good harvest; in England each spot means a lucky month to come; in French vineyards Ladybugs bring good weather; and, similarly, in Austria a Ladybug is a sign of good weather; its name in Iran means "Good News"; and Canadians say that you should make a wish and let the Ladybug fly away--the direction it flies too shows the direction from which your wish will come; the Chinese consider it good luck to find one in the house. But less and less people know about ladybugs, since they are rarely seen in cities now. Some people have heard of the story, but no one knows where it originated from.

So it think it is fair to say that the lady beetle is a symbol of good luck, but is not specific to China. For this reason, I think we will leave the lady beetles out of the quilt.

NB - Apparently, they are called ladybugs in the US, ladybirds in Commonwealth countries (this is what I gew up calling them) but the correct name is lady beetle and thus they shall be called by me forever after.

Book review: A Quilt of Wishes

While scanning the web for information relating to the 100 Good Wishes custom, I came across a reference to a children's picture book on just this subject. After waffling over the hardback version in my local bookstore, I decided to purchase it in paperback from Amazon.

The book is called "A Quilt of Wishes," and it was written by Teresa Orem Werner and illustrated by Nathan Tremlin. From the acknowledgements page, it is clear that the story was based on the Werner family's experiences preparing for the arrival of their internationally-adopted daughter, Natalie Xiao Li.

The story tells of Xiao Li, an orphan in China, and her adoptive parents. While the parents wait for the adoption process to complete, they worry about their little girl, wondering whether she is safe and warm there on the other side of the world.

Remembering how her childhood quilt brought her warmth and comfort, the mother begins a quilt for her baby daughter. Friends and family members learn about this blanket, and send scraps of brightly colored cloth together with beautiful wishes for the little girl. When the quilt is complete, the mother sends it to China.

Xiao Li's nanny opens the box and admires the beautiful quilt, remembering the 100 Good Wishes quilt she was given when she was a child. But this quilt only has 50 squares. She takes it home with her that night, and, in a lovely scene, "within an hour, fifty women who had come to love Xiao Li... showed up with squares of fabric to be added to the quilt." Together they use red thread to stitch the old and new squares together, creating a quilt that will wrap Xiao Li in love and good wishes that stretch from the land of her birth to the land where her future lies.

(As a quilter, I wondered briefly how they added new squares without completely deconstructing the old quilt, but I found myself too caught up in the story to give more than a passing thought to such technicalities.)

When the parents come to get the little girl, the new and improved quilt stands as visible testimony to just how deeply she was loved and cared for even before they held her in their arms. The mother wonderingly realizes that the soft blanket which had been meant to comfort her daughter has comforted her own fears as well.

If there were anything I would change about this sweet book, it's probably something that's partially my own fault. When I saw the hardback version at my bookstore, the illustrations were intensely colored but lovely; when I opened the box to look at the paperback I purchased online, I saw pictures that seemed heavy on magenta. While this gives the Good Wishes quilt a luscious ruby border, and makes the famous red couch at the White Swan Hotel practically glow, it also means that the mother and baby appear sunburned throughout the story. (I probably should have paid more attention to the relative colors of the book covers when I viewed them online.)

While the hardback is a little more expensive (as you would expect), the author has pledged to donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale to the FTIA foster care program in Changsha, Hunan, China, so that other babies can receive the same quality care that her daughter Natalie did.

FTIA supports foster care programs in Hunan and Zhanjiang, China. These programs sponsor carefully selected foster families to care for children who would otherwise be raised in an orphanage. While the orphanages give the children the best care possible, in-home foster care allows for children to receive much more personal care and attention than an institution can provide.

Donations to these programs are used to provide foster care and better quality nutrition for the children. Participating foster parents receive training and education by our FTIA staff in China to better equip them to care for the children.

100% of all monies received for these programs are used for the children – nothing is deducted for any kind of administrative expenses. All administrative costs are provided for by FTIA. (FTIA, "China Foster Care Program")

The early years are such a critical time in a child's development that programs like this really can make a tremendous difference in the lives of those little ones. It's hard to begrudge a few dollars to such a worthy cause.

Buy it in hardback:

To be Chinese or not to be Chinese?

I asked my Chinese friend Stella about the validity of the following 3 Chinese traditions:
1. Ladybugs for good luck
2. The Invisible Red Thread and
3. The 100 Good Wishes Quilt

Here is Stella's reply:

Yes I've heard all of them. I wouldn't say they are the Chinese traditions. I'd say they are from some of the folk stories. Very interesting, hey? The second one appears in many books - novels or whatever books, mainly love books...but it can be applied to whoever that meet with each other and become friends or whatever, even your enemy. If the people's lives or activities are always tangled, yes, it applies.

Real traditions vs pretend traditions

I'm also curious about the genuineness of other "traditions" popular within the Chinese Adoption community. I read on Amazon this week that the belief that ladybugs are good luck began about 10 years ago when an American couple saw a ladybug just before they received their referral. Now, that's a lovely story, but I don't want to be raising my child with a false understanding of Chinese beliefs and customs so if that's the case, then ladybugs are out.

Also popular is this:

"An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but never break." Ancient Chinese Belief

Apparently this refers to adults who will eventually marry. Does it matter? I'm not so sure.

Let me consult my sources and report back regarding the validity of these "customs."

Pondering the history of 100 Good Wishes quilts

I love old-fashioned research. I practically leapt for joy in school the day we were assigned to examine old magazines and I found an early 20th century ad for Jell-o. (It was pitched as an upscale item, can you imagine?) I could probably pitch a small tent in the library stacks of any major university and live happily the rest of my days if I only could smuggle in a few necessities (a coffee maker, my sewing paraphernalia, perhaps a cat...).

When I was planning my wedding, I indulged my love of research by tracking down the origins of the traditions we included in our ceremony. Armed with this information, I set out to edify our soon-to-be-dumbfounded guests by explaining in our program what the heck we were actually doing up there slurping that sake and why there were origami cranes everywhere. Our guests seemed to find the presence of the blurbs tolerable enough – or maybe they just turned the page – and it brought me deep satisfaction to put disparate pieces together to form a meaningful whole.

In the case of 100 Good Wishes quilts, however, we may be facing a puzzle that we may not easily be able to solve: just where did the idea originate?

Using the keywords 100 Good Wishes and Bai Jia Bei, I performed a few online searches and skimmed through the results. Google returned a ream of blogs where people like ourselves cataloged their experiences creating these quilts. Many users seemed to have copied and pasted the following explanatory paragraph into their blogs verbatim without attribution:

To welcome and celebrate a new life, there is a tradition in the northern part of China to make a Bai Jia Bei, or 100 Good Wishes Quilt. It is a custom to invite 100 people to contribute a single square patch of cloth. The 100 patches are sewn together into a quilt that contains the luck, energy, and good wishes from all the families and friends who contributed a piece of fabric. The quilt is then passed down from generation to generation. (100 Good Wishes Project 2000, "Introduction")

A few sites referred back to a Yahoo mailing list for adoptive parents (a possible source for the quote) where the concept was apparently broached in the spring of the year 2000. The web site for this mailing list remains vague on the details, stating only that "adoptive parents and prospective adoptive parents on the APC listserv learned of this tradition," not where they learned it, or from whom. Even the webmaster of this Ur-site admits, "We have not been able to find very much information about this tradition...," although she notes that one of the site members found a passage in a book by Pearl S. Buck that seems to capture its gist:

She must offer the child as an adopted son, by symbol, to other powerful families in her clan. Yet what friends had she? She thought and she pondered and she devised this plan. From the head of each of the highest one hundred families in the Empire, she required a bolt of the finest silk. From the silks she commanded the palace tailors to cut one hundred small pieces and from these make a robe for her child. Thus he belonged, by symbol, to one hundred strong and noble families, and under their shelter the gods would fear to harm him. (Pearl S. Buck, "Imperial Woman," p. 60)

This may be the closest we can come to a historical reference without access to a university library.

But, as another blogger points out, how much does the history matter? Although "we've got no real documentation," does the origin actually "matte[r] at this point since the tradition has established itself within the China-adoptive community"? Whether the custom of creating a 100 Good Wishes quilt has been practiced for hundreds of years in China or whether it was a more recent invention built on Chinese ideas, the idea of wanting to share the love and luck of 100 families with a baby is just as valid and just as meaningful. Even if it weren't a tradition before, it certainly is one now.

I cherish the hope that more evidence will come to light. In the meantime, I leave you with this quotation, as independent verification that the tradition did not spring fully formed from the head of an imaginative list member but probably is actually practiced in some parts of China today: "For those of you who have asked about the '100 Good Wishes' quilt, it is Chinese tradition in Northern China. I have a volunteer right now who is from that part of China. She explained that not only do they create quilts but they also make food and deliver it to the new family with their special wishes."

100 Good Dishes, anyone?