Mari, A Free-Range Mexican Nanny in Hong Kong—Part Two—The Memoir Continues

by Barbara Fischkin

 Warren Wilson College
Swannanoa, North Carolina
Winter 1989

Now, it sounds exciting. And unusual. Back then I was terrified. I would be moving with my foreign correspondent husband from Mexico City to Hong Kong—a place I had never been—with a toddler and a Mexican nanny in tow.

Mari and my son Danny at the Regent Hotel in Hong Kong, after their Rolls Royce ride from the airport. Towers in background are Hong Kong’s Central district.

Mari, the nanny, was calm. She was ready. And if she wasn’t, she knew how to fake it. Also, she had experience with children—and with difficult but necessary situations. She had left her own little ones with relatives back home in her small village to earn money in the capital. She was a mother who understood the long game. Sometimes short term pain was necessary for the goal of giving them a better life.

Still, I needed to make sure she really was ready for the big move, from one continent to another. She had never been out of Mexico.

Mari did not know it at the time but taking her from Mexico City to North Carolina—which one could do in those days without fear—was a test. If she could babysit while I attended a two-week fiction-writing residency at an isolated American college, close by an Appalachian mountain range, she could do Asia.

Why fiction? I already had a flourishing career in journalism. In Mexico City, I’d written a piece for the New Yorker and another one for the New York Times. But since I was a little girl, I wanted to be able to make up stories, too.

My first attempt at this, at around eight years old, horrified my mother. For good reason. I presented her with a short story about a child who swallowed her grandmother’s pills—as an “experiment”— and died.  Although I did not understand this at the time, the story was my fictional turnaround of a real-life incident. At the age of two, I had found my real-life grandmother, my mother’s mother, dead in her bed from heart failure. It actually was a better-than-expected demise for my grandmother. She was born in an Eastern European shtetl. A brigade of Cossacks ransacked the shtetl. She survived, along with her husband and children, through a combination of luck and fortitude.  Nevertheless, I don’t think my mother ever got over the fact that she was downstairs when I found grandma dead.

I have no idea why my first attempt at fiction switched a dead grandmother for a dead grandchild. These days, a mother presented with such “creativity,” would probably march her child off to the nearest kid-centered shrink. My mother just gulped. She also discouraged writing fiction. Read more »

Monday, December 7, 2020

The End of the World as We Know It

by Leanne Ogasawara

Ministry of the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson (October 2020)

1.

The year is 2025.

Frank, who is an American aid worker living in northern India, is alarmed to wake up one morning to an outside temperature of 103° F with 35% humidity. Things go from bad to worse, when the power grid goes down, and there is no air conditioning. As temperatures climb to 108° F with 60% humidity, people begin dying. They are being cooked to death.

Known as a wet-bulb temperature event, a sustained combination of high temperature plus high humidity exceeding wet-bulb temperature 35 °C (95 °F) will likely cause death, even in a healthy person sitting in the shade with plenty of water to drink.

When things become unbearable, Frank takes refuge with many others in a shallow lake. But the water is too warm –and by morning, everyone in the lake but Frank is dead. He has no idea why he survived –but life will never be the same.

The shock surrounding the event, which saw millions die in Uttar Pradesh, led to the formation of the Ministry for the Future. Part of the United Nation’s Convention on Climate Change, it was founded under Article 14 of the Paris Agreement with an office set up in Zürich.

The people of India are rightly furious. They point out that the Europeans sucked their resources dry for hundreds of years, and by the time they shook free of their colonialist yoke and tried to develop, they were being told by wealthy Europeans that, “Sorry, you are too late to the party. Rising CO2 and all that.” Indian leadership argues that they use far less coal-generated electricity to bring their people out of poverty than the Americans do to live what in America is considered a normal life.

Compare the average electrical energy consumption per capita 12,071 kWh in the US to 1,181 kWh in India.

Located in a part of the world that will bear the initial brunt of the crises, India had expected that other members of the Paris Convention would come to their aid.

Drones were seen overhead so the Indian people knew the situation was being monitored, but at the end of the day, they appeared to be left to die.

And so, they decide to take matters into their own hands. Read more »