Other people's wishes

Here is a page of all the wishes that were sent in for one family's Good Wishes quilt project. While it's not the same as paging through the scrapbook itself, skimming through these wishes does give a bit of a taste of what that experience must actually be like.

(They sent some nice ones, didn't they?)

The finished quilt is pretty too. I only wish the site owners had linked each wish to its square, as I am curious to know how the contributors chose to express some of those rather abstract wishes in graphic form!

(But my friends and I were always in search of an unbreakable, secret code for passing messages when we were small - so perhaps knowing that only you, with the help of your superfantastic scrapbook decoder, will ever be able to uncover all your quilt's secrets is part of the fun!)

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.