{pretty, happy, funny, real}

Happy: The year I lived alone in Rochester teck-ing in a lab, my grandparents dropped off my Step-Great-Grandmother’s camphor chest that they had inherited a few years before.  My studio had plenty of room, one of the reasons I inherited it.

I’ve always though it was pretty.  When Great Grandma still lived in South Hampton (she wasn’t a “summer person”) and I was a little girl, I used to put my nose to the arch, and try to see if there were more gardens or harbours beyond it.

Dragons symbolise lots of things in China: China itself, life, luck, courage.  Sometimes I’d get nervous trying to go to sleep alone in my apartment, the dragons were a comfort.  Great Grandma herself had shown courage over the years.  She bought the chest for storage when she worked in a mission school in Kowloon in the ’30’.

When the Japanese invaded, she and other foreigners were interned on very short rations.  At one point one of the other missionaries fought off a drunken soldier trying to enter her house.  Her students snuck her Bible, and some of their own rice rations into her, but as an old lady, her doctor could tell that she had been starved at some point in her life.  Grandpa remembered her as a fiery preacher lady (she’s founded a Sunday School that grew into a church before she went to China) but he said the internment took the ginger out of her.  She was freed in a Red Cross Prisoner exchange, America hadn’t yet entered the war.  Her ship had to go around the horn of Africa because there was too much fighting in the Mediterranean, and she got to room with an old friend that she thought had died.

Real: my husband is forever barking his shins on the chest.  It is usually covered in library books and laundry. My Grandma wanted to put a plexiglass cover on it to keep it from getting dusty, but I don’t think Grandpa agreed.  I wonder if giving it to me was a compromise!

Funny: When I visited Guangzhou, I asked a shop girl selling carved chests what was the best way to keep them from getting dusty.  She said that “We like our homes to be elegant, but also we all work, so I would put plastic over it…I sell them before I have to dust them.”