酷我-北美枫

[ericcoliu]

(The Chicken and Egg Question was anthologized in Summer Tapestry, which was published in Jan., 2009. This story is dedicated to my mother, who has never understood why I gave up what I had in Taiwan and left for Canada to learn and write in a language she couldn’t understand)



The Chicken and Egg Question


My mother never got much schooling and so lived her life as many women of her time did – as a housewife managing the household. Family affairs were the sole focus of her life, and the goings on of the world held little interest. But everyone knew that my mother had a big heart for people around her, and that it was agonizing for her when she read the headlines about human atrocities occurring around the world. Moreover, my mother would cry for the dramatized human suffering shown on TV melodramas. Everyone in my family, at times, got annoyed at my mother’s overly sentimental responses. Sometimes, I think my mother was not only sympathetic towards people suffering hardship, but also saw herself as one of them. Although it has been almost twenty-six years, I still feel haunted, as well as puzzled, by one particularly vivid memory of tears rolling down my mother’s face. I often wonder why it still haunts me.

One October morning twenty-six years ago, I was one of a myriad of tortured Taiwanese high school students preparing for the National Entrance Examination. I got up early and entered the kitchen. I pushed aside the newspaper on the dining room table, and buried my head in my notes while awaiting my mother’s breakfast preparation.

"Mother, where is my breakfast?" I impatiently spoke out loud.

My mother, standing still in front of the stove, didn’t answer my question.

"Mother, I need to go to school earlier today. Can you do the cooking quickly?" I shouted loudly, and then immersed myself again in my notes.

After a while, a bizarre question was uttered from my mother’s mouth, “If chickens knew what they were out for, they’d rather stay in their eggs.” She was scrambling eggs at the time.

"What are you talking about ---the chicken and egg thing?" I raised my head and turned towards my mother; I was surprised to see tears rolling down her face.

After years of schooling, I have had no clue about how my mother came up with this chicken and egg question. More importantly, I can’t figure out why I still think of this question.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

(The Chicken and Egg Question was anthologized in Summer Tapestry, which was published in Jan., 2009. This story is dedicated to my mother, who has never understood why I gave up what I had in Taiwan and left for Canada to learn and write in a language she couldn’t understand)



The Chicken and Egg Question


My mother never got much schooling and so lived her life as many women of her time did – as a housewife managing the household. Family affairs were the sole focus of her life, and the goings on of the world held little interest. But everyone knew that my mother had a big heart for people around her, and that it was agonizing for her when she read the headlines about human atrocities occurring around the world. Moreover, my mother would cry for the dramatized human suffering shown on TV melodramas. Everyone in my family, at times, got annoyed at my mother’s overly sentimental responses. Sometimes, I think my mother was not only sympathetic towards people suffering hardship, but also saw herself as one of them. Although it has been almost twenty-six years, I still feel haunted, as well as puzzled, by one particularly vivid memory of tears rolling down my mother’s face. I often wonder why it still haunts me.

One October morning twenty-six years ago, I was one of a myriad of tortured Taiwanese high school students preparing for the National Entrance Examination. I got up early and entered the kitchen. I pushed aside the newspaper on the dining room table, and buried my head in my notes while awaiting my mother’s breakfast preparation.

"Mother, where is my breakfast?" I impatiently spoke out loud.

My mother, standing still in front of the stove, didn’t answer my question.

"Mother, I need to go to school earlier today. Can you do the cooking quickly?" I shouted loudly, and then immersed myself again in my notes.

After a while, a bizarre question was uttered from my mother’s mouth, “If chickens knew what they were out for, they’d rather stay in their eggs.” She was scrambling eggs at the time.

"What are you talking about ---the chicken and egg thing?" I raised my head and turned towards my mother; I was surprised to see tears rolling down her face.

After years of schooling, I have had no clue about how my mother came up with this chicken and egg question. More importantly, I can’t figure out why I still think of this question.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[anna]

有句俗语...人怕出名,猪怕壮...

your mother's story reminds me of my mother, though she worked all the time, still managed to do the whole housework by herself.

Sometimes I felt her on the edge of life...
_________________
---------------------

Anna Yin

《爱的灯塔-星子安娜双语诗选》
<Nightlights> <Seven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac> ...

http://annapoetry.com

[[星子安娜]]

有句俗语...人怕出名,猪怕壮...

your mother's story reminds me of my mother, though she worked all the time, still managed to do the whole housework by herself.

Sometimes I felt her on the edge of life...
_________________
---------------------

Anna Yin

《爱的灯塔-星子安娜双语诗选》
<Nightlights> <Seven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac> ...

http://annapoetry.com

[ericcoliu]

That’s the fault of a patriarchal society, which is structured on fulfilling men’s needs and belittling women’s achievements and feelings.

In her To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf employs the idea of the moment and the innovative use of stream of consciousness to reveal the moment of a typical day of a housewife, Mrs. Ramsay, who is far more complex and multi-layered than hysteric:

The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat in the window which opened on the terrace), that the men were happily talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then, "How's that? How's that?" of the children playing cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, "I am guarding you--I am your support," but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow--this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror. (To the Lighthouse , 23-24)
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

That’s the fault of a patriarchal society, which is structured on fulfilling men’s needs and belittling women’s achievements and feelings.

In her To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf employs the idea of the moment and the innovative use of stream of consciousness to reveal the moment of a typical day of a housewife, Mrs. Ramsay, who is far more complex and multi-layered than hysteric:

The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat in the window which opened on the terrace), that the men were happily talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then, "How's that? How's that?" of the children playing cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, "I am guarding you--I am your support," but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow--this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror. (To the Lighthouse , 23-24)
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[Lake]

[[Lake]]

[ericcoliu]

Hi! Lake:

Thanks for your comment.

The appropriation of the verse line from Emily Dickinson' poem entitled Wonder — is not precisely Knowing (1331), which places emphasis on the associative beauty of the mind, seems intriguing or disturbingly provocative.

Read my appropriation of her poem below:

Suffering — is not precisely distressing
And not precisely distressing not —
A bodily but soulful condition
He has not lived who has not felt —


Yes, Kongzi can’t answer the “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” question.

Philosophically speaking, the chicken-and-egg conundrum is a typical Greek metaphysical question concerning with the study of “first principles” and “being”, which is mainly outside the intellectual realm of Chinese philosophical traditions.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

Hi! Lake:

Thanks for your comment.

The appropriation of the verse line from Emily Dickinson' poem entitled Wonder — is not precisely Knowing (1331), which places emphasis on the associative beauty of the mind, seems intriguing or disturbingly provocative.

Read my appropriation of her poem below:

Suffering — is not precisely distressing
And not precisely distressing not —
A bodily but soulful condition
He has not lived who has not felt —


Yes, Kongzi can’t answer the “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” question.

Philosophically speaking, the chicken-and-egg conundrum is a typical Greek metaphysical question concerning with the study of “first principles” and “being”, which is mainly outside the intellectual realm of Chinese philosophical traditions.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[Lake]

附和一首

Grumbling— is not precisely Complaining
And not precisely Complaining not—
A stressful but relieving condition
He has not lived who has not felt—

。

[[Lake]]

附和一首

Grumbling— is not precisely Complaining
And not precisely Complaining not—
A stressful but relieving condition
He has not lived who has not felt—

。

[ericcoliu]

Hi! Lake:

I like it. It's definitely not "just a piece of unrhythmical grumbling", a comment appropriated from Eliot’s The Waste Land (xxxiii).
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

Hi! Lake:

I like it. It's definitely not "just a piece of unrhythmical grumbling", a comment appropriated from Eliot’s The Waste Land (xxxiii).
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[ericcoliu]

I was notified by Ms. Wendy K. Burgess, Managing Editor of the forthcoming anthology of short stories entitled Summer Tapestry which is scheduled to be published in January 2009, that my short story, The Chicken and Egg Question, has been chosen by the editorial committee to be included in Summer Tapestry , and that my short story will now go forward into the final competition to be judged in winter 2008/2009.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

I was notified by Ms. Wendy K. Burgess, Managing Editor of the forthcoming anthology of short stories entitled Summer Tapestry which is scheduled to be published in January 2009, that my short story, The Chicken and Egg Question, has been chosen by the editorial committee to be included in Summer Tapestry , and that my short story will now go forward into the final competition to be judged in winter 2008/2009.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[温暖的水獸]

[[温暖的水獸]]

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[robarts]

[[robarts]]

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[ericcoliu]

The Chicken and Egg Question was anthologized in Summer Tapestry, which was published this month.

This is the first time my short story appears in book form.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

The Chicken and Egg Question was anthologized in Summer Tapestry, which was published this month.

This is the first time my short story appears in book form.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[clair]

[[clair]]

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]