Scrjbbles: J's random writings

My tan dusty Honda Civic hatchback sagged under six loads of dirty clothes that desperately required washing at the laundromat once my workday finished, lest I go to my office the following morning in soiled underwear.  But first, I had to stop for another online matchmaking blind date.

My recent discouraging succession of blind dates (sigh) matched me with a string of socially awkward computer programmers.  According to this guy’s photo-less dating profile, he too is a computer geek. I was fairly sure this evening foreshadowed another dull disappointing outcome, so I had considered cancelling at the last minute, but didn’t. 

As I drove, I wondered why the algorithms were testing my patience with men who were apparently my total opposites, that is, introverted, quiet, engineering types?  I thought, “Oh well.  Just a dull date with yet another computer programmer guy.  Ugh!  I’ll make it short, then hit the laundromat.” 

I arrived at the pizza place. After swapping first-name only introductions, I was surprised to hear this tall, well-dressed man with a beautiful big smile say to me, “You are much prettier than your picture.”

Huh?!  That compliment was a totally, absolutely shocking first for me. 

Early into our conversation, I could tell this delightfully handsome Chinese-American man across from me possessed a worldly wisdom that I had NEVER encountered in a person remotely close to my age. He captured my full attention.

Over a pepperoni pie and moments of laughter, we discovered that our family sizes and composition were very similar. He and I were each the second youngest of many children to loving parents, all with nearly identical ages.

From there, the similarities began to diverge. 

His childhood, spent on China’s east coast, was drastically unlike my upbringing in Oklahoma.  As a kid, I lived mostly carefree. I played with friends who looked and acted a lot like me, attended my parochial school, and cruised with me on bicycles around our neighborhood.  When he was a boy there were periods when he could not attend school. I heard that China’s Cultural Revolution, led by Mao Tse Tung and the Communist Party, had closed his, and most of the schools, across China as the regime was busy persecuting teachers who were accused of not adhering to Party dogma — essentially indoctrination disguised as an education.

My girlhood house, filled with nine people enjoying lively conversations over Mom’s nutritious home-cooked dinners at the oversized family table, contrasted with his family’s home. Their house became occupied with Communist party members and tofu factory workers assigned to take up residence there.  

As I listened to my date, I learned there were periods that youth across China were not allowed to attend school.  Instead they were sent to communal farms on barely arable land.  (We know now, in the 21^st century, that when China’s government took control of family farms and converted them into communal ones “to serve the greater good” the outcome was a massive and deadly failure. Historians estimate more than 33 MILLION Chinese died from starvation in the resulting famine.)  I was saddened to hear that my date’s family had struggled to find enough food to eat and subsequently suffered the effects of malnutrition. 

No wonder he relished the pizza so much.

He and I continued sharing bits of our respective pasts, revealing some additional comparisons among many stark contrasts.

When my father happily retired from a 25-year career as a Special Agent in the FBI, his father, the successful owner of a silk-dyeing business that the government seized, was forcibly sent to a “work camp” with extremely difficult conditions that proved hard to endure, much less survive.  Finally, when his father became gravely ill, his dad was released from the camp and died shortly thereafter, in his late fifties. My father also died is his late fifties from a heart condition.

When this blind date merged into its fourth hour, I was completely interested and enamored with the man across the table.  Hearing glimpses of his boyhood experiences that included surviving the nationwide famine, periods without education (aside from his older brothers teaching him lessons at home on a piece of black painted plywood to mimic a chalkboard) and his eventual immigration to the United States to attend college and earn an engineering degree, I was duly impressed by his diligence, intellect, fortitude, and his astoundingly wise character.

This momentous first date had introduced me to my first boyfriend and the joys of my first mutually loving adult relationship — one that enhanced my world perspective in a myriad of profound ways, all due to knowing and growing with this wonderful man I met on the “Thank God I didn’t cancel” blind date.   

From there, our relationship grew. I bore witness to stories of his past challenges, while learning alongside him. He gifted me with his honest, deeply personal circumstances along his path to adulthood halfway round the globe. I wondered how he withstood so many difficulties — even heartbreaking life or death situations in China. Clearly, he managed to survive, thrive, and then leave his homeland. In the US he embraced higher learning, a new language, a vividly different culture, a successful career, and the enormous shifts of living in America.

Through him, I came to deeply appreciate how the USA is truly rich with opportunity, abundance, personal, societal and political freedoms, and relative to a China — a grand daily existence. I grew keenly aware of the multitude of blessings I had taken for granted up to that point in my very American lifestyle.  I felt simultaneously humbled and thankful for this incredibly kind and very wise man for accompanying me as I gained more worldly knowledge, fresh points of view, empathy for immigrants’ determination to adapt to the new norms beyond those of their homelands, and a much greater understanding of just how lucky we are to live in the USA.

Paradigm shift much?  Yes, my perspectives changed – all to the better.  And forever.

Last, and most certainly least, the morning after that life-altering first date which detoured me from visiting the laundromat, I mercifully found an errant pair of clean underwear scrunched at the back of my dresser drawer, feeling very grateful for my good fortune.