Hikers

I remember, with exquisite clarity, the time my daughter away from home, joining the overnight school camp. Next come the five-day camp in the week ahead. 

That means we're busy preparing her backpack this weekend, handing her sleeping bag, camping lantern, inflatable mattress and all gadgets she will need. The fun of kayaking, challenging Pak Sin Leng hike, stand up paddle, as I muse, justify the physical separation with our daughter for five days.

The way nature has been woven into the fabric of her school and family lives means we don't stay home the day before the exciting camp. We took a ferry trip to Lantau today and hiked on a sunny afternoon. If I am honest with myself - actually honest, in the sort of way all parents can understand - I need to stay close to my daughter for one good outing before she stays away from home.

We've been fortunate to have an outdoorsy family. You may think my daughter might whine about hiking (again) before her school camp, but she doesn't. We enjoy life in as much harmony as we can find. Flowers and trees, butterflies and dragonflies, the sights, the sounds, the smell all so rich in wonder.

The Four Winds

If you could step into a time machine to travel with Kristin Hannah to The Four Winds in the 1930s, you'd better make sure you have your return trip ticket. 

There's more dust than you would expect, when you finally know the meaning of the word "breathtaking."

That's when the protagonist of Kristin's fiction, Elsa Martinelli, was seized by the natural disaster of dust storm in Texas. Plagued by nightmares of dust raining down like a screaming monster, Elsa kept coughing despite pulling her bandanna up around her mouth and nose, squinting to protect her eyes. That reminds me of wearing the mask for our pandemic.

Dust was engulfing the land deep in the Great Depression. Even cow's milk turned into a dirt-brown stream, smelling fecund. Elsa's son ended up running fever, red eyes rolling back in seizure, wheezing, breathless. Her son ended up staying in a Red Cross makeshift hospital for more than two weeks. When the doctor told Elsa that it may take as long as a year to really heal from the dust pneumonia, I was thinking of the long Covid.

Elsa stopped sleeping well, or at all, really. Their family eventually moved to California with twenty-seven dollars. To make ends meet, Elsa started the low-paying job of cotton picking, her finger bleeding from the thorns, dawn to dusk. What hurt Elsa the most wasn't the thorns. It's the fight to stand up for the rights, for the minimum wages. She was paid a meagre ninety cents for a hundred pounds of picked cotton. Eighty cents if you counted the cut taken by the crooks.

What could Elsa do in the middle of seemingly never-ending wage cutting? One option is to reach and unionise as many of the migrant labourers as possible to organise a strike. To fight for fair pay. To stop the inequity between the haves and have-nots.

The scene of strikers would have scared many of us. When the strikers gathered to chant "Fair pay," they met rampant discrimination and resistance: the cops stepped out of the cruisers, guns drawn, shortly followed by a group of masked vigilantes and landing of metal tear-gas canisters. Now, the image still makes me flinch. You wouldn't wish to be there, and please make sure you have your return trip ticket. Trust me.